smores's recent activity

  1. Comment on What ridiculous thing would you spend billions on? in ~talk

    smores
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    I would be very into the Animorphs adaption you're describing. Those books got dark.

    I would be very into the Animorphs adaption you're describing. Those books got dark.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on GrapheneOS is finally ready to break free from Pixels, and it may never look back in ~tech

    smores
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    For what it's worth, I've been using iodéOS ever since Calyx sort of imploded over the summer, and it's been great. The project is actively maintained by a self funded French shop that makes money...

    For what it's worth, I've been using iodéOS ever since Calyx sort of imploded over the summer, and it's been great. The project is actively maintained by a self funded French shop that makes money by selling phones preloaded with iodéOS, and by selling subscriptions to a device-level tracker blocking service (which I don't use, as I have my own setup). They are pleasant and responsive, and have decent documentation. The installation process was very easy. And they have made very similar decisions about privacy and security tradeoffs to Calyx, which I largely agree with. They also support a very large number of devices (I think it's even the same set of devices that Lineage supports?).

    5 votes

  3. Comment on What code editor / IDE do you use (2025)? in ~comp

    smores
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    Oh! I use Zed, which I think fits your requirements? It does have a bunch of AI features, but I don't use them, and they're very unobtrusive. It's not Electron — the entire rendering stack is...

    Oh! I use Zed, which I think fits your requirements? It does have a bunch of AI features, but I don't use them, and they're very unobtrusive. It's not Electron — the entire rendering stack is built from scratch in Rust, so it's very fast (I didn't think this was going to be a selling point for me, but actually it's enough faster than VS Code that I find it a little painful going back to VS Code now). It also has very good LSP support, etc.

    The development is also very active and they're pretty responsive to issues (most of the time)

    3 votes

  4. Comment on ‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    I don't really think this is in disagreement with what I said. Everyone is going to have a better time if both members of an engagement are on the same page about what they're looking for. Finding...

    I don't really think this is in disagreement with what I said. Everyone is going to have a better time if both members of an engagement are on the same page about what they're looking for. Finding one night stands is still cooperative matchmaking. Viewing another person's romantic, sexual, and relationship preferences as an obstacle to overcome in order to get them to sleep with you is a deeply alarming and antisocial worldview.

    24 votes

  5. Comment on ‘I realised I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: how ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    It feels like a very large number of people (especially men, but not exclusively) absolutely cannot wrap their heads around the idea of dating as cooperative matchmaking. This guy, like many guys,...

    It feels like a very large number of people (especially men, but not exclusively) absolutely cannot wrap their heads around the idea of dating as cooperative matchmaking. This guy, like many guys, seems to see the entire thing as a charade that only gets in the way of him getting "a girl."

    Like, dude. If a woman you're talking to cares about attachment styles and love languages, and you don't, that's probably a bad fit for you. Don't you think you'll both have a bad time if, in your actual relationship, your partner has a completely different framing of what a relationship is than you do? Why are you attempting to trick this person into thinking you care about a thing they care about? If you don't care, find someone else who also doesn't care! You're gonna have a better time!

    38 votes

  6. Comment on Suggestion request - My 75 year old mentor has gone blind in ~music

    smores
    Link Parent
    Oh, I'm excited for you! I think you'll like Punch Brothers quite a lot. His other band is Nickel Creek, which has been around since they were teenagers — their latest album, Celebrants, is really...

    Oh, I'm excited for you! I think you'll like Punch Brothers quite a lot. His other band is Nickel Creek, which has been around since they were teenagers — their latest album, Celebrants, is really interesting and I love it. Dotted Line is also very good, but is a more straightforward bluegress album (which, to be clear, I also love haha)

    2 votes

  7. Comment on Suggestion request - My 75 year old mentor has gone blind in ~music

    smores
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    If he likes classical music, he may like Punch Brothers? They're a bluegrass band, but they're all classical music nerds, and they tend to incorporate aspects of classical arrangements into their...

    If he likes classical music, he may like Punch Brothers? They're a bluegrass band, but they're all classical music nerds, and they tend to incorporate aspects of classical arrangements into their writing. Phosphorescent Blues, in particular, has several songs (Familiarity being probably the most prominent) that feel like classical/bluegrass fusion.

    The band leader for the Punch Brothers, Chris Thile, also has a few collections of Bach sonatas that he's recorded on mandolin. He's probably the most talented mandolin player alive, and they're pretty fantastic to listen to.

    Thile also has some collaborations with some of the folks that @Shevanel mentioned! He has a duo album with Brad Meldau that has my favorite rendition of Tabhair dom do Lámh. And he's featured on a few Fearless Flyers tracks, too!

