Spyke

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If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.

The biggest problem with lemmy and decentralization right now is that for optimal performance you need to spread out the load relatively evenly between instances. The problem is that users tend to go where other users are (otherwise why go there) and that naturally leads to clumping on one or few instances which causes it to overload.

The way to solve it is to avoid having generic "anything goes" instances and instead have instances be focused on a specific topic. For example, have gaming instance, a personal finance/investing instance, all things home ownership and improvement instance, etc. You can have multiple communities per instance as long as they stay within the same general topic. This way users will naturally spread out by subscribing to different instances based on topics they're interested in. And that will solve the performance issue we're seeing with lemmy.world or other popular instances.

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Skyrim lead designer says it will be 'almost impossible' for Elder Scrolls 6 to meet fan expectations: 'Marketing departments just put their heads in their hands and weep'

All you have to do is make it more like Morrowind with some updated mechanics. The world doesn't have to be huge; smaller, handcrafted one is preferred to huge, lifeless one. Set it in an interesting, alien province, not generic medieval like Oblivion and Skyrim. And for the love of God, move on from Gamebryo/Creation engine, it's been outdated for over a decade.

piracy

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How is pirating software a thing?

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Also, I would consider some legitimate licenced software more of a malware than a cracked one. If your software forces always-online license, comes with annoying startup processes, nagging ad screens, etc, it's malware. And if there's a cracked version without those things, I'll take the cracked version any day.

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Home Assistant - am I missing something?

HA is geared towards selfhosted, locally controlled stuff (zwave, ZigBee, mqqt, local WiFi, etc). Because the cloud and privacy invasion is the mainstream, HA may require a bit more tweaking and technical knowledge to get up and running.

With that said, once you get it to how you want it, it's been working rock solid for me for a few years now. I've built my house around HA automations and can't imagine living without it.

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If Lemmy and Mastodon continues to get popular, we will eventually get Instance wars.

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Correct, as long as the instance your account is in federated with all other instances you're subscribed to, you don't have to switch accounts.

Now, defederation is another issue if you want to see the widest possible amount of content. What's going to happen is ideologically opposed instances are going to defederate each other, so left-wing instances are going to defederate right-wing ones and vice versa. So if you're a user who wants to see the content from both sides, you'll have to create multiple accounts in each "cluster" of federated instances. It's kind of annoying to be honest, it makes it hard to discover communities just because your instance admin decided to defederate from them and encourages echo chambers, but it it's the best we've got.

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How do people afford the upfront cost of solar?

Make sure to do the math if solar is even worth it for you. Electricity is relatively cheap in my area. When I did the math, it would take me at least 20 years to break even (that's if I paid cash, even longer if I finance). Considering 25 years is an average panels lifespan, it would not save me any money.

Being independent of the grid is the only selling point, but I haven't done enough research if that's even true with solar. If it's still connected to the grid, will I even be able to utilize my panels if there's an outage in the grid?

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Homebox is the inventory and organization system built for the Home User!

So, I used Homebox for a few days now. I like the simplicity of it and I like the direction they're going. However, there are quite a few bugs and data loss issues, it's not ready for production yet. The thing is, these issues should be so easy to fix (it's a simple CRUD app) that it makes me doubt the dev skills and possibility of other issues I haven't discovered yet.

  • The purchase date just increments or decrements by one day after editing an item
  • When editing an item the notes/description fields show the data from the previously edited item, causing you to overwrite data

These two issues alone made me go back to my spreadsheet for now (good thing I kept a backup). I simply don't trust the app to keep my data intact.