For me, this is a feature. The last thing I want is celebrities and news outlets clogging up my feed of nice people’s sandwiches and cat pictures.

Virtually every app collects crash reports and anonymized analytics. Better for them to tell you about it than not.

I worked at Google for over a decade. The issue isn't that the engineers are unaware or unable. Time and time and time again there would be some new product or feature released for internal testing, it would be a complete disaster, bugs would be filed with tens of thousands of votes begging not to release it, and Memegen would go nuts. And all the feedback would be ignored and it would ship anyway.

Upper management just doesn't care. Reputational damage isn't something they understand. The company is run by professional management consultants whose main expertise is gaslighting. And the layers and layers of people in the middle who don't actually contribute any value have to constantly generate something to go into the constant cycle of performance reviews and promotion attempts, so they mess with everything, re-org, cancel projects, move teams around, duplicate work, compete with each other, and generally make life hell for everyone under them. It's surprising anything gets done at all, but what does moves at a snail's pace compared to the outside world. Not for lack of effort, the whole system is designed so you have to work 100 times harder than necessary and it feels like an accomplishment when you've spent a year adding a single checkbox to a UI.

I may have gone on a slight tangent there.

At the risk of facts getting in the way:

1. You can install ad blockers
2. Apps are not able to do that

You have disabled Safe Browsing. That prevents files from being checked for malware, so all downloads are blocked by default (nothing to do with Firefox). As you noted, you can override the warning to download anyway, but it is an extra step to try to reduce the chance of someone accidentally running a malicious program.

That’s how it’s made. They melt cheese with emulsifying salts, squirt it into a plastic envelope, and it cools into the shape of the wrapper.

This will not be a popular thing to say in Lemmy, but I don’t think self hosting those things is going to reduce your headaches. I have worked in IT all my life, and I have lots of experience running services of all kinds, including my self-hosted home stuff. Nowadays, I am very mindful of the cost in time and hassle to DIY rather than let someone else handle it. When it comes to calendars, everything I see has an option to integrate with Google or Outlook, so I can’t imagine how sharing and syncing are going to be better if you move to some obscure open source thing. I fought that exact battle for an entire decade - you don’t want to get me started talking about CalDAV - and my life got so much easier when I gave up and moved my stuff to a standard provider.

I have a friend who bought a new house and wanted to do some automation with the lights. While my HA is a total DIY setup, I thought maybe I’d suggest he get one of these boxes I was vaguely aware they sell. I went to the web site and first of all couldn’t find them from home-assistant.io (I see they’re on the front page at least now, but I swear it was harder to find when I looked the other day). Then I got lost trying to understand what the actual box was.. yellow, blue, some third party odroid thing? Didn’t matter, everything was out of stock anyway. Now there’s a green one. I’m not sure this is actually making it easier to get started. I’m somewhat of an expert and I gave up.

I have ADHD.

Not being able to exit your home in an emergency without a key is a serious safety problem. In most places it is not permitted.

International Residential Code R311.4.4 “All egress doors shall be readily openable from the side from which egress is to be made without the use of a key or special knowledge or effort”. Most local codes are derived from this.

Cutting a pipe and adding a valve is a really simple thing and should only be expensive to the extent that any plumbing job is expensive.

I would specifically ask for a quality 1/4 turn ball valve - there’s no point in cheaping out on that part when you’re mostly paying for labor. And as long as you’re doing that, you probably want two of them. For the same reason the city doesn’t want you touching theirs, you should have a shutoff that you actually use when you need to do plumbing work in the house, and one before that that you never touch unless it’s an emergency and you can’t shut off the other one.

For a bit more expense, you could consider an automatic shutoff leak detector. I have one called Phyn that keeps track of water usage, tests for pressure drops every night, and detects unusual flow patterns and can automatically shut it off.

I've never been happier and more productive than when I was working in Perl. It's a language that, at its apex, had a community of incredibly smart and creative people evolving it and its ecosystem. It's a practical, powerful, multi-paradigm language that let me get work done with a minimum of fuss.

Perl was a language that felt like an extension of my thoughts, like it was working with me and for me. Most other languages feel like I am working for the compiler rather than the other way around. Or at the very least, spending unnecessary effort satisfying some language designer's personal pet peeve, which constantly takes me out of the flow of the job I'm trying to do.