It still functions as a thermostat. You simply can’t access the smart features like presence sensing (to automatically turn your system off when you’re not home) or cloud control, (so you can’t adjust the temperature from your phone anymore). But it’ll still continue to function as a dumb thermostat. You set the temperature at the unit, and it holds said temperature until you change it.

It’s a rest/do shit at home/Dr appt day.

In other words, you’re using your vacation time to sleep. Which means the headline is accurate. Americans are in a weird limbo where they have juuuuust enough vacation time to feel like they have enough. But not enough to actually plan any big trips, and not enough money to actually afford it. So they just end up using it to get an extra day off once or twice a month, to be able to catch up on all the shit they are behind on in their personal lives.

Because the 40 hour work week was made with the intent of having one adult working to support the household, while the other adult took care of the errands and chores. But since wages have stagnated, families can’t afford to live off of just one income anymore. So both adults end up working, which means the household suffers.

Just make serifs for the I standard, even with sans-serif fonts.

Yeah, plenty of indie games do really well on mobile formats. Slay the Spire, Balatro, Vampire Survivors, etc… All of those have really basic click-and-drag controls, which means they translate to touchscreen really well. Or if you’re willing to use a Bluetooth controller, (I keep one in my bag), then games like Dead Cells or emulators.

Every single statement they have made about the topic should be admissible as evidence to be used against them in court during sentencing. Every single time they have suggested stricter punishments should be compiled into a list and tacked onto their sentence.

Junkyard Wars and BattleBots at the same time. The robots have to be made out of scrap and beat the opponent while completing a specific task.

Even MAGA isn’t safe. There have been a lot of faces eaten by leopards, and they haven’t all been left of MAGA. If anything, this really just proves that being the token friend doesn’t protect you. Being “one of the good ones” isn’t good enough. The only thing that matters is conformity, and things like non-conforming race, gender, or sexuality will be punished regardless of who you voted for.

Also fairly common with cops to not live inside of their own precinct. Because nobody wants to be the neighbor who hands out tickets. I know a cop who does stand up comedy, but she specifically avoids doing any comedy inside of her own jurisdiction. Because her interactions are her standup content, and there’s a non-zero chance that the person she’s telling a story about could be in (or have friends in) the audience.

For real. The headlines about it all read like “woman married to open racist outed as a racist too”. Like yeah, no shit.

Yes. You only need to pay if you’re connecting via their relay or trying to use the remote hosting functionality. But since a VPN would land you inside of the network, you’d be fine. You’d probably need to dig into the plex settings to specify that the VPN subnet is LAN traffic. But after that, you should be good.

I mean, you just listed the most insecure way to host Jellyfin. Poking a hole in your firewall will technically work, but that doesn’t mean it’s the correct way to do things. A good setup would use a reverse proxy, and some sort of authentication wall like Authentik or Authelia.

All of that would only take about 15 minutes for someone who knows what they’re doing. But the vast majority of people setting up Jellyfin for the first time won’t know what they’re doing. And seeing the inevitable “lol just open your firewall” comments only serves to scare them away, because even the noobs have heads that’s the wrong way to do things.

Let’s at least not exaggerate, because it’s not particularly useful if you’re trying to get someone to switch. If someone is on the fence about it and sees comments like yours, they’ll be more likely to go “oh well I don’t have those kinds of issues with Windows, so it must just be them.” The vast majority of Windows users (office workers, people using it to check emails and browse Facebook, people just using it for Steam, etc) will literally never need to use CLI.

If you’re needing to use CLI every hour or two on Windows, that sounds more like you’re using the wrong tool for the job. Essentially, you’re trying to use a drill when you need a hammer. A drill may function as a hammer… But it’ll probably take a lot of extra effort. And it’ll likely end up damaging the tool, because you’re using it for something it wasn’t designed to do.

Yup, versioned files ALWAYS get a YYYY-MM-DD HHMM timestamp. So when you sort alphabetically, they sort chronologically.

To me it’s much more unclear how sound is first encoded into a digital signal, transmitted as a digital signal through wires and radio waves, and then translated back into sound in a phone. I mean it’s essentially the same physics as the analog electronics, just with a bunch of extra steps added.

Yeah, this is where sample rate and bit depth come into play. In case you’re curious, digital audio is possible due to the Nyquist-Shannon Sampling Theorem. The TL;DR is that you don’t record a continuous stream of audio data; You just sample the wave at regular intervals by recording the current amplitude. And then you can recreate it on the other end. The theorem states that an analog wave can be perfectly recorded and replicated, as long as you have a sufficiently high sample rate and bit depth. Since human hearing generally tops out at 20kHz, we need to sample the audio signal at least 40k times per second; Most consumer-grade audio equipment uses 44.1 or 48kHz. Phones actually use a much lower sample rate for calls, but more on that later.

