Well the half-good news is, judging by Palantir’s track record of managing large public projects elsewhere, that project is bound to bankrupt the US once and for all so people can build something new. The bad news is, it’s probably only going to happen late within the first fifteen years of the ‘two-year’ contract.
The knowledge is still there, it’s just that the LLM has been instructed not to divulge it, and these instructions are often imperfect and can sometimes be circumvented accidentally or on purpose.
and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.
Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.
You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.
Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:
The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.
If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.
When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.
That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.
So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.
I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.
“Give a man a cleaning rag and he will stare at it helplessly. Give him a pressure washer and he will clean everything as far as the cable will reach.”
I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.
I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.
Home ACs are just wasteful.
I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.
Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.
Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.
I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.
As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.
I’m not sure “cooling degree days” are a good way to measure environmental impact. They neither represent the amount of heat pumped into the atmosphere (as the energy per degree depends on several factors such as mass and heat capacity of the cooled stuff) nor the amount of electricity used (as different A/C’s have wildly different degrees of efficiency) nor the amount of CO2 released (as that depends on how the electricity has been produced).
The power hunger of AI has already been mentioned, so I’m not going to repeat that point, though IMHO it’s by far the bigger issue than residential cooling.
Having said that, if you’re worried about the enviromental impact of your home, the power consumption of a reasonably efficient A/C can easily be offset by just a couple of medium-sized solar panels. Of course both the solar panels and the efficient A/C cost money that not everybody can afford to (or cares to) spend, so you’d have to take cheap and inefficient A/C’s off the market, thus effectively making chilled air a privilege that only the rich can afford. That’d probably lead to lots of heat strokes and other health problems amongst low-income families, so you’d have to weigh the environmental impact of inefficient A/C’s against another rich/poor gap.
It depends on what you’re looking for.
File storage - plenty of solutions, though make sure you don’t pick one that rents their storage space from AWS or Azure.
Personally I use Tresorit at it is end-to-end encrypted, easy to use and has a native client for almost every system I use (except for FreeBSD) in addition to the web interface. On your PC you get a network drive but can also include folders located elsewhere. It’s by no means the cheapest solutio though.
For pictures there’s Ente. It works very well, is cross-platform, and you can even set up your own server if you’re so inclined.
Sadly there’s no real alternative to Microsoft’s 365 offers - maybe a combination of lifetime MS Office licences or LibreOffice plus some cloud storage provider comes close.
To replace Teams you could use a secure messenger such as Threema Work (this version comes with user management and a versatile inbuilt MDM) and your own Jitsi videochat server. We’ve replaced Teams with this combo years ago and never looked back.
Hosted Exchange can be rented from many service providers, running on either genuine MS Exchange or a compatible third-party system such as KerioConnect.
There are also other places such as Proton that offer several services at once.
Or are you looking for something completely different?
If it’s Adobe it can be made DRM-free relatively easy. It’s the first thing I do with every purchase (and legal where I live). Try Calibre (free/libre) or Epubor (paid but more versatile and works better for me).
Amazon has just introduced a policy change that probably makes it much harder (or impossible) to de-DRM stuff bought there, so I’m going to do without the books exclusive to them for the time being.
That’s why I’m driving a 1994 Geo Metro.
FWIW, Android offers a one-handed mode to shrink the available screen estate so you can reach the top of the screen with your thumb. It needs to be enabled in settings once and can then be toggled by double-tapping the home button or a swiping gesture at the bottom of the screen.
In my experience (6.1" Samsung Galaxy S2x user with slightly above-average hands) this is a good compromise between occasionally wanting to do things one-handed on the shrunken screen, and still being able to hit the right keys on the on-screen keyboard most of the time on the regular-size screen.
Bing DuckDuckGo says the iPhone has a similar feature, though I haven’t touched one in years so can’t say anything about it.
Do people think that the more specific labels and variations are the reason for the hate?
One straight cis-male here (so very small sample size). I think there’s not the one reason why people are transphobic or bigoted. I’ve personally witnessed bigotry that was driven by fear, an upbringing based on ‘traditional’ values (using that term as a swear word here) or other lack of education, peer pressure and probably a few other reasons.
Also, some people just are arseholes and proud of it. Short of going back in time and making their daddy show them some affection, there’s just no changing them.
