Are you ok?

Yes, I’ve got a detailed plan and I’m sticking to it. In 12 years from now, my youngest will be 15 and I can start winding down. I can’t imagine doing nothing, but with some part time work I think my wife and I can stretch to make it work. Requires that the oldest self-fund through university, which I had to do, so I’m ok with that.

Currently 47, which is probably substantially older than most people here. The concept of “retirement” (winding down) seemed so far away (didn’t start saving for it until late twenties) but compounding interest really is the most powerful force in the universe.

Of course if the stock crashes, plans may have to change. I’m slowly moving towards a stronger bond mix but that lowers return and pushes dates out. It’s a hard balance.

I think I’ve accounted for everything that one can plan for; late life care costs, risk of both my wife and I living to 100 (in a financial sense, we should all be so lucky), higher spend until 75, then lowered. There’s a risk that the UK removes universal state pensions, which would drastically alter my plans.

https://imgur.com/a/MAWe4eq

Crucially though, for a very long time they forced you to choose a server instead of just set you up on the default on.

I’m not saying don’t federate. I’m saying don’t talk about that as the primary feature when you’re enticing people to sign up to it.

Agreed. There should have been a default place to sign up from the beginning. Leaning on federation as a feature is something very few people care about until they really care about it. The mass adopter just looks at where their favourite celebrity or talking head is and then move there.

I didn’t. Thanks for the shoutout, I’ll have a look.

You’re way outside my scope of knowledge - I know a bit about the decisions they took 10 years, and not very much on what is happening today. I would imagine some of these limits are configurable and dynamic. I really don’t know.

Skype made the call negotiation go through a central server (as does all systems nowadays). Skype was originally built on Kazaa technology to punch through firewalls without a central coordinator and that’s what Microsoft removed. They didn’t remove it to track the calling but to enable larger group calls on weaker devices which required video mixing on a central system rather than peer to peer call (where weaker peers couldn’t decode that many video streams). Calls up to 4 are still routed peer to peer if the backend can find routes through all firewalls.

Very very little of Skype was in the new Teams if anything. Teams was a rewrap of Communicator calling tech and was a response to Slack. The real time chatting had nothing to do with Skype either.

Skype lingered in Microsoft for a couple of reasons; Microsoft was crap at acquiring businesses back then, thinking that a hands off approach was best. It meant Skype never really became a proper Microsoft team - they still felt and acted like Skype employees and they didn’t manage to affect Redmond very well. Being acquired is super hard especially when almost all of the bigger business was in a different time zone and a different culture.

I was at a leadership development workshop with a tonne of Skype leaders about 10 years ago. They were still feeling incredibly frustrated and not understanding what was expected of them. It was a botched acquisition and the fault was on both sides.

Of all the meeting solutions, I’ve come to the conclusion that Google Meet is the least bad.

In mean aside from the fact that almost all of that story is completely wrong, it’s a good story.

Source: Used to work at Microsoft and worked a lot with people from the Skype team.

For anyone finding this later. Unfortunately I’ve had to come off Actual :-(

While the gocardless syncing works really well, Actuals code for merging transactions is just too flaky for the banks I use. I end up having multiple similar transactions, done on the same day for the same amount, collapse into one and while you’re meant to be able to just set a starting date and an account value, Actual kept on syncing transactions from before the starting date.

I appreciate it’s open source and given I’ve paid nothing I should expect nothing. All good. But there wasn’t any engagement in the discord support section nor any response to bugs filed. It’s clearly under active development but the QA side doesn’t get enough attention that I could get it to work for me.

While I understand they don’t want to accept bugs without repro steps, there’s not enough scaffolding for capturing data and submitting issues inside the app.

I know I could get on that and fix it. I’m not complaining. I’m glad Actual works for many. But the transaction syncing totally did not work for the banks I used and so I’ve had to stop using it.

Been on PhotoPrism+ for a few years (90000 photos, 9000 videos). I use PhotoSync and it’s rock solid (although I go through an FTPS server for sync) - I’ve never ever had an issue with it. Yes, it’s third party, but for me it has just WORKED. Can also highly recommend PhotoPrism although I don’t edit many tags.

The only thing we can hope for is that Musk is dumb enough to volunteer to be “apprehended” by ED209. He strikes me as having that much techno-optimism (also see: Steel ball against Cybertruck window).

Yeah, don’t for a second think this wasn’t part of the deal he made with Musk.

I don’t quite understand how this is an issue.

I mean personally I’m happy with anonymised ads from DDG in return for anonymised Bing searches (+their own guffins) but I think it’s fair enough, if you really want to see no ads, that some turn to Kagi.

Looks great. Will definitely try out.

Day to day I just use LunaSea. Added convenience of being able to add a film from a phone.

Speaking as a Dane, where Halloween has invaded in the last 20 years, basically to replace Fastelavn, the traditional spring-based festival of trick or treating, just another excuse for selling stuff.

You’ll be able to fit a finger under it I bet.

Yes 100% that. I’ve never met a dentist who didn’t immediately tell me to rinse before brushing on hearing I used mouthwash; they all categorically said not to do it after brushing.

Your own happiness is more important that somebody else’s happiness.

Not to say you shouldn’t be nice or help people, or invest in other people’s growth.

But don’t do it to the detriment of your own.