So, it mostly doesn’t mirror US demographics then, as the US, as a whole, skews away from the GOP.

They also skew away from the Democratic Party. Look at approval ratings for Biden and Trump if you don’t believe me, both were absolutely terrible, and Congress is arguably worse. I think most people hate both parties, but the system is rigged to support a two-party system.

If we look at issues, I think most people lean a bit more progressive on social issues and pretty moderate on fiscal issues. Even in my very red state, there are tons of pride flags out during pride month, and our conservative governor was openly supportive of trans issues (esp. kids). But neither party seems to do much to actually progress social issues, so I think people just end up getting pissed off. Democrats push on climate change and Republicans push tax cuts, when we really just want to legalize marijuana and let people marry whoever they want.

I don’t think there’s an article, at least I couldn’t find one. I tried to find the original source, but internet searches suck these days (or maybe I’ve lost my touch).

Here’s a YT video that talks about it, but it’s also quite biased. The two anchors here are conservative and “libertarian” (I think Robbie Suave is more conservative than he claims). And here’s Sky News YT video about it (right-wing UK media IIRC).

I wish I had more to go on, and I’d really like to see the original story, but there you go.

Yeah, my coworkers were kind of excited about Trump cutting $2T, and I tried to explain to them that’s not feasible with the way budgets are set up. They could maybe cut $1T if they really went deep, but to get anything more, they’d have to cut SS, Medicare, and the military, and Trump said that’s off limits.

I doubt they’ll hit $500B. They might get $2T over 10 years (so $200B/year) though, which I guess is how Congress likes to quantify spending changes to lessen the blow.

Sure, but there are all kinds of issue with that. First, Trump has significant investments in TS, so having the government fund that would be a massive conflict of interest. Second, conservatives love to rail on places like NPR getting public funding, and funding X is a bit too much of an about-face IMO.

Yup, probably.

But hey, there are free options (Actual and Firefly), so there’s no harm in trying them out. If you can replicate your setup in YNAB, you might just save yourself some money. But definitely don’t ditch it until you’ve gotten everything set up first.

I’m more interested in ideological balance, because I’m looking for social media to curate news sources for me. If all I’m getting is conservative or progressive articles, it’s not doing its job.

I had a pretty good setup on Reddit with just the right subs to get a good ideological balance (despite Reddit being pretty left leaning), but I bailed when they pulled the API BS and I’m staying away due to their data harvesting. Lemmy is much worse than Reddit as far as bias goes, but it’s better than nothing I suppose. I’ve had to actually go back and follow news sources to rebalance my media consumption, which is a pain because there’s so much BS on news sites.

I don’t want to be social, and if I want entertainment, I’ll play video games or watch a movie/TV show. I just want to stay informed and hear other peoples’ takes on current events, ideally from a diverse set of perspectives. And yet, my main options are left wing or right wing sources, both of whom will misrepresent stuff and nobody will correct them.

I’m probably not going back to Twitter/X because I hate the format, but I am happy to see that at least someone thinks it’s somewhat balanced. I’m working on my own Reddit/Lemmy alternative with the express goal to make it easier to get a balanced feed, so hopefully some day I’ll be able to eat my cake and have it too.

Yeah, it’s not perfect, but it works well enough to get what I wanted: see unexpected expenses from my vast array of credit cards. I’ve caught fraudulent transactions my bank didn’t, so that’s nice.

I don’t actually do strict budgeting with it, I mostly just want to see generally where our money is being spent, and I prefer to keep those transactions as private as possible (well, outside of my banks selling my transaction data to data brokers, that is…).

Not legally AFAIK.

My ISP doesn’t support IPv6, so I haven’t needed to touch that, but we’ll be getting muni fiber soon-ish (they claim the next year or two), so that could change. I’ll definitely think about upgrading to pfSense or something when that happens.