    4 votes

  8. Comment on Adam Conover: Unmedicated in ~tv

    smores
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I think this Reddit comment more or less captures my feelings about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/dropout/comments/1ktqws9/comment/mtw2rma If you weren't a huge fan of him before or whatever,...

    I think this Reddit comment more or less captures my feelings about it: https://www.reddit.com/r/dropout/comments/1ktqws9/comment/mtw2rma

    If you weren't a huge fan of him before or whatever, obviously that's fine — he has a very specific style and it's not for everyone. But he's ultimately a champion of progressive movements, and he very clearly owned this mistake, apologized, and did not accept money even though he actually produced and released the video he was asked for. The action itself was obviously bad and world is clearly an unhinged crypto grift, but it doesn't really change my perspective about Conover at all.

    28 votes

  9. Comment on Looking forward to Apple Container/Containerization tool in macOS 26, an alternative to Docker in ~comp

    smores
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    The very first question I ask when a Storyteller user reports that they got a 137 exit code is "What operating system do you use?" immediately followed by "Have you configured your Docker VM to...

    The very first question I ask when a Storyteller user reports that they got a 137 exit code is "What operating system do you use?" immediately followed by "Have you configured your Docker VM to use more than the default 2GB of RAM?"

    I think the dynamic resource allocation is the most interesting part of this for me. It would be really cool to not have to permanently allocate more than half of a computer's memory to Docker just to occasionally run a process in a container that needs a lot of RAM!

    9 votes

  10. Comment on How many valid JSON strings are there? in ~comp

    smores
    Link Parent
    Wait, is this true? I don't see the word document anywhere in that spec. I agree that a JSON value can be a primitive, array, or object, but I've mostly seen a JSON "document" referred in the...

    Wait, is this true? I don't see the word document anywhere in that spec. I agree that a JSON value can be a primitive, array, or object, but I've mostly seen a JSON "document" referred in the context of either a document store or a JSON schema document. In both of those cases, a document is specifically an object.

    I wouldn't be surprised if there simply is no commonly accepted definition of JSON document, but I don't think it's uncommon to use it to refer to a JSON-serializable object!

    1 vote

  11. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    Link Parent
    Especially now that we have an infant, the sleep mode is truly amazing. Someone has to get up to make a bottle around 4 or 5am most mornings, and doing so in very dim, very warm lights is...

    Especially now that we have an infant, the sleep mode is truly amazing. Someone has to get up to make a bottle around 4 or 5am most mornings, and doing so in very dim, very warm lights is definitely the only reason everyone is able to go back to sleep for a few more hours afterward!

    1 vote

  12. Comment on I tried to protect my kids from the internet. Here’s what happened. in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    If that standard is implementable on desktop computers, and by arbitrary operating systems (I'm ok with requiring a secure enclave of some kind), I will feel ok about it. I truly cannot find any...

    If that standard is implementable on desktop computers, and by arbitrary operating systems (I'm ok with requiring a secure enclave of some kind), I will feel ok about it. I truly cannot find any information after a cursory search about how mobile wallets work, and I am definitely worried that this will be an "open spec" the way RCS is an "open spec" — publicly documented, but functionally impossible to implement by any entities other than Apple and Google.

    Passkeys, by contrast, had other major contributors (Yubico, 1Password, etc) during their development, and so are actually an open standard, and have been implemented by a number of providers.

    4 votes

  13. Comment on I tried to protect my kids from the internet. Here’s what happened. in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    This is a less bad solution than “every individual company gets a photograph of your goverment ID”, but it has its own downsides. I don't know that much about how mobile operating system wallets...

    This is a less bad solution than “every individual company gets a photograph of your goverment ID”, but it has its own downsides. I don't know that much about how mobile operating system wallets are implemented (I assume it has at least something to do with secure enclaves), but my Android phone is running iodeOS, and so it doesn’t have Google Wallet.

    I’m sure Apple and Google are pretty jazzed about the idea of a future where their devices are essentially required to access necessary internet services, but… I’m not haha.

    11 votes

  14. Comment on I tried to protect my kids from the internet. Here’s what happened. in ~tech

    smores
    Link Parent
    Ok, so, this is very funny to me. Aside from continuous, realtime, biometric monitoring, there is no technical solution that would have prevented this child from accessing the content she wanted...

    She eventually admitted that she’d sneaked into my home office, pulled up the Qustodio website and changed the control settings.

    Ok, so, this is very funny to me. Aside from continuous, realtime, biometric monitoring, there is no technical solution that would have prevented this child from accessing the content she wanted to access, because she had access to her parents’ credentials. This is precisely the problem — even if a company is legally required to verify every user’s age, they will only do so at the time the account is created. Which means that such a requirement will immediately create a thriving black market of age-verified accounts, sold to minors. And then we’re exactly back where we started, except now a bunch of untrustworthy, insecure tech companies have verified records of the real name and address of every single one of their users.

