My homelab has never been running more smoothly and I’m learning tonnes with effectively bespoke tutorials for my exact setup. At work, if I spend weeks developing a high quality report, translating it into derivative documents (like work plans or policy documents) has never been easier to get started. It gets me unstuck in a few keystrokes with a “shitty first draft” that I can refine. But you have to start with good info - it can’t make something good out of nothing. I see value, but maybe different from what it’s being sold as.

Hermes is also the trickster god in Greek mythology, but not sure if the makers of that project were thinking of that, or his role as messenger. Or the one who guides souls to Hades. Dude’s got a lot of jobs…

“It’s going to be a maze”

That was my initial reaction, thinking China MUST hold more treasury bonds than anyone else, right? Turns out that’s typically Japan ($1 trillion), and the UK has generally held roughly the same number as China (both in the $700B range). Maybe the US anticipated and had contingencies ready if it was just China doing the selling, but when the other big holders started a slow bleed, it might’ve given them pause? Dunno.

We also don’t know who held what more recently than January and I don’t know if the data gap is the usual lag or if the the people who do this work at the Treasury department got “DOGE’d”.

Bottom line, it’s been fun to think about but I don’t think we should put too much stock in conspiracy theories originating on Substack.

There’s a theory being batted around without too much evidence (hold tight, Snopes is on it) that Mark Carney talked European and Japanese leaders into accumulating US Treasury bonds, and then slow-selling them to make Trump squirm once he imposed the broad-brush tariffs to spook the T-bill market.

The theory sounds mostly plausible in that Carney was in Europe for closed door meetings with European leaders shortly after being designated PM, and that Trump backed off so quickly and used the language of “the bond market is tricky” to justify the change in direction. Dropping demand for T-bills leads the Fed to increase yields to keep the borrowing taps on, means expensive borrowing for them, means no money for tax cuts for billionaires.

On the other hand, the story originates from a twice-fired shock-jock’s Substack.

But it sounds like something a wicked smart Harvard/Oxford educated economist would dream up and pull off…

¯\(ツ)/¯

…that mediocrity can pay to greatness”

All this “mediocrity” is pretty overwhelming right now.

One other devastating reason to vaccinate, particularly against measles: measles can give your immune system amnesia. All that precious “natural immunity” that these ghouls profess? You can just fucking LOSE it and have to relearn how to fight off previous infections. It’s a goddamned factory reset to day one, but without mommy’s antibodies you got in utero, nor from breast milk. Unless you’re Robin Arryn of the Vale from Game of Thrones.

Except without the living wages, public works infrastructure investments, emphasis on education, and tax rates!

You may want check out Infuse for the AppleTV. I have found it fixed every audio drift and video jitter concern that I’ve ever had with Plex or Jellyfin.

You can point it either directly at an SMB share, or a library hosted on Jellyfin or Plex. The advantage of this is it caches the artwork in the library, not on the AppleTV, because the AppleTV will periodically flush its local cache, leading to long re-fetching times and waiting to watch things.

I have no recommendations for the Chromecast.

Ramesses II and his daughters have entered the chat…

Relevant 30 Rock

Most answers here are missing the benefits of a home Mac running 24/7 if you’re already part of the Apple ecosystem. For example, you can have it sync all your iCloud data (documents, photos, iTunes content) and back them up locally, then elsewhere outside of Apple’s ecosystem. You can also have it act as a local CDN for OS updates, whereby it will cache OS downloads locally so any subsequent updates will be super quick.

On the downside, I found native Docker on macOS kinda sucked, and just installed Ubuntu on my 2012 Mac Mini (now running Proxmox for funsies), but I have an old iMac to do the caching. You could probably virtualize and get both benefits, and I am considering moving to a new M4 mini for the power savings and sheer speed. That M4 Pro chip has absolutely incredible Geekbench numbers while sipping power.

generate some minor descriptions for generic stuff in my TTRPG campaigns.

Need a quick 200 word description of the interior of an apothecary? Or a band of marauding orcs? It’s been a huge time saver for me.

3 Astronauts. 1 candidate. Only really got to know one astronaut (family friend) and one candidate (supervised her training in an unrelated field) super well. I’ve had long term interactions with two wannabes who were disasters.

Unfortunately, in contrast to astronauts, most of the politicians I’ve met are complete shits. Only met a few at the civic level who are excellent. And one at the federal level. Everyone else has been truly🤮.

It’s funny. Literally every astronaut I’ve met is exactly like this - quietly competent, affable, team player. As is the astronaut candidate I’ve met.

And yet…

Every person I’ve met who has been keen on becoming an astronaut or astronaut candidate has been an insufferable self-aggrandizing jerk face. Like, just awful people who suck all the air out of any room they’re in, expounding on how they (or the idea they’re selling) are the most amazing thing ever.

For iPhones, if you have Find My turned on, you can’t activate the device without the iCloud password, unless the owner removes the device from their iCloud account. Which is what the scammers are trying to get her to do here.

Interesting. I will take a look and see if that fixes it. Thanks for the tip!

The layout of Plex definitely fits my brain waaaaay better with respect to navigation. But I hardly use it because I keep running into playback stuttering which doesn’t happen on Infuse, which I point at Jellyfin in my Synology. Will give this version another try.

Why do you believe that judges (or even juries made of lay people) can make sense of the very things that you’re so confident legislators or regulators cannot?

I’m not saying regulation is perfect, and as a result, certainly there is a role for judicial review. But come on, man…lots of non sequiturs and straw dogs in your argument.

That’s more of a Shelbyville idea