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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • Well they still have a finite life and are less replaceable than a battery. Even if it quadrupled the lifespan (which is a reasonably generous estimate given OP’s 4-year duration and wikipedia telling me supercapacitors last 10-15 years), it would still eventually need to be replaced and that would generally require resoldering it.

    I think a much better solution is 2 battery slots, one to be a backup battery, unused, and then when needed, an LED on the mobo can be turned on. Honestly OP could jury-rig up a similar system if he wanted to, although it’d be a bit ugly and anytime something is jury-rigged I don’t really think of it as reliable.



  • It’s a bit different because of the stated values though.

    Raspberry pi’s foundation is focused on making computers available broadly, while this new organization is focused on making privacy widely accessible.

    While both can be commercialized, the pi’s foundation has no fundamental problems with selling out privacy or focusing on money to achieve those goals. Proton would have a much harder time arguing that profiting from sale.of private data supports privacy.

    This is relevant because it means even if the remaining shares end up on the stock market, the foundation can use its majority ownership to veto any privacy concerns.

    Time will tell. I could also have missed something


  • A company with a public offering basically cannot refuse a large enough buyout because with a public offering comes a financial responsibility to the shareholders. Public stock is a contract saying give me money and I’ll do my best to make you money back, and it’s very legally binding.

    You can avoid this by never going public, but that also means you basically don’t get big investors for expanding what you can offer. A public offering involves losing some of your rights as owner for cash.

    When the legal goal becomes “money above all else”, it is hard to justify NOT selling all the data and violating the trust of your customers for money, customer loyalty has to be monetizable and also worth more.

    Proton has given a majority share to a nonprofit with a legal requirement to uphold the current values, not make money. This means that the remaining ownership can be sold to whoever, the only way anything gets done is if this foundation agrees. It prevents everything associated with a legal financial responsibility to make money, but still allows the business to do business things and make money, which seems to be proton’s founder’s belief, that the software should be sold to be sustainable.


  • Seems solid.

    It doesn’t change a ton, but the point was basically them putting their money where their mouth is and saying “now we can’t sell out like everything else.”

    If you liked them before, this is great. It means google or whoever literally can’t buy them out, it’s not about the money. If you were iffy already because they’re not FOSS or whatever other reason, this doesn’t change that, either, for better or worse




  • For me, I’m cool with barebones.

    A player once wanted to persuade a government official to basically not do the paperwork, I asked him how he wanted to do that, and he sat for a minute trying to figure it out. What I ended up doing is just asking him how he’d like it to go, and he ended up saying something like “I want my character to just be suave and say something to make the guy swoon a bit”. Called for a roll, he did alright, so I narrated the scene like I would an NPC and that was a success.

    My player needed the idea, but that doesn’t mean he needed to act out the idea. Without even knowing the idea it’s “I want to roll persuasion. Does a 19 work?” and that’s boring, but he didn’t need to roleplay to succeed, either.


  • True Polymorph is the easiest if we just wanna accrue wealth quickly

    Buy some live feeder mice (a small animal that doesn’t involve killing someone’s pet) and transform them into jewelry. True Polymorph has none of the restrictions of Fabricate, so we can create fine jewelry without skill. Turn a mouse into a gold ring or necklace, with a large gemstone embedded into it. Sell it at a pawn shop. Repeat, use different pawn shops, and use Dominate Person with Modify Memory afterwards if theres some law about needing an ID. The dominated person can use theirs, and then you remove the interaction from their memories.

    Sell fine jewelry made from mice all you want. Use that cash to buy cows or other massive animals, turn them into gold. We don’t have to worry about how to pass the gold off though, the goal was to accumulate wealth. Use Fabricate to make the cow-gold into rough coins, build a secret dragon’s den.

    Of course, if we’re willing to be a little less subtle, True Polymorph is also great for doing some light faith healing, restoring blindness due to injury by transforming them into another person that’s basically identical, or we could make people look like their ideal selves. Not in the bounds of the question though.


  • First off, multiple pieces requires multiple mendings, it’s true. Second, the break doesn’t have to actually divide the object in two, otherwise it couldn’t fix, say, a rip in the sleeve of a shirt, or a hole left from stabbing through a tent wall. So you repair the phone screens. One crack = 1 break.

