Recently my wife was complaining how her phone has been getting overzealous when flagging incoming phone spam, and as a result she's missed some important calls. It made me think about how easy it is for me to avoid spam calls, despite using a 3rd party dialer on my phone without any kind of spam ID features.

It's because around 15 years ago when Google started letting you pick your own phone number through Google Voice, I (for various reasons) needed to change my phone number. I ended up choosing one with what I thought was a really cool area code, and I've ported that number to every new provider I've swapped to so it's stuck with me since then. It turns out that all the spam callers, bless their hearts, like to spoof incoming phone numbers with the same area code as the number they're dialing. It means whenever I see a call coming from the same area code as my number it's ~100% guaranteed to be spam, and if I see a call coming from the same area code that I actually live in it's ~100% guaranteed to be something actually important (doctor, pharmacy, kids' school, something like that). It wasn't my intent when picking the number (I just wanted the cool area code), but it turned out to also be the perfect spam call ID system. (At least so long as I never move to the place that matches my area code.)

So I'm curious if anyone else has similar stories, where you did something for one reason but it turned out to actually be awesome for an entirely different, unexpected reason?

It’s been about a month and a half since our big Kagi trial giveaway, which means most people are probably about halfway through their trial periods, so I figured we were due for a follow-up.

To those who started using it recently, what are your thoughts?

What do you like and dislike about Kagi?

Do you think you will continue your subscription past the end of the trial?

Note: I’m not affiliated with Kagi in any way besides being a happy customer myself. I’m asking this entirely out of curiosity.

This thread is posted weekly - please try to post all relevant US political content in here, such as news, updates, opinion articles, etc. Extremely significant events may warrant a separate topic, but almost all should be posted in here.

This is an inherently political thread; please try to avoid antagonistic arguments and bickering matches. Comment threads that devolve into unproductive arguments may be removed so that the overall topic is able to continue.

This is the tenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our next book will be Born a Crime by Trevor Noah at the end of February.

I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.

For latecomers, don't worry if you didn't read the book in time for this Discussion topic. You can always join in once you finish it. Tildes Activity sort, and "Collapse old comments" feature should keep the topic going for as long as people are still replying.
And for anyone uninterested in this topic please use the Ignore Topic feature on this so it doesn't keep popping up in your Activity sort, since it's likely to keep doing that while I set this discussion up, and once people start joining in.

I've gone down the rabbit hole of self-hosting, and I'm wondering if I should try self-hosting my blog. The blog is currently on Netlify. I've left it there because I figure their infrastructure is much better than mine... but part of that is a CDN, and, despite the performance benefits, I'm not thrilled about the privacy implications of subjecting my users to that. I'm torn on that point.

That said, I'm on cable internet, so my upstream is abysmal. My site is mostly text and the site is low traffic, so maybe it's not a problem. What do you think? What are some of the implications of self-hosting the blog that I'm not considering?

Edit: Wanted to clarify a couple of things I realize weren't clear in my original posting. I'm already self-hosting a few dozen services from home on my own hardware. Port 80 and 443 both work, and I'm already running a Caddy reverse proxy to proxy to the other services. My question is less about whether self-hosting is a good idea and whether I should be keeping my blog on Netlify for the reasons above. My biggest concerns are the privacy implications of keeping with Netlify and their CDN vs. the performance implications of losing the CDN and serving via a ~30Mbps upstream connection.

Thank you for all the comments so far!

SOLVED
Bit of a long shot here because this is one of those issues where I search for the problem and you get a sea of replies like "have you checked the settings?" or "have you tried changing HDMI cables".

I just got a brand new LG OLED TV and I'm happy, but I've been watching Arcane on it and I notice jarring changes in brightness through the episode.
I'm playing through a native app (Stremio) on WebOS and it's not the source file, I've tested the same file on two different monitors and it's fine.
I went through the settings and disabled every autocorrect and "boost" capability the TV has to try and diagnose it, and the first pass did seem to improve the rate of changes, but it still happens maybe once every 5 mins of watch time.
From what I can tell it seems to be picking up particular colour/brightness changes in the source (Arcane is full of then being so vivid) and when it does, it just changes the brightness of the whole display.
I'm no expert here, I'm also colour blind, so I won't categorically claim it is definitely brightness changing, it could be contract or colour, I'm not sure, but it looks like brightness because the whole picture gets darker or lighter.

I wondered if it was actually flip flopping between SDR and HDR which honestly, it might be. If it is I have no idea how to fix that, as the TV seems to have no option to enable or disable HDR on native apps.

Any advice, thoughts, things to try would be appreciated. I'm technically orientated but I don't really know much about changing picture settings to be honest, I tend to pick the most basic/neutral setting and leave it like that.

Edit: I've dug out the old 4k firestick as suggested and don't get the flickering at all through that. Also running through the guide below helped make the picture look even better! Thanks everyone!
I might yet grab the service remote though and see if I can make the native apps work, then I can retire the firestick for good.

I'd love to hear everyone's thoughts who watched through the basho.

I don't have all my thoughts together yet but wanted to post this after watching the last day of the basho to get the ball rolling on any discussion.

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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If you are like me then you are kinda over hearing about AI all the time; I get it, believe me. I've written about jobs on here before: my day job is absolutely infested with AI jargon, most of it pretty meaningless (flashbacks to "The Cloud"), and it's a constant everywhere else too, so yeah it's a lot and it's largely unimpressive. Image gen has gotten pretty ridiculous in the last 6-12 months, and video gen seems to be taking off next, and I've successfully wrangled various chatbots into helping with coding projects, etc.

Probably none of this is news to you, but I just found out that I can get AI to edit video. I've done a lot of short-form editing, and recently picked up some side work that is much lengthier, without realizing that the time I would spend hunkered over going through it would be exponentially more lengthy. Painfully so. Cue signing up for a trial of AutoCut, and hot damn it's like living in the future. I am as we speak watching it delete gaps, cut to speakers, add captions that are mostly correct & even formatted & unbelievably also do the VHS singalong/Tiktok "highlight the word being spoken" thing that all the cool kids are doing these days. It's not perfect, it's kinda finicky—I'm having to use a V1 when V2 is supposedly much better, and I'm having to chunk these beastly premiere timelines to get it to do anything at all, but wow—if this is your day job, are you worried? Cause it's a game changer for me but no one is going to replace me because no one else would bother messing with it lol, but on a corporate scale do people know about this stuff yet? I'm thinking our jobs may not be replaced by AI, our jobs will probably just become AI babysitting.

While many of you are an inspiration to others on your own creative merits, I wonder if there is anyone else who sets aside little (or big) passages and other quotations from authors, poets, film, or TV whose work gets you in the mood to write or in some other way encourages you into a certain manner of expression.

I keep around a digital notebook of some of my favorite thought-provoking, creativity-motivating, or words that paint an immediately vivid picture. Sometimes they add color to a character or world in an intense way, or they're clever ways to word things I wouldn't have thought to express from that angle. Sometimes they're ways of phrasing or writing a concept or theme that we don't often see in modern fiction but might work for a fantasy setting or elsewhere and I want to keep around that idea as a reference of how I might do something similar, but different.

Please share and feel free to provide some context if necessary, such as a passage from a sci-fi novel that really gets you motivated to write something science-y, or a bit about the person if the passage is from a memoir.