Can’t you just not use their cloud services? It makes you create an account for setup, but once setup was done I never touched it.

I do not know what you mean by third-party integrations. I do not use any cloud stuff, Ubiquiti’s or otherwise.

I used to use OpenWRT on various devices, but two years ago I got a UDM-Pro, a USW-16-POE, and a few Unifi APs and cameras. I run pi-hole on the UDM-Pro. I have no complaints. It is more expensive than piecing it all together using OpenWRT and some Raspberry PIs, but way easier.

You could use multiple USB microphones and do the mixing in software. I prefer using an audio interface (e.g. UMC204HD) because it is simpler to set up and adjust levels, and because it lets you use any widely available microphone, or plug in an instrument (e.g.: electric guitar, electric piano). You can plug your headphones into the audio interface and adjust the relative level of your own sound and what is coming from the computer (e.g.: your teacher). sweetwater.com has the UMC204HD and the UMC404HD on sale right now.

I do not have any experience with pick-up mics.

I tried Jitsi, but was unable to match Zoom’s audio quality.

The difference between Jitsi and Zoom was noticeable, but less important than the difference between the mic built in to the webcam and good mics. I use an SM58 for voice and an SM137 pointed at the cello just below the bridge, through a UMC204HD.

How much AI do you want in your browser:

( ) None

( ) Zero

( ) I want my browser to automatically close any page that mentions AI

I feel for the hundreds of engineers at Microsoft who have been yelling about these security issues since day one, but cannot say “I told you so” because they’d get fired.

Get an A/V receiver, a computer monitor or dumb TV, and speakers. Then you can get a Roku streaming player and it cannot show you anything when you do not have its input selected on the receiver.

Even an inexpensive pair of bookshelf speakers placed on either side of the TV will sound better than built-in TV speakers. Add a center speaker and a subwoofer drastically improved sound.

Non-4k AV receivers are dirt cheap used.

You can turn off search-in-url-bar.

You do not want to stop getting security updates.

Just use Tree Style Tab

I will never understand why browser.tabs.closeWindowWithLastTab = false is not the default, or why it is not an option in the Tab section of settings.

My complaint is no so much the requirement of a phone number as the requirement of an Android/iPhone app.

The desktop app should be a first-class client.

And a place name with twice as many letters as are necessary.

1. CEO wastes a ton of money on generative AI
2. CEO fires a bunch of people to hit quarterly profit targets

generative AI resulted in job cuts.

Men will literally let an AI kill thousands of drivers a year instead of going to therapy building high-speed rail.

The P in HIPAA is for Portability, not Privacy, and the S is for security.

Like with anything, you will not know if you are going to be good at it until you spend a lot of time trying and failing and learning. If you enjoy it, just keep doing it.

Non-profits, just like for-profits, need to keep revenue at or above expenditures. Just like for-profits they end up run by executives who prioritize bringing money in to sustain the bureaucracy over doing good.

Spring combines combinations of environment variables, system properties, files, and classpath resources, and handles a variety of patterns (e.g.: aConfigOption could be configured by system property A_CONFIG_OPTION, aConfigOption, or several other possibilities), so tracking down where the configuration came from is not always easy. Sometimes you think you can just set a property, but it turns out another property triggers loading a resource that overrides yours. This would be fine if applications/libraries clearly documented how to configure them, but most say “config via spring, good luck lol”.

And good luck if you are trying to use two different components both built on Spring, and they both rely on the dependency injector settings “db.url”. Now you have to start playing games with dependency injector scopes.