WxFisch

It really depends on what you want to accomplish, your priorities, the amount of time and effort you are willing/able to put into it, and your risk appetite (not just privacy but also availability of your mail server).

It is for sure one of the more challenging services to self-host, and IMO doesn’t offer a huge improvement over a hosted solution with your own domain from an actual security and privacy standards point since email is inherently insecure and non-privacy protecting without adding additional not-always-standard layers on top like PGP/GPG, SMIME, one-time passcode escrow systems, etc. that all have their own huge trade offs.

Your self-hosted server will have downtime as well, some planned but also some unplanned. If your server is down, it can’t accept or send mail obviously which can be an issue (many services will try to deliver again after a back off period, but won’t try forever). Enterprises work around this with load balanced servers and running different services on fault tolerant infrastructure. That increases complexity quickly though and isn’t what most self hosters do AFAIK.

It’s a combination of conservative designs, robust training, and a zero tolerance safety stance where even minor misses that have any relationship to the reactor or power systems get throughly investigated through a formal process that seeks to understand and learn from mistakes rather than assign blame.

If anyone is curious, the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program (NNPP) publishes the Gray Book with some history of the Program, the various arms that are involved to make it successful, and how the Program is managed including training, suppliers, labs, and fleet operations and maintenance.

Turn the Ship Around is a leadership book that also touches on safety and operations of a nuclear sub and is just a good read overall if your looking for a different way to think about bringing a leader in an organization.

I use SimpleLogin with my own domain and have no problems 99% of the time. Every once in a while I’ll find a site that doesn’t like my .net domain, but those typically won’t take anything that isn’t a major provider. I use that as a sign I probably don’t need to use that service.

There is, I think, a few things that contribute here.

1. The US has a very stupid “bigger is better” mentality. So if you go out you expect a large portion because that translates to better (and more value). This is of course not true, but culturally it’s very embedded.
2. almost everyone I know takes home some portion of their meal from a restaurant. So that single portion is really two, or maybe three.
3. IME people don’t usually have giant portions at home, they sometimes do of course, but things tend to be more sane for home cooked meals for your family. They also tend to be a lot more balanced, with more veg and grain.
4. what you see on TV is often sensationalized, and not fully indicative of normal here.

I would hazard to guess they are investigating how the use of AI was missed in their editorial process, how they missed the incorrect quotes, and who violated their journalistic standards by using an AI to directly write article text since it’s a coauthored piece.

In typical Ars fashion, the editorial team appears to be looking into what happened and are being fairly open about at things: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/journalistic-standards.1511650/

I will be very disappointed if this was BenJ or Dan [edit: I had messed this up, it wasn’t Dan but Kyle Orland that coauthored it] Kyle using AI to write their article since both have had really good pieces in the past, but it doesn’t sound like this is some Ars wide shift at this point. Like all things, it makes sense that it will take time for them to investigate this, Aurich (the Ars community lead and graphic designer) was clear that with this happening on a Friday afternoon and a US holiday on Monday, it’s likely to be into next week before they have anything they can share.

I take it you don’t know much of what the federal government actually does or how many of those things benefit you both directly and indirectly.

I won’t argue that the federal government is anywhere close to as efficient as it could be, or that there aren’t bad/lazy workers. But to just make a sweeping generalization shows real ignorance to why so much of these services are truly critical to why the US has been a world power, with a secure, comfortable populace compared to what it will be if those services are cut.

I would guess they are looking to use it with pagent to support login with PIVs which is likely required by the servers they want to access. It’s a pretty standard login setup in federal IT honestly.

I do exactly this. My bank will try to use ACH or a one time debit card automatically, but inevitably ends up sending a check each month. What’s better is if I use the bill the water company sends and mail it back with a check there is a fee, but they don’t charge it when my bank sends a check.

And I will continue to use it until they take it away

US Aid, that is how it’s word mark is stylized as well (and well, it’s Aid from the US so the branding works)

Don’t make me like Delta, I really hate flying Delta flights but I may need to consider them going forward if they are going to be slightly less shitty corporate citizens…

Another plus one for Proton with your own domain.

