MudMan

3 Km is what? A half hour walk? I’ve lived in multiple European countries in my life and never been that far from a supermarket.

I mean, I definitely have walked that much daily. My longest walk to work I can remember was maybe 40 minutes. In some places where I’d take public transportation for like 20-30 min I’ve walked for an hour when I felt like it instead.

For groceries I don’t think I’d take that with me that far walking unless it could go in my backpack. But seriously, if you don’t have a shop in that radius around you in Europe you need a car anyway because you’re out in the middle of nowhere.

But also, in European supermarkets you can normally get big grocery hauls delivered that far away. Just go there, buy your stuff, pay, book a delivery. Lots of old people who can’t carry heavy weights do it. They still go to the shop, though.

Sure, but that’s a problem with the language selector setting, as I said above, not with the country list.

Yeeeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting UX question. For language selection, sure. For country? There are plenty of reasons why you may need to select a country name and not be clear on the native spelling of its name. Plus how do you end up in a country selector list in a language you don’t understand?

I’ll say that flagging the language selector for international users is even harder than the list itself. If you don’t have an icon for it in particular. You can make the name cycle, but depending on where it’s at it can be distracting or impractical. Accidentally changing the language to Hungarian (which may as well be an alien language, for how unrecognizeable its roots are if you don’t speak it) was one of the few times I ended up having to delete a config file just to be able to use a piece of software again because I just could not find the lanuage selector after that.

Eh… why would including English help?

Ideally you keep each language in their own language so it can be recognized by native speakers. Flags help. Adding English to the native name… does not.

And of course if you’re selecting a country, not a language, then it makes sense for the country list to be in the language you have selected. Why would you not know the names of countries in the language you chose for the interface? As somebody points out below, those are not language names in the screenshot.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

Yeeeeah, I have less of a problem for that, because… well yeah, people host stuff for you all the time, right? Any time you’re a client the host is someone else. Self-hosting makes some sense for services where you’re both the host and the client.

Technically you’re not self hosting anything for your family in that case, you’re just… hosting it, but I can live with it.

I do think this would all go down easier if we had a nice marketable name for it. I don’t know, power-internetting, or “the information superdriveway”. This was all easier in the 90s, I guess is what I’m accidentally saying.

This is a me thing and not related to this video specifically, but I absolutely hate that we’ve settled on “homelab” as a term for “I have software in some computer I expose to my home network”.

It makes sense if you are also a system administrator of an online service and you’re testing stuff before you deploy it, but a home server isn’t a “lab” for anything, it’s the final server you’re using and don’t plan to do anything else with. Your kitchen isn’t a “test kitchen” just because you’re serving food to your family.

Sorry, pet peeve over. The video is actually ok.

It is between 0.1 and 0.05% the size of Reddit.

So yes.

I guess that’s a fair point, but there are a few things I’d point out in response.

For one thing, nested threads weren’t that rare, even early on. I refuse to give Reddit credit for that one. Pair that with the fact that around here the upvote sorting is far less relevant and you have a more forum-like arrangement. It’s definitely not the “only the most upvoted post counts” thing over here. You have very long threads with a lot of different responses and responses to responses. The filtering and bubbling up based on popularity is not quite Reddit-like.

For another thing, and perhaps more importantly, social media isn’t just defined by its features. Reddit is the way it is because of how people engage with it and how large and anonymous it is. The entry points are different, the connections are different, the reliance on discoverability tools is waaay different. This place doesn’t feel like Reddit because even if it has a few of those tools it doesn’t much need them. You can parse the entire firehose. You can’t be Reddit like that.

If anything I’m surprised by the constant Reddit comparisons, because this has never felt like Reddit to me.

It feels like a 90s forum. Small, focused on a handful of topics, you always argue with the same five guys about the same five things… It’s not a Reddit replacement at all. Which is why I’m here, I don’t contribute to Reddit and never have.

Cool. So not totally screwed then.

It’s normally 1-2 days where I am (not the US, incidentally).

Still, I mean… pretty sure I can survive that long without a toaster (or… you know, go outside and buy one from a shop).

As screwed as a society with same-day online order delivery can be, I guess?

I have a minifridge I use for drinks (admittedly it’s a relatively large household). It has the advantage of having an easily accessible plug, so you can even easily run it on a battery or generator in emergencies. It’s not super cold, but it beats room temperature.

I’ll say that sounds way less crazy to me, being from a relatively rural area. I know multiple people with chest freezers on the side. Health regulations have made butchering pigs at home very impractical, but chickens are still fair game (if a lot more paperwork than they used to be).

You can’t hear it from there, but I am screaming in non-native English speaker.

Or, to put it another way, every single song you know released before 1995.

I’m gonna guess from the scratched and replaced line that this was an edit. The original response was about federal systems in general, the guy generalized from the US, I noted this was not the case in general. I guess I wouldn’t have been confused if you had responded to him, but I was specifically not talking about the US. Muddled online chats with strangers are muddled, I suppose.

Which states and which federal government?

This is not how that works in all federal systems.

In most of them the things the federal/regional governments can do are mutually exclusive. If a region has the attributions over, say, education policy, the central government can’t override that with a law, it requires a constitutional change to do so. In some cases, the central government gets authority in those areas only if the regional government doesn’t take it.

And the other way around it’s the same thing. A region can’t start making choices on defense, for instance.

When those things are in conflict the federal tier doesn’t automatically override anything, it’s a constitutional crisis and the higher constitutional courts have to resolve which law is actually applicable. They are on equal footing. Otherwise it’s not a federal state, it’s devolved powers like in the UK, which are fundamentally different.

Because people don’t think about anything that way. Individual action won’t make large scale changes.

That isn’t news, either. We just happen to also suck to find ways around that problem, in general.