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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: January 25th, 2025

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  • I had a long, exhausting conversation with my father-in-law last week where my son and I both had to explain to him the basic fundamentals of what science actually is, how the scientific method works, and why and how the NSF awards grants.

    We also kept having to explain that just because there’s some junk science put out by bad actors to line up with an agenda, that doesn’t mean all science is junk. We also, also, kept having to explain that there isn’t some “the government” conspiracy manipulating all science behind the scenes to push out things that will kill us (that’s good old capitalism, baby!)

    AND the fact that science rarely gives you a hard, definite answer one way or the other because it’s not meant to. And that continuously changing scientific consensus is not only a good thing, but that’s how it’s supposed to work.

    AND! why the Joe Rogan thought process of “every conclusion is equally as valid regardless of evidence or actual knowledge” is not only invalid but incredibly dangerous, and further explaining the idea of the hierarchy of evidence, and that individual people are not sources, even if they’re a PhD at Harvard or Stanford.

    All that to say he stills sees this as a great thing. Because Fox News and Newsmax.


  • A couple years ago my in-laws were downsizing after retiring and they asked if I would possibly have any use for their ancient desktop PC (at least old enough to have shipped with Windows 7).

    I installed Debian on it and it’s running Jellyfin, qBittorrent through Gluetun, Calibre-web, NextCloud, and Pi-Hole containers, with plenty of room to spare. I’ve also got some services running on Raspberry pis (back when they were cheap). And an external 4TB hard drive connected to it acting as a NAS. No hardware transcoding or 4K video on Jellyfin but that’s no big deal for me.

    All that to say yes, you can absolutely self-host on repurposed hardware. Any old PC you’re looking at is no doubt newer than mine.