Aussie living in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Coding since 1998.
.NET Foundation member. C# fan
https://d.sb/
Mastodon: @[email protected]

  • 6 Posts
  • 1.23K Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle

  • If you’re investing more than a few percent of your portfolio in any one company, you’re probably gambling though.

    I read a forum post many years ago about people that put all their retirement money into some company that was going to be the sole supplier for some components for the iPhone. Apple didn’t end up going with them, and the company was relying entirely on that contract. The company went bankrupt, and the people that invested lost all their money.

    In the end, why invest in a small number of companies when you can invest in practically all of them? Bogleheads three fund portfolio (total US stock + total world stock + bonds) is very simple yet will beat most actively-managed portfolios over the long run.


  • For DNS challenges, I personally prefer using acme-dns. It’s a separate DNS server that only serves ACME DNS challenges. I felt a bit uneasy using an access token for my actual DNS host since it grants full read/write access to every record. acme-dns reduces the attack surface.

    Let’s Encrypt follows CNAMEs and supports IPv6-only DNS servers, so you could just run acme-dns on a spare IPv6 address (assuming your internet provider has a static IPv6 range, or you have a VPS with IPv6).





  • I receive alerts when people are outside my house, using security cameras, Blue Iris, CodeProject AI, Node-RED and Home Assistant, using a Google Coral for local AI. Entirely local - no cloud services apart from Google’s notification system to get notifications to my phone while I’m not home (which most Android apps use). That’s a good use case for AI since it avoids false positives that occur with regular motion detection.




  • The current owner of Winamp tried to open source the Winamp 5 source code, but there were so many problems with the launch that they had to delete the repo. Things like a license that prevented the repo from being forked (which violates Github’s terms of service), and the repo contained licensed proprietary code from companies like Dolby and Intel that wasn’t supposed to be open sourced, things like that. They didn’t understand how Git works so they unsuccessfully tried to delete the infringing code.







  • illegally in the US after one of her visas expired.

    Just to clarify: A visa just determines the time period when you can enter the USA. How long you can stay in the USA is determined by the I-94 (a form that’s issued upon arrival), not the visa.

    It’s possible for the I-94 expiration date to be later than the visa expiration date, which means you can still stay in the USA after the visa expires (until the I-94 expires), but you just won’t be able to leave and re-enter without renewing the visa.




  • Thanks for the comment! I’m Aussie but I’ve lived in the USA for around a decade, so I wasn’t aware of how bad it had gotten. I had only ever used the public system in Australia and never had issues with it up until when I left. My parents didn’t have a lot of money, and my job didn’t pay too well, so I was heavily reliant on the public system.

    It honestly sounds like health care in the USA is better (for me personally, not in general) compared to the state of health care in Australia at the moment. My employer pays most of the cost (which is common at large companies) and my plan covers both my wife and I. On my insurance, doctors visits are flat rate $15, and hospital stays are $100 max. A lot of medication are fully covered and cost me nothing out-of-pocket. I need to use a CPAP for sleep apnea, and the machine and supplies are both fully covered. There’s a $4000 out of pocket maximum per year after which everything is covered 100%.

    The problem in the USA is that there’s no universal health care. There’s a huge divide between people that are doing well vs people that aren’t having a good time. The prices are crazy for people that don’t have good health insurance - usually people that are lower income, self-employed, or unemployed.