Vacuum under my bed in the middle of the night. That’s what passes as excitement for me.

Spam?

Don’t mess with computers or AI or other distracting crap. Do ALL the exercises in your textbook. Then get another textbook covering similar material but with different exercises, and do those. The idea is not to do exercises on topic X until you can get it right. Rather it’s to do them until you can’t get it wrong.

Schaum’s Outlines used to be good for upper division college level math. IDK what they have for intro level like you’re describing.

For the factorization you mention, look at the roots of the polynomial, i.e. x^3+1=0. So the roots are the (complex) cube roots of -1. One of those cube roots is -1 itself, i.e. x+1=0. So that is one of the factors: x^3+1 = (x+1)(something). So then figure out what (something) is.

open source competitor

I have been under the impression that they are rather closed, like almost everything else in the ARM A-series universe.

I don’t know of an all-in-one-place guide but there’s not a whole lot to it. Just look up how to do each of the parts you mentioned. I’d say that buying a domain and using LetsEncrypt is not really in the self-hosting spirit (i.e. you should run your own DNS and CA) but it’s up to you. Running a serious CA with real security is quite hard, but for your purposes you can just do whatever. There are various programs or scripts for it. I still use CA.pl from the openssl distro, but that’s very old school and people here hate it. Anyway, you will do a little head scratching to get everything working right, but it will be educational, so you’ll get something out of it in its own right.

The good news is that the guiding document for the AI robots will be called “How to Serve Man”. The bad news is it’s a cookbook. :)

reduced two-day work week

Lol, it will be more like “Soylent Green is people”.

If you’re self hosting Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the server operator (i.e. you) enshittifying it against you. There is still some concern towards the software supplier, as we keep seeing with Firefox, but users can react to that.

I’m not really familiar with the situation around Plex since I’ve heard some mixed things, but I don’t use it and have lost track of what is what.

I would consider Firefox to be a bad actor but it’s a bit more nuance than the situation with, say, Chrome. Firefox is involved in the server side as well (i.e. evolving standards that enshittify the web more and more). I would like to have had the web standards frozen some years ago. BIFL should apply to software as well as to physical products.

It’s not just the spam, there is other enshittification like the endless co-option with AI companies and private info disclosure (aka surveillance capitalism) under the self-serving excuse of being anonymized or aggregated.

Most of those are programs rather than services.

sensorwatch.net is the only one I have any interest in, and it doesn’t pair with a phone.

Oh crap I missed that. I’m going to delete the post. Sorry.

I’d say there’s a wider spectrum on reddit, if only because reddit is so much bigger. Lemmy is mostly center left while reddit goes everywhere.

Did the new orgs sign the thing that the old ones refused to?

I don’t have the hardware or the interest for TV, but I do sometimes watch youtube vids about whatever.

Not my thing but I thought of the famous and frequently parodied “Scream” painting.

Impeachment ceremonies?

It’s just called makeup. Almost all public “faces” such as actors and politicians wear it. There’s actually an Oscar category for Best Makeup and Hairstyling. An extreme example, Mr. Spock’s makeup on the original Star Trek took something like 2 hours to put on each day. Leonard Nimoy wrote about it in his autobiography “I am Spock”.

Brick is an evocative word for something happening to a waterbed.