"But rocket science is arguably simpler than weight loss, in the sense that it involves less unpredictability and variation. We control how rockets are made, and they don’t change their material composition over time."
The composition of rockets do change over time. Small fractures, corrosion, wear-and-tear from reuse, and manufacturing defects can have catastrophic consequences. The exposure of O-rings to extreme cold, leading to the Challenger disaster, is one example.
Not only did he not mention PiHole (or the similar, but better, Adguard Home), he didn't seem to be aware that network adblocking is a thing—but who can blame him? It's not exactly trivial unless you're comfortable with a terminal. Is there any sort of commercialized solution for this? I'd love to see Adguard/Pihole devices available off the shelf; with a little marketing I think they could really appeal to a lot of people.
(I looked around and the only 'built in' solution I could find for adblocking is in Eero WiFi's paid subscription, which blocks ads on their wifi router)
Its not built in per se, but its arguably less complicated than replacing a router (or worse, putting one router behind another, as would be required for the many people who's cable/fiber/etc modem is all in one with their router).
I think what GP means is that someone needs to set up the PiHole/Adguard software on their own hardware (like a RPi). After it's up and running it's pretty trivial to set it up in your router.
Reading through Adguard's GitHub page I can't help not noticing some disingenuous feature comparison there. Like how PiHole doesn't support "Blocking phishing and malware domains" or "Parental control (blocking adult domains)". Although they both do it in the exact same way: blacklists [0]. Does it block YouTube ads?
I'd like better reports and stats on PiHole, not just top sites, top clients, etc. Adguard seems to do better here from the screenshots. But I'll take it with a grain of salt.
You don't need to setup adguard software or hardware at all to use it - you just change your existing router's DHCP setup to point to their DNS servers.
Its pretty handy on Android (I think requires 9 or later), you can set dns.adguard.com as your "Private DNS" server and it will work system wide, with no Apps or VPNs to install, and on every network you connect to. I beleive it uses DNS over TLS as well.
Brave works. Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason. It's open source based on chromium with all the Google bits taken out, and it has built in ad blocking. So there's an opt-in crypto coin, so what.
> Lots of propaganda on here against Brave for some reason.
I think the same reason some people find Google's advertising-based business model problematic, they find Brave's advertising-based business model problematic.
I'd say these people are out of touch. If sites aren't funded by advertising, that means people need to pay to access. See all the efforts to workaround paywalls because nobody wants to pay every single site that they visit $5 a month, and plenty of people simply couldn't afford paying to access the internet in that way. That's enabled by advertising. But somehow nobody here wants to hear it. Advertising is incredibly important to enable open access to, well, the entire internet. We see with the Linux Journal how well subscription-only services work out - they live by the skin of their teeth for a while until they go under. But somehow we're better off because they didn't use advertising for funding? Now we don't have any LJ at all. I don't see how that's better.
Not that I'm advocating for ads that track and profile you and everything that you do. We should be making an effort to create an infrastructure for ads where they can't track and profile us. That's what Brave is trying to do, and I don't understand why people are against it. Like, how do they expect sites to be financed?
I frequently recommend Brave to non-technical people who would have problems installing browser extensions. Everything works out of the box without configuration.
If I could have one thing in Brave, aside from bug fixes, it’s this: rather than give me popup ads on my desktop, replace some of the static ads it blocks with Brave ones. They’re way less intrusive.
Then I would have to look for a solution for the sites I run that completely block Brave. I don't care if people block ads. But I give a massive fuck if someone/thing swapped out my ads for theirs.
After a brief skim of that README, I'm not 100% certain how Pi-hole works. Basically, it is a DNS server whose job is to lose requests to trackers, sort of like modifying the hosts file to fail to connect to facebook owned domains? And you use it by telling your router to use it as its DNS server, controlling it via a webpage it hosts on your private network?
If a site is serving ads from their own domain, that's OK. As a pi-hole user I'm trying to block automated ad networks as those are the worst culprits when it comes to tracking and serving malware.
I visit some sites that sell their ad spaces directly to advertisers and create and host all creative themselves. I have no issue with those ads.
DNS based ad-blocking has limitations. YouTube does exactly this, with ads served from the same URL as the videos. It's a better than nothing solution that will cover 95% of the needs of the whole network. For the rest you can add a browser based adblocker, where possible. Or even firewall rules.
