SHOE

THIS IS THE BATTLE OF YOUR LIFE

This is a blanket statement that doesn’t really hold up.

Commercial off the shelf cloud service based smart home = control over you.

Fully self hosted smart home = control over your house.

Oh it’s definitely easier if it’s on Wi-Fi. I mean, ask 20 people on the street if they even know what zigby is and you’re gonna get 20 blank stares.

But for people who are into this type of thing either to regain control of their networks, to optimize their networks, or both - it’s objectively the better choice in most ways other than easy mode adoption.

Personally I have a TON of small Wi-Fi devices that are constantly transmitting (cheap interior cameras for keeping an eye on pets all over the house - all my security cameras are hard wired) so I try to limit new Wi-Fi traffic onto the net if I can help it.

It’s more about having fewer devices on Wi-Fi network IMO.

Until Wi-Fi 5, only one device could talk on Wi-Fi at a time, and even with 5+ the number of devices is limited by a ton of factors, so the more devices you have chattering the slower everything gets as devices wait their turn to speak, have collisions, time out, try to speak again, etc.

You can mitigate this through several different methods, but removing randomly transmitting devices will always be a benefit.

Zwave, zigby, all of those all operate in a different band so it’s better for your internet connection to wireless devices if you can offload stuff into those ranges.

No. But they’re really inexpensive and link up to people’s Amazon accounts so it’s easy to manage your books, if you are a person who likes to use Amazon for that.

I’ve had two Kindles, the first was before they had touch screens, and I loved it (this was a long, long time ago). Even with the hard case eventually I broke the screen after many years of travel and use, and hated the one I replaced it with. Awful piece of garbage, I wanted to return it and get one with physical buttons but they didn’t make them any more and I was too lazy to do second hand searching. I’ve never used Amazon to buy e books but I got a lot of free ones over the years (mostly cookbooks) and it was handy to be able to just download them directly to the device, but I prefer to manage books over USB and that always worked fine.

E-ink is amazing. Battery life lasts for ages, which really is what you want for a dedicated reader. There’s other types on the market, but it’s hard to compete with Amazon’s prices and feature set - especially because they sell ones that are ad-supported and that REALLY drives the prices down for people that are willing to have their lock screen be an ad that goes away when they wake the device, which is an easy compromise for most.

My Kindle just collected dust now, I use a supernote as a note taker and I use it for ebooks also. It was about $500 USD - granted it does way, way more than a Kindle, but yeah. I could probably get an ad-supported Kindle for 1/10 the cost, maybe, not sure what their prices are these days. Not saying that competing dedicated readers are in that price range, they’re not, but Kindle dominates the market due to brand recognition, advertising, and as far as I know they were the first to really offer a product like it in the first place so they’ll always have a big piece of the market, like iPods did in the MP3 player space vs objectively superior competitors that came after it.

Depending on what you’re running on it or how you connect it to the Internet or your home network, you’re going to be at more and more risk as time goes on.

What’s the harm in upgrading now, especially if you barely ever use it?

I hate win 11 and there’s a lot of downsides to running it, but they’re going to quickly become a minor issue when compared to the risks of running an unpatched OS that is that huge of a target for exploits. Just trust me on that, the risks are going to get more and more real because attackers KNOW there’s a huuuuge number of businesses and consumers that just won’t upgrade and they’re frothing at the mouth to take advantage of the next few years of opportunity.

There’s a version of Windows 10 called LTSC (long term servicing channel) that will continue to receive patches, just no new features, that you can stay on for probably the length of time you’ll have that laptop. Since you barely use the laptop it’s probably perfect for you. You can easily find out how to obtain and activate it for free, securely, with a simple search - I won’t link to it here. One of my servers is running it because it’s old hardware and runs software that requires windows. It’s a really good option for people that don’t want to or don’t have hardware that supports 11, but want something secure and functional.

When my large appliances broke under warranty I’d sometimes find replacement parts on Amazon or eBay, install myself, and keep the replacement that inevitably shows up 90 days later as a spare.

Better than washing dishes by hand

The slider you’re mentioning is specifically for cloud sync, correct. But as far as I know Word still does the thingy where it will periodically snapshot and allow you to recover previous versions.

I’m not 100% sure because I don’t use it at home anymore but I still do at work.

