• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • I’ve switched from similiar-sized apartment with a tank heater to a house with a tankless heater. My bills are close enough that it isn’t super easy to tell. total it was about 20-40 more a month for the location switch.

    The real difference is how often you use it. You’ll save money if you use it sparingly (as opposed to an always on tank heater), but you’ll definitely spend more if you don’t (because infinite hot water access!). Just make sure it and it’s power source is sized for the house it’s going into.

    You’ll definitely want to pay for an electrician to get it on a dedicated circuit to power it. Otherwise you’ll just get infinite tepid water instead.


  • gotta be specific, but my tankless water heater has actually been pretty okay actually.

    Context! I live in Texas, which actually has some pretty great renewable use compared to other states. My personal plan isn’t solely wind powered anymore, but it has been in the past, and still partially is right now.

    My house is a super cheap remodel. The tankless water heater is completely electric.

    My repair costs have been as follows: complete replacement of the heater cores: 70$.

    • two out of three failed over the course of a year and a half.
    • I also paid for the plumber to figure out what the issue was, but i’ll be able to replace them on my own pretty easily whenever this happens again

    I also paid plumber and electrician costs to move the water heater so i could actually get at them without pulling the whole thing off the wall (thanks shitty remodel!)

    $200 for the plumber to run the cleaner through it, since i have super hard water here

    • and another half grand to install the valves required to actually be able to do that (thanks shitty remodel!)
    • I’ll be able to get my own cleaning kit for one to two hundred online in the future.

    So like, because i’m new at taking care of one, and because of the shitty remodel, I have paid over a gran in ‘repairs’ on the thing. But, at the same time, the next time it needs replaced heater cores, or to get it’s annual cleaning, it’ll cost me basically nothing.

    Energy costs haven’t been much more expensive than a tanked water heater either, but it’s hard to compare considering those tank water heaters also ran in a different location with different AC needs. And I take super long showers, which I was straight up unable to do before moving here. I don’t pay too much more than previously despite that though.

    Most importantly! I can take hour long showers without running out of hot water, and being honest, that’s really the biggest deal for me. I don’t always do that, but sometimes I just wanna relax for a while and running out of hot water is a bitch when I do.

    I’d honestly recommend a modern tankless water heater, so long as your electric can handle a load specifically sized to your house, even despite the problems i’ve had surrounding my own.


  • Ah, I think there’s a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren’t. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says “everything made with intent” is some form or other of art.

    Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don’t like, when you look at it, for example.)

    I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.



  • I’ll give you ‘satire’. But I don’t really agree with ‘critiques’. The lesson i got from the movie was “stupid people can’t really have empathy, so they just need to shut up and let actual smart people do the important work”, and also eugenics.

    If it was critiquing the modern corporate structure, it would have included actual critiques of the modern corporate structure, rather than a single poor idiot in charge of a big company who should have just let the smart guy fix it all for him. In short, comapnies as they are would’ve worked if only the smart people were in charge of them.



  • I wasn’t there for it, but this opinion piece has a pretty good story about the whole thing. https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-networks.html

    Basically, once Google had most of the regular users, and had convinced many of the XMPP users to switch to them, they just cut off support for xmpp, effectively neutering any growth it may have had without their influence.

    To compare that to webp, it would be pretty easy for them to fork their webp into a closed source “2.0” and most everyone would be switched over to that version without even having a say in it. Sure, original WebP would still exist, but since nobody uses/supports it, it’s basically dead in the water anyways. This sounds awful and unlikely, but it’s literally in their playbook, and it is a thing they have done several times. Android, chrome, XMPP, etc…

    It’s just as likely that Google keeps WebP as open standard for all time as it is that Google remakes it into a closed source tool that only their closed systems can use. The fact that they have a history of being awful is why we need to keep competing standards around, even if they’re just not as good or as widely spread around.



  • Y’all appear to have forgotten what phones felt like before things got to this extreme.

    It was for ergonomics; it’s easier and more comfortable to hold a phone when it fits better in your hand. The phablet phase broke this for most people by making the screens super big, so they tried to correct by making the phones thinner.

    A reasonable size phone that is thin enough would be perfect, but marketing doesn’t like it when they can’t advertise a bigger screen number, or a smaller thickness, so here we are.



  • Good insights, and not just software developers, really. We don’t like ads, sensationalism, or anything reeking of bullshit

    Its a big list of major assumptions by someone who never bothered to verify if they’re even true. He’s mad he had to work with a heavily marketed product that his boss liked, and wrote this about it. Check out this quote from the article;

    And the really fun part is that “astroturfing” a thread about your product on Hacker News or Reddit is just about impossible. If you go to the places where developers hang out and try to promote your product, you will be shot down faster than Mark Zuckerberg at a privacy conference.

    Dude. Reddit is practically more bot than person at this point, and its impossible to know by how much, because of how good they are at fooling everyone. https://www.clrn.org/how-much-of-reddit-is-bots/





  • Traditional way is to just use a WordPress account, and then move onto a paid hosting service of you decide you like keeping up with your blog. No point in paying for something you don’t use. Their ceo was a dick with open source stuff, but the website itself is still solid enough to be used to check if its a hobby you want to actually keep up with.

    If you want to spend just as much time managing the blog as you do actually sharing things, a raspberry pi, Hugo, nginx, and a lot of time are also an option.

    I personally use Porkbun for the .com and hostinger for the backend, and it’s been great for the past couple years to host my own wordpress setup.

    But actually, I think that makes me oldschool. The new kids are using neocities.