He / They

  • 0 posts
  • 18 comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 16th, 2023
  • You’re looking for the populace as a whole to have some kind of sit-down, coordinated evaluation of what has maximal climate impact, but that’s not how protest movements work.

    Small groups can be tactical like that. Large protest movements have to seize on whatever momentum happens, when it happens.

    If people were out there protesting golf courses, I’d be there too, and I’d be encouraging it, but I’m not going to waste my breath as someone with zero meaningful platform trying to foment a mass protest movement out of thin air.

    And there’s something more important to this movement than just directly addressing the environmental impact of datacenters, which is the anti-large-corporation sentiment it’s feeding (both from, and into). That is very important for climate action. And I’m not sure if you’ve been going to any (climate) protests, but there are definitely signs at all of them protesting oil and gas companies.

  • One thing that’s important to understand is that this is going to be a non-starter for a FOSS project that isn’t a 501c3, for most companies, for legal reasons. Charitable giving to 501c3s is defensible spending because of the impact on taxes. (Yay Crapitalism!)

    You’d probably have more success onboarding them as a contractor doing “implementation support”.

    Also, imo big projects like Linux and postgres are doing fine, and it’s the small tool creators that need support.

  • As someone with no 3d printing experience, but a lot of firearm experience, I’m surprised that PLA holds up as a comp.

    It’s one thing to have a printed frame of course, but comps are right past the barrel and get the worst of gas and heat (by design). Hell, I have a very heavy comp on my HK P2000, and it gets absolutely scorched.

  • Sadly, they exist irregardless of our little projects. Financially supporting them is one thing, and if your own ethics prevent you from using a weapon of the enemy, as it were, that’s fine, but abstention is not actually doing anything to oppose them.

    The water consumption of any LLM compute time I’ve used is almost assuredly less than a single bath, and I’ve certainly skipped more baths in my life than I probably should have. :P

    And more importantly, an hour of Netflix uses SIGNIFICANTLY more water than an hour of text LLM generation, so most people are not actually having the impacts on water consumption they likely think they are.

  • As someone who works in security, you should be extremely skeptical of their stated reasons, or even the validