I think it’s probably better to amend it to, “if it was covered in poop would you get rid of it and not replace it?”

Talk to your manager.

Shortly after I was hired, my manager told me I should feel free to decline any meeting that didn’t seem useful, or that if it was preventing me from getting “real” work done.

Not parent, but when a minute isn’t quite enough, 77 seconds might do the trick. Multiples of eleven are quick to enter, and with a simple nuker with no “minute” button, 66s is easier than 1:00.

Eurythmics 🫱 sailing the seven seas 🫲 Village People

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.

It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.

If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.

I remember when phones used to be good.

Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.

Inconceivable! Some also look like Winston Churchill.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sickos-haha-yes

In my head it was definitely Cave.

Can you explain the Ethernet requirement more? Was that just that the computer didn’t have WiFi, or was it set up such that only the wired interface worked with their VPN, or…?

Can you explain your travel router situation? Did you use the travel router to access WiFi and provide an Ethernet port for the computer (I think this is called “WISP mode”)? Or was this an 4G/5G router?

In any event, at least on Android you can connect to WiFi and tether to a computer over USB. It’s very useful for setting up a computer without WiFi drivers, as Linux will almost always recognize the shared Internet (so, it’s functionally a USB wifi dongle with very good driver support).

“Can you hold it” was meant as “abstain from pooping for just a little longer,” but was instead interpreted as, “poop, and then hold the poop in your hands.”

If you lose power, you can use one of these cables to power your house (or at least, the part of your house on that phase).

This is not how you should do this, but it can work. It is not a good idea (possibly illegal?).

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

You said that no one…

I don’t think that was the parent commenter though…

You experience the passage of time as ever increasing in speed, and before long the universe has died, leaving you — immortal and sentient — alone in the cold, dead cosmos, for eternity.

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

It’s nerf or and nuttin’

FTFY

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).