I’m less than half his age, and if I could, I’d do the same thing. I’m also not running for president and fighting against rhetoric that says I’m old, inept, and mentally not all there.

Good for him, but maybe it wasn’t the best idea to make this public?

I spend less money on beer and don’t have to drive to get it. Otherwise, not much has changed.

I’m going to break with what most people are saying and offer the suggestion that search engines are actually doing a decent job. If my mother searches Google for the phrase “Can you please show me a recipe for apple pie?,” she’s probably going to get a recipe for apple pie. If I search google for “c++20” “std::string” “constructors”, after I skip over the ads, I’m most likely going to get a web page that shows me the the constructors for std::string in c++20.

Ad-sponsored pages and AI bullshit aside, most search engines do still give decent results.

I tend to agree, but I would set the age lower. A person can graduate high school at 18, get a 4-year degree, and still be 3 years away from “adulthood” by your definition. There are plenty of professionals in the first 3 years of their career who are contributing members of society. Shouldn’t they be able to drive to work, sign a rental contract, etc? I’ve been in my career for over 20 years, and I have always worked with young people who may be lacking experience but are still productive employees. I think you’d be cutting out a significant portion of the workforce by excluding those in early adulthood.

If you can afford one, I would strongly recommend going with a dual-conversion UPS. A line-interactive UPS like the one you posted essentially acts as a pass-through for your mains power until it detects a power loss or a brown-out. This works most of the time, but there’s a short delay during the switch from line to batteries (just guessing, but most likely on the order of milliseconds). This might not sound like much, but you’re counting on the capacitors in your server’s power supply to hold enough charge until the UPS kicks in.

The other thing to consider is that a dual-conversion UPS also supplies “clean” power to your equipment. It essentially acts as a DC power supply connected to an inverter, so regardless of how bad your input power is, you’re always going to get the correct voltage and frequency out. I connected my old line-interactive UPS to a cheap generator at one point; the voltage and frequency regulation was so bad on the generator that my UPS continually switched on/off of battery (several times per second), and the equipment attached to it immediately shut down.

I can connect my dual-conversion UPS to the same generator, and it keeps humming along as if it was connected to mains voltage. According to the datasheet, anything from 60VAC to 150VAC, it’s still going to output clean 120V/60hz power.

They’re much more expensive. Mine is 1000VA, and if I remember correctly, I paid something like 600 or 700 USD for the UPS. An add-on rackmount battery pack was another $300 or so. It was well worth the cost, though.

What devices are you using that support 3x3? My APs are set to 3x3, but every device I have ever tried only connects at 2x2.

I testing this after reading your comment. A few feet away from one of my APs, I got about 550 down, 650 up. 15 feet away through a single wall, I get 250. I had no idea a 5Ghz signal falls of that quickly.

I was actually thinking about something similar today. We’ve already had an actor as president, then with Trump, we had a reality-TV star. Social media is the new “TV” for the younger generation, so it’s only a matter of time before we have an influencer or a YouTube creator as a candidate, right? Let’s see MrBeast go toe-to-toe with Trump.

I have a decently-sized homelab, and a large home network. I also have IPv6 disabled everywhere. Compared to a normal home network, my config is very complex. (Extensive firewall and routing rules, multiple gateways, multiple subnets and VLANs, inbound traffic filtering, and plenty more.) With the exception of VLANs, IPv6 would require reconfiguring EVERYTHING. What’s the advantage?

In the US at least, most equipment (unless you get into high-and datacenter stuff) runs on 120V. We also use 240V power, but a 240V connection is actually two 120V phases 180-degrees out of sync. The main feed coming into your home is 240V, so your breaker panel splits the circuits evenly between the two phases. Running dual-phase power to a server rack is as simple as just running two 120V circuits from the panel.

My rack only receives a single 120V circuit, but it’s backed up by a dual-conversion UPS and a generator on a transfer switch. That was enough for me. For redundancy, though, dual phases, each with its own UPS, and dual-PSU servers are hard ro beat.

I probably should have specified I’m using libcurl, but I did try the equivalent of what you suggested. I even tried setting a list of user agents and having it cycle through. None of them work. A lot of anti-scraping methods use much more complex schemes than just validating the user agent. In some cases, even a headless browser will be blocked.

Speaking from experience, be careful you don’t become over-zealous in your anti-scraping efforts.

I often buy parts and equipment from a particular online supplier. I also use custom inventory software to catalog my parts. In the past, I could use cURL to pull from their website, and my software would parse the website and save part specifications to my local database.

They have since enacted intense anti-scraping measures, to the point that cURL no longer works. I’ve had to resort to having the software launch Firefox to load the web page, then the software extracts the HTML from Firefox.

