I think they’re pretty different cases.

Amazon’s one was essentially a side project for them, likely fully funded in-house using their R&D (research and development) budget.

In Nate’s case, it was their entire product. They received funding from investors purely for the AI functionality that didn’t actually exist or work. They specifically claimed that it did work, which is how they got the money. They spent all the investor money and had essentially nothing to show for it.

At least there’s some competitors now, which could be used as drop-in replacements if Let’s Encrypt were to disappear.

I suspect the vast majority of certificate authorities will implement the ACME protocol eventually, since the industry as a whole is moving towards certificates with shorter expiry times, meaning that automation will essentially be mandatory unless you like manually updating certs every 90-180 days.

I’m the same as you - I had experience with mdadm, LVM, LUKS, and ext4, but no experience with ZFS. I still don’t know a lot about ZFS, but Unraid set it up for me, and I can always Googl4/DuckDuckGo any issues I encounter.

From what I can see bit rot is not a huge problems for home users

The thing is that it’s likely that lots of people are affected by bitrot and just don’t know it, since there’s no way to detect it without using checksums. People don’t know that their files have succumbed to bitrot until they try to use them and realise they’re corrupted.

Instead of 4 x 6TB drives, consider 2 x 14TB or even 2 x 20TB in a ZFS mirror. Buy the biggest drives you can afford that have reasonable pricing. When I was buying drives two years ago, 16 - 20GB was the sweet spot for price per GB.

Make sure you use NAS drives. Western Digital has had several controversies so I usually go for Seagate Exos instead.

You could use an OS like Unraid that handles ZFS for you. You don’t really need to know how ZFS works if you use Unraid since it’s all set up through the web UI. You can always search for how to do things if needed :)

ZFS has bitrot protection which is very useful for important files. Whenever you save a file, it computes a checksum for that file and stores it in the file table. When you read a file, it can detect if that file is corrupted on the drive it’s reading from (the checksum won’t match) and it’ll silently / automatically repair it using data from a different drive.

AFAIK none of the other file systems support this. You need to use ZFS RAID rather than mdadm RAID for it to work.

This is sad to read, but I just wanted to say that I love the graphics in the article. They’ve presented the information in a nice way.

They already factored in some amount of tariffs into the US price. It’s not really that it’s cheaper in Japan, but rather it’s more expensive in the USA. It’s also US$65 cheaper in Australia, for example, and even cheaper in the UK.

(keep in mind that advertised prices in Australia and the UK include tax, so you need to subtract the tax to compare with US prices)

The tariffs are just a lot higher than everyone expected. Nintendo were probably preparing for a 20% tariff, not a 54% one.

Maybe! I’m sure there’s loopholes of some sort.

Are there any economies that are truly self-sufficient?

China is trying. I feel like at least some industries there would be fine even if the US collapses.

Check Usenet, or get a friend with a subscription to a Usenet indexer to search for you.

This is a rare case where a piece of consumer electronics is going to be quite a bit cheaper in Australia compared to the USA! Usually stuff costs more in Australia.

The Switch is currently US$450 and will probably go up with tariffs. Meanwhile, it’s listed as AU$700 in Australia, which is AU$630 before tax (all advertised prices include tax), which is US$385.

I imagine this is going to happen for a lot of devices. I’m an Aussie living in the USA and I never thought I’d see the day when buying stuff in Australia would be cheaper. Australia has better consumer protection too, around things like repairs/refunds due to major issues even outside the warranty period.

Do you not like reading the truth?

Absolutely. The console is manufactured in Vietnam, which now has a 46% tariff. I really doubt that Nintendo’s profit margin is high enough to allow them to just eat that cost.

the US will.

But there’s a US$130,000 exemption (the “foreign earned income exclusion”) and tax treaties with many countries, so not many people actually need to pay extra tax to the USA. Realistically, the only time you need to is if you earn more than US$130k and the country you live in has a lower tax rate than the USA.

What hurts much more is the “exit tax” when you leave the USA (as a green card holder after 7 years) or renounce your citizenship.

It’s cheaper in Australia. It’s AU$700 which is US$427 at the moment, and Australian prices always includes tax. If you exclude tax, it’s US$385.

The drivers have gotten a lot better over the last few years, and Nvidia even have an official open-source driver now, but there’s still issues with them. Wayland works very well now, but not perfectly (especially on GPUs with low VRAM).

If you’re on Linux and are buying a new GPU, stick to AMD. Their driver is part of the Linux kernel, it’s more stable, and it gets all the newest features first.

install newest proprietary nvidia drivers

On newer cards, the open source drivers work pretty well as of version 555. The process for installing them is usually very similar to the proprietary drivers, but there’s often some flag you need to set to tell it to use the open source ones instead. For Fedora, the instructions are here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA#Kernel_Open (ignore the part about it only working for data center GPUs, as that’s no longer true)

sudo sh -c 'echo "%_with_kmod_nvidia_open 1" > /etc/rpm/macros.nvidia-kmod'
sudo akmods --kernels $(uname -r) --rebuild 

If you use Nvidia’s installer, it automatically uses the open source driver instead of the proprietary one if you have a new enough GPU (20 series or newer)

Nvidia has helped the Nouveau devs by answering questions in the past, but they also have their own open source driver here: https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules

There’s no reason your media server needs to be directly exposed to the public internet. Use Tailscale. Get everyone that uses it to sign up for a Tailscale account, and add them all to your Tailnet.

Tailscale will perform better than a Cloudflare tunnel because it’s a direct connection between the two peers, whereas Cloudflare tunnels route through Cloudflare.

Tailscale does have relay servers, but they’re only used in very rare cases, if both peers have very strict firewalls. Almost always, the connection between two peers over Tailscale is a direct connection, so there’s no extra latency (other than some small overhead for the encryption)

You could use Wireguard and manually configure it to be in a mesh config, but Tailscale makes it so much easier. I’m a big fan of their product.

But for there to be used cars, there needs to be new cars… How do the people that buy new cars pay for them?