livueta

Sibling comment has good suggestions. I personally like Dell Optiplex models, e.g. 9020. Looks like right now the best you can do is about 40-45 shipped for a complete one, but I've snagged about six in the last year or two for 20-35. They come and go. Beware of sellers posting the same thing for 100+; they're worth max 50.

Nope, and that definitely would have helped, but I bet 99% of people looking to use an old phone as a server aren't going to do all that either.

The biggest issue I've found while trying to do this is a very high rate of battery failure while plugged in 24/7 under load. 4/5 phones I've done this with have become spicy pillows in the 1-2 year timeframe. They were all Samsung or LG devices, so not complete bottom of the barrel garbage batteries either. IME if you need a cheap server, a used enterprise micro pc has a much lower chance of potentially burning your house down, can be found on ebay for literally $30, and can be easily stuffed full of ssds.

While I don't think you're wrong to say that the trends/regime were the same then as today, that's very much more obvious in hindsight than it was at the time. You've got to recall the triumphal attitude in the West towards China circa the run-up to WTO admission in the late 90s. Read Clinton on the topic: https://www.iatp.org/sites/default/files/Full_Text_of_Clinto...

The trendy thing was to believe that exposure to global markets and the Internet would inevitably result in further liberalization, and anyone who disagreed was probably a car-burning anarchist. It was only in the 2010s that the fact that reality wasn't quite that beneficent started creeping into mainstream neoliberal perspectives.

To be fair, China really had seen massive changes under Deng, so the idea that continued reform would eventually result in major political liberalisation wasn't completely insane. It went from Mao to a semblance of rule of (in retrospect, obviously "by" rather than "of", but whatever) law, so was extending the trend line really so implausible?

In retrospect, obviously, yes, it was implausible. But that general vibe meant that many really did think that the Sino-British Joint Declaration would be respected.

Of course, the actual history of how that whole thing turned out w.r.t. tearing up the treaty and burning the bits in the fires of national-security laws, has altered perspectives on how well Taiwan would cope under rule from Beijing. Now that the concept of one country, two systems - that idea of a special status - is widely understood to be a meaningless platitude, the assumptions that were common at the time of HK reunification are totally invalid. You can see this in trends of polling of Taiwanese attitudes to reunification: as HK has been strangled, the Taiwanese public has come to understand the worthlesness of any of the sort of assurances that were offered to HK, which at the time assauged a lot of objections.

Finally, there's a matter of basic military calculus: HK is a lot harder to defend than Taiwan. It's not a natural polity grounded in geography, and not potentially self-sufficient in the same ways as Taiwan. Thatcher didn't agree in 1984 because she loved and trusted Deng, but because he could credibly have taken it by force in a day and told her so, so, in a very real sense, there wasn't much of an alternative.

It's been kind of enlightening seeing leadership at $BIGCORP push AI coding solutions like they're guaranteed to be a 10x increase in velocity in every context. Feedback from ICs isn't wholly negative - there are definitely situations where it can be useful, like quickly grokking common applications of common tools, or semi-intelligently applying a diff pattern that is more then just a regex - but there's a complete unwillingness to hear any feedback that isn't "this tech is a total paradigm shift that allows us to finally get rid of all these pesky and expensive developers". Reports of, for instance, the introduction of subtle bugs that take extended amounts of time to understand and fix, are met with outright hostility and accusations of incompetence. When a complex defect or escalation drags on, a common question is "why haven't you asked AI to fix it yet", belying a total misunderstanding of the sorts of tasks the tool is applicable to. The kool-aid is not so much drunk as rectally infused. If valuations are based on this sort of outlook, whew, this market is totally fucked.

You can trade range for bandwidth by playing with the spread factor, an encoding tunable: https://meshtastic.org/docs/configuration/radio/lora/#modem-...

But generally yes, latency is too high and bandwidth is too low for synchronous voice. The upside is that real-world performance often exceeds the range of analog UHF even at significantly lower frequencies, e.g. GMRS.

Sounds like the plot of a Fukumoto Nobuyuki manga.

Re ISM band usefulness: yeah. I grudgingly admit that the propagation characteristics of HF and probably even VHF aren't a great match for the ISM governance model, but at least everywhere I've ever used radios, UHF HAM bands are as dead as a doornail and don't (fine, generally) propagate far enough for small numbers of negligent users to create major problems for large amounts of users. Take some 400mhz UHF and make it ISM. 902-928mhz ISM has a ton of great stuff like LoRa going on, but access to 400mhz bands would be a huge shot in the arm to the practical usability of projects like Meshtastic without significant risks to the general usability of that chunk of spectrum. Another interesting thing about the history of protocol development in ISM bands is how the need to cope with noise/overuse/other forms of spectrum degradation has spurred enormous advances in encoding and signal-processing techniques, quite contrary to the initial expectation of useless garbage dumping zone bands.

> and then I'll use passkeys in keepassxc.

If the auth cartel deigns to allow it:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706876

Attestation makes passkeys inherently anti-user, full stop.

An interesting facet of this that makes me feel somewhat more charitable to cashless payments in that context is that it's very easy to perform cashless payments in Japan pseudoanonymously, in that you can buy an IC card from a vending machine, load it with cash, and use it for payments all without explicit links to your KYC'd banking identity. Sure, if you attracted individualized security state attention they could probably pull security camera footage and figure it out, but that approach doesn't scale into turnkey tyrrany; sort of how like $5 wrench cryptanalysis doesn't prevent widespread strong cryptography fundamentally altering the envelope of what kinds of automated, at-scale privacy abuses are possible.

