Is there one place where the guidelines for all the forum categories are listed? If so, I can’t find it. If not, I’d like to see something like that.
Happy Halloween all 
Does anyone use multiple ISPs + a failover router to avoid internet downtime?
I’ve got cell phone internet, including hotspot, as a backup. Seems fine.
yeah that’s what i currently use in a pinch but my cellular connection seems kinda slow for what i need it for. also my iMac doesn’t like talking to my iPhone reliably for some reason (MacBook works better)
That could potentially be fixed with a better cell phone provider. Lots of areas have at least one provider that has decent quality connection that should be reasonable to use for most things. (And the resellers of the “big brand” services are often worse than getting the actual big brand.)
Are you only trying to use bluetooth/wireless, or have you tried plugging phone directly into iMac with lightning cable? I often find the connection with a direct cable more reliable.
Yeah. I should consider another cell phone provider.
I was actually looking at the home 5G internet of a cell phone provider (T-Mobile), cuz it’s unlimited with no cap and pretty cheap. But I should look at cell plans with hotspot too…
I also was looking at Verizon. They have some super high speed availability (like 1 gig) on their 5G home, but the availability is really limited atm, so real world availability seemed kinda comparable to TMobile but more expensive.
I hadn’t tried plugging phone directly into Mac, so I will try that.
I have a multi-WAN router I’ve played around with for internet backup. I took it out of general use because I couldn’t set up a failover protocol that worked well enough to offset downsides like:
- the multi-WAN router not being able to fully keep up with my fastest connection (1Gbps symmetric)
- failovers either being too sensitive (happening too often when not needed) or taking too long (by the time the router notices and fails over, I could have done it manually)
- packet loss and dropped connections during failover anyway
If it was important enough to me to have another go at it, I’d want to try a bonding router like: Pepwave MAX HD2 Mini | PeplinkWorks.com
That method has both connections active at all times, and uses a VPN to bond them. That requires a complementary bonding endpoint (and usually some kinda monthly fee in addition to your connections) But then, if one connection dies there is not a “failover”, the VPN just resends any lost packets over the good connection and keeps using that until the other one comes back. You also get simultaneous bandwidth from both connections, instead of only one connection in use at a time.
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Hulu really sucks for auto-playing paused videos approximately 4 hours after you pause the video. This must waste a lot of bandwidth playing videos with no one in the room, waste some electricity, and also wakes people up who went to sleep 3-4 hours ago.
There’s one other source of videos auto-playing hours later that I’ve run into. It’s streams on both Twitch and YouTube. If a streamer is offline and you’re on their page, and then they come online, that can trigger playing video. It can happen if you pause the stream, and then the streamer goes offline and back online (either in a short time due to an internet issue, or he just does another stream again hours or days later). YouTube streams often are created the day before so people can go to the page early – but then they autoplay when the stream starts, which can easily be while people are sleeping if e.g. it’s a chess tournament in a distant time zone. Or it can just be when no one is there to watch. Twitch now also tends to redirect you to a new streamer when one streamer stops, and that can force an unpause hours after pausing, and can do it repeatedly (as each streamer stops and redirects you).
The basic solution to this stuff is to close the window. Don’t leave Twitch or Hulu pages open in browser tabs. Don’t load up YouTube streams that haven’t started yet – just check back later possibly after it’s over (personally I want to watch faster than real time, so I need to start late anyway).
IINA player is better than VLC in some ways but the default algorithm for playing sped-up audio is significantly worse. There are threads with settings you can put in a config file.
I enabled a config dir in settings and did:
$ cat ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf
af=scaletempo=stride=28:overlap=.9:search=25
That seemed better but I only tested one video.
http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html
He writes this ode to free speech, non-conformists and tolerating ideas you think are bad. But I remember when he banned me from his forum for my controversial ideas.
Descript thinks “over and over” is filler words in the repeated words category that should be de-duplicated by algorithm to just “over”. heh doh.
Ugh there’s another one. it thinks the “you you’re” is a double “you” and wants to remove the first “you”. I think maybe removing repeated words is just unsafe and bad.
Steven Crowder talks about Big Con(servative) enabling Big Tech standards
Some key points:
Crowder was getting some offers and contracts with conservative media agencies, but found that their contracts will basically punish him very severely for any sort of deplatforming (e.g. if his work is demonetised on YT (which it already is)). Which basically means he would have to really tone down his content and change everything he does to be acceptable to Big Tech.
He wants to warn people about these contracts and warn them not to accept them. He’s staying independent and wants to work with conservative media hopefuls to give them an alternative to punitive contracts.
I think this is really cool. I don’t like that Big Tech social media is the focus of so much attention from so many people and control what people are allowed to see. I’m sure Crowder has caused himself a lot of problems with this actions, but for good reason.
Follow up video including conversation with Jeremy Boreing (co-CEO of Daily Wire) including trying to convince him to use a different business model.
I don’t think it’s good that Crowder shared his conversation with Jeremy Boreing. I don’t think it’s something that shouldn’t ever be done on principle (and as Texas is a single-party consent state it’s legal, and I’m sure Jeremy Boreing knows that). But it is a betrayal of a long-term otherwise positive working relationship and I don’t think he should have done that.
Ben Shapiro calls this a despicable betrayal
I think he misses Crowder’s point - which is objecting to these terms being sent out to anyone as a possible agreement on principle. He misrepresents Crowder (honestly very surprised by this as generally I think Shapiro is good at getting to the truth) and claims that Crowder wanted that contract with all that money but none of the penalties (Crowder said nothing of the sort). He also characterises Crowder’s actions as a cynical attack on DW just for clicks and subscribers which I don’t think is fair.
I don’t like the big tech deplatforming and censorship stuff. Deplatforming and Censorship Examples
I think Crowder and Shapiro are tribalists who feed into the culture wars instead of encouraging rational debate and unbiased problem-solving. I avoid them and generally avoid most politics.
I also have issues with approaches to politics that don’t deal seriously with political philosophy (and some economics). I think it’d help if people tried to understand and agree on concepts more before worrying about current events, news, policies and controversies. I think most politics is tribalist fighting over local optima and short time frames.
Does anyone else find reading Ayn Rand’s non-fiction significantly easier than Popper’s? By easier, I mostly mean easier to read more of in a sitting and faster to read. I can see that I’m not fully grasping everything that Rand is saying as I’m reading it but it doesn’t block me from reading on. With Popper, it’s easier for me to lose the thread of his discussion as he goes from one idea to the next.
Does it have to do with the difficulty of the subject matter that they’re covering? Does it have to with the writing style? Does it have to do Rand’s ideas having more overlap with some semi-mainstream capitalism stuff?
I also wonder if I’m reading Rand’s material in a moral tribalist way than Popper’s. I’ve also been familiar with capitalism ideas a lot longer than Popper’s ideas.