I’ve been stuck deciding between getting the 2.8k screen and upgrading to the larger 16 laptop. I stopped using my desktop last year entirely and so now I’m trying to figure out whether I should go with the larger laptop since it’s the only thing I use now.

I’m always wondering is how I became an independent thinker. I have a hard time understanding how so many people are so gullible

You may not think this way, but I’ll comment just in case: Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are too smart to fall for a lie. The smartest people in the world have blind spots, and only the blind think they have none.

Note that established, accepted scientific theories often fall into the “fact” category.

For example the Theory of Gravity.

Yes, these devices exist. But, IR is significantly, even several orders of magnitude, less powerful from the sun than visible and UV light. The only applications derive from receiving power from human sources that are bright enough, some examples are here in the other comments.

Even then, I have doubts that human IR emitters produce enough power for anything but the most highly efficiently engineered device, outside of a microwave.

Watched the documentary with a friend; we were trying to guess his age. We agreed on “decent looking for 55”. He’s 47 lol.

+1 on wildcard addresses. Any 10 min mail site is also great for anything unimportant.

7-8% is the standard value used after taking inflation into account. It’s really 10%, but inflation eats 3% yearly, on average. Using the metric this way also conveniently means that the value you calculate for the end of compounding (in 35 years) is interpretable in todays dollars.

So 7% interest on 50$ monthly for 35 years means total principal of 21k$ and total of 83k$ (todays value).

See https://www.investor.gov/financial-tools-calculators/calculators/compound-interest-calculator

Fun fact: decibels are exponential; A 180 db sound would be the loudest thing ever recorded (the krakatoa volcano was 172) and after 194 db it ceases to be sound and becomes a shockwave.

Do you mean abominations? lol.

Second this. Vanlife stuff is focused on size, mass, durability, efficiency, replaceability, repairability, modularity, price. There is nothing better than vanlife videos for learning how to live minimally within an apartment.

Some additional tips,

• folding furniture.
• Human baseline happiness returns to set points. Remove something non-essential and you may be sad at first, but will eventually stop caring.
• No couch or TV: if it cant fit on/in my car or is fragile, I’m not buying it.
• if you don’t mind appearing “poor”, you may realize that the products that best fit all the above criteria are just basic things from walmart, target, etc. Those folding plastic tables and metal bed frames, plastic tubs and drawers, actually solve their problems 90% as well as traditional products at 10% the price, while being readily available everywhere. You don’t worry about damaging them either.
• take or leave advice. Maybe you want a nice desk. I have a nice office chair. It will be hard to move, but it’s worth it. The point is you can be minimal in unimportant areas.

Also isn’t LoRa proprietary/patent encumbered?

I’ve noticed that too. Is it related to covid you think? As in it was like this before and now we’re returning to normal progression as people rebuild social connections and lose time. Or is it that the whole dev economy is changing with layoffs and such that devs are leaving the industry altogether? Or something else even?

• gmail you can forward all mail to another account.
• Youtube, you could try following your subscriptions via RSS/ATOM feed reader. It’s honestly just like regular YT but without the recommendation engine.

Fair. I just learned about and like PeerTube so far (activitypub federated video hosting), but it’s has even more infantile adoption than Lemmy does. I don’t know that anyone I follow on youtube posts there, and if they do I don’t know how to find them.

I think the panic around analog clocks comes from the scenario where you have to explain what clockwise and counterclockwise is. I have personally seen someone eventually removed from a workgroup because they couldn’t understand it.

Not that analog clocks matter, but that was an easy way to teach direction in cylindrical coordinates. What can we use now for that?

+1 for syncthing.

Always get the version of the gadget with replaceable batteries unless you want a brick in 3-10 years. Additionally, prefer 18650, AA, AAA batteries, and keep some rechargeable ones around.

It’s not the biggest, but it still is a concern, and is exceedingly easily mitigated.

Yes! It’s not so much the work itself, but the mental effort tied to it. After a couple weeks of repetition something becomes habit, that mental effort is diminished.

For most people, big breaks in habits fall apart fast, while more gradual changes stick.

For example, many make resolutions to get fit, and start a bunch of related things. But since none of it is habitual, it requires mental effort to do consistently. Soon, something else important requires that mental attention, and the plan falls apart.

The successful ones aren’t special, but they created one, little, achievable metric to hit:

1. “Subscribe to 2 science-based fitness influencers and watch their content regularly”.

Because it was easy, it became habit. Then, they chose another simple thing to build on:

2. “Change evening commute to pass by gym”
3. “On Tuesdays, go into gym”
4. “Learn proper form for one excercise”
5. “Bring a protein shake”
6. etc.

Each of these is so small they don’t really feel significant at all. And they’re not. The important thing to understand is we’re all lazy. The real challenge isn’t getting yourself onto a diet or into the gym, it’s designing your habits so that the diet isn’t “a diet”, it’s just what you eat. It’s designing your life so that going to the gym requires less mental effort than not going.

I could write a lot more about this but it’s already getting long. Atomic Habits is a good book on how to design your habits and habit chains, if you have the time.