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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • It sounds like he’s not being given a house, but cash that the donor intends OP should use to buy a house.

    To me, this sounds like a combination of “you’re going to inherit significant money” and “here’s a strategy to survive on it long-term.” If OP’s family member has made their life as a landlord, then that’s just them passing on their own experience. OP is unhoused, and it’s reasonable to imagine their family member distrusts OP’s financial awareness.

    The inheritance may or may not specify how the money is to be used. If OP just gets some lump sum of money, then there’s the financial question of how to extract the greatest quality of life from that money and each strategy has its own ethical question. Would it ethical to buy two homes - even if they’re the same physical building - and rent one out to pay for both? Plus OP’s living expenses? Would it be ethical to invest it all in United Healthcare and live off the dividends? To open a restaurant?

    If OP gets a lump sum, there is also the ethical question of whether they are bound to use it in the fashion recommended by their family member.





  • There’s no wrong or right way to enjoy games, and so many ways to find enjoyment in those games. Some people love the novelty, or the stories, graphics, music…

    Based on the favorites you’ve mentioned, I feel like you really enjoy specific mechanics or the physical experience/practice of the game. Back in the day, I could spend hours running through Diablo 2, and that was entirely based on button mashing and running. Something about its pacing, interface, and the match of its challenge with my coordination just hit exactly right - difficult enough to be rewarding, easy enough that repeatedly dying didn’t frustrate me, and always another fight just seconds away. I played that for years.

    Now that game launchers track my time, it’s really obvious that I like certain games for their mechanics - mostly Skyrim & Fallout - other games for sandbox/crafting - Valheim, Rimworld, X4 - hundreds of hours in each, even though I’ll try other games, at least long enough to finish their stories, once. Sometimes just because I paid for it & feel obligated to get to the end. It’s OK to have favorites.


  • Super easy, as it turns out. I run my own DNS and web servers, so I pointed quicken.com at my web server to capture the request, then used curl to capture the response. Both turned out to be plain ASCII, request like

    stk.1=SMCI;.2=NVDA;.3=INTC;

    as POST data, and responses like

    qwin.quotes.ASTM.symbol 4 ASTM
    .last 7 18.7400
    .time 10 1573074000
    .time.str 5 16:00
    .change 6 0.4000

    plus a whole slew of other optional fields for fundamentals, dividends, etc. It was a simpler time on the internet, when no one cared about leaking data and companies didn’t care if a handful of geeks reversed engineered their data structures.


  • This won’t help you, but I want to brag. I started using Quicken to track my finances at the turn of the century, back when it was all local storage. Quicken 2012 was the last iteration that used http (not https) to update stock prices. When they discontinued support, I captured the interaction and deciphered the formats. Wrote a proxy to intercept the request, look up the security info, and send back the data.

    So, I self-host quicken.com. It’s saved me having to update Quicken or submit to their subscription model.


  • I don’t watch streamers, but I’ll watch videos like ‘which is the best weapon for [X]’ or ‘how to optimize production in [X].’ I’ve watched stream highlights like SovietWomble’s bullshittery, or IAmCrusty’s psychopathic VR vids. Once you get stuff like that into your YouTube algorithm, there’s a lot of it. It’s gaming content you can consume when location or time constraints won’t let you actually game, and that’s a larger chunk of my day than when I can sit down and play.

    You can’t have stream highlights without a stream. Even if no one watches the stream, the infrastructure and technologies have to be there. And I can see where some audience members of those highlights would be attracted to the raw stream, trying to catch the ‘good stuff’ live, the same way some people watch NASCAR hoping to see crashes as they happen.



  • tburkhol@lemmy.worldtoSelfhosted@lemmy.worldPower usage
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    12 days ago

    Yeah, don’t let the bashers get you down: wasting stuff just because it’s cheap is how we got here. Measuring your power use is the only way to make informed choices, and sometimes the results are surprising.

    Like, I was surprised to find that my audio gear uses exactly the same power whether it’s playing or not. The subwoofer alone uses twice as much power as the RPi that feeds it signal. It’s maybe 0.02 USD/day (for the sub), but I’ve got extra smart plugs from a multi-pack, and it’s easy enough to put together an automation to power them all down if they’ve been idle a while.







  • Sensors. Especially sensors in your living space where fans or other noise from the proper server would be distracting, or in a tight space - inside your HVAC, for example - where a proper server wouldn’t fit.

    Media front-end. Most of those SBCs are more than enough to run a kodi or jellyfin frontend, fanless for minimum distraction.

    Robot. Low power requirement so it could be mobile; but there are lots of stationary possibilities. GPIO libraries are great for running servos and there’s tons of libraries to facilitate.


  • For small businesses, a president taking power can immediately affect business. Small business owners make decisions based on their expectations of future, colored by their emotional state, so if they believe that a Republican President will be good for business, then they’re more likely to order new machinery, hire an extra person, etc. In an ecosystem of small businesses, that optimism feeds on itself.

    Happens in big business, too. S&P500 gained 3+% the day after election, which (if you don’t believe the daily stock market is just gambling) presumably means that ‘the market’ expects 3% more growth out of all those companies, just by Trump’s win being formalized. Stock price up makes it easier for companies to raise capital to expand, buy out competitors, etc

    Neither of those things is “the economy,” but they can feel like it, if you’re close enough.