Something I don't get: Why don't people, for starters, just install a single cheap mini-split (with a reverser valve, i.e. heating funtion) in some room? Each time it runs, it should heat up the home at least a bit, which in turn should make the old-school heating furnance's thermostat swtich 'on' less often, right?
Next season, you install another mini-split or two, and go from there?
Sure, it will probably not be as super efficient as a perfect 'heat pump' installation or whatever, but that could be off-set by smart meters or whatever.
But we really need some gradual way to ween ourselved of out fossil fuel addiction.

I wonder why the governments don't really seem to have an opinion on the matter. WFH comes with so many benefits for the population, iwth only arguable or minimal "cost" to business. Less traffic, more family time, less urbanization, overall better quality of life, more dynamic workforce, flexibility to do stuff during the day, and soo many other things.
Governments should - as far as I can see - be pushing WFH like crazy and adapt incentives to it!
I simply don't understand why they are not

I looked it up. With it was way more funtions!

I have to do a lot of SSH things from my phone. I use JuiceSSH which adds a row above the Android keyboard with some useful CLI buttons.
I didn't know about Hacker Keyboard. Sounds interesting, but would you recommend it in portrait mode, too? Is it really better than what JuiceSSH does?

Amongst the AI 'chatGPT' hype, I think people haven't celebreated the incredible progress that OCR has made recently. I don't know how exactly, but the OCR capabiities of these multimodal models is incredible. You can e.g. take a kind of blurry photo of a menu in a bar or restaurant, and ask for suggestions. Just the OCR aspect of that is omething that was completely outside of OCRs league just a few years ago.

And yet, as far as I am aware, the only important network equipment that we KNOW has had rather obvious backdoors built-in were from Cisco.
Of course running any equipment on your network requires that you trust it. But why should we, especially outsido if the USA, trust US equipment more than chinese one?
The only kind of secure solution is audited open source software. OpenWRT, as others have mentioned.
There was also a great CCC talk by Bunnie about what could be done to make hardware at least kind of verifyable:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.ccc.de%2Fv%2F38c3-ir...

Not to defend Big Oil, but it's obviously not them as such producing that CO2. (athough I bet the fossil fuel industry is not clean by any measure). It's their clients that burn the stuff.
The solution is painful but simple and straightforward: the price of fossil fuels should not just reflect the cost of getting it out of the ground. It has to reflect the damage it will do later on. That money has to be collected at the initial producer and spent on recapturing the CO2 or mitigating the damage. A Carbon Tax.
Most countries have schemes in place that if you i.e. import or produce a fridge, you are responible for it once it ends up as garbage. Usually, that entails paying NGOs and goverments to take care of the rubbish in the correct way decades down the line.
It's just logical to apply the same logic to fossil fuels.
But we as a society are still hooked on too cheap oil and gas. And we will have to pay for this eventually. The lack of a carbon tax is just kicking the can down the road.

We as a species really look and behave so much like some drug addict. We know oil is really bad for us, but it (short term, economically) feels so nice, so we need just oooone more hit / oil field.

I don't think connectivity, as such, is a bad thing. I don't even think 'cloud' functionality is a bad thing.
The problem is that using the OEM's app and servers is mandatory.
All 'smart'/IoT devices should, by law, have a simple way of configuring the server adress it talks to via an open protocol like MQTT.
This way, you could easily block it at your firewall if you'd wanted to, and let it talk to some local smart home controller.

I've found this awesome article on Nature.com which describes the exact lifecycle of a COVID19 case, on molecular level. Highly recommended. Anyhow, they mention HCQ:

So, it seems that at least HCQ could make theoretical sense, but we now even know why id doesn't work. Full article: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nature.com%2Farticle...

I'd just like to point our that there's a flavour of Mint called "Linux Mint Debian Edition".
It is based on the traditional Debian repos, and should be slightly more stable than the more up-to-date ones. I like the combination of straight Debian for the underpinnings, and the more "playful" Mint stuff for the GUI.

While Google's porping up of Mozilla might very well have been an attempt of reducing their exposure to being called a monopoly ... that's not a bad thing? It was working exactly as intended. While Chrome has become dominant (IMHO on merit, but it doesn't really matter), we, and many other people, always know that Firefox is a worthy competitor, and if Chrome would screw up, people could very easily switch to Firefox.
That, in my opinion, was an almost optimal win-win solution.
If Chrome would rest on its laurels, people could and would switch to Firefox in a heartbeat. Thanks to Mozilla getting Google money, we are not in that horrible situation where IE4 was the only (very generously said) half-way modern browser, and switching to Netscape would have been quite annoying.

I'd love to see the accounting behind that. Like, will Russia count this as "future incoming payments" in their budget? Does Google legally have to include this in the column of stuff they should in theory pay at some point in the future? How would a bean-counter justify not including it?

The sad thing is that I just read in an Apple forum that "well, if you're using the iMac for memory intensive tasks like video editing, you're doing it wrong and should use one of their pro offerings!".
Like...why?! Since it runs the same (admittedly powerful) CPU, the only thing really holding it back would be the RAM and storage. So Apple is purposefuly castrating these so not to steal marketshare from their other products.

It's the first time I actually watched a whole Apple announcement video in a while.
It seems erringly ... distopian? Uncanny valley-ish?
The features all - as usual - look like stuff we've all had for years, if you wanted to.
But what especially turns me off are those strangely robotic 'happy people' they aways show. Like the video call of people happily watching another person acoomodating stuff on their desk? WTF?
Also note that the first thing they mentioned - twice - is that you can get different colors now. Wow.