As others have suggested, you’ll probably want to pack a combination of movies, books and audio.

I don’t know what kind of media you normally consume, but here’s what has worked for me and others in the past:

• 18 hours is a looong time. Your attention span and interests may vary wildly from one minute to the other.
• Download some series in addition to regular movies. 35-50min chunks are much more manageable with a reduced attention span.
• Get some e-books about various topics, ideally some fiction and some non-fiction. Again, some short stories can’t hurt. Or some entertaining science book such as What If? by Randall Munroe.
• Audiobooks are a great way to be entertained with your eyes closed. You can actively consume them or fall asleep while listening.
• Include some movies/books that you already know but don’t mind watching/reading a second time.

Only maginally related to your question:

• By all means, pack a bottle of eyedrops. My personal recommendation is Bepanthen Pro if you can get them where you live. A bit on the expensive side but absolutely worth it.
• If you plan to bring your own comfy headphones, consider getting one of those Bluetooth transmitters with a headphone jack so you can watch movies on the built-in screen with your own headphones. (Pick one that can handle most planes’ headphone plugs that use two jacks.)

It’s what they should do really. Make the consequences of the law as visible as possible.

So long, Elon…

Trade-in deals mostly suck around here. I hand my ‘old’ phones down to friends and family, who hand theirs down to their kids. Their kids usually get a ‘new’ phone when their old one has stopped working or is really, really showing its age. I assume this system is representative of a quite sizeable part of society, so I’m not sure how much to read into those trade-in statistics.

+1 for Jitsi. Works well, user-friendly, lots of features without looking complicated, not too resource-hungry, lots of ways to extend it. All the other person needs it to click a link, enter a name and allow microphone/camera usage one time. There’s also an app for Android and iOS, though you can just as well use a mobile browser.

Well the half-good news is, judging by Palantir’s track record of managing large public projects elsewhere, that project is bound to bankrupt the US once and for all so people can build something new. The bad news is, it’s probably only going to happen late within the first fifteen years of the ‘two-year’ contract.

The knowledge is still there, it’s just that the LLM has been instructed not to divulge it, and these instructions are often imperfect and can sometimes be circumvented accidentally or on purpose.

I know most people find it unrealistic that underpaid sweatshop-style manufacturing could ever be moved to the US, but considering the rate at which social safety nets, employee rights and unions are deconstructed, the idea might not be that far-fetched. Already many people work two or more jobs to make ends meet, jobs such as waiting are already grossly underpaid and borderline degrading in many cases, and people are still eager to do that work because the alternative would be for them and their families to go hungry or homeless. Who’s to say sewing cheap dresses 12-14 hours a day is such a bad pospect in comparison?

Well, Nvidia plans to move manufacturing to the US, and Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has pledged a 50 billion investment in US facilities, so there are at least some ass-kissers.
What happens after these announcements remains to be seen.

and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:

The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.

If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.

When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.

That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.

So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.

I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.

I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.

As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.

I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).

The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.

Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.

I was with a dude once whose foreskin was super tight and couldn’t even be pulled down when flaccid.

That’s called phimosis and is an actual medical condition where it makes sense to remove part of the foreskin.

Other than that, without informed consent (which a baby/child obviously can’t give) it’s genital mutilation, plain and simple, and should be punished as such. It’s a remainder of barbaric times where the concept of enjoyable sex was considered evil and masturbation in particular was to be prevented at any cost. The excuses about health, hygiene etc. are just convenient lies.

Personally I’ve heard (anecdotal evidence) from men who had a circumcision as adults (either by choice or for medical reasons) and some say the sex afterwards was better, some say it was worse. The point is, either way it should be an informed decision by the person whose penis is affected, and not by anybody else.

It depends on what you’re looking for.

File storage - plenty of solutions, though make sure you don’t pick one that rents their storage space from AWS or Azure.
Personally I use Tresorit at it is end-to-end encrypted, easy to use and has a native client for almost every system I use (except for FreeBSD) in addition to the web interface. On your PC you get a network drive but can also include folders located elsewhere. It’s by no means the cheapest solutio though.

For pictures there’s Ente. It works very well, is cross-platform, and you can even set up your own server if you’re so inclined.

Sadly there’s no real alternative to Microsoft’s 365 offers - maybe a combination of lifetime MS Office licences or LibreOffice plus some cloud storage provider comes close.

To replace Teams you could use a secure messenger such as Threema Work (this version comes with user management and a versatile inbuilt MDM) and your own Jitsi videochat server. We’ve replaced Teams with this combo years ago and never looked back.

Hosted Exchange can be rented from many service providers, running on either genuine MS Exchange or a compatible third-party system such as KerioConnect.

There are also other places such as Proton that offer several services at once.

Or are you looking for something completely different?