ebc

ebc , 8 months ago to selfhosted in Anybody using a local server for their "cloud"based thermostats?

For baseboard heaters, I have the Sinopé line of ZigBee thermostats, with home-assistant on my home server. Baseboards are kind of particular in that you have one thermostat per room, so at 350+ for a Nest, it’d be cost-prohibitive as I have like 15 thermostats in the house. Also, they’re line voltage, meaning that they directly switch the full power of the heaters, so they need to be well made.

I’ve had my Sinopé thermostats for 2+ years now, and I’m very happy with them. No clouds involved here.

ebc , 8 months ago to world in Panama Canal reduces the maximum number of ships travelling the waterway to 31 per day

Also tides are not the same on both sides, even if they were the same average level, the tides definitely wouldn’t be synchronized. This would result in very strong currents in the canal, making it impossible to safely navigate. The most common fix for that type of situation is to put… locks in the canal.

ebc , 8 months ago to world in Panama Canal reduces the maximum number of ships travelling the waterway to 31 per day

There already is a reservoir, it’s called Gatun Lake. It’s not filled using pumps, though, it’s filled from the rain.

That rain is what’s the problem right now, there’s not enough.

ebc , 8 months ago to programmerhumor in Comment Your Code People

Yeah, good code should explain the “what” without the need for comments. Good comments explain the “why”.

ebc , 9 months ago to technology in The smart(shit)ification of TVs pisses me off.

I just never entered my Wifi details into my smart TV. I only use the HDMI inputs on it anyway, so it behaves like a dumb one. It’s a RCA TV from Walmart, if anyone is wondering.

ebc , 9 months ago to gaming in Weekly “What are you playing” Thread || Week of September 10th

I just got into Factorio, and I’m lucky I have other stuff going on in my life, because it’s such a big rabbit hole I don’t think I’d come out! I never played it or even knew what the game was about, but the announcement last week about the space expansion got me to download the demo.

ebc , 9 months ago to programmerhumor in My poor RAM...

As a freelance fronted dev, I really love Docker. I don’t need to mess up my system installing ancient Java versions or whatever Python wants to easy_install, pip or whatever, I can just run the backend Docker image and go on with my life. Especially when project A’s backend has incompatible Java/Ruby/Python dependencies with project B.

You can shit on npm all you want (yes, I was there for left_pad), but at least they got the dependency issues between projects solved.

ebc , 9 months ago to programmer_humor in Which side are you? Javascript or Typescript

This last part sounds nice in theory, but it’s way outside the scope of what Typescript is intended to accomplish. I’ve been pursuing a similar goal on and off for 10+ years at this point, I even wrote an ORM for Backbone.js so I could use it on the server as well. Back then we called it Isomorphic Javascript, later on it got renamed to “universal javascript”, nowadays I’m not sure.

But yeah, the problem is similar with any code, really… What you’re often writing in software dev is just functions, but the infrastructure required to actually call said function is often not trivial. I agree it’d be nice to be able to have different “wrapper types” easily, but I’m afraid their usefulness would be limited beyond toy projects.

ebc , 9 months ago to memes in Just witnessed this meeting of the minds on FB

Yeah, at first it was the “glorified golf cart” angle, but when Tesla proved that wasn’t true, it turned into “they’re too expensive”, “ackthually they pollute more”, “rare earths”, etc… There will always be something.

ebc , 10 months ago to worldnews in Heritage Minister says Meta news block endangers lives as Canadians flee wildfires

I never said they got revenue from a link. They make their revenue by showing you ads, and they use various strategies to make you stay longer on their website so they can show you more ads. One of these strategies is to include news articles in your feed, either shared by your friends, shared by the news organizations themselves (in a desperate bid to get you to visit their website), or just as suggested stuff.

They captured a huge chunk of the advertising market, and it’s happening at the expense of other businesses who provide a useful service to the people. I won’t pretend that they aren’t useful themselves, but I think they reached a point where they’ve stopped seeing that as a goal, and are instead focused on antisocial objectives (showing you more ads).

ebc , 10 months ago to worldnews in Heritage Minister says Meta news block endangers lives as Canadians flee wildfires

That’s obviously something we need to decide as a society, I just took it as a given since that’s what our government is trying to do.

As to why, well I think the issue is that the social media companies inserted themselves as middlemen through monopolistic behaviours and captured all the ad revenue the news organizations used to get. The fair market isn’t always fair, and monopolies are one of its failure modes. Market failure is one good example of situations where government intervention is warranted.

ebc , 10 months ago to worldnews in Heritage Minister says Meta news block endangers lives as Canadians flee wildfires

I think it’s a bit of both. The law has good objectives (making sure news organizations can have some revenue), but the way they implemented it is terrible (paying to post a link). Meta just complied in the most dick-move way they found.

EDIT: I think a better way they could’ve done this is to tax the hell out of ad revenue from Canadian users. Then just subsidize the news with this money.

ebc , 10 months ago to homeassistant in Any smart garden hose valve integration?

I’ll second the Zigbee valve, I got mine on AliExpress for about 50$ CAD. It’s a big gray thing with a button on the side, it looks like it’s all the same model. It exposes a switch in HA, on when the water can flow, off when it can’t. Pretty easy to automate.

ebc , 11 months ago to programmerhumor in Discord != Documentation

Lexical (rich text editor by Facebook) recently “migrated” their Github discussions to Discord… I have a question that I can see was asked on the discussion, as it appears in my search results on DDG, but I get a 404 when I try to open it. The fuckers deleted the discussions!

Of course, Discord only has poor-quality answers to that questions as it gets asked every week and maybe gets answered in a different way every time. Quality of discussion is much lower.

ebc , 11 months ago to fediverse in What If: Signal Was Part of the Fediverse?

Well, yes. But when all your friends are already on Facebook Messenger, good luck getting them to install Signal only to talk with you. Network effects are important; a messaging app has no use when you have nobody to message on the app. Supporting SMS was taking advantage of its network effect, and I don’t think their network was big enough to be self-sustaining for most users (it wasn’t in my case, my only contact in there is my wife).