Self hosting sounds good, but it’s fraught with mines that if you don’t know what you’re doing can take from “can’t send email because my domains been back listed” to “everything in my network is now sending spam to the entire world”. Sure, many folks self hosting sounds with no issues, but the price for configuring something wrong can be steep and IMO is just not worth the trouble and risks when there are good options for encrypted, privacy protecting email services for a reasonable price.

This guy s 100% accurate. When I was a contractor for the NWS in the mid 2010s they were working aggressively to get their HQ staff setup to telework at least some of the time to save on office leases. They built out a large fix work space in their silver spring building and when it went live they were able to vacate an entire floor, saving something like a million dollars in month in lease, utilities, etc costs.

This mindset of return to office to force attrition also seems less likely to work for federal employees that often need to work in the office at least part time anyways, and often have very strong union protections that will cost a ton for the government to fight through.

On top of that, the costs to return employees to offices will be astronomical both in fitting out those office spaces again and in terms of supporting infrastructure like transit costs. A lot of those additional costs get borne by state governments and often passed on to the federal government through grants and chargebacks for various services.

In this case it seems to be abandoned mine subsidence which at least in SWPA (where this happened, outside of Latrobe in Westmoreland county) is a huge issue. We had to do a search when we bought our house to see if there were known abandoned mines on our property which would have required we bought subsidence Insurance from DEP.

Kagi doesn’t hide that they use API calls to multiple sources for each search, they are fairly upfront about honestly. The benefits of use Jagi IME are the results are great, the site is fast and gets out of the way, it’s fairly affordable for what it provides, and the goals of the company is in line with mine (namely to find a thing I’m searching for). They are well funded enough to give me confidence that I’m not going to have to configure yet another search engine, and the integrate into pretty much all my access points easily as a default search engine.

I have seen no reason to think they abuse their position to impact my privacy, and bring closed source does not automatically make them evil. You included no alternatives that are open source, and the ones I explored were either difficult to get setup, required me to run something on my own infrastructure, or didn’t provide the integrations or results I expect. Kagi does.

Kagi isn’t perfect, and there are a ton of suggestions on their feature tracker that users rightly want implemented (including open sourcing more of their code-base). But as a paid search engine that makes me not the product, it does that job well.

So we did exactly this when we dropped our Prime membership a few years ago as part of working against Amazon building a massive warehouse in our fully residential borough (we won if anyone was wondering, they chose not to continue fighting it in court). We shop mostly in store at Target and other brick and mortar stores. We will also shop online still, but almost always directly from the manufacturer. This usually means paying shipping, but I figure our UPS driver and mail person need a paycheck too so we are fine with that. We will occasionally use Amazon for things that are just hard to find elsewhere but only order once our cart is in the free shipping price range. It turns out, Amazon is not only a shit company the uses dark patterns to push a mostly superfluous subscription, most things we buy are cheaper elsewhere. Combined with not buying nearly as much random crap, we have saved a butt load since quitting Amazon.

Looks from the article like it was stolen by infecting the PC of a third party analytics firm user who had privileged access to Hot Topics snowflake data warehouses and didn’t have MFA enabled. That is just inexcusable in this day and age and $100k is a small price for Hot Topics snowflake to pay for that fuck up (assuming the bad actor actually follows through and doesn’t sell the data if HT pays the price set). Pro tip (or really amateur tip), MFA all the things. Even SMS based MFA is better than no MFA even though it’s not ideal.

The creativity is in how the photo was shot; the camera settings, framing, when the photographer chose to take the photo, etc. To say that anyone could have taken this exact photo is both incorrect and doesn’t matter. Anyone could have written any book, play, or script but they didn’t. Anyone could have painted pretty much any particular painting, but they didn’t. I don’t disagree that many aspects of US copyright law are ridiculous, but to say there’s no artistic vision in taking a photograph like this is ignorant.

No, because no one intends to hit a pedestrian with the car they are buying. That’s why we need to mandate safer vehicles, not trust people to factor that in as they look for a car.