The best mechanics can track down an issue by reasoning about what could be causing it

Same principle works with IT. I do and have done sysadmin stuff for quite a while and there’s always some random software or whatever I’ve never heard of and someone comes and asks me to fix it. Then you start to ask questions, “what exactly doesn’t work”, “can you show me what you’re doing”, “what should happen when you press that button”, “can you show settings on that thing” and so on. Then you can start to dig down, does the server they’re using respond to ping, does DNS resolve (it’s always DNS after all), does that thing work on the next workstation, when did the problem appear and was there some other maintenance or changes going on at that time and so on.

Same principle, just start to reason the whole thing from bottom up, check everything you come across untill you find something which doesn’t work and then do what’s needed to fix that, rinse and repeat until the problem goes away and make sure that what you’re doing won’t cause new problems. Just the tools are different, the mindset is more or less the same.

Does a senior mechanic need to understand the physics of piston design to be a great mechanic

I would argue that if senior mechanic doesn’t understand the physics of piston design at least on some degree he’s not a great mechanic. Obviously mechanic doesn’t need understanding on metallurgy, CAD models and a ton of other deeper level stuff just like an IT engineer doesn’t need to know on a deep level how circuit boards are designed or how CPU die manufacturing process works. But both benefit greatly when they understand why something is built the way it is.

I’m also an systems engineer of sorts and have worked with software engineers. And I’ve had requests like “Can’t you just set 'bind-address = 0.0.0.0 on mysql-server and disable firewall” on a directly internet-facing machine and then received complaints when I’m “making things more difficult” from “senior software” -titles. Sure, I can’t write the code they’re doing, or at least it would take me a crapload of more time to do that but on the other hand there’s guys who have so very narrow understanding on anything they work with that it makes me wonder how they can do their work at all in the first place.

Of course no one can master everything in any field but I find it concerning that a lot of guys just press the buttons more or less randomly until their thing works without any clue on what they actually did and how it might affect on different parts of the house of cards they’re building.

It’s always DNS, everyone should know that.

It’s not DNS. There’s no way it is DNS. It’s not technically possible for it to be DNS.

And it’s always DNS.

I somewhat agree on your comment about documentation and UI (altough once you get used to it, it’s manageable) but just to add with my experience on these things: for me they’ve been rock solid. I’ve used them both at home and professionally (mostly on small-ish networks) for at least 10 years and they just seem to run just fine.

Currently my home router is RB4011iGS+ and there’s been absolutely no problems with it in the 4-5 years it’s been on my network. I’m not saying all their models are as reliable and there’s not that many models I’ve had my hands on, but my experience with them has so far been pretty good.

You’ll get used to it eventually

I’ve been earning my living mostly with connecting to remote systems via ssh (and other means) for quite a few years and I still occasionally mess up and enter commands on a wrong terminal. Less now than I used to, but it still happens. The trick is to learn youself to pause for a second and confirm the target for any potentially destructive or otherwise harmful command, no matter if it’s locally or to some server other side of the world.

Except that traditional Google search is often filled with AI-generated sites without any value. I use DDG and if that fails it’s simple to use their ‘bangs’ to try other engines.

Do they really care enough to check your info manually if you don’t use your domain name for malicious purposes?

Depends on TLD how strict the checks are, but generally you’re at least violating TOS by doing it and can lose your domain should someone actually check the info. A lot of registrars provide at least whois-security, so they’ll know your real details but won’t share them openly to anyone who asks. I assume if you get into something illegal and court orders to release the data then they’ll happily comply instead of hurting their own business.

But if you just want to keep your real name and address out of the internet, that would be enough at least for me.

a) that doesn’t really sound like the fault of EVs or the charging stations themselves. Any sort of very moderate air current would cause the same problem.

Excactly. The stations themselves don’t create particles but magnetic fields from the high voltage DC lines and cooling fans just pick them up from the ground and back to air. It’s quite misleading to claim this is “Fine particulate matter emissions from electric vehicle fast charging stations” as the stations just redistribute existing emissions.

Obviously this is not a good thing, but the underlying cause is something else than these stations, I’d bet considerable amount of it comes from combustion engines. And as you said, simple filters should fix the problem and clean up the pollution from environment as well.

Ubiquiti

And they too aggressively push their cloud services and at least some point their management tool gave you ads on their other products.

I refuse to call it X. It’s twitter, formerly known as somewhat sensible platform to receive information around the world.

I did self-host bitwarden and it’s not that bad to keep updated and running after initial setup (including backups obviously) but it still requires some time and effort to keep it running. And as I was the only user for the service it just wasn’t worth the time spent for me (YMMV) so I switched to their EU servers and I’ve been a happy user ever since.

What I should do is to improve local backps on that, currently I just export my data every now and then manually to a secured storage, but doing it manually means that there’s often too long time between exports.

Also, should true AI some day become reality, it makes equally sense that it’ll do whatever it can to stay “alive”, like any other life form.

For example I’m not aware of any way to do upload without a login in Seafile.

You can create upload share the same way you create a download share. Then just give a link to whoever you want to and that’s it. I’m pretty sure it’ll show files already in the share while uploading, but I’m not 100% sure on that.

They didn’t hack anything. Just your plain old DDoS attack which took the service offline for a while, nothing was (at least based on what I read) actually hacked (or cracked as old-school folks like me would like it to be called) or stolen.

Is there a safe and private way to verify that I am in fact a real human on the internet?

In Finland we have this thing called ‘mobile verification’ which I use almost daily. It’s a service where my phone number is verified to my identity in a secure manner (via multifactor bank account on my case but there’s multiple ways to achieve that verification) and it works as an “middleman” where I can just click an icon on a website, feed in my phone number to the identification service, check MFA on my cellphone and then I’m shown a web page where the identity provider shows what information is delivered to an original website. Most of the cases, at least on my usage, it sends out my social security number, so that I can access my invoices, sign legal documents, check my tax forms or whatever I’m doing but the underlying system can provide pretty much whatever data they have stored. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t be used to verify that I’m an actual human being too.

Say, if that was used in Lemmy (unlikely as the service costs something per each verification), identity provider would just send to my instance that I’m an actual human being but nothing else. The instance could then store that data and show a pretty blue checkmark next to my username without any personal data from me.

Disney+ subscribers will see interactive ads pop up as well.

The Mouse can fuck the right off with that. We’ve had subscription for quite a while since there’s a ton of stuff for our kids but if they start to overlay shows with pop-up ads not unlike The Truman Show I’ll rather set up a jellyfin server and dust the old pirate hat than continue to give them money.

Why would they even need an “AI” to run a power plant?

Because when you call your automation “AI”, no matter how dumb PID or whatever you might be running, the product is at least 30% more fancy and gains more news articles, possibly funding and atleast some coffee with pastries and pats on the back to some front figure in a suit.

I think there already was case like this with either Google or Meta somewhere around Europe few years back. Or it might’ve been actual search results instead of extracts. The decision was overriden shortly as their web traffic dropped drastically. They’ll 100% do this and don’t think twice.

Generally, heating and cooling are the main energy consumption for domestic purposes. next up is the car, and then electrical consumption. (from what i remember).

I suppose it depends on where you live. Our house consumes something over 20 000kWh per year as our heating is also electric (and rest of the consumption is pretty neglible compared to heating) and we also have a fireplace which consumes around 15m³ of firewood, depending on how cold winter happens to be. Electric grid here has a ton of renewables and nuclear, so co2 footprint should be on the smaller side compared to global average.

Also, as google and microsoft (among others) shoehorns AI “answers” to everything that adds up, but private use seems to be quite insignificant anyways.