Supernotes are my preference. They are e-ink, and have an option for a smaller size than remarkables. Constant great software/firmware development, durable, and e-ink. Downside, if you care (I do not) is they’re b+w only.

Can side load android apps, they sync fine, work as e-reader, etc. Good stuff.

Remarkables are good I think but they have one foot in the digital artist niche and one in the note niche, whereas a supernote is firmly in the business/meeting/note niche.

Studying, in its base form, follows these steps:

-take in the information

-record the information

-review the information you’ve recorded in chunks. Best practice is to review your newly recorded information at the end of the session, and at the start of the next session review old information. If you can review ALL your recorded information on a subject at the start of a new session that’s best - at first it’s slow but as you review a couple times you’re skimming or skipping most of it and only focus on the parts that you have trouble retaining.

With that being said, the ways we prefer to TAKE IN and RECORD information vary between people, but the overall concept does not.

In terms of flash cards, they’re great for memorization. That has not changed - it’s a base way to record and review information.

A modern version of this applies the base method but digitizes it. Anki is a very good and popular modern flash card app/program

-you can make flash cards with text, but also audio, images, and video

-you can save decks and sync them across all devices and share/upload decks

-it’s “smart.” If you spend more time struggling to answer a card, or get it wrong, it’ll show it to you more frequently. The reverse is true if you get it right every time quickly, you see it much less frequently

-it can nag you to study. You can set it up to notify you every hour, day, whatever and thrust 10-1000 cards in your face, whatever you set it to.

-tons of ways to configure it so it meets your specific needs.

So, that’s how things have modernized, for flash cards at least. But plenty of people still buy 3x5 index cards and keep a physical deck if that’s what they prefer. Again, the method isn’t as important as the process of receive/record/review.

Personally I like to use an e-ink handwriting tablet for in person note taking (all the benefits of paper/handwriting without the fuss of paper, plus lots of other features like cut/paste, linking/bookmarking items, etc) and I prefer typing into a word document when I’m studying from a book. The word document is very clean and I can use structured outlining formatting as well as a quick Ctrl+f to find terms I’ve written about. But whether it’s e-ink tablet or word doc, the base method is the same as when I was younger and it was all paper.

I think phones have their uses but they are awful for note taking. The fastest texter is much slower than writing by hand or typing, and you are so, so much more limited in underlining, highlighting, little symbols, positioning text in weird ways to symbolize things, etc. I don’t advocate that people use them unless they’re in a bind and have nothing else, but a lot of kids grow up these days and that’s their go to method because of familiarity, and we shouldn’t encourage that because it’s flat worse. However, phones can do great things such as record/transcribe, photos, videos etc - so they’re a great addition to the toolbox, but they’re not a NOTE TAKING replacement unless they’re a stylus/handwriting type, and even those are a poor cousin to a dedicated device for the purpose, but they can be a more affordable/versatile/portable version. My note writer was about $500 and that’s a lot of cheese but it was worth every penny to me because of how I use it.

I think the biggest systemic issue in most places is that most people don’t actually know how to train people, including most senior staff. Very few people are actually natural trainers/instructors, so they have to be trained in how to train, and the expectations that they do so has to be part of company culture as well as time baked into the workday to do it, because it DOES take time. It pays off huge in the long run but it can be hard to see the forest through the trees if the management themselves don’t know or understand the value.

As much as I hate corporate jobs they’re generally better than small companies about having a formalized training program. It’s a shame because there’s so much garbage in corporate culture that a lot of small businesses don’t want to implement the good with the bad.

One thing I’ve seen over the years is that a TON of businesses have NO IDEA how to be functional. It’s a person that started in their garage and managed to grow and they just do stuff, and keep just doing stuff and hiring more people to do stuff and quickly outgrow the garage but don’t introduce sound business practices that you need to run things effectively. It’s crazy how many businesses are like that.

It can be both. Jobs should invest in their people, but individuals should also take some ownership of their own skills.

The apprentice/journeyman dynamic was a lot better suited to a time when a) people left their hometowns a lot less, b) information was MUCH less accessible except from people who showed you how, and c) businesses put a lot more stock into their people as an asset, instead of treating labor as a liability.

A isn’t anyone’s fault.

B isn’t anyone’s fault.