Eh, I thought the sequence from 0:46 to 1:06 was pretty good. I just wonder if that’s actual footage or just a render. It seems like it’s their first game, so there’s no way I’m buying this w/o some actual gameplay footage.

According to CNN, X is the most ideologically balanced of the social media platforms (party affiliation stats are at 1:25).

I’m not saying that this makes X good, I’m saying it makes it interesting. Most social media sites lean left of center or very hard to the right, yet X seems to have found a balance. Or maybe it’s in transition into being a far right platform, idk, but at least as of this moment, it’s pretty balanced. Users are down, but it seems the current userbase is more balanced than it was.

That has little to do with whether X is “toxic,” but I do think it’s an interesting statistic to discuss.

I highly doubt it’ll ever be funded by the government.

Yeah, I’d be down with that, and I’d go for the last one. I only need 1 2.5G port, though 2x is always nice to have. The extra gigabit lines would be nice for separated VLANs, like running my camera network (don’t want that touching the net).

Yeah, there’s a bunch of new stuff. I got it when it was in beta or something back in 2011 or so, and my kids wanted to try it, so I dug out my old credentials. It has come a long way from when I last played in the mid 2010s.

It’s still largely a block builder, but there’s a ton more complexity to it now, even on vanilla MC. My understanding is that most servers run a bunch of mods, and there are a ton of crazy mods out there these days, so it’s more a platform than anything at this point.

One of us!

And yeah, a few of my coworkers have been talking about getting one as well. So far, their main reason was, “I don’t need one,” but that’s perfect territory for a Christmas present.

AOOSTAR WTR PRO AMD Ryzen 7 5825u 4 Bay Nas Mini PC

Huh, I’ve never heard of them, that looks like a pretty cool box!

The main issue I see is no PCIe slot. My current NAS runs over Wi-Fi (I know, I should run cable to it), so I would need to put this next to my router, which is in my bedroom. And even though it’s pretty quite, I don’t want to hear that all night. A minor issue is that it uses laptop RAM, so I probably can’t reuse the modules in something else.

That said, definitely a cool find, thanks!

JONSBO N4

The N2 and N3 also look pretty neat, but they’re mini-ITX, so I’d need to either buy a new mobo or wait until I upgrade one of our SFX PCs.

My current NAS box is way too big, since it’s basically a full tower and I only have one GPU and 3 drives in there, so 80% of the space is completely wasted. It’s also idle most of the time and never does anything intense, so it’s not like I need the cooling either.

I’d highly suggest getting a case with at least 1 more free HDD bay

Good call. I currently only have 2, and I was shopping for a 4-bay so I could run a second mirror pair, but getting 5 makes a lot of sense to replace a failing drive w/o yanking it out (maybe it’ll function well enough to help copy to the new drive).

Firefly

Nope. I found AB and saw that they had experimental support for SimpleFIN, which supports financial institutions in my country (USA), and it was cheaper than my old, non-selfhosted solution (Tiller). SimpleFIN provides a pretty simple API, so there’s no reason Firefly couldn’t support it as well (and there’s an issue for it).

I also really hate PHP, so the fact that Actual Budget is written in node.js is a plus.

Having at least one more port makes debugging a lot easier, and it also opens the door to port-based VLANs. If they had three ports, it would be infinitely more useful to me, and any more ports than that is just icing on the cake.

But only two ports means you have to get a separate switch unless you’ll only ever have the one ethernet device.

In terms of tradeoffs, drop the Wi-Fi capability entirely and add more physical ports. I doubt the Wi-Fi module is any good (doesn’t even do 6GHz), and it doesn’t seem to be replaceable either. If you’re going for a home-lab setup, you’re going to want more ports. If you’re going for a regular home user use-case, you’d prefer a better Wi-Fi card. Maybe sell two models, one w/ better Wi-Fi (full 6E standard) and one w/ more ports and no Wi-Fi.

Well, it won’t be the end of gaming, but maybe the end of console gaming. Why buy a console when you can get a wider selection of games with a PC?