You don’t get Maps “for free”, you pay with your data (your searches, your preferences, etc.). For Google maps is the bait to reel you in, you are the product they sell to their real customers: businesses. Google can shape your preferences by showing you what their paying customers want you to see.

I thought it’s self evident that products like Gmail, Search, Maps and others aren’t free because Google is aiming to do charity but because your personal data allows them to build a digital model of you and charge other businesses for access to that knowledge.

Around me I can’t think of a bank that allows any remote operation without a TAN only available on iOS or Android. That’s the root of a lot of future problems, not the least of which being that the bank charges you more for in person operations.

I understand that, but how does that factor into the larger conversation? Are you saying that Google should want to make sure these services should work flawlessly on other stores so we can be tracked by them even if we don't use the Play Store?

The unknown model here [1] looks a lot like the Nokia E6 to the point it might be a prototype. The date on the screen suggests it's from ~8 months before the E6's launch. AFAIK only the mic hole is places slightly off from the E6.

[1] https://nokiadesignarchive.aalto.fi/index.html?node=A0383

Back then this was quite a bit of effort and engineering (especially the bootloader auto detection) to achieve and probably got a lot of wowed faces. Today nobody would bat an eye, you can cram anywhere a tiny PC or even stick PC, and maybe have a single USB-C cable sticking out.

Now you could maybe cram the guts of a DGX Spark in there and have an incredible sleeper machine.

Now you can cram some seriously powerful hardware inside your keyboard (to go back to a form factor really popular some decades ago), or even a larger mouse with enough skill and determination. Stick PCs and tiny PCs made everything so accessible because they're already in a super compact form factor, ready to be crammed into any enclosure with minimal modding.

Hard to be impressed with small builds today considering what a flagship phone is capable of in that tiny package.

That's why we have Teams. /s

I'd consider power generation (solar, wind, nuclear) as strategically important and accept that it may need subsidies long term. If this allows the country a degree of independence from external shocks, it would be worth it.

Agreed, I've always been pro-nuclear (although the arguments have been getting weaker as solar+batteries keeps getting cheaper). I just want the vocal advocates to be honest about the cost and timelines instead of blaming everything on environmentalists as a way to side step the argument.

> Notice the no response, they know what they’re doing and they don’t care.

I was with you in principle until this part. You gave them ~30 minutes before claiming "no answer".

Also, if Apenwarr is in Quebec, it was like 2am when he launched his question. He might be sleeping and all that ...

Isn’t it a bit soon to call Tailscale a giant corporation?

Fair let’s see.

> just expensive and inconvenient

You mean something is theoretically possible, but in practice only works at small scale and is otherwise effectively impossible. You only have so many resources for all those big topics.

And after you spent all the world's resources on the "perfect", formally bug-free software, you get hacked via social engineering or malicious insider.

This is an underestimated part of operating IT infrastructure at home. Something a lot of homelab builders miss. They have a homelab that mixes in the same environment and same equipment the role of delivering standard services for the house and family, with the role of experimenting and toying around.

Everyone who builds this should really have "homeprod" and "homelab". And when the experiments and tests inevitably lead to an outage, the movie streaming or photo storage or home control parts don't die with it.

All homelabs need a DevOps Engineer :-D

That doesn't save you from failure, just automates it :D.

I'm running Linux on a UGREEN NAS without a problem from the OS perspective. On AOOSTAR even Windows 11 ran fine after digging for appropriate drivers.

Where most of these machines suffer is the default UEFI config and the cooling. The UGREEN luckily gives the option to dig into the advanced UEFI settings (they just left the entire setup open in "engineering" mode so every option the firmware gives is there to tweak) and optimize what the manufacturer defaults, change the power saving options, turbo and power limits, etc. This makes a huge difference.

But the CPU cooling is still sub-par and there's no off the shelf replacement. Most of these smaller Chinese NAS brands I tried have this issue, they take very decent hardware and slap on them the crappiest accessories like cooling. You get a hobbled CPU, always pegged at low clocks because the temperature spiked to 99C. Sometimes the disk cooling isn't too well conceived either and the disks bake at 45C idle but these can usually be compensated if you're willing to take the noise.

These days the inheritance will include mostly junk. Old, worn out, low quality items, clothes, furniture, appliances, etc. Nobody says no to the one thing they need but can't afford, they say no to having yet another item they have no need for and its only value could be sentimental but otherwise it's a burden, one other thing among many to store somewhere, or throw out/donate/sell.

Do you need and can afford to keep somewhere another 6 creaky chairs, a big worn out dining table, bags of old clothes that don't fit anyone, outdated and broken electronics that probably don't work anymore, and so on? Even memories like pictures and videos are sometimes too much. They used to be a couple of photo albums, half with people you wouldn't even recognize, now there are TB of digital ones.

> She figures that they’ve spent at least fifty thousand dollars in rental fees so far—more than they could get from selling the furniture.

That probably doesn't even consider inflation, $1 in 2006 was worth $1.60 in today's money. People are really bad at long term financial planning but also get really attached to objects with some sentimental value. So this is a market where it's even easier to exploit that poor financial education.

Even without the sentimental part, cancelling means sorting everything out and finding people to take it away.

In theory, one can just hand the keys to a Junk Busters-type company. But yeah - actually doing that is another barrier to action.

Rather than just not paying and letting the owner auction off the contents, maybe you can tell the owner of the storage facility you'd be fine with them auctioning off the contents without ever going into debt?