You probably have a higher attack surface from the gremlins in your walls. OTOH, Amazon knowing that you use Mullvad is a tangible downside, as they will probably use that to stick you in a marketing group or something. Monero is still an easy solution with the ~same cost if you’re concerned about that.

How would Amazon track a voucher? It’s a physical scratch off code, sealed by Mullvad before they send it over to Amazon. More importantly, if you think that was possible why would Mullvad be unaware of it and/or lie about it? Just go with the vouchers if you want untraceability. They’re also cheaper in USD than other methods IIRC, at $29/6 months and $57/12 months.

Vote with your wallet regards any sort of purchase. By giving money to someone you are giving them the most encouragement possible to continue doing what they’re doing. If you purchase something that you end up not liking, they will still receive your initial vote loud and clear. The gaming industry especially has shown us that companies will happily take both the money and the negative review and say ‘thank you’.

I feel piracy for demo purposes is fully justified if you buy it after you like it. People always say vote with your wallet but it’s more like gambling with your wallet if you don’t get to see and touch the product before you make the purchase. Giving proper demos should be more common with digital media.

You’re right, and I suppose I was half-thinking along the lines of “we have all the pieces to solve this, but we don’t because we’re frozen in place by greed” instead of “this is something we could do with infrastructure today”. If everyone could collectively let go and re-distribute wealth and materials efficiently everyone would be much better off for it, but instead we’re stuck in some game theory hell where the optimal personal choice results in one of the worst outcomes.

The existence of poverty/hunger/homelessness in a post-scarcity world. if we wanted to eliminate those problems we could, but humans are blocked on how it can be done without hurting their own wealth.

Garf

You can circumvent this by connecting to a router that has no access to internet. It will connect to the router, fail to connect to the internet, and then you can tell it to skip the initial setup and enable sideload mode.

Semi-related, can these automations really be relied upon for quality, or is there a system to help find the best copy? When I’m downloading books I do it manually through Anna’s Archive and I always download as many unique versions of a book that I see, then open them all and compare their internals to see which one I keep. Often not many ebooks are suitable for using my own font and layouts with Koreader.

Looks good. I’m opinionated on the asset allocations but it makes sense not to put some of those biases in for an overview. I’m very surprised that the Bogleheads wiki glosses over bond allocation with “age in bonds” and a small note that this is “conservative”, which is quite an understatement - starting your investment plan with 20% bonds at age 20 is throwing money away.

The app I use (Eternity) has options for 15/30/60/etc mins. You can theoretically get notifications every second if you set up your own RSS reader to check that quickly (though be considerate of your instance’s resources). Before I settled on my current solution I had an RSS reader check every so often and ding a desktop notification when it found something. I use 30 minutes because if I’m using Lemmy I’ll see the notification alert anyway, and if I’m away from Lemmy I don’t want to be notified potentially every 15 minutes when people keep replying.

Your inbox has an RSS feed that you can hook up to whatever RSS reader you want. Personally I let my Android app watch for notifications every 30 mins, and then KDE Connect will mirror that notification onto my PC when my phone dings.

The readme links to this one. It will automatically update after manual installation.

I keep a budget, and this structure keeps me honest

It’s not clear why you don’t have it all sit in brokerage checking instead of split between savings? Personally I find any sort of attempts to “trick” yourself into certain spending behaviors when it would be more optimal to do something else with better discipline to be silly.

However, the bank account can’t fulfill other benefits, like state tax savings on interest

How much interest are you making? For every 1000 you have in SPAXX, let’s say you make 5% interest on it, so $50. You can take 30% of that income off of your state taxes, so $15. Let’s say your state taxes are 5% because I’m not sure where you live, so that’s 75 cents per 1000 that you’ve saved (did I do that correctly?). Returns being 5% is highly abnormal, so this is best case scenario at the moment.

the ability to invest part of my savings into t-bills or funds(I can get a CD though).

Unless you can sell these fully liquid I don’t see the point. You might as well put it into these types of accounts normally if that’s where you want money to be. If your money is truly tied up in t-bill ladders then it seems less liquid than selling stocks.

the debit card is way better than any bank account I’ve had

Good banks have good debit cards.

What happens if SoFi no longer has the best rates?

I’m not married to SoFi, but if it was severe I would move. I already have accounts at most of the big ones so it’s not a big deal to me. Money market accounts are not guaranteed to be the highest rates either, and when I switched a few years ago HYSAs were leading money market returns. When that becomes the case will you move? Personally I don’t keep enough cash to sweat $0-10 per year.

when will they add needing debit card transactions as well? That kind of thing is pretty common with banks since they may not need to be as aggressive in getting deposits at some point if the loan market cools

This doesn’t happen at normal banks. This is common with very specific banks that offer really high returns compared to normal HYSAs. I don’t think these sorts of banks are ever worth it unless you’re holding onto a ton of cash, which I also don’t think is good.

