Here’s January of this year. San Francisco, so pretty moderate weather — typically don’t run heat during the day, and low 60s at night (if at all) during the winter. Large temperature gradient throughout house, typically.

South facing windows gives kitchen and living room a greenhouse effect, particularly in the winter, hence the large daily temperature swings:

We’re expecting a baby. Do people travel with a baby? Is it safe? Is it insane? I think we’re just gonna have to stay put for 3 years or so.

If your baby isn’t super fussy, the transportation difficulty (in our experience) is more in the logistics getting to/from airport, and dealing with other ground transportation. We just flew 5+hrs (coast to coast, US) with a 2mo and a ~3yo, and it was a piece of cake (typing that, I’ve jinxed the return flight…).

We haven’t done international travel with our kids yet, but we will eventually. When I was 2 my family went to Europe — some countries were meh with respect to kids, but Italy (from my folks’ retelling) was fantastic, as there is (or was) a big cultural love for young kids.

YMMV of course, but it’s absolutely doable! Kids — even starting as babies — have personalities, and you’ll get a sense of what’s appropriate with yours. Good luck!

Good point — it is “incrementally free,” although I guess if you count tire wear and tear that’s not even true.

A lot of non-graphical utilities — basically the *NIX coreutils, plus stuff like rsync, ssh, compression/archival tools (tar, gzip, bzip2, etc.), grep, and the like. Git also comes to mind.

I think part of this is that the UNIX philosophy is “developer friendly” — tell a good dev they need to make a compression utility that follows this protocol, and they will make a compression utility that follows the protocol.

Your local city college may or may not offer free classes (in San Francisco, you just need to show proof that you live in the city with some legal status).

Some public transportation is free for certain groups (youth and folks experiencing homelessness can get free passes here).

“First X of the month” at the zoo/a museum/whatever — lots of venues have free events.

A jog, bike ride, hike — lots of great stuff outside!

You ever been to a city that’s not San Francisco?

Of course; my point was never that it’s a ubiquitous practice in the US, only that it definitely exists in places.

One that’s newer?

Sure (Seattle is newer, for instance), but that’s obviously not what you mean.

I think we’re talking about different types of cities — new, rural, small incorporated cities are certainly very different than “capital C” Cities. I’m guessing this is the real distinction that we’re talking about…

Plenty in the US, too — I’m in San Francisco and there are tons of mixed use buildings, in both “sharp” and well-off neighborhoods alike.

Having a CC doesn’t mean you have debt…

“Why the HELL should I have to press 2 for English?”

— bumper sticker I would see on my bike commute back in the day.

The bank doesn’t own the house, they just have a significant lien against it. Maybe a potato potato situation (how are you supposed to spell that phrase 🤔), but it is an important distinction.

Landlords can get pissed if you paint the walls/change appliances/remodel/etc., but so long as the property is properly insured (and you make your loan payments on time) the bank probably isn’t going to bother you.

Landlords can — and do — place restrictions on quiet hours, guest policy, who is allowed to live there, etc. Owning is definitely different.

My $4k piece of carbon and $3k hunk of titanium would like to have a word…

I would bet just about anything that the only reason profit margins could possibly be higher for a car is due to volume — which, if everyone rode bikes, wouldn’t be an issue at all.

Absolute profit, sure — cars are more expensive, so they’ll win out.

Fail2ban config can get fairly involved in my experience. I’m probably not doing it the right way, as I wrote a bunch of web server ban rules — anyone trying to access wpadmin gets banned, for instance (I don’t use WordPress, and if I did, it wouldn’t be accessible from my public facing reverse proxy).

I just skimmed my nginx logs and looked for anything funky and put that in a ban rule, basically.

I’m gonna try to guess the most likely LLM response to your post, trained on reddit data:

“This.”

How’d I do?

Yeah, without being a policy junkie I think a reasonable step would be to have Prop 13 only apply to primary residence — investment real estate would be subject to a “wealth tax,” but folks wouldn’t get priced out of their primary home due to gentrification.

Right, that’s a huge downside for sure.

Property tax is on the one hand a wealth tax, which sounds like a great idea; but on the other hand, it’s a wealth tax that disproportionately affects people with the bulk of their assets tied up in real estate — which often means middle class homeowners.

So while you can certainly look at prop 13 as “good” in that folks don’t get priced out of their existing homes, it of course gets used to the advantage of rent seekers, etc.

It’s…complicated.

California disagrees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13

Property tax is assessed when there’s a sale, and otherwise changes very slowly. It’s a controversial measure.

But this is a weird thing to lie about — the only reason to implement toner DRM is to get people to buy your cartridges. But if your public statement is, “it’s ok to buy off brand cartridges,” then…well… that’s kinda weird.

Not saying you’re wrong, and they could be trying to have their cake and eat it too (court the anti-DRM crowd but also scare people into sticking with their toner). I’m just saying your snarky/sarcastic response seems unwarranted here.

Brother deny the claims: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/brother-denies-using-firmware-updates-to-brick-printers-with-third-party-ink/

Lemmy is not encrypted, my comments are public, your comments are public, we both know that. Anyone with a raspberry pi or an old netbook can scrape them.

If I use an encrypted service and all of a sudden everything that I thought was encrypted was decrypted by the service provider without my consent? That’s breaking encryption.

If on the other hand I use an encrypted service and they tell me that they can no longer offer the service, my data will be destroyed after X days, and I need to find another way of storing my encrypted data because of privacy invading government policies? That is not breaking encryption.

For many things I completely agree.

That said, we just had our second kid, and neither set of grandparents live locally. That we can video chat with our family — for free, essentially! — is astonishing. And it’s not a big deal, not something we plan, just, “hey let’s say hi to Gramma and Gramps!”

When I was a kid, videoconferencing was exclusive to seriously high end offices. And when we wanted to make a long distance phone call, we’d sometimes plan it in advance and buy prepaid minutes (this was on a landline, mid 90s maybe). Now my mom can just chat with her friend “across the pond” whenever she wants, from the comfort of her couch, and for zero incremental cost.

I think technology that “feels like tech” is oftentimes a time sink and a waste. But the tech we take for granted? There’s some pretty amazing stuff there.