My understanding is that it accomplishes the same thing but for every device on your network rather than having to manage host files on each device. It also works for those where editing the host file isn't possible.
I'm guessing a dns lookup of annoying.adserver.com returns the pihole ip address (or a dedicated alternate address)
Then when your browser tries to load content from annoying.adserver.com it connects to the pihole, which returns dummy content (a blank image or html page)
I would imagine hardcoded ip addresses in trackers/ads might bypass pihole.
Are you talking about the latest MacBook Air, as per the comment, or the previous version that hadn't changed much since 2014? GP is talking about the 2018 model.
The block-based visual programming system also looks similar to Scratch. I think kids still pick up valuable experience with basic logic, side-effects and weird cases like non-terminating loops.
I met a 10-year-old who made a cat-and-mouse game with Scratch. He was thrilled to explain to me that in a previous version of his game, touching the mouse would do infinite damage. He needed to throttle the damage function to 10 times/sec to get reasonable scores.
The issue here is there needs to be administrative mechanisms to match supply and distribution of assets to demand. If you give someone $20 worth of food, but what they really need is a place to sleep, then that's not an optimally distributed asset. They could maybe trade the food for a place to rest, but this will incur search, transaction, depreciation and negotiation costs. They won't get the full value of the asset.
With cash, the recipient gets $20 worth of value to spend on what they need most. They don't need to barter the asset they received, they can directly participate in consumer markets to get what they need. We also already have the mechanism to generate these cash flows, in the form of interest and dividends on capital assets.
It's important to start saving first and buy property only after you have a sustainable nest egg. The extra liquidity from saving helps in all scenarios: if you need to find a new rental, if you need a down payment, if tragedy strikes and you need to support a loved one.
If I had to list financial lessons for most Americans they would be:
1. Pay down high-interest debt. Nowadays that's 5%+. Anything above 10% is an emergency.
2. Save an emergency fund: 2-3 months living expenses. Put most of this in a high-yield savings account earning ~2% interest.
3. Look at retirement savings plans that are advantageous for your taxes. Tradtional IRAs, Roth IRAs and employer-match 401ks are a few places to start. Try to save at least 15-20% of your income this way.
4. Great job! Continue to build your emergency fund (to 4-6 months), pay down moderate-interest debt (3-5%), and contribute to retirement accounts.
5. Put extra cash in stock and bond index funds in a taxable account. You can use this money anytime but its value will fluctuate (hopefully growing long-term).
6. Saving for a house? Sock more money in that high-yield savings account to hit a 20% down payment for a home mortgage.
7. Now you're ready for OP's life lesson #1. Buy a house you can afford and keep saving.
This advice is only applicable to those who aren't in mountains of debt, which is pretty hard to do when you're younger than 40: $30,000 in student loans plus whatever other debt was acquired getting situated after college such as credit card and auto loans...
If you're fresh out of college and have student debt, you probably shouldn't be taking on an auto loan of any notable value... and you shouldn't be racking up too much in credit card debt beyond maybe a security deposit on an apartment as a last resort.
Even if you have a six-figure job, everything you need should be acquired like you're broke, because you literally have negative money until that $30k debt is wiped out. In fact, if you live that way for a few years on a six-figure salary, you should be able to knock that $30k out in one year and save up the downpayment for a property in the following years. I understand this isn't fun and most people wouldn't do it, but it is the solution.
The banks have made us very comfortable living with debt, and we have to do everything we can to resist it. Credit cards are great for cash back but you shouldn't carry a balance -- set the limit to an amount that you can pay in full every month.
For someone making median wage after graduating (>= $55k) that $30k student debt should take no more than 5 years to kill - $10k taxes, $30k living expenses (and I'm being very generous with this), $5k savings, $10k loan payment (numbers are approximate). Someone who graduates college in their early 20s and has income comparable to their loan amount should not be entering their 30s with any student debt.
Auto loans - never buy a depreciating asset with debt. When starting out, save up for a few months and get a cheap used car for cash, then level up every few years as your circumstances improve, until you're satisfied with your car. Always pay cash - if you can't pay cash for a car, you can't afford it.
Credit card debt should not exist, period (one exception: life-threatening medical emergency for oneself or a loved one, and no savings). Credit cards are not meant for borrowing money; they are for getting rewards points and building a good credit score.
sounds pretty applicable. As someone who found himself in precisely the described situation ($40K in student loans, a car loan, and some credit card debt resulting from living in the Bay Area on an entry level salary and not being disciplined enough to live within my means then, I can tell you that this advice is painful to execute, but actually the only thing that works.
I do truly hope insect biomass decline is uncorrelated to global climate change, and has more to do with local land use (farming, concrete, fertilizer, etc). That would mean we could make significant progress on restoring land-based insect biodiversity even with smaller community initiatives.
John Bogle created the index fund, and along with it a savings philosophy that enabled the average investor to build wealth by taking an appropriate amount of risk (with exposure to stock/bond markets) and minimizing fees.
The Bogleheads Wiki has great resources on topics related to savings, retirement and investing. Here are a couple entry points into what Bogle's method looks like:
Not quite sure we can credit Bogle with creating the index fund. He certainly popularized it, though.
Bill Fouse at Wells Fargo got a rather clunky version of an index fund started in 1971, based on equal weighting of all NYSE shares. It took a couple more years for various people, including Dean LeBaron (later of Batterymarch) and John Bogle to get everything working the right way with timely capitalization weighting and rebalancing. That's when the S&P 500 became the index of choice.
Getting index funds to track consistently over time takes a fair amount of market monitoring plus basic computing power. (Reinvesting dividends brings one set of headaches; so does adjusting specific stocks' weightings as individual companies either shrink their float by buying back stock or expand it by issuing new shares.)
All these calculations seem trivial today, but back in the 1970s, we didn't have up-to-the-minute electronic Edgar filings at the SEC. Or abundant computer power on everyone's desks.
I had the privilege of working with Bill Fouse and other brilliant people at Wells Fargo Investment Advisors in the 70s. At the time, it was a huge technical challenge to crunch the numbers for a multi-million dollar investment, and to execute it without affecting the market prices of the target stocks.
The tax reporting is also pretty nightmarish. I have a friend who once decided he could mimic an index fund without the fees by buying individual stocks in the same proportions as the index (I think his broker offered a free trades deal or something, otherwise this is an obviously bad idea). His Schedule D that year was about 60 pages long, and he decided never again. Of course, it took him years to finish unwinding all the positions and reporting all the taxes, since many times you're left with a small fraction of a share once dividends have been reinvested.
Buying individual stocks in proportion to the market-cap index is possible today as a service, and advertised by Wealthfront as "direct indexing" or stock-level tax-loss harvesting
The small tax advantage is that you can sell individual stocks for tax-loss harvesting. Fisher advisors also offers this for HNW folks.
This article criticizes this as a lock-in for wealthfront, unlike funds which can be easily transferred to brokerage "in-kind" (without 500 separate securities, or selling as a taxable event)
* https://medium.com/@wwalser/the-trap-of-wealthfronts-direct-...
RIP Bogle, making the world a fairer place rather than being a billionaire. I'd like to bike from Philadelphia to Valley Forge again to make pilgrimage.
Oh man you definitely want to turn off dividend reinvestment in taxable accounts, the tax reporting makes it impractical. Take dividends as cash and then roll that cash into regular periodic contributions (or distributions).
Their revenue continued to grow in the early iPhone days. Blackberry was still the mobile for business users until iOS (and Android) caught up on application and service support that those users wanted/needed.
I don't think we've seen (yet) a situation where people will, en masse, depart the iOS platform. RIM failed to recognize (until too late) the desire for an iPhone-style device amongst business users, and ended up losing out to both Android and iOS devices. Android devices aren't offering anything (with regard to hardware and software capabilities) that is substantially different than what iOS devices offer. The primary differentiator today is the pricing, which it seems many Apple customers don't care about (enough to jump ship).
RIM failed to recognize (until too late) the desire for an iPhone-style device amongst business users, and ended up losing out to both Android and iOS devices.
After listening to the book Losing the Signal, I'm starting to think they rushed into the iPhone clone market too fast at the insistence of Verizon. I actually think they would have better off getting their ducks in a row and getting their software strategy correct before challenging Apple. It really seems like they were rushed badly.
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/02/keep-your...