Regardless, that’s not really what this is about. I’m discussing bank vs brokerage account, not investing vs not investing cash reserves…

It’s relevant because your entire emergency fund strategy changes when you keep most of it in a real brokerage account instead of with money market. You are talking about how to optimize your big pool of cash, but I’m saying that you should focus less on chasing 0.3% returns on your cash and more on keeping less cash around in the first place. I keep about $3-4k cash around liquid as money that I could use today if I needed to. If I need more money for an emergency, I can still cash it out of my brokerage account very quickly without needing to keep the full 6 months worth of expenses tied up in cash. Note that I have a ton of money in raw brokerage because I make too much money to put it all into tax advantaged spaces. If you don’t make enough money to outpace your tax-advantaged spaces it’s possible that you don’t have any money available to play with in raw brokerage to start with.

it all comes down to when you’re likely to need that cash and how much the market has tanked. By the time you have enough assets that the difference doesn’t matter, you also have enough assets where the extra you’d potentially get by investing it doesn’t matter.

I’m not sure what you mean by the second part but as for thinking that having your emergency fund in a brokerage account isn’t worth it: if you have very bad luck you might lose money in the short term, e.g. putting money into stocks, market crashes, then you have an emergency. Even in this case, unless you continue to have an emergency frequently and with every downturn, you will still come out ahead of cash if you continue with the strategy after your first emergency. On the flip side, in the average case if you have an emergency without the market being down or best case don’t have an emergency for the first few years, you’ll have outpaced any returns that cash will give you for quite a while, and this will continue to grow indefinitely. Stick it in bonds if you’re risk-averse, but keeping it in cash is wasting money. Cash returns are very high right now and it’s easy to feel comfortable with your 5% money market, but the calculus will change when returns go sub-1% again.

I used to do this but if you aren’t aware Regulation D was removed during the pandemic which means you can use savings accounts exactly like checking accounts. Some banks will also let you store nothing in checking and auto-draw from savings when you use your checking account.

I currently store my cash with SoFi which allows this and has 4.6% returns. I made the decision to stop using a brokerage as checking a while ago but IIRC, money market accounts and HYSA accounts moved together for returns and sometimes HYSAs were better so I felt like it wasn’t worth the complication for potentially a few dollars of profit per year. I store very little cash on hand anyway since I’m able to sell raw stocks in the event of an emergency. (Selling while the market is down will still put you ahead of cash returns if you invested that part of your emergency fund a while ago).

Are NPCs silent when talking? If so you’ll need to install faudio into your Wine prefix with Winetricks. Running with Steam may help a little also but l don’t remember if Proton includes faudio by default.

As for the cart crashing that’s probably just Skyrim. The opening cutscene is notoriously buggy.

Yeah I wouldn’t bother. It intends for you to have a duplicate copy on every device, which is probably not what you want. Syncthing is really good for things like synchronizing notes, calendars, password databases, music, etc to your devices. Things that you want to access in both places, but that are usually disconnected from each other from time to time.

Remember that cheap subscriptions for digital media is the compromise we made. If they want to fuck around and find out then you should remind them that you can just as easily pay nothing for the same content.

Conduit is also licensed under Apache 2.0, so it could also be taken closed source at any point in time. The reason this wouldn’t impact Conduit as much is that there’re other contributors, whilst Synapse and Dendrite are almost exclusively developed by Element.

Right. The current perspective is based on the idea that if Synapse/Dendrite go closed-source right now, an open source version would be good as dead. Element is responsible for 95% of Synapse/Dendrite and I’m sure a community fork would have to play a lot of catch-up to figure out how to keep it going. If the community was more involved in Synapse/Dendrite implementation (and if Element let them) there would be less cause for alarm, as closing the source would just mean an immediate community fork and putting Element on ignore. Also to reiterate, The Matrix Foundation is not going along with Element on this move, and even if Element pulled something shady the Matrix Core Spec etc. would still remain open and under the Foundation’s control, so the max we have to lose is Synapse/Dendrite and all of Element’s developers.

As for the rest I agree and I do actually trust that Element is simply playing their only card here. These maneuvers are all required in order for Element to survive as a company at all, but they also unfortunately leave this backdoor open as a consequence. Matthew has pinky-promised over and over that they are only acting in good faith and that they would never use the backdoor, but it’s understandable that the presence of the backdoor is putting everyone at unease. Best case scenario we take this as a warning sign that if Element drops dead tomorrow then Matrix is also dead. If people want Matrix to not be practically owned by Element then we should diversify and prepare escape plans.

It depends on what your workflow/usecase for putting documents on the drive currently is. Syncthing is usually intended to be put on two separate devices, and then a folder on each device gets synchronized - meaning you have a folder of your documents on each device. Is there any reason not to just mount the network drive’s folder and drag the documents in that way?