*ought (whoosh?)

I once heard a native English speaker pronounce it as “the printer kweeyee.”

I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.

Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.

Let’s see Stephan Miller’s card…

I’m too lazy to verify my hunch, but I’m guessing Texas is largely oil (exploiting natural resources), whereas California is largely intellectual output (tech, with some Hollywood and other sundry stuff), though California certainly does exploit its natural resources too (good farming conditions, some oil…).

>2000 mile flight. Not crazy long but not short. (The state of Alaska was not involved, just the airline.)

In the US it depends on the airline. We went on a babymoon vacation when my partner was 30-something weeks and didn’t need to provide any documentation (Alaska Airlines). She did run it by her providers first, but that wasn’t an airline/TSA/FAA requirement.

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

Yes, but you’re not alone (my partner tends this way).

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)

Bonus points: use non-qwerty keyboard for added obfuscation (but keep the qwerty key caps of course).

This type of thing is the nominal purpose of credit scores, I believe. (Whether they’re implemented effectively is another story…)

Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.

— Richard P. Feynman

I think the same is true for a lot of folks and self hosting. Sure, having data in our own hands is great, and yes avoiding vendor lock-in is nice. But at the end of the day, it’s nice to have computers seem “fun” again.

At least, that’s my perspective.

Whatever you decide for your laptop, I’m a proponent of a barebones off-site setup if you’re trying for 3-2-1 backup or similar.

I use a raspberry pi 3 with a single HD (ZFS) retaining some number of daily/weekly/monthly snapshots. Daily rsync, everything over WireGuard+VPS (TailScale would work too).

From our experience in the US, the birth is nothing compared to the financial drain of the other expenses. And at this age, childcare dwarfs all the other child-related expenses.

We have great insurance and don’t rely on family for childcare though, so the math is very very different for someone with “free” familial childcare and no/lousy insurance…

Others mentioned virtualization — I have had issues with COW filesystems (btrfs), as COW does not always play nicely with VM drives (extreme fragmentation and very poor performance).