I doubt that their goal was to block customers from accessing data for items they purchased, but that’s exactly what they did in my case. I’ve bought thousands of dollars of product from them in the past, but this was enough of a pain in the ass to make me consider switching to a supplier with a decent API or at least a less restrictive website.

Simple rate limiting may have been a better choice.

Unlike just about everyone else here, I agree with this 100%. Population does not need to increase. Take either men or women and limit their number of children to 2; that would ensure a 1-to-1 replacement with the exception of early deaths. Once population decreases, maybe increase the limit to 3 if the numbers support it.

I’m not sure where I heard this quote, but it holds true here: “Save the earth; don’t give birth.”

I’m strongly in favor of keeping things compartmentalized. I have two main servers: One is a Proxmox host with a powerful CPU and a few hard drives set up in a fast but not-so redundant array (I use ZFS, but my setup is similar to RAID10). Then a have second server that runs TrueNAS; the CPU is slower, but it has a large amount of storage (120TB physical) arrayed in an extremely fault-tolerant configuration.

My Proxmox box runs every service on my network, but all that gets stored the hard drives are the main boot disks. It backs up daily, so I’m not so concerned about drive failure. All my data is stored on the NAS, and it’s shared with the VMs via NFS, SMB, or iSCSI, depending on which is more appropriate.

For you, I’d recommend building a NAS, and keep all your important data there. Your NUC can host your services, and they can pull data from the NAS. The 256GB on your NUC will be more than enough to host whatever services you need.

4 Mbit is exceptionally slow by today’s standards; when I signed up for internet access (there’s only one provider available where I live), I told them “I will pay for whatever the fastest connection is that you can offer.” Turns out that’s just single-channel DSL. They won’t even install bonded DSL where I live, and believe me, I’ve tried. I do have Starlink as well, but because of the land around me, it’s always going to be obstructed by the land topology; when I calculated how high I would need to raise my antenna to avoid obstructions, it was several hundred feet. My pfSense box does a good job of routing traffic between my DSL connection and my Starlink connetion (and falling back when Starlink is obstructed), but for hosting anything, I need a stable connection. That leaves me with just my DSL connection.

I know you said you don’t like dating apps, but I would write them off completely. My partner and I met online (we’re both within a few years of your age), and one thing we both agree on is that dating apps are great for vetting a potential partner ahead of time. It’s frustrating to meet someone only to find out that they have/want kids (we don’t), don’t share any common interests, have opposing religious/political views, etc. By the time we actually met in person, we both already knew that we would at least get along as friends. It does seem that women tend to get a lot more “garbage” matches on online dating than men do, though; it probably also depends largely on where you live.

Are you sure Youtube doesn’t pick video quality based on connection speed? It will frequently drop down to 360p when my connection speed is particularly shitty that day, and I’ll have to manually increase it (I’d rather have occasional buffering than a blurry mess).

Unfortunately, the only people who would actually want to see my home videos (family) live several thousand miles away. I’m also not sure they would even know what to do with an external HDD. Not a bad idea, though.

I honestly didn’t know that Youtube “unlisted” was even a thing; I’ve never posted a video to Youtube before, but this might be a promising idea. I’m assuming they still inject ads into unlisted videos, which is a major barrier for me… I hate ads.

I’ll admit that I’m a snob when it comes to video and audio quality; 4k/60 might be overkill, but I think at least 4k/30 has some merit in this case. Most modern phones and tablets (and TVs) are at least greater than 1080p, so assuming they’re watching the video horizontally, 1080p video would still result in a loss of quality. Would they care? Almost certainly not, but the idea of watching a UHD video source in a lower resolution bothers me far more than it should.

It definitely seems like VPS hosting is out of my budget. I think that hosting multiple version of the same video (and paying for more HDD space) would probably be cheaper than a VPS with a GPU resources, but the recurring fees are probably more than I’m willing to spend.

I’m a big fan of Jellyfin. I run it at home with a dedicated Nvidia A2000 for hardware transcoding. It’s able to transcode multiple 4k streams with tonemapping faster than they can play.

As much as I’d love to use Jellyfin, there are two major issues: My internet connection is so slow, that I’d be lucky to stream 720p at a low bitrate. I’d spend the money on a faster connection, but I live in an area that doesn’t even get cell phone service. My options are DSL and Starlink, and I have both; the DSL is just slow, and Starlink uplink speed isn’t much better, plus I have plenty of obstructions that make it somewhat unreliable. The second problem is that Jellyfin has too steep of a learning curve. Telling my relatives “oh, if it starts buffering, just lower the bitrate” isn’t an option. Not to mention, I’d have to run it on a VPS, and hosting a VPS with the resources required for this is way too expensive for me.