Off on a bit of a tangent, I 100% agree with you, and that was probably the best feature of California's Prop 13 from 1978. After it passed, the projected income to Sacramento was rock-solid for decades. California doesn't have an income problem; it has a spending problem.
Still, I would welcome the opportunity to let Sacramento know that, in my opinion, they spend too much on education and welfare and not enough on infrastructure.
My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.
I was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.
I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.
My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.
There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months.
And yes, just plain old Google search is completely lackluster in comparison to the perplexity.ai search I get to do today.
I always liked that on SuSE, I had my choice with YaST of either the Ncurses interface or the GUI X Window System. The functionality was identical, but sometimes a GUI is pleasant.
I'd like to ask if there is a bookmark sync function and plugin sync function in any of these alternatives.
It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.
But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.
The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.
If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.
Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.
My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.
I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.