Again, as long as your sample rate is at least 2x the rate of the highest frequency being recorded, you’re able to perfectly recreate the wave. For an example, here’s a gif:

The image on the left shows the wave being recorded, and the dots are samples. As you add more samples, the reproduced wave gets more accurate. By the time you have 2x the fastest frequency, there is only one possible wave that will fit every sample. Again, human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so we use a sample rate just above 40kHz.

Phone calls will often put a filter on the high and low ends, and only capture the mid-range. It gives that distinct “this is shitty phone call quality” sound, but means they can use a much lower sample rate; Since they’re lopping off most of the high end with that filter, they may only need a sample rate closer to 15 or 20kHz. Because fewer samples means less data. The intelligibility happens in the mid-range, so that’s what the phone makers (and telecom companies) focus on. This low sample rate is also why hold music sounds so fucking awful. It’s essentially being passed through a “make this sound as shitty as possible while still being intelligible” filter.

And then bit depth simply determines how detailed each sample is. If you use 8 bits per sample, that gives you 256 potential values per sample. 12 bits gives you 4096. The trade-off is that a higher bit depth means each sample takes exponentially more data; Audiophiles will generally push for higher bit depths, so each sample is more accurate. In contrast, phone calls often use lower bit depths, (again, to save data).

As for how it actually transmits the data, that’s just 1’s and 0’s. It’s a little more complicated than that, (packets, for example) but in the digital realm, as long as the 1’s and 0’s get to where they need to be, you’re good to go.

Ironically, mobile phones being digital makes them easier for many people to understand. The analog circuitry that goes into simply making an analog phone ring is surprisingly complex, let along how they actually function as phones.

Analog audio is a lot less “computer nerds programming things” and a lot more “scrapped together from some resistors that were ripped out of an old TV. We don’t even know how it turns on, let alone how it functions.” You can literally build a basic microphone with nothing but a balloon stretched across an embroidery hoop, some copper wire, a small magnet, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but it would function as a microphone in some capacity, and at least be able to detect loud noises. And the same goes for a speaker; You could build one out of a red Solo cup, a magnet, some wire, and some glue. It wouldn’t sound good, but you could at least get a basic “sound is being emitted from this” level from it. But if you showed that scrapped-together device to someone, they’d have no idea that it was a phone.

It has a decent community, yes. It’s basically the go-to gaming distro for many people.

Because China supposedly used Nvidia cards to train DeepSeek, which blew all of the US AI out of the water. And apparently that raised some eyebrows, because Nvidia wasn’t supposed to be selling to China (free market, right?). Since China was eating big tech’s lunch, they cried to republicans (and gave them a bunch of reelection money) and now we have this bill. The point is to be able to remotely disable cards if they’re outside of their sale region.

If you’re looking for a desktop version of SteamOS and are used to using Windows, your best bet is likely Bazzite with the KDE desktop environment. There are mixed feelings among Linux users about immutable distros, (many of the more advanced users feel it is too limiting), but there’s no denying the Bazzite is the most straightforward way to get things like Nvidia drivers and HDR.

Oh, is EA the reason Popcap vanished? Honestly, if they were still around, they’d probably make some killer mobile games (if they actually sold them as complete games and not the microtransaction hell that most mobile games fall into).

that respect their time

I know you’re not talking about old school RPGs. The older games tended to pad playtime by having insane difficulty levels or by requiring grinds. Hell, my favorite JRPG (edit: Legend of Legaia) is specifically more grindy in America, because the devs decided to slash the experience and gold drop rates by like 50% for the American release, and make all of the enemies hit much harder. (Interestingly, the original enemy stats are still present in the game code, and then the game runs some “x1.25” math when the battle starts, to bump all of their stats up to the values that actually get used in combat.) So you need to be a higher level to be able to survive, and you need to grind twice as long to reach those higher levels and to be able to buy better gear. I like it despite the grind, not because of it; In most of my play throughs, I end up using cheats to avoid the grind.

and aren’t a glorified second job

I mean, games like Ultima Online, RuneScape, Diablo, and EverQuest have existed since the 90’s. Hell, RuneScape used to be extremely approachable for young players because it didn’t require a good computer or any installs; It just ran directly in your internet browser.

The bigger reason many adults feel this way is not because games have gotten longer or harder. Adults simply have less time to play. They don’t want to spend a bunch of time researching optimal builds or grinding rank in multiplayer matches. Instead, they want to fall back to the games that they already know how to play. They’re willing to ignore the fact that their favorite single player game requires 10-20 hours of grinding, because it doesn’t feel like work to them. Or if it does, they can just use cheats to get around it. They don’t need to research how to get a specific item, or how to approach a specific boss fight, because they have already done it a dozen times.