We tend to leave spiders alone in the house, they don’t really bother anything and keep other bugs at bay. The exception is when I need to work somewhere they built webs, then the webs gotta go and for that I use the shop vac.
For the centipedes though we have an agreement, they can stay as long as we don’t see them. You start scurrying across the kitchen floor and I will step on you (though to be fair I think that’s true for anything that “scurries” in the same way a centipede does).
Just to put this out there, a Nabu Casa sub directly supports the development of HA. For me the remote connectivity is just a bonus (that I honestly don’t need since I could easily put it through a cloudflared tunnel or set it up through NGINX proxy manager.
Not that this isn’t cool, having more ways to use HA is always great. Personally I expose my garage doors as Apple Home devices through HA and so get buttons on CarPlay that generally work well (as long as I have any signal which isn’t always the case in the driveway).
So it is very dependent on your location with the exception of Federal jury duty which is pretty consistent. If you are out of state for school you can get an automatic exemption for that since I was selected in college once and didn’t need to show up.
I was called for county civil court a couple years ago. You get a letter with a phone number to call the night before to see if you need to show up. If you do then you park downtown/take the bus/etc and bring your letter (and usually a book or something else to do for the day). You sit in a large room with about 50-100 people where you get checked in by a clerk where you get a number (usually alphabetical by last name) . A judge comes in around 9am and tells everyone how important it is, thanks you for showing up and explains the process. We did have a handful of folks show up late due to issues with the light rail that morning which were allowed. The list of no shows was provided to the sheriff to issue fines after a certain point.
We then got a paper questionnaire to complete to help speed up voir dire and handed them in to the clerk, each had our juror selection number on it. Then you wait. The room had a small breakroom like area connected to it with tables, vending machines, and water fountains as well as restrooms for potential jurors to use throughout the day. We weren’t allowed to leave the room at all during this time.
After the attorneys finished reviewing papers we were called in groups of about 20 to walk to the courtroom for interviews. We were verbally asked at that point if there was a reason we could not serve for the case which was expected to take less than a week. Reasons were written down but no excuses were given at this point.
After the interview you went back and waited. At lunch you were permitted to leave for an hour and had to check in when you returned. Around 3pm they called numbers of who was selected and 2 alternates (I was the second alternate). Everyone else was dismissed and we were walked back to the courtroom to talk with the judge. He told us when to show up the following day and again thanked us for serving.
The pay for my state is only milage travelled and for the selection day and 3 days of trial was something like $25 total which didn’t even cover parking for me. It’s set by the state and there hasn’t been a push to update it. The judge did order lunch for all the jurors during the deliberation time (which was about an hour, I think so everyone could eat, I wasn’t in the deliberation room as an alternate but it was a really clear case).
We were told not to talk about the trial to anyone while it was ongoing. Even family or friends less it influence our judgement. Afterwards we were told it was up to us if we discussed it with anyone, we didn’t have to but were allowed. The attorneys both asked for some feedback on how they did which I provided to hopefully help them get better.
It’s not really a thing, though some states have non-partisan redistricting commissions.
In the US, elections are constitutionally run by the state, not the federal government. Functionally the Secretary of State for each state runs the elections, which are really run by county election boards.
Keep in mind that in the US elections happen on predetermined cycles, they are not typically “called” like in a parliamentary system. Every representative, senator, governor, and president knows when their term is up, when elections happen, and what the state timlines are for each one.
In MO, my understanding is that the USSC simply remanded the ruling back to the MI Surpreme Court who had already ruled the new map can’t be used. The issue really stems from that new map having been used in primaries to determine the candidates, so who appears on a ballot in a location whose district has changed between then and now?
Go through it, keep what is truly sir use and definitely try to sell or donate what you can, especially physical media since even without a lot of monetary value those are items that typically aren’t being made any more so are of a finite number. There are those of us that like collecting physical media and have the space to store and enjoy it so helping it get a second life is a better choice than just dumping it in a landfill to rot (almost literally) forever.
Otherwise the key is to relish the nostalgia of going through it but don’t let it color your decisions on what to keep too much. It’s okay to hold on to some things that truly matter to you just for sentimental reasons, but you shouldn’t try to keep it all. My wife and I each have a plastic tote in our basement of keepsakes, we try to limit sentimental things to just that one tote each to help keep it manageable.
This is comparing apples and oranges though. Automotive cooling systems are designed for a very different problem set than datacenter cooling systems. The temperature gradients are much larger in ICE systems, they need to be small, light, and portable, and they cool something that generates much more variable heat loads.
A data center creates a consistent heat load, is stationary, with access to a source of water that is functionally limitless to the operators, cools a much smaller gradient and needs to do so in the most economical way possible to be as profitable as it can be to the owners. Evaporative coolers are dead simple, very effective, and scale very easily which is why they are used.
It evaporates, that’s how it cools. The water is sprayed over a heat exchanger and gets turned to essentially steam and then new water is pumped in and thus the water is “gone”. It will fall as rain somewhere but likely not near where it was taken from.
A closed loop system could be used but they are more expensive and require more maintenance so large data centers don’t usually use them unless required to.