This is a fairly stark contrast with the West, where pseudoanonymous cashless payments basically don't exist. The closest thing (stuff like xmr aside, where the chance you can use it to buy a coffee is very low) are prepaid visa gift cards, but the UX on these is terrible for a lot of reasons and so aren't anywhere close to the practical usability of cash-charged IC cards in Japan.

You might enjoy it if you're after thoughtful story-driven shows from the last decade. It's on my personal mental shortlist of those right alongside ODDTAXI and Ousama. Knowledge of rakugo is definitely not required.

Have you seen Shōwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjū?

Kuuchuu Buranko

Kaiba

Kemonozume

Chihayafuru

Akagi

Penguindrum

Jinrui

Hidamari

Joshiraku

(ymmv w.r.t. "underrated" as that's all relative, but hey)

Because I can't fit hundreds of tb of stuff on every endpoint and don't like having to manage either adding or removing dirs from Syncthing or moving things in/out from preexisting sync dirs. IME Syncthing is also less performant on hundred-gb scale copies.

Syncthing for background syncing things like my keepass db I always want an offline, updated copy of. Smb over wg for general filesystem access and one-off bulk copies, usually via rsync. Both are served from the same fileserver cluster; the graphene phones and macbooks are all clients. Nextcloud for notes and photos, though I can also get at those over smb if necessary.

Something I've wondered about, because it seems like you might have run across this in your testing: does the default keyboard get anything if it's present on the system, but not the currently active keyboard? I enjoy FlorisBoard for English input, but I've had a hard time finding a quality replacement for Gboard's Japanese input mode.

Definitely possible. Now I want to dig out a stock Android phone and retest. Aiui tailscale shouldn't introduce much if any load over wg, but I also wonder if you'd have different results with standalone wg.

I don't find that to be the case with wg - have actually tested this and found a ~1-2% difference in battery consumption over a full charge, all on lte (pixel 8, graphene). Openvpn, though - yeah.

On Kon, Paranoia Agent is also excellent. And if we're taking 2000s shows into account, I also have to mention Kuuchuu Buranko in that category of Paranoia Agent-reminiscent sociologically interesting shows.

If we're specifically talking stuff from the last few years, and if shows count, I gotta put in a word for ODDTAXI. Feels like a mashup of the best parts of Yuasa Masaaki and Kon Satoshi works.

Afaik, while better anti-tank weapons did come about during the war, a lot of it was also to do with adapting tactics and usage of existing weapons to counter the new "meta". For example, the flak 88 and the 90mm M1 were originally intended for use as antiaircraft weapons and were widely deployed as early as 1936-38. They just so happened to also be excellent antitank weapons, once people figured out how to deploy them as such.

I'm honestly bamboozled why anyone gives passkeys the time of day, given the mess that is attestation and its ability to enforce user-hostile ecosystem lockin:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc/issues/10407

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39698502

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706876

In principle, it's a great idea. This specific implementation should be treated as DoA because of how attestation works.

While I quite like Meshtastic and have literally dozens of t-beams, they serve fairly different usecases. Meshtastic is great for keeping in touch with your preorganized paragliding group or whatever, but the need for special hardware will always limit adoption in emergent scenarios vs. FireChat's "we're going to the protest; install this app".

As someone who both a) does precision fab work as a hobby and b) made the somewhat unfortunate decision to memorize many thousands of kanji without caring about stroke order: it's harder. Sorry. 100% agree with the parent: even though I can read Japanese at a fairly advanced level, having not properly learned stroke order is a massive bitch. I can't handwrite for shit, and that's obvious to me and anyone else who can read Japanese of any degree of complexity. It is so many orders of difficulty above "ask[ing] about character order" that I can't even begin to verbalize what a category difference of difficulty it is. Handwriting Japanese that looks correct to a native reader assumes years of naturalization.

It's especially nice given that a fair number of Japanese websites are aggressive about blocking foreign registrations even to the extent of blacklisting known VPN nodes. First thing I did upon reading this headline was confirming that my actually-created-in-Japan account hadn't ever had its location setting autoupdated by geoip.

I'm curious how that feature works on the backend. If the premise is employees abusing internal access to fiddle account data, and the feature can be toggled on an account page, can't the insider abuse a password reset flow, toggle the setting off, then proceed as normal? I'm assuming that there's some "customer walks into store and needs to reset their password" functionality employees can access. Maybe a mandatory waiting period?

I mean, it's just one program out of many. Japan is the largest bilateral national contributor to foreign aid to Nepal: https://www.foreignassistance.gov/cd/nepal/current/obligatio... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_aid_to_Nepal

In 2019, 146.7M vs 129.0M from the U.S.

Lots of Japanese people travel to Nepal to volunteer in schools and clinics and stuff; when living in Japan I knew several different people who'd done that sort of thing. It's like U.S. doctors and contractors doing projects in Central America. Japan is very into building soft power in SEA through development assistance.

> this is a reminder that the only reason people aren't flying planes into buildings is because they don't want to

One of the things about reading Stand on Zanzibar that really stuck with me was, amid all these relatively spot-on predictions of societal dysfunction, from rampant corporatism to debt-trap neocolonialism to housing affordability, the contrast between Brunner's world of high-impact, low-complexity domestic terrorism and our reality. There are shockingly few people blowing up box trucks full of anfo on major bridges.