I don’t blame you. I’m not quite at that point yet, but I’m not far off.

If they kill or nerf Old Reddit I’ll probably be done.

I would love to be 100% Lemmy but there’s still a lot more users and discussions on Reddit. It’s getting better, but it’s not yet at critical mass for me

This exactly.

I looked into setting Plex up a few years ago. It installed, and then starts talking about making a cloud account. I don’t want to talk to a cloud I just want to organize my own shit on my own network. Why does that need a cloud?

I uninstalled it. Everything I’ve seen since, and I mean EVERYthing, tells me I dodged a bullet. Not once have I read an article that makes me wish I’d continued the install.

They’re gonna shut down old reddit

Day they do that is the day I never go back to Reddit.

Yes. You are always adding net energy to the system. That’s why a heater is a self-contained unit (turns energy into heat) while an air conditioner requires two units- one to suck up the heat outside, another to reject that heat outside. It’s not ‘creating cold’, it’s using energy to pump heat from the inside to the outside. The total amount of heat rejected outside is a net addition- it’s the heat sucked up from inside, plus the waste heat from the compressor.

The air conditioner (current design) works on the simple principle that the boiling point of a liquid changes based on ambient pressure, and that phase change (between liquid and gas) carries a lot of latent energy. To boil water with heat alone, it takes about 100 calories to heat a gram of water from just above freezing to just below boiling. But to boil it, to heat it less than one more degree and turn it into gas, takes another 433 calories. That means if you adjust its boiling point by pressurizing and depressurizing it, whenever it boils or condenses it’ll suck up or release a lot of heat at the same time.

Obviously we want colder than 100c, so we use a refrigerant like tetrafluoroethane with a boiling point of -26c.

This gadget uses a similar concept. Instead of using pressure to tweak the boiling point of a refrigerant, it uses a solid that heats or cools in response to pressure. Then water carries the heat around.

Yes but China, Russia, Iran, etc all have national-level firewalls in place. You can go in China and chances are your VPN won’t work, and if it does the whole country is fucking network-hostile (like I’ve seen reports of the USB charger ports in hotels trying to hack into phones).
UK, as far as I know, doesn’t have any kind of similar national level firewall. Nor does USA or most other ‘civilized’ nations.

And without that national firewall, all these laws are crap. Because unless you’re physically prevented by the firewall from downloading or using VPNs or similar tools, all the laws in the world are just a padlock on a cardboard box.

I have the same thought. I still use Reddit, 100% on Old Reddit and I think objectively you could say I contribute a lot in terms of comments and participation. If old Reddit goes away, I’m done.

The problem is that the internet is fucking global. As long as that is the case, it is simply not possible to fix this problem.

You can put whatever regulations you want on online content, and some provider from a different jurisdiction is going to say screw you I abide by the laws of my own jurisdiction. The restricted citizens will use that company.

It is like making drugs illegal when there is still an illegal drug dispenser in every home. It doesn’t work.

The most you can do is try to block this at the payment level, but that requires setting up a very intrusive payment blacklist or whitelist system. And then some VPN provider will just make themselves ad supported and you are back at square one.

And that doesn’t even touch the issue of torrents, p2p file sharing, and decentralized networks. Go back to the early to mid-200s and everybody used those things because most of the content they wanted wasn’t easily available legally. Then it became easily available and people started paying for it. But you throw enough roadblocks, make people subscribe to too many streaming services, require too much age verification type crap, and the world will sail the high seas once again.

Google for ‘perfect fit content’. Spotify was and potentially still is aggressively pushing AI content in some of their curated playlists because it’s cheaper for them to play it

There’s stupid from top to bottom here.

The company is stupid for allowing an AI full root access to their entire setup.

The provider is stupid for only generating full-access API keys. They’re even stupider for storing backups with a volume, so deleting the volume (zero confirmation via API key) also insta-deletes the backups. And they’re stupidest for encouraging users to plug AIs into this full-trust mess.

And the company is absolute stupidest for having no backups other than the provider’s builtin versioning.

