That argument only works to explain and support the existence of millionaires and multimillionaires. With millions of dollars you can hire out most menial tasks easily. Especially if you’re still living in a reasonable home.

It falls apart when you reach excessive levels of wealth. Your first few million buys you a lot of time to specialize, but your $101st million buys you less. Even moreso when you get to billions.

I run Debian on most of my systems and run all of my services in docker (with rare exceptions for node_exporter or stable core tools). My base systems get automatic security upgrades, and then I’ll manually check in every few weeks whenever I feel like it.

My services in docker are version locked to a specific major version (when there’s a tag available) so I can usually re-pull to get minor version updates freely without breaking issues. My few more finnickey services get manual upgrades from me every 6 months or so only.

I usually stick to an OS version for as long as I can, and to that aim I stick to LTS versions with long support windows.

4 major versions in 12mo is…a lot. Especially if those include breaking changes for you. Yikes

A Windows VM running Windows terminal, SSH’d back into the host, obviously.

Honestly I stick with whatever the default is and never had a problem that led me to find anything else.

I have my primary, and my secondary, and my secondary secondary.

Leader/follower works though.

Look at Amazon and their Fire TV platform. It’s just android, with all of the Google stuff stripped out.

Sure, Google may not be getting any money for that, but they are getting more dev time and attention on the open source parts of Android which helps to solidify the base of the OS which helps them.

And Android got popular because it was open and manufacturers could build phones that support it without necessarily needing to involve Google (or at least without needing to certify it or meet strict standards) which let the platform grow significantly. If Google closed it up today it would likely cause a fork in the Android platform ecosystem and you’d end up with “Google Android” on pixel and “Open Android” on all others.

Many registrars let you buy a domain and set up dynamic DNS for it within their system so you can own a domain and get dyndns on it.

Otherwise you could accomplish it with a VPS but you’d only need the smallest one available because it would just need to run nginx to forward to your home ip (and a small tool to update that IP when it changes). So you could probably get something for less than $5/mo.

Sorry I don’t have any suggestions, but I’m very curious about your use case. What led you to needing this?

Are you doing web dev with just a phone? Impressive

True, but I don’t want to scare the carbrains. :P

Honestly though yes. My pretty basic road bike was 1600 and that was one of the lower prices in the shop. I think they averaged at around 5-8k in that shop at least.

Bikes can reasonably get to 1.5k at least without things getting too absurdly overpriced. If there’s a trade in it would at least be for bikes in that range.

I see you got your answer, but I’m adding on for anyone else that comes across this.

For me, I learned the most when I had a disposable and replaceable system. When I was dual booted I was too scared to touch anything in case it fucked everything up. Once I started poking round on a Pi, LiveUSB, etc it was a lot easier to learn because I could always restart.

Id start there with something like Mint or Ubuntu. Then set it up in a way where you can easily replace your OS so you can reset it often and fuck around. Then just learn as you go.

How long are folks planning to wait before migrating to something new? I suspect this is still safe for at least a few months before things fall out of date, right?

Or I guess it allows wire guard to update freely so it’s probably safe until something specifically breaks.

That’s amazing, I’m glad your coworker was able to find someone and get to be a parent.

I’m sorry if I came across as advocating against surrogacy. I don’t nearly know enough to have that strong of an opinion on it in either direction. All I wanted to get across was that making sure there’s no coercion is hard. Not impossible, but hard. There were some really sweeping statements under this post that felt like they were oversimplifications and I wanted to consider the nuance.

Separate from any discussion about surrogacy, that’s fucked and our adoption system should be way more accepting of gay couples than it is. There’s no reason it should be so hard.

Absolutely! And more to cover other expenses like maternity clothing, any comfort items to manage the pregnancy, additional dietary needs, and probably some more to help account for how traumatic a pregnancy can be and the body changes it causes.

I’m absolutely not advocating that a surrogate shouldn’t get paid. Just that it’s hard to separate payment from coercion in even the best situations.

Im not sure I can be so confident just because the surrogate knows the couple. If anything that would make me more worried about coercion. That could easily add MORE pressure for a surrogate to take on the pregnancy if that surrogate knows how important it is to the couple.

I don’t know how I feel about it overall (surrogacy, not gay people getting to have children, that’s beautiful), but it’s hard to be confident there’s no coercion when money is involved. The money itself can be coercive especially if the surrogate is particularly in need of the money. I’m not sure it can always be “clear” it’s not coerced.

Just be careful you don’t get their “smarthome” line, at least for cameras. It doesn’t require Internet to operate, but it requires Internet for configuration and management.

I’m not sure if that’s the same with their doorbells, but it was true of their wifi cameras.

I’d also recommend installing whatever quality of life mods/romhacks/emulator settings you can find. Gaming has changed a lot over the years and our brains expect different things than they used to.

I used to love Gen3 Pokemon growing up, but playing it now feels unbearably slow, but it’s a lot nicer with a fast forward setting. Same with adding text speed up cheats, faster running cheats, etc.

That, and I’d recommend starting with remakes of popular retro games to get hooked. Usually they have some revamping of control schemes or graphics that match your expectations a bit better. Then once you get the momentum going, expand from there.

Probably some kind of wallpaper app then? Or maybe a video call app downloading backgrounds?

You could try limiting files permissions on a bunch of apps to see what gets them to stop.

At least in very dramatic extremes, yes there’s at least a correlation between horrific animal abuse and psychopathy.

No idea if that extends to more run of the mill actions.