Dillon, you son of a bitch you piece of shit!

I can quit any time, I swear!

I was of the same mindset for a long time; SmartThings, Hue and Google Home all worked well enough together to do what I wanted. But holy shit, Home Assistant is on another level and I only wish I’d installed it sooner.

The only real downside is that it makes home automation somewhat addictive and, by extension, expensive. I spend quite a lot of my time thinking about how to automate more of the things, and have a never ending list of stuff that I want to add to my setup.

We were forcibly moved from Mattermost to Teams (because cost) and the lack of custom emotes is sorely felt throughout the company. I never counted, but I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if we’d had >100 of them. So many in-jokes gone forever.

I am by no means an expert, but I think Gustave may be an alligator.

Srsly though, crocodiles have pointy snouts, sort of like an A, and alligators have rounded snouts, sort of like a C.

No, I don’t know why they were named the wrong way around.

It was two minutes five minutes ago!

I’m not saying Telegram is perfect by a long shot, and they’ve made some questionable decisions around crypto and paid-for services, but it grinds my gears when people suggest that it’s “unencrypted”.

E2E encryption means that yours and the other person’s device are the only ones that have the keys for decryption and are typically the only places where chats are stored.* The conversation is secured end-to-end.

Telegram has the master copies of your chats on their servers to enable certain extra functionality that you can’t get with E2E messengers, but it does not mean that the data is stored or transmitted unencrypted. The data at rest is encrypted and it’s encrypted when it travels to and from your device.

Sure, there’s the argument that governments could compel Telegram to hand over the keys to your chats, but considering that the platform is outright banned in more than one country with questionable regimes, it’s reasonable to conclude that they don’t give in to such demands. Honestly, if your government wanted copies of your chats so badly it’d be far easier for them to go through you and your device directly, and then no amount of E2E encryption is going to help you.

All that said, Telegram does actually have E2E encryption in the form of Secret Chats which, while having no method of backup, allows you to have two very different conversations with the same person and provides a level of plausible deniability that E2E only platforms cannot.

*Until you or the other party chooses to export a plain-text backup and store it on Google Drive where it’s far easier for governments to subpoena. I’m looking at you, WhatsApp.

The problems with tipping culture aside, the eyes in this strip are just perfect. I love it.

I was with you until you suggested it would use 5kWh every hour. That’s an insane amount of power even if they were using an electric griddle, which is unlikely. A small generator would be enough to power the lighting and refrigeration and then the griddle would run on gas, which is way cheaper than electricity (or the petrol for the electric generator).

I’d imagine energy costs would be a fraction of what you’ve calculated, and would scale up along with any increase in sales volume.

I hadn’t even seen Alien when I first saw Spaceballs, but my god this scene had me in absolute stitches. It’s the way he puts on the little hat while eyeballing everyone. It’s making me chuckle just thinking about it.

Supposably