I don’t really think it’s any of those things in particular. I think the problem is there are quite a few programmers who use OOP, especially in Java circles, who think they’re writing good code because they can name all the design patterns they’re using. It turns out patterns like Factory, Model View Controller, Dependency Injection etc., are actually really niche, rarely useful, and generally overcomplicate an application, but there is a subset of programmers who shoehorn them everywhere. I’d expect the same would be said about functional programming if it were the dominant paradigm, but barely anyone writes large applications in functional languages and thus sane programmers don’t usually come in contact with design pattern fetishists in that space.

Yeah, for this reason I would pretty much never encourage exceptions in Python over some other form of error handling. It’s so frustrating when called code throws some random exceptions that are completely undocumented. This is one of the few things Java got (sort of) right

Isn’t a huge part of the point of copy left licences that an author can’t change the license without rewriting the code entirely?

So pissed at YouTube (Google) you’re switching to Android (…)? Was this their master plan all along?

A dedicated server is needed because something needs to keep a catalog of the smart devices available on your network and ideally be accessible to many people in one household. You could make a system that went phone -> device but you would need to set up each device on each phone you wanted to use, which isn’t a great user experience. You could also run into issues where devices would need to handle multiple conflicting commands from different users coming in at once. Since smart devices are usually trying to use as little power as possible, that extra complexity would hurt you in that department. The third reason is that having a separate server enables automated workflows that would depend on an always online server that orchestrates multiple devices. For example, let’s say you have some automatic insulating blinds, a smart thermostat. You want to raise and lower the blinds to maximize your energy efficiency. Since you have the dedicated server, that server can check the temperature set point of your thermostat, current weather, and sunrise\sunset times. If it’s sunny out, and your set point is higher than the outdoor temperature, the server can raise the blinds to let warm sunlight in, and vice versa. If only your phone could control the devices a workflow like this couldn’t work when you were out of the house.

It really sucks there’s no good open source alternative to MS Office. LibreOffice has been so bad for so long its not funny. Maybe if Typst got a good WYSIWYG editor it could compete.

If you want to share a set of feeds between devices, and sync read/unread, organization, etc.

Amazon is probably the worst of all of these. The only reason prime exists is to lock you into their store for all your purchases, when shipping orders should be a discrete charge for each shipment. At least the rest of these (except for Adobe and Nintendo, who suck about as hard) give you access to their infrastructure that lets you access the entirety of the product they offer instantly, whenever you have an internet connection.

The only thing he listed that isn’t a service is his Costco membership.

I got a shield a while back because I was having issues with the built in chromecast on my TV. It worked fine for about a year, but I’ve been having issues with lag and apps crashing for the past 2-3 years. Meanwhile my girlfriend’s cheap roku puck still works fine, and she bought it around the same time I got the shield and it was way cheaper. I wouldn’t recommend the shield based on that. The only annoyance is jellyfin on the roku isn’t as feature complete, multiple language audio tracks aren’t supported, but if that’s not an issue for you I’d recommend getting a roku over a shield.

I got a set off ebay, Jesus christ they’re loud. I ended up returning them cause I could hear the grinding through my whole house

I think it’s because it’s the only one that comes close to working well

I’ve been using it for a couple months now on a NixOS setup, I had issues before I split my media collection so shows and movies are in different collections. Now that I’ve done that, I haven’t had any noteworthy bugs. There are some missing features on certain platforms, namely the current roku app doesn’t support multi audio movies and shows and will only use the primary audio track. Hopefully that’s resolved with this update.

If your cloud provider decides to screw you you’re gonna have to put physical infrastructure together no matter what license their software is distributed under.

Is this different than hosting an ftp server?

One of the main things I feel is missing is there doesn’t seem to be a way to view and track all tasks in all your pages, I generally like tasks to live with the relevant info rather than in the journals. Do you know if there’s a way to get something like that?

I’ve been using Logseq and syncing via syncthing, but you can sync with any file syncing service