freakazoid

freakazoid, 17 hours ago

When I was arriving home this morning from dropping the kids off at school, I was driving at about 5 mph in the alley behind my house. A bird in the road kept taking off as I approached and landing about 10 feet farther down the alley. Which meant it kept having to flee over and over.

That's basically what people are doing when they move from one proprietary silo to another because one got too shitty for them.

freakazoid, 17 hours ago

I'm not saying people should use Linux. I'm saying computers are shit thanks to capitalism. Turn off your computer and never turn it on again. If Linux is right for you, you will figure it out on your own.

freakazoid, 17 hours ago

This message posted on a computer.

freakazoid, 17 hours ago

On a more constructive note, in many ways it's easier to use Linux than it's ever been. But there are also more choices than there ever have been, and some things are harder. There is no clear winner when it comes to usable Linux distros; if you ask five people you will get 15 answers.

It would be better if Linux were easier to try out. But that's extremely difficult if you have a Mac. I think it's still fairly straight forward to boot a live USB stick on a PC, laptop or otherwise, but even that's not a given with secure boot. Thanks to all the security issues involved (and a desire to make it as hard as possible to move away from Windows) PCs no longer boot from removable media by default. So booting anything else is a big hurdle.

But, honestly, if you can't even make it over that hurdle, you have no hope at all of using a computer instead of having the computer use you. The lesson for those of us who DO know how to use computers is that we need to help people make it over that hurdle. We can't just tell them to use Linux.

I didn't learn to use Linux because some rando on the Internet told me to. I learned DOS because my dad taught me. I learned to install OS/2 because my dad showed me how. That got me over the hurdle of installing new OSes. Then a friend was trying out Slackware, and I was able to help him out because of that experience I already had with different OSes. Then the same friend sold me a Pentium 200 in a motherboard, and I built a Linux box around it.

I don't think the Internet changes the necessity of this sort of experience and support at all. You need people who can be THERE, because you might brick your computer, and that's scary, even if it's theoretically possible to use your phone to look stuff up.

freakazoid, 16 hours ago

Linux has its share of enshittification these days, primarily via Red Hat and Canonical. I use an Ubuntu derivative (PopOS) on my laptop, but if Canonical were to vanish off the face of the planet they could pretty easily switch over to Debian as a base, because Ubuntu still uses Debian as a base. I use Debian on my desktop, and if I ever reinstall my laptop it's what I'll use (it came with PopOS preinstalled).

AFAIK Debian is the only noncommercial Linux distro that has a well-funded nonprofit organization behind it. It's not necessarily the easiest to use, but it's been around for over 30 years and could well be around and still unenshittified 30 years from now. I can't say that about any other Linux distro. Slackware has been around that long, but it is still developed by its original developer, which is a huge risk factor.

freakazoid, 7 days ago

@whitequark Telegram doesn't encrypt group chats at all, though. They are not comparable in that regard.

And it only encrypts DMs if you turn that on.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@tuckerm Looks like we have a whole network of bots on our hands.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo While I agree with your overall point, the Jevons paradox applies. The cost of energy is the primary limiting factor for both AI and cloud compute. As its efficiency goes up, its power consumption won't go down; instead they'll just do more AI, and the total power consumption will almost certainly rise. So arguments about the per operation cost won't hold up, but arguments about total energy and water consumption will. So I guess it will depend on how people think about the total utility of AI versus other energy-using endeavors.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo I'm sure a golf course does.

Pop quiz: how many datacenters does Google have?

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo Average data center is what, 100MW these days? That's the equivalent of 100,000 homes.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo Sounds about right. And that number keeps rising faster than other consumers of electricity, so it will be equivalent to ever larger chunks of human activity over time. Which is fine, if people consider the utility of those datacenters to be worth it.

And by "worth it" I mean not just the price of the electricity but the externalities that come with it. One of the great things about datacenters from a multinational corporation's perspective is that you have some flexibility in where to put them. Flexibility to avoid, for example, places that do a better job of pricing in the externalities of electricity production. Fortunately, Google and Facebook (and I think Microsoft as well?) have also tried to choose places that have cheap electricity from sources like hydroelectric, but that can still displace other users into dirtier energy sources.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo Incidentally, what year is that figure from? Europe's, and especially Germany's, energy consumption have been dropping due to high energy prices. I seem to recall Google had a few datacenters in Germany. I'm sure they'll operate them until the equipment has depreciated, but I wouldn't be surprised if they shut them down and take the loss on the buildings after that, if they haven't already.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@danilo I totally agree.

Personally, I never found the energy arguments against crypfocurrency to be particularly compelling. I figured eventually transaction fees would have to pay for all energy consumption due to the transaction, or mining wouldn't be profitable. It's still too soon to tell, but I think we're starting to see that with this latest Bitcoin halving, but it's hard to tell because it seems like transaction fees are driven a lot more by demand than by miners. The total hashrate seems to be dropping, though.

freakazoid, 8 days ago

@faab64 @Justis4u That account is a bot. All their non-Zionist posts are bland nonsense. But the real tell is the alt text on images they post. Nothing to do with the images.