I will admit this is somewhat of a selfish topic as I am struggling to make a decision about selling or keeping a used car I own. I have two vehicles, a relatively newer model crossover which is our primary family car, and my daily driver when running errands with the baby. Our second car is an '06 Acura RSX which is a little coupe (although, it's quite practical and spacious for a coupe)

Our current situation is that my wife works less than a mile from home, and I am a stay at home dad. My wife generally walks or rides our electric scooter to work, while very rarely (extremely snowy or rainy days) we will load up and drive her down the road. The result of this is that the RSX sits unused a lot of the time, except for specific times like when she takes the baby somewhere on the weekend and I have errands to run as well, or when the crossover is otherwise occupied (oil changes, tire rotation etc)

For these reasons, we have been considering selling the RSX. Since used car prices have been spiking it would pay off all of our remaining debt on the crossover, and leave us with a few thousand in the bank. It's not a huge amount of money but it will save us a few hundred a month. We are not well-off on a single income, but we're not struggling by any means.

My hesitancy is basically two economic reasons and one personal:

1. With the tariff insanity, used car prices do seem to be spiking and I don't think (or know if) we're necessarily at the price peak. I would regret selling it and having the price jump 25% a few months later.

2. Because of the same reasons, replacing it in a year or two when I want to go back to work might end up costing us more than we made from selling it. My daughter is 18 months now and we'll probably be looking to get her into daycare by 2.5-3 years old.

3. As for the personal reason, I just really like this car. I bought it outright from the insurance payment on my first real car getting totaled, and it has gotten me through some tough times in my life. I have done a lot of work on it to make it "my" car. I love the fact that it's from the era where cars were just machines, but its still modern enough for tech upgrades, and parts for it (both OEM and third party) are basically everywhere. It's cheap to work on and barely needs work to begin with. That being said, it does need a few things done that might be outside of my skill set in the next year or so. I might be able to manage a serpentine belt replacement, but the front control arm bushings are wearing out and it seems like you need a lot of specialized tools for that replacement so I'm not sure I'm confident in doing it myself.

As for the less "me specific" portion of the conversation, I'm just curious what the smart people of Tildes think about what's going to happen in the near/mid future in the US regarding the car market, used cars, the transition to electric vehicles, and what you're thinking about in regards buying, selling, or holding vehicles in these uncertain times.

This is a recurring post to discuss programming or other technical projects that we've been working on. Tell us about one of your recent projects, either at work or personal projects. What's interesting about it? Are you having trouble with anything?

I am planning to use Plaid API and have a spring boot backend but given that I will be storing my financial information (such as whatever the Plaid API needs me to store to use their endpoints as well as just the transactions on my credit and chequing account), the security of the data is obviously crucial. and I think my problem is I don't know what I don't know.

I have a basic idea of what kind of things I need to protect against.

1. WIll have to use Spring security (or whatever is best) for thing like protecting against xss and csrf
2. I need to ensure that the PostgreSQL database is encrypted

but beyond that, I don't know much about the nuances of each type of security and customizations I should be on the look-out for. wonder if there's a trustworthy resource for at least detailing for me the kind of security I need to implement on either the Spring or PostgreSQL side of things?

So a my building charged me for a clogged toilet repair that turned into a total replacement.

Its listed as a plumbing damage charge, I don't believe they have a basis to charge for that. What should I do?

Also my insurance company interestingly didnt renew my tenant insurance policy ive had fot years with no change.

Should I ask them to provide the documented charge and consider filing a claim with my insurance seeing as they're dropping me anyway? Should I ensure I have a new policy before I file that claim

Not proud but proudly not ashamed

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In the notification setting, I have untoggled both options but then I am wondering how can I mark a comment as read if I dont actually want to vote, label, reply or anything?

I am used to the reddit interface where iirc, you can just hit a button for toggle that state on a comment.

There's white smoke on St. Peter's Square (at 18:08 local time). Given the time it's probably been the fourth round of voting that yielded a positive result. You can watch the vatican media livestream here with english commentary and here without any commentary.

Thought I'd post this as a text post to keep it updated with relevant information (e.g. who it is) over the next hour or so.

The swiss guard has arrived on the square shortly after 18:30. If the previous two conclaves are anything to go by it'll be another 30 minutes or so until Cardinal Mamberti will step onto the balcony to announce the new pope's name.

Update 19:13: Mamberti has entered the balcony and is making his announcement (rewatch here):

Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum; habemus Papam:

Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum dominum, dominum Robertum Franciscum, Sanctæ Romanæ Ecclesiæ Cardinalem Prevost, qui sibi nomen imposui Leonem XIV.

Pope Leo XIV, formerly Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, is a US American by birth, but moved to Peru later on and became bishop there, making him the second pope from America and first ever US American to hold the title. He's generally viewed as a compromise candidate between progressives and conservatives within the catholic church as far as I know. He was created (as a cardinal) by pope francis and was responsible for personell management under him.

Update 19:23: Pope Leo XIV has entered the balcony and is making his first public statement (rewatch original here or with english subtitles here).

Update 19:40: After speaking for more than 10 minutes (a lot longer than his predrcessors during their first appearance) he's now issued the traditional blessing 'urbi et orbi' and has left the balcony.

How many languages y'all speak? From how many different language families? How many scripts can you read? Any special grammatical quirks that your languages have?

It doesn't matter if it's A2 level or C2 level, share it with us!

I wasn’t sure whether I should file this under ~movies, ~music, or ~society, so I put it here. Feel free to move it elsewhere.

I had a thought this morning: I’m confused about the attention-seeking behavior of famous and wealthy celebrities in the music or film industries, past their peak.

From my point of view, as someone who is neither famous nor wealthy, I think that if I ever reached that level, then I would be more than happy when people stop paying attention to me, and instead start swooning for newer, younger artists on their way to stardom.

It would signal to me that my time to be in the spotlight is over, that it’s my turn to pass on the torch, and that I can now ride into the sunset, content to potentially have several decades of time left for me to just enjoy a quiet, cozy life, making use of my money to amuse myself as well as to invest it in worthy causes, so that I not only leave behind a legacy of fame and wealth, but also improve the lives of other people.

Every famous and wealthy musician or actor could do this.

But so many of them don’t. They choose to, instead, do everything they can to stay in the limelight. They pull extreme stunts with which they harm themselves, which ironically, in many cases only end up embarrassing in the eyes of the world anyway. And they do all of this to retain the attention of people who have long forgotten about them.

What for? I don’t get it.

Is it really so that fame and wealth just corrupts a person to such an extent that they become addicted to being the center of attention?

This thought, by the way, came about because I’ve become aware of many such “extreme and dangerous attention-seeking stunts” from many celebrities in the last few weeks. It’s not about one celebrity in particular. It’s been a thought that has been brewing in my head for a while.

I tried looking through the docs but couldn't find an answer to this question: What is the nature of the link that is established to the sys-admin and devs of tildes for an account and the invite account?

as in, do they store the invite code that I used to create this account permanently and will be able to link that invite back to the issuing user? so that my account and the issuing user will always be linked in that way?

Yesterday presented the biggest pain over my few years of using Linux that I have personally encountered. With the current prevalence of topics related to Linux, and especially ones related to new users, I figured it would be good to share and leave a place for others to share any similar stories (and ideally how to avoid them).

The problem I encountered was effectively that my machine crashed and I was locked out on reboot. I'll describe how I crashed it later and for now just focus on the locked out bit.

During startup something was failing and as a result it would dump me into emergency mode. Emergency mode is basically just a root terminal where your ultimate goal is usually to read your logs and fix whatever was logged as failing. Annoying, but not a real issue. The real issue was that I was also locked out of emergency mode! This meant that literally the only thing I could do was get into a boot cycle telling me everything is locked.

So I head off to forums on my phone looking for what cryptic wizardry I'm going to need to perform. I need to a live boot OS because it is impossible to fix from my current install. I have to live boot another image, mount my original primary partition (after decrypting it), chroot the new mount point, and then use passwd to set a new root password. If I'm smart I'll come back to this thread later, when I'm not on my phone, and edit in or reply the actual commands needed since in reality I found myself piecing them together from across the Internet and maybe I'll need them again some day.

For avoiding this: check you have a root password. You may think you have one but might not. Set it to anything. Do it now, not after you're already locked out. The reason for being locked out of emergency mode was that passwordless root is locked, but there's no way to unlock it in emergency mode. I personally encountered this on Arch, but my search for error text was also taking me to Fedora forums so I don't think it is related to distro beyond the distro supporting no root password.

The bit down here is a bit less relevant as it is specific to my case.

Ultimately, I had an invalid /etc/fstab entry for a secondary drive (NTFS extra storage, not boot-critical). The thing is that entry has been there through months of daily boots and had worked, even though it may have been giving warnings or something. It's still lost on me as to why that suddenly became a boot blocker.

I'm pretty sure the original crash was my fault, although it seems pretty insane that what I was doing can break everything to the level it does. I was working on some Vulkan code and I definitely had some bugs in it that made my shader capable of reading out-of-bounds memory, but one would think this would stop at crashing the application. Instead it was causing graphical issues across the entire machine as if I'd simultaneously broken the logical drivers for every application, desktop environment included, at once. If I was lucky Plasma would reboot the whole desktop, if I was unlucky everything was completely frozen with mouse and keyboard doing nothing at all. It was me using the power button to escape the locked machine that triggered my chain of events.

For whatever reason on reboot it behaved differently than before. I'm still not sure why. I hadn't applied any updates or anything during that boot cycle. I shut this particular machine down every night and the issue was on a reboot, not my first boot of the day.

Hello tilderunners! Apologies for the delay on this thread, I was out of town and realized I hadn't posted last week. I'm posting to collect everyone's YAML for their intended Archipelago run and confirm if we have enough people to go.

For anyone out of the know, Archipelago is a large multiworld randomizer across multiple games. I made an FAQ over here with some details and info. If it sounds vaguely interesting, don't be intimidated and come on in! It's as crazy as it sounds, but not nearly as hard as you think it'll be.

Let's put a hard cutoff of 9 PM ET on the night of Thursday, May 8th to post your YAML(s) in this thread. The YAMLs have to bake in at the beginning - we can't add you later! So please try to get them in then, or let me know if you'll be a bit late so we can push the start a little bit. If a majority of people cannot make the Thursday night time, I can push the date, so please let me know - I'm thinking if we hit ~7 YAMLs posted and ready for the start time we'll go. There are often a lot of checks at the beginning, so it's typically best to be around for the start to be around for the opening chaos. It's still asynchronous, though - if you can start playing within the first 24 hours, that should be fine!

I'm not sure what the best way to attach the YAML would be, so I'm going to suggest posting a spoilered code block that I can throw into a text file. If anyone has a better idea, please throw it in here. I've also thrown a discord server together if you want to join and stream or chat while you play! Technically I've got a separate emojis one with Nitro if that's better for the audio quality boost, but this might be fine for now.

Add awesome game deals to this topic as they come up over the course of the week!

Alternately, ask about a given game deal if you want the community’s opinions: e.g. “What games from this bundle are most worth my attention?”

Rules:

• No grey market sales
• No affiliate links

If posting a sale, it is strongly encouraged that you share why you think the available game/games are worthwhile.

All previous Save Point topics

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