As someone who spends a lot of time searching and is tired of AI slop, tracking, and targeted ads, it’s a breath of fresh air.

It provides a level of quality and control you don’t get from the Brave/DDGs of the world, and a reliability that’s hard to match with the SearXNGs.

It took a bit of mental back and forth to get comfortable paying for something that has historically been “free”, but I’m alright with it.

I’d love to see more FOSS competition (or frankly any competition) out there but hosting a reliable search engine is difficult and expensive.

It’s cheaper than any of my streaming subscriptions and I use it 10x as much, so I’m good paying the price.

Kagi will let you block slop sites (but you have to manually block each one)

I confess I haven’t used it but I’ve been wanting to try and get my preferred RSS reader app (Feeder) on my computer - that’s the only one that I want though

Do you believe Luigi Mangione killed Bryan Johnson?

Do I think he’s more likely than not the killer? Yes. Do I think that “beyond a reasonable doubt”? No, BUT I haven’t spent as much time studying the facts of the case as I hope each juror has.

Can he be found guilty with the evidence against him?

Of course. With the right frame job, my cat could be found guilty of the murder.

There are ads on news articles?

Is your favorite color purple?

A capacitor has ~1% of the storage capacity of a battery of similar power rating.

Saying its storage performance is better because its holds a larger % of that capacity at low temperatures is nonsense because its storage performance objectively sucks (and not what it’s designed to be good at)

It’s like saying a Tesla is better than a 747 because it can go from 0-60 faster. A technically true statement but a meaningless performance comparison.

30-50% of my energy is the EV. About 20% is 120V plug loads (computers, fridges, home server), ~5-10% lighting, ~15% large equipment (dryer, electric range, electric water heater), and the remainder (15-30% seasonally) is HVAC (heat pump)

Any gas appliances would bring a lot of those numbers down

American House with an EV, all electric, and no solar, I use about 1200 kWh/mo (1.2 MWh/mo) on average. This could only carry me through about 3y. Even if I had access to good public infrastructure I think best I could do is 6y (again, all-electric home).

But I digress. Lithium ion as purely load shifting is a pretty reasonable, I’d argue critical, solution for covering day/night loads, but starts to fall apart completely when it comes to seasonal (summer/winter) loads.

But what makes this plant interesting is the addition of super capacitors. The combo battery/SC plant is less about day/night load shifting and more about providing stability to a shifting grid. As supply and demand grow increasingly decoupled, and we try and shift away from expensive peaker plants always on standby, systems like this can dramatically help smooth grid performance.

~90 MW of peaker capacity is small potatoes currently, but this is a big step towards a more reliable grid future.

Supercapacitors provide ultrafast response times – specified at 0.001 seconds – and maintain over 85% capacity at –40°C, significantly outperforming lithium-ion batteries in extreme cold.

Outperform how? At being a capacitor? That’s their whole point.

On the energy side, 85% of 29 MW-min is 0.41 MWh. Even if the batteries lose 99% of their capacity at -40 °F, last I checked .42 MWh > 0.41 MWh.

These are two different tools for two different purposes, I’m not sure how you compare their “performance” under this metric.

If your tight on money, building a system will always come out on top in the long term, specifically in terms of upgrade paths to keep up with the times.

If you’re actually strapped for cash, buying a used system will always come on top. If you’re patient, watch goodwill and other spots for home-built systems that have new enough components to have an upgrade path in the future.

I’ll run a backup and restore when moving to a new device, because why not. But regular backups? Meh, the ether can have my messages if my phone dies.

That said, depending on how this new system is rolled out, I may subscribe just to support the Signal foundation.

You do you - anything is technically possible, and from a purely engineering perspective a Steam Deck is an impressive little piece of hardware.

That said. I would advise against getting it for any sort of productivity. Having to haul out it, a separate keyboard, and mouse, just to take a quick note in class is cumbersome and distracting, even if we assume everything works on the first go every time (it won’t.).

As others have pointed out, Linux is nice until it isn’t - maybe you can partner up with a friend when your chemistry lab needs you to reference their archaic software to find some material property, but its a risk you’re choosing to take on. Will it pair with the campus printers? What if you need to run Solid Works? Ansys? The drivers for a digital microscope? Collaborating on group projects in Microsoft Office (the web apps aren’t the same.)? The list goes on.

Additionally, something like the Steam Deck is built for gaming. Meaning every time you pick it up, it reminds you it’s time to game. As someone with ADHD who struggled to stay on task in college, having a constant reminder of distractions at my fingertips would have been overwhelming.

That’s before we factor in the ‘cool’ factor of being that person in the class.

Get a laptop.

Maybe, but I’m talking about this fuckerthat you would see at a restaurant:

Ghostly pink on the inside and full of air between thick crunchy dividers. It can fuck right off.

I still hate tomatoes…

…that aren’t ripe heirloom tomatoes. You try to put an unripe, dried out, perfectly red and circular, bland slice of mass market tomato on my burger and I will RAAAGE.

I used it once to charge my Pixel Buds and went “huh, that was neat, but inconvenient because now I have to keep my phone in one spot, can’t use it, and probably could just plug the buds into something nearby” then never used it again.

In transit, it’s impossible to get them all, though it should support PGP to anyone else that has it.

At rest, it should all be locked down so only I can access, they may have to store some messages temporarily until I connect to provide the encryption, but everything else better be completely inaccessible.

A couple of people mentioned sparkling water, and I want to join the train.

I got an off-brand sodastream. That and some Aarke flavor drops (https://aarke.us/collections/flavor-drops), and I have an infinite supply of la croix-esq bubble water.

I keep 2 bottles of (fridge-filtered) tap water in the fridge at all times and when I get the “I’m bored and don’t know what else I want” pangs, I go there first.

I also generally try drinking more water, especially at the start of a meal, to push back against the tendency to over eat.

Finally there’s the “just buy healthier snacks” but I struggle with that one the most

Who would be able to access my emails at rest?

If the answer isn’t abso-fucking-lutely no one, I’m not interested.

This is the Spotify/Apple Music/etc model and the reason why music piracy is practically dead (yes, I know there are a few sites still going).

These services are doing their best to find ways to push people back to piracy but for now they keep it at bay through competition to provide better service.

If there was a catchall video streaming service where all publishers released and got a cut of their plays it would be game over for piracy. Fortunately that’ll never happen.