I think the seemingly endless amount of labels (though not necessarily their implications) exacerbate the problem in that it takes time for a society to process and accept new things. Just as society (using that term loosely) at large has finally come to terms with concepts such as gay men and self-determined female sexuality, there comes a torrent of alien new concepts and groups that challenge large parts of every outsider’s understanding of the world. For the average person not immediately involved with these concepts, that can be a very scary thought. And people react to fear in different ways. Some people learn. Some people just refuse change on principle and will do anything for the world to stay the same as it has ‘always’ been. Because that’s what they’re familiar and comfortable with. Raise your hand if you’re older than 30 or 40 and have never yearned for ‘simpler times’.
(Please note that the following text block by no means reflects my own opinions and preferred choice of words.)
From the point of view of a simple mind, including people of average intelligence but with lots of other things than political correctness to worry about: Imagine you’re a regular guy who has just come to terms with the fact that there are three kinds of people - gay, lesbian and normal. (Yes, I know. Remember, simple mind.) Including all the potentially far-reaching implications for your own life, lessons learned and fears overcome - gays aren’t dangerous, they’re not contagious, they will probably not mindlessly rear-end you any chance they get etc., so peaceful coexistence is possible after all. Lesbians are even kinda hot (probably all secretly eager to let you watch and/or join them), so no complaints there.
You’ve managed to accept all that and maybe even are a bit proud of yourself. Go progressive you!
And only a few years later you’re bombarded from seemingly every angle with new, alien terms. Suddenly everybody around you seems to be bisexual (okay - not that different from what you already know), trans (how can you not obviously be a man when you’ve got a dong), non-binary (what does that even mean?), you’re expected to use new pronouns now (Jack is a ‘they’ now?!), how can you be ‘fluid’ if you’re not a beer or used to lubricate a transmission, and WTF are neopronouns???
And every other politician and celebrity implies that the smallest perceived transgression of these absolutely incomprehensible and ever-changing rules means you’re a bad person.
That’s fucking scary. And completely unnecessary. And you’ve got tons of other things to worry about, especially in that economy, so all these snowflakes can just sod right off. And all the regulars at the bar feel the same, so…!
Personally I can somehow relate to the above in that I’m sometimes expected to understand and celebrate every last nuance of a self-appointed snowflake’s uniqueness, and potentially also accept the inferiority and/or guilt coming with my white cishet male-ness. Cut that BS. I’m a live-and-let-live kind of person, which means that you being different from me is totally fine and doesn’t make you inferior in any way, but it also doesn’t make me inferior or means I have to learn in painstaking detail about how you’ve picked your neopronouns. If we’re not going to hook up or talk about our relationships, I don’t even need to know anything about your sexuality in the first place.
But then again, that trait is neither representative of the queer community nor unique to them. BDSM people for instance can be even worse, they’re just not that public. It would also be wrong to judge all minorities in the world for that, but it just goes to show, every group has its share of idiots, and they’re the ones who tend to stick out.
TL;DR: In my unprofessional opinion, the problem could be solved over night if everybody could just accept that every group has its share of loud idiots but that they’re not representative of the entire group, and the media would maybe stop blowing everything out of proportion.
That question is going to be impossible to answer without a lot more details. The number of websites is largely irrelevant (each website will use a negligible amount of RAM for the web server process to know about). What you want to know is the total number of HTTP and HTTPS requests per minute (the latter being a bit more expensive) in peak times to estimate the required CPU horsepower, the amount of data transferred (network bandwidth and CPU to some degree), whether it will be mostly static pages or dynamic/scripted content (CPU and RAM), and of course disk space to store everything (a stock photo library will likely use more space than a pizza place).
If there’s a database backend you’ll want to add even more RAM and faster storage (both in terms of throughput and IOPS).
Also, acceptable waiting times. An under-powered server will work just the same, just slower.
If you know a bit about the websites you want to host but need some pointers, maybe start by checking out some packages by other hosting providers (how much CPU and RAM does their ‘local chess club WordPress site’ package offer?) and go from there.
Trade-in deals mostly suck around here. I hand my ‘old’ phones down to friends and family, who hand theirs down to their kids. Their kids usually get a ‘new’ phone when their old one has stopped working or is really, really showing its age. I assume this system is representative of a quite sizeable part of society, so I’m not sure how much to read into those trade-in statistics.