C is where businesses have gone sour, but it’s not like businesses have ever been well known for taking care of their people (labor laws, unions, OSHA are all examples of this from history)

It’s not propaganda that people need to take ownership of their own skills and careers. Nobody’s responsible for you or your success but you. If you want to be good at what you do then that’s on you. You can take what your job gives you and that’s it, and you’ll probably do fine at whatever tasks you got specific OJT for, but unless you get lucky or play your cards right that’s not going to make you very successful.

I really don’t want to sound like an old person saying that kids these days want things handed to them, and I really do think that employers in general don’t invest in their entry level workers as well as they used to, but expecting an employer to take you from know-nothing to a master of your craft is naive, frankly, because the days of someone working at a place for 10-30 years are just gone, and everyone has accepted it. There’s a ton of reasons why that’s the case and a lot of that is employers not incentivising employees to stay via wage growth, promotion opportunities, and training, but there’s a lot of other factors. Either way things have changed, and it doesn’t really do much except make you sound like you need a waahmbulance if you just sit back on your haunches and complain about it.

You can still become an apprentice if you want to work a trade, and a good union will train you up if you’re a good worker, but that isn’t fast. It was never fast, and most people aren’t satisfied with the pace today, because it doesn’t get you earning six figures out the gate. You had to work hard, earn a good reputation, and stay in the area for 10-20 years. Most people don’t want to do that, and that dynamic never took a hard root in the tech sector in the first place, which is where this conversation started.

I encourage you to stick to a career that you enjoy enough to take some joy in getting better at your skills for the sake of getting better at stuff instead of just trying to earn a paycheck. Nothing wrong with a job being just a means to an end, but I say this because you’ll enjoy your jobs much better if you’re passionate about what you do, and you’ll naturally be drawn to opportunities to gain mastery in skills that will make you more successful.

None of this might change your mind, might just piss you off even, but the guy you’re replying to sounds like he enjoys the job enough that he’s trying to be better for the sake of being better. I wouldn’t knock them for that.

My guess is that it’s a loss on the hardware but their revenue stream is tied to data collection.

I’m not defending Israel. I’m answering this guy’s question, like wHaT PrOxIeS??

You can straw man all you want, but not once have I defended Israel’s actions. Just because Israel is shit to gazans doesn’t mean that Iran is not also shit to Israel. Straw man.

If we want to have a legitimate conversation about morality then we start by agreeing on facts.

Trying to claim Iran did nothing wrong is not factual.

The most prevalent proxies are the houthis and Hezbollah, which Iran has been arming, financially supporting, and influencing for about two decades now so they can attack Israel without getting themselves into an all out war with Israel and the USA, which they know they would likely lose.

Argue all you want about whether or not Israel should have bombed Iran, but calling it unprovoked is extremely disingenuous.

About half of SCOTUS decisions are unanimous. The just don’t make the news.

The 6/3 splits usually do but they’re actually much more rare.

No, he was responding to a top level comment about banning a style of weapons being ineffective, and essentially said that banning this particular platform of weapon will be effective because reasons.

That’s a pretty common perspective for anyone that’s never lived a life where you must hunt in order to put food on your family’s table, or you need to shoot coyotes or other pests that attach your livestock or crops that threaten your farm-to-table, or lived in an area where there’s literally no police for an hour or more and it’s just you if anyone comes knocking.

Poor rural folks don’t have a huge representation on Lemmy but there are plenty that live this way in the USA.

You don’t see it in the bigger cities and suburbs, rightfully so.

I don’t even live in a small town and there’s plenty of people I work with that drive in ~45 minutes and have livestock that have to worry about coyotes and other wild dogs attacking their livestock.

Guns are a tool. If you can’t imagine what they’re a tool for all it means is you lack perspective to see how - no judgment, just stating the fact. I mention all this because this misunderstanding is a huge reason for the divide between pro/anti gun crowds, and closing the gap can help set us up for better discussions about where we want to go in terms of gun legislation (assuming you’re in the USA - if not then all applies in general, not to you specifically)

My reply wasn’t in response to the law, but to the guy claiming that by removing AR-15s you increase the barrier to entry to mass shootings.

Read the federalist papers if you want to understand the 2nd amendment better. You’re just as wrong as the people who like to say that the 2nd amendment was just to protect having a militia.