• 7 Posts
  • 11 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • Dark matter might not even exist, all we know is that gravity-based predictions break down after a certain point. Dark matter is the just the most popular proposed solution where you essentially just add extra undetectable mass until it works. The distant second is Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND) or some variation of it, which is where you try to tweak the theories to fit observations instead. It has the same problem as dark matter where we keep coming up with better experiments which always fail to find anything.

    There’s a similar problem at the opposite end of the scale spectrum too; quantum mechanics doesn’t play nice with our current understanding of gravity leading to the search for the “theory of everything”. This is why I personally lean towards the idea that it’s our theories that are wrong and not an undetectable mass, but this isn’t my field so my opinion isn’t worth much (especially since a majority actually working in the field lean towards dark matter as far as I can tell).


  • I’m not really sure what you’re asking since your post is a but unfocused, but if your problem is that you have too many addresses with different providers you could simply redirect mail from alternate addresses to whichever one you actually check. When I switched to proton I didn’t delete my old gmail account, I simply imported my old emails and set up email forwarding (see here for Proton’s migration instructions from Gmail). If you want to completely de-Google you don’t need to do it all at once, just migrate accounts to your new addresses as needed.

    If you want a separate account for your PC then this does of course require a separate account. There isn’t really a solution there since your problem is also your requirement. You could set up separate folders or aliases for your PC and phone but that might not have the same level of separation you want.

    I’d recommend switching away from Chrome-based browsers entirely anyway due to Google forcing through questionable standards by throwing their near-monopoly around, but using one Google service doesn’t mean it’s pointless to switch away from others. You don’t need to do everything at once.


  • I made a fair bit of commission upgrading people to much much better hardware and speed for not much more money.

    See that’s your entire problem right there, you’re in sales. Your incentive is to drain every penny you can out of customers through useless up-sells and selling hardware to get the service they’re already paying for.

    You literally just argued that if your 600mbps router only supplies an 80mbps connection then your 600mbps connection is 80mbps. And speed isn’t divided equally by the number of devices connected either, that’s just ridiculous. The impact of a connected but idle device is minimal. Also, why would you need 600mbps for only 4 devices? You could stream 4k video on all four devices 24/7 and you’re still not using even a quarter of that bandwidth; you’re looking at a recommendation of only 15mbps to 25mbps per user for a 4k-viable internet connection.

    Here’s a ping to my stock ISP-supplied router on another floor and three rooms away via wifi:

    --- 192.168.1.1 ping statistics ---
    611 packets transmitted, 611 received, 0% packet loss, time 623436ms
    rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 0.647/0.779/2.105/0.110 ms
    

    It’s obviously impossible to improve a 0% packet loss, switching to a wired connection would be a considerable cost for minimal benefit (though admittedly that ping is unusually good, I’d normally expect slightly over 1ms average). I’m also getting over my advertised speeds according to fast.com and speedtest.net despite being on wifi and running through Mullvad so I suppose the problem might just be that I’m not using whichever scummy ISP you work for.

    I have a home office and have work from home (or hybrid) for pretty much my entire career, even before WFH was normalised. I can assure you a wired connection is not a necessity to work from home.


  • So the ISP isn’t to blame when the cheap ISP-provided hardware fails, and the solution isn’t for the ISP to replace insufficient ISP-owned hardware but for you to buy your own instead?

    The “wire everything” approach is a little excessive for most home networks too, outside of exceptional circumstances modern WiFi on modern hardware is more than enough for home users. It’s only worth the time and money to wire everything if you’ve identified specific issues with signal loss or noise, don’t just do it by default.


  • Not really, where I am full-time employees are legally entitled to a minimum 28 paid days off per year (including public holidays at employer’s discretion) and that’s still low compared to some of the better European countries. My understanding is that the US does not require any paid time off and this petition is to fix that.

    3-6 months maternity leave at 66% pay isn’t necessarily great either, here we have 52 weeks maternity leave starting at 90% pay for 6 weeks then the lower of 90% pay or a fixed weekly amount for another 33 weeks. Returning to work in the first 6 months entitles you to the same job, in the second 6 months an equivalent job (equal pay, location, etc). There’s also 1-2 weeks paternity leave for other involved adults (eg father or partner) and the option to share up to 50 weeks of the maternity leave entitlement with them. And those are just legal minimums, for instance my work offers much better paternity leave than just a couple of weeks.



  • Good luck remembering them all, also change them all every 30 days, so here are my secrets.

    Password expiry hasn’t been considered best practice for a long time (must be at least a decade now?) largely because of the other points you mentioned; it leads to weak easily memorable passwords written somewhere easily accessible. Even when it was considered good 30 days would have been an unusually short time.

    Current advice is to change passwords whenever there’s a chance it’s been compromised, not on a schedule.