    26 votes

  15. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    Link Parent
    The switches are all running on watch batteries as well, so basically 0 energy usage. Also, overall we use much less electricity to power our lights, since they're dimmed to 70% when the sun is...

    The switches are all running on watch batteries as well, so basically 0 energy usage. Also, overall we use much less electricity to power our lights, since they're dimmed to 70% when the sun is down! And we're also much better about making sure all of yhe lights are off when we leave the house, since we can easily turn off every light by long pressing the switches at the front and back doors.

    I already have a (pretty energy efficient) server that was running lots of other services — adding home assistant did not measurably affect its energy draw (which is usually around 100W)

    2 votes

  16. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    Link Parent
    The title is more general than the topic haha, I was being a little dramatic. This is really about my saga to have automated temperature and brightness changes that follow the sunrise and sunset,...

    The title is more general than the topic haha, I was being a little dramatic. This is really about my saga to have automated temperature and brightness changes that follow the sunrise and sunset, and finding the right setup for me and my family. We have almost no lamps in the house — there are very many ceiling lights, and being able to dim these has eliminated a lot of our need for lamps, which is nice.

    I will try to find some time to share some pictures, though! What are you interested in seeing? The switches, or the actual lighting?

    2 votes

  17. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    Link Parent
    I looked into the Sonoff relays at one point! I think I was concerned that they wouldn't physically fit in some of my switch boxes, which were PACKED. But I probably should have looked a bit...

    I looked into the Sonoff relays at one point! I think I was concerned that they wouldn't physically fit in some of my switch boxes, which were PACKED. But I probably should have looked a bit harder. Ultimately, I think I ended up in a pretty similar place, with an always-on circuit and wireless-only light signalling. Also, my existing switches didn't have any dimming functionality, so I'm happier with the new rotary switches (I also just really like rotary switches).

    It's very nice to hear that other folks have been adaptive-lighting-pilled haha. We're completely bought in, it's hard to imagine going back

    4 votes

  18. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    Yeah, the problem I had here was that my Home Assistant instance doesn't have a Zigbee receiver directly — I already had a Hubitat Elevation that does all of my other home automation (their...

    Yeah, the problem I had here was that my Home Assistant instance doesn't have a Zigbee receiver directly — I already had a Hubitat Elevation that does all of my other home automation (their thermostat app is amazing!), so all of my Zigbee devices are available to Home Assistant through the Hubitat integration, which is over HTTP and very slow. This also would not have resolved the internal level issue that I had with the Auroras (I actually don't even know exactly how Hue works around this, I guess they have some API that allows them to update the level that isn't available on the generic Zigbee interface? Or maybe it's only Hubitat that couldn't do this and connecting directly to Home Assistant would have resolved it 🤷).

    I was also under the impression that folks generally didn't recommend having like 30 Hue hulbs directly in your Zigbee network, though it's been a few years since I looked into this and maybe the recommendations have changed

    Also also, yes Philips sucks, and I almost dropped the whole thing when they started requiring that I have an account and sign into it in order to configure my own lights in my own house. If I hadn't already purchased all of the lights and the hub, that probably would have turned me off from the whole product line

    4 votes

  19. Comment on The perfect lighting in ~life.home_improvement

    smores
    Link Parent
    You can configure the center button of the Auroras to cycle different scenes, instead of always turning on to the same scene. I believe that the way that it works is that one press with turn the...

    You can configure the center button of the Auroras to cycle different scenes, instead of always turning on to the same scene. I believe that the way that it works is that one press with turn the lights on, and then another press shortly after will begin cycling scenes, one per additional press.

    But I don't do this haha. Ultimately, I just want the temperature tied to the time of day, so I just wanted the minimal light switch interface that would allow that.

    2 votes

  20. Comment on The Buff Scammer, isolation, and the male loneliness epidemic in ~life.men

    smores
    Link Parent
    They will deny it vehemently, but ultimately, they see gayness as a deficit in men. Speculating about a man's gayness is a way for them to feel better than them, to implicitly at their own...

    This kind of surprises me, I would assume that being able to "guess" someone's sexuality would be considered gay in and of itself (did i use that right?), just based on my experience of the gaydar trope in films and TV.

    They will deny it vehemently, but ultimately, they see gayness as a deficit in men. Speculating about a man's gayness is a way for them to feel better than them, to implicitly at their own straightness. This is sort of transparently obvious, because the two times I have dared to push back (I was genuinely very gentle and lighthearted), my dad aggressively insisted that it was fine if the person was gay and he wasn't homophobic. So. You know.

    11 votes