    You could try to be pedantic and say a dropped phone could arguably have hundreds of little cracks, but the same pedantism applies to any cut in fabric, it’s actually hundreds of individually cut threads. There’s a point where you have to stop lumping tiny things into one “break”, obviously, but that point is when lumping them together creates a break that’s more than a foot across.

    Fixing phone screens should be valid with mending. Of course, phones are more than just screens, so you might need multiple Mendings to fully fix a phone, but you’ll do great at screen repair at a minimum.


  • DC 20 isn’t even hard considering the effect it’s supposed to have.

    Level 7 rogue that just got Evasion has a +3 proficiency and could have 20 dex, so succeeds for ZERO damage on a 12, and never takes full.

    I think the scroll should’ve split between Force and Fire damage. Make the Force damage a CON save for half, because you can’t avoid it, only tank it, and make the fire the dex save.

    Then rogues still get to use Evasion, but it’s not “I anime dodge the comet”.



  • I used a pi 3 to host a Foundry server (TTRPG software).

    I use Docker to simplify things, since I run two instances of it. Simple port forwarding setup within the docker container. the main reason I used a pi instead of my computer is so my players could access their dnd stuff all the time.

    I stopped because I switched ISPs and they won’t let me port-forward. My vpn supports it but the latency isn’t ideal. I host the same thing through a cheap server now.


  • Mozilla still has terms and conditions, so there’s still a relationship, and still a liability for them letting a customer misuse their browser, even if they don’t keep data on everyone.

    While I absolutely agree it’s ridiculous, as I read it, it would also apply to self-hosted software and things like thunderbird that are technically a browser.

    Still, I expect enforcement to really only care about “real” browsers, not one user and their own thing or someone using Thunderbird to browse the web. France (and most other governments) have shown multiple times that they don’t really look into the how they’d do these things before they try to make it law and it’d be a mess.

    As per the article this post linked, this would definitely be a new precedent, browsers have never been responsible for this content, and whatever actually happens is up in the air. I’m mostly talking worst-case scenario. It’s entirely possible some other business or consumer protection law makes this unenforceable, or any number of other situations, but since the French government decides how unreasonable they’re gonna be, that’s all up to them. Maybe they crusade against Firefox, maybe they give up when they realize there’s only so much to do without drafting even more, and maybe they do go after everyone, including thunderbird or any other app that opens a webpage. Probably just ones that navigate to the illegal webpages though.

    Still, a measure that’s completely defeated by a VPN, unless they add all of them to their illegal pages.


  • Making something available when it’s not legal to do so is still a crime. Mozilla can’t put the burden of “Is this illegal?” on the downloader. On top of that, with the specific nature of this law, they’ll likely get added to this blocked list.

    “For research” changes nothing, there isn’t an exception for research in the French law (as far as I know, at least).

    Nothing would stop a French person from taking extra steps to circumvent the law, so it’s true that it could be gotten around with a VPN or peer-to-peer sharing of the installer, and Mozilla isn’t liable for that, but also that would still dramatically reduce Firefox installs in France. It isn’t really a good solution for Firefox to need the same steps as piracy for people to access it.

    Firefox not needing user accounts isn’t that relevant, because it’s the distribution of illegal software that will be acted upon.

    While it’s true that they wouldn’t necessarily have to pay a French fine, most large companies have assets in a lot of nations. For Mozilla, this could be people that translate the browser to French, who may have office space or supplies, and the French government could seize Mozilla’s French assets, which also impacts their other projects like Thunderbird.

    A search tells me they do have such an office in Paris which would be threatened by their noncompliance, which does include just telling French people it’s illegal but letting them do it anyway.


  • Firefox is open source but it’s controlled by the Mozilla Foundation.

    The steps would be

    1. Pass the law
    2. Tell Mozilla they’re breaking the law
    3. Do things to them as they’re breaking the law

    It could be fines, it could be banning firefox in France. The good/bad roles are flipped, but anything anyone has tried to do to meta can be done to Mozilla, too. The only alternative Mozilla would have would be purposefully pulling Firefox from France.

    Ultimately, Mozilla would have a vote of some kind, deciding to capitulate or pull firefox (or just keep paying fees, potentially, but they’re not made of money).