It really depends on what you want to accomplish, your priorities, the amount of time and effort you are willing/able to put into it, and your risk appetite (not just privacy but also availability of your mail server).
It is for sure one of the more challenging services to self-host, and IMO doesn’t offer a huge improvement over a hosted solution with your own domain from an actual security and privacy standards point since email is inherently insecure and non-privacy protecting without adding additional not-always-standard layers on top like PGP/GPG, SMIME, one-time passcode escrow systems, etc. that all have their own huge trade offs.
Your self-hosted server will have downtime as well, some planned but also some unplanned. If your server is down, it can’t accept or send mail obviously which can be an issue (many services will try to deliver again after a back off period, but won’t try forever). Enterprises work around this with load balanced servers and running different services on fault tolerant infrastructure. That increases complexity quickly though and isn’t what most self hosters do AFAIK.
It’s a combination of conservative designs, robust training, and a zero tolerance safety stance where even minor misses that have any relationship to the reactor or power systems get throughly investigated through a formal process that seeks to understand and learn from mistakes rather than assign blame.
If anyone is curious, the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP) publishes the Gray Book with some history of the Program, the various arms that are involved to make it successful, and how the Program is managed including training, suppliers, labs, and fleet operations and maintenance.
Turn the Ship Around is a leadership book that also touches on safety and operations of a nuclear sub and is just a good read overall if your looking for a different way to think about bringing a leader in an organization.
Email is de facto not private/secure without adding additional layers to it, so using services like ProtonMail or Tuta are putting lipstick on a pig. They give a false sense of security and privacy that just doesn’t exist without a ton of additional overhead and opsec. Unless you plan to only email other Proton accounts, or use janky one-time password secure messages, your email isn’t E2EE, it’s just encrypted on Protons servers which is table stakes for most paid mail services. They are marketing something that just can’t fully work in the real world. You also then make a ton of trade offs like very limited client support (especially on mobile), and can’t even use S/MIME for compatibility with enterprise secure mail solutions.
To be clear, I think it makes sense to pay for something as critical as email so you aren’t the product, as well is using your own domain for portability. But I don’t recommend folks buy into the false security and privacy promises of services like Proton for email/calendaring.
I use SimpleLogin with my own domain and have no problems 99% of the time. Every once in a while I’ll find a site that doesn’t like my .net domain, but those typically won’t take anything that isn’t a major provider. I use that as a sign I probably don’t need to use that service.
There are two things in my house I don’t “play” with: internet connectivity and core home functions (lights, locks, garage doors, etc). That doesn’t mean I don’t self host anything or then, but I always start from a mindset of “must work”.
I run HA on a Yellow (functionally an RPi 5 with radios and storage interface built in). My lights are either Hue running as plain Zigbee devices, or Zigbee switches. I don’t necessarily want more customization with home automation, I want stable, extensible, and easy to use day today. HA checks all those boxes easily. I’ve not done much looking into OpenHAB, but I would caution against going with something for home automation just because it’s more customizable. Sure, it’s great to have an automation routine that turns on your lights when you get home, it’s less great to have an integration that misbehaves and now you cannot turn off a light, or lock your door, or turn down the volume on your music, etc. Be sure to know what you want to accomplish before you buy devices, build automations, and always build things with a manual backup operation option.
There is, I think, a few things that contribute here.
I would hazard to guess they are investigating how the use of AI was missed in their editorial process, how they missed the incorrect quotes, and who violated their journalistic standards by using an AI to directly write article text since it’s a coauthored piece.
In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/
I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or Dan [edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.
Eh, it can be a lot of work but doesn’t have to be. I’ve automated backups, and if you follow current best practice guidance from industry, you should use long pass phrases and not worry about regularly rotating them. For things like SSH keys, you can rotate them if you think you’ve had a breach but in normal usage there isn’t a huge benefit security-wise since they functionally can’t be guessed and would need to be stolen. If an adversary steals your SSH keys then you’re already pretty hosed as the next step is for them to establish another backdoor to access your server without needing your key.
Yes, hail is from thunderstorms and is generally larger, ice pellets are winter precipitation and almost always smaller. Hail usually lasts only a few minutes, ice pellets can last many hours.
Honestly it’s not a ton of time. A few minutes to run patches every few weeks, and the initial investment to plan, install, and configure your services (but then that’s the fun part no?). Self hosting IMO isn’t a great way to save time and money, or even to get out of the pocket of big tech. If those are your goals you’re better off looking at hosted solutions that are Open, and likely paying for it since running IT stacks isn’t free. Self hosting is a hobby, something you do to learn and because you enjoy it. It is hard sometimes, takes time, and comes with risks, but so do most other hobbies.
We had this giant orb weaver (yellow garden spider) living outside my wife’s office window at home for almost two months. We named her Shelob because of how surprisingly big she was, and I at least really enjoyed visiting her from inside until one day she was just gone.
Im actually really proud of the pictures I got with the sun backlighting her since it shows how translucent they are
Photo of said spider, spoilered in case folks don’t want to see it