It’s our first nice car.

Same. The only other car I’ve ever owned is a 2012 Mazda 3. I’m from Australia in an area with good public transport, and so I didn’t drive until I was 26 and living in the USA. Bought the Mazda 3 second hand for a pretty good price. The iX was a big upgrade!

Ive still got the Mazda, but when it stops working, I want to replace it with a small, sporty EV. I’m kinda sad we don’t have Chinese EVs in the USA, since cars like the MG Cyberster look pretty nice, don’t really have a US-made alternative, and are good value for the price (in Australia, it’s the equivalent of around US$72,000 including all taxes and fees). The range of cars is relatively limited (and expensive) in the USA.

I just got a BMW iX a few months ago and love it, so I’m very excited for Neue Klasse. I’ve got a three year lease. I’d love to get another, smaller EV.

This isn’t surprising at all. Centralized services are expensive to run at a large scale.

Good reminder to remove old DNS records that point to IPs or hostnames you no longer control or service providers you no longer use.

That’s the main attack vector here - you delete an S3 bucket but still have a subdomain CNAME’d to it, so anyone could create a new bucket with the same name and serve arbitrary files from your domain.

The part north of the Mexico - US maritime border is US territory and the US can name it whatever it wants.

Google Maps is US-based. And even if it wasn’t, it’s still going to use official US data for US locations, just like they use official Australian data for Australian locations. If Australia renamed the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Bridgey McBridgeface, they’d show the new name even if you view it from a different country.

It’s been changed in the Geographic Names Information System which is the official government system used for naming geographic things in the USA. Every US-based mapping system will eventually pull in the update.

As far as I can tell, none of them are actually doing it right? The presidential order to rename the Gulf of Mexico was just for the portion of it that’s considered part of the US. The rest of it is supposed to still be called the Gulf of Mexico.

rename as the “Gulf of America” the U.S. Continental Shelf area bounded on the northeast, north, and northwest by the States of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida and extending to the seaward boundary with Mexico and Cuba in the area formerly named as the Gulf of Mexico

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/restoring-names-that-honor-american-greatness/

Mastodon already does this

That’s only for showing a domain on your profile. What I meant is using a domain as your username, so if you own example.com and used that as your username people would mention you by writing @example.com. A DNS record delegates the domain to the right server.

Interesting, I hadn’t heard of that. Does everyone who’s following the old account automatically refollow you when you do that?

IMO it’d still be useful to be able to use an identity you control, like a domain name. I’ll have to find those proposals you mentioned.

The Fediverse has been around for over 15 years now. In order for one app/server to talk to another, they need to support the same protocol. Mastodon and Lemmy (and Pixelfed and many others) use a protocol called ActivityPub. Since they both use it, you can actually reply to Lemmy comments using Mastodon.

Not all of the Fediverse uses ActivityPub though. For example, the original Fediverse apps like Identica and StatusNet used Activity Streams or OStatus instead. ActivityPub didn’t exist yet.

AT Protocol is another protocol, created specifically for Bluesky, although there’s no reason other apps couldn’t use it, once Bluesky actually enable decentralization.

It does have some useful features that ActivityPub doesn’t have, like identity portability - you can move a profile from one server to another without having to change username or refollow everyone. AT Protocol lets you use your own domain name as your username, even if you don’t host your own instance. With Mastodon and Lemmy, your identity is tightly coupled to the instance you use (i.e. an account on Lemmy.world is always going to have @lemmy.world at the end), which makes it a pain to move to a different one.

Which parts of the protocol’s design are mostly centralized?

Hmm, yeah, good point. It could be based off a hash of the serial number or something similar.

Companies are probably doing the easiest thing, and it seems easier to make it completely random. I can imagine something very basic like a giant spreadsheet of all the devices being produced, and running some formula to enter a random value into every cell in a particular column.

What do you mean by starting to die? Have you tried factory resetting it?

My recommendation is still the 2019 Shield Pro, unless you’re all-in on the Apple ecosystem, in which case the Apple TV is pretty decent.

One issue with a PC is that you won’t be able to stream 4K or even 1080p content from services like Netflix if you run Linux, as Linux only supports Widevine L3 which is limited to 720p. Widevine L1 is needed for 4K content, and it’s only available on more “locked down” OSes (Windows, MacOS, unrooted Android, etc). Of course, that’s not an issue if you’re using Plex or some other form of non-DRM-protected content.

The HDMI Forum are also blocking open-source implementations of HDMI 2.1, so it likely won’t come to open-source Linux drivers for a long time: https://www.phoronix.com/news/HDMI-2.1-OSS-Rejected. DisplayPort is superior to HDMI (as it does basically all the same things except it’s an open, free protocol) but TVs tend to not have DisplayPort ports since the major manufacturers are on the board that receives royalties from the usage of HDMI. That’s an argument for another day…

default credentials

Wifi doesn’t have default credentials any more… These days, there’s legislation (at least in California) that requires default passwords to be randomly generated, but it’s recommended to have no default password at all and instead prompt the user for a password when setting up the device.

That’s why some access points have the default password either printed on the box or on the bottom of the device.

Reposting the same comment I made on another post:

It’s not just Honey swapping the affiliate codes. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too. That’s why they require you to click on a coupon code to reveal it. When you click, they usually reveal the coupon code in a new tab, and helpfully redirect the current tab to the store, using their affiliate link.

It’s more obvious when websites do it though, since they can’t auto-close the tab like Honey does. They also don’t automatically pop up at checkout like Honey does.

I imagine some of the other coupon extensions do the exact same thing as Honey though.

I’m not sure which companies are best for this use case.

If you’re hosting anything even remotely controversial, Hetzner isn’t a good choice. They’ve been known to disable servers without warning after receiving reports like this.

I think the Home Assistant community has been working on offline speech recognition too, as a fully open replacement to things like Google Assistant.