I live in a fairly conservative area that’s working class.

People intuitively understand when you describe how much capitalism sucks because they’re living it.

If you say “capitalism sucks”, you are going to get reactionary thought and action. You have to say things in a way to engage their experience and understanding without tripping the propagandized brain worms.

If you can do that, you’ll find that they’re primed to reject capitalism, they just don’t know it yet.

“These rich fuckers don’t give a shit about us, but they have no problems helping each other out.”

“Everybody’s boss is the same, they want you to work harder, more hours, and do it all for less money. They want us to be able to barely survive.”

“The only way we can make them change is to all work together. They’ll screw over each one of us individually, but if we’re together they’ll know it’s actually them who needs us.”

I believe you and I’m sure they were fine.

I wrote an XML parser in LabVIEW once. Just because you can doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do lol.

That’s ridiculous. Everyone knows its best to write modern bootloaders in Matlab.

Programming languages, much like the jackass in the middle, are tools. Different tools are for different things. The right tool for the job can make your day. The wrong tool can make you question your entire career.

“We have decided that we will use deck screws to build our deck, it’s the right pattern and architecture for the job. Now get started with this hammer, the tool you use doesn’t matter as long as it’s functional as a tool. If it’s not working well that’s an optimization problem because you’re bad at your job.”

I generally don’t do GUIs for C. But I’m also an embedded C person.

When I have I’ll generate DLLs for the C portion then just pull them into a python based interface or something with easier to deal with gui implementations.

Programming languages are tools. Would you use a wrench to drive a nail? You could. But it would be painful, you’re gonna miss and whack your hand at least once.

If it’s a learning exercise, go for the C implementation, why not? I’ve written an XML parser in LabVIEW. (I never stopped to ask whether I should…) Is that the right tool for the job? Fuck no.

If this is an exercise in software engineering be an engineer and use the 99% already built and verified system to do the job it’s meant to.

Or you can write an entire theme park simulator in assembly because you like pain or something.

I can’t tell you that a baofeng is gonna outperform any of these radios. I can tell you that I’ve got two of them, a programming cable, a mag mount vhf/uhf antenna, a nagoya antenna, and an antenna I made out of some leftover Romex and a painting pole. All this was well within that budget.

I can also tell you that I, not without some antenna placement experiments, can consistently activate a local repeater from around 15 miles. And have been complimented on audio quality on multiple occasions.

You are not going to find an ht with a rubber duck antenna that’s going to perform the way you’d like. You will need to try out some different things.

Save yourself some heartache and get an sma to BNC adapter for the radios you wanna play with some antennas on and some whatever your antennas have to bnc adapters, get a few antennas instead of another ht, and just try stuff out. Or hell, throw $16 bucks at a gt-5r, they’re clean transmitters now, the build quality is surprisingly good (on mine anyway) and even if it’s hot garbage you didn’t spend a fortune on it.

You will always wonder if you’re screwing things up, you just get better and faster at diagnosing the issue through practice.

Off lease corporate thin clients with fresh ssds. You can get something that runs off a laptop power supply, will handle more than you’re going to throw at it, and they’re insanely cheap.

I moved to one from a pi when I got serious about home assistant.

I also run a stack of networking utilities on my OPNSense router.

Jellyfin has been a bit more difficult to transition, I’m still running it on my wife’s gaming computer. I’ve pre transcoded most of our collection, but not all of it. I need to find something very cheap but also capable of handling the odd 4k transcode.

Take a look at their coverage of the Holocaust. Hasn’t gotten better since.

The problem with windows 8 is that with the initial release they wanted everything to be a mobile OS, even your desktop.

“Metro Design” lol

But it seemed decent for tablets and phones.

The door monitor mostly helps when a kid walks off leaving it open thinking they closed it.

The freezer temperature monitoring has saved the contents several times. A breaker had tripped once and I didn’t notice, it let me know that I needed a generator during a power outage, and one of the kids snuck an ice cream and left the lid wide open.

So yeah, it’s been useful. It’s not needed 99% of the time.

Nothing needs to be, but I do like to monitor door status and temperature for my fridge and deep freezers with home assistant.

It’s not the actual tech, generally speaking, that people are upset about. Although your Luddite reference is probably more accurate than you intended.

The Luddites weren’t anti-tech, they were anti- the damage it was doing to the people who did the work.

Most people who hate these new technologies aren’t mad at the tech itself, they’re mad at the quality that’s produced when the only concern is lowering costs and the extractive infrastructure built around it. A monthly fucking subscription for heated seats. This exists now.

The alternative to this is the galaxy brained take: “THESE PEOPLE HATE HAVING A COMFORTABLE ASS WHILE DRIVING”

As an addendum to 4 - state level power is also required to protect aspiring communist societies (socialists) from antagonistic forces with state level resources. If your state is not strong enough, you will be undermined into destruction by external forces, colonial powers that will use this “failure” as both propaganda and a method of appropriating your resources to further colonial projects.

Also, as someone who lives in and was raised in the heart of empire, the amount of propaganda that we have ingested is unfathomable.

It is good practice when you find yourself asking about any topic that may be deemed antithetical to a settler colonial project to thoroughly examine the sources of the information you’re basing your opinion on, and perhaps consider that while you may be a very intelligent and thoughtful individual, expertly crafted and ubiquitous propaganda can shape your opinion as well.

Is your upright the one with all the little compartments? That one looked to me like the most efficient upright design I’ve ever seen.

I bought a protectli awhile back. Mines 4 port 2.5 gbps nics, and it runs opnsense out the box.

You should take a look at their sfp+ model, if I were in your shoes that’s what I’d be looking at. It’s all in one, works nicely, is incredibly customizable, and is lower power usage than basically anything you’ll build yourself.

I use that for my router/firewall, then I use an off lease dell thin client to run my home assistant server, and a standard off the shelf buffalo nas. If you’re into immich, I’ll recommend jellyfin over Plex. I used it for years but they started collecting more data, sticking their own junk in etc. Jellyfin is open source and works great.

I’m glad to hear this, I keep looking at it. I’m a little worried about the hardware requirements for it though. I keep putting off getting hardware for a dedicated jellyfin server (it’s on my wife’s gaming PC right now and it bugs the heck out of her)

To expand on the 3-2-1 rule for the uninitiated:

3 total copies 2 onsite, using dissimilar media 1 offsite, for disaster recovery