The problem is it’s not just ‘form a union’. In most cases unionizing means joining a much larger union that covers many hundreds of companies. And it will mean that all questions of compensation or discipline then have to go through a union contract. It means more paperwork and less flexibility.

If there is trust between workers and management, then workers often don’t see much benefit to going through all this. And that’s why the guy said every shop that went Union deserved it, because those shots all tried to save money by screwing their employees and so the employees fought back and unionized which ended up costing the company more than if they had just paid the workers correctly in the first place.

In most cases here unions are fairly large organizations where the larger union covers dozens or hundreds of companies. So it wouldn’t be like ‘Bob’s maintenance shop union’ it would be like ‘international brotherhood of machinists union chapter #1234’.

And when that is done, the relationship between the workers and the company changes. The union will negotiate a specific contract with the company which all workers and all jobs then are covered under. This provides a lot stronger protections for the workers, but can also be less flexible in some cases. And of course the worker has to pay dues to the union, it’s usually not that much but it’s not zero.

Point is, if the workers are happy and have good relations with management then they often see no reason to go through all this.

On the other hand when management starts turning the screws and tries to make more profit out of the worker compensation, then it’s absolutely time to unionize and workers are even more seeing that.

I once was on a tour of a non union maintenance shop, in an area where most similar shops were union. One of the people on the tour asked the manager about this.

His answer- ‘Every shop around here that’s gone union, has deserved it. I pay my guys above average, I don’t flip out when they take time off, and we have decent health insurance. My workers are happy- when the union comes calling it’s the workers who tell them to get lost.’

If WotC is going union, they probably deserve it.

This is absolutely a thing. I remember reading a story about this, this was years ago, but this guy worked for the air force of some nation in heavy conflict. One of the most used weapons in this war was an anti-radiation missile, it would loiter for some time until it detected an emissions target then lock on and destroy it. Whenever they needed to use radar, they would hotwire a bunch of microwave ovens to work with the door open, then plug them in with like six extension cords plugged together. The missiles would lock right onto those microwave ovens and blow them up. He was joking about how the enemy would boast they destroyed 15 aircraft that week on the ground, when his force only had 10 aircraft to begin with.

Please understand that this is not due to any sort of bubble. Especially not with memory.

OpenAI has themselves purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory production for 2026. The negotiated in secret with two different manufacturers, announcing the deals on the same day. Neither manufacturer was aware of the other, and both have said if they were they would not have made the deal as it sent a significant percentage of the world’s memory production to one customer.
More interestingly, the deal was not for memory chips. It was for finished wafers, which themselves have to then be sliced into hundreds of individual chips, which each need to be tested and packaged in the black casing we call a chip. As far as I am aware, OpenAI has no capability to do this. Which means they may have purchased a significant percentage of the world’s memory output only to throw it in the garbage and keep it from their competitors.

My understanding however is that this deal was for 2026 production. Go to next year, there may be an improvement.

This is why software patents were a horrible idea. We were all warned.

Still, I thought the whole objective of AV1 was to avoid any incumbrances.

Thing that bothers me is these guys are claiming to have patents over AV1.

The whole point of av1 is it supposed to be free of this bullshit.

I think this doesn’t go far enough. The problem isn’t just okcupid, problem is the data. Any company they sold face data to should be required to delete it, it should be treated as receiving stolen property that must be returned. The users of the site did not consent to have their faces shared with the database companies, so the only true redress for the users is to get those faces out of the database.

I think this is true with a lot of companies. Microsoft is a good example. Whoever is responsible for the current state of Windows 11 should be turfed as rapidly and efficiently as possible both for the good of Microsoft and to send a message that this sort of thing is not wanted anymore.

I really can’t believe this got the green light. GitHub has, or perhaps had, the trust of most of the open source world. It was used by everybody. This is so fucking short-sighted, it’s signing away your stock portfolio for a popsicle. Whatever couple bucks they get from this ad is worth absolutely nothing compared to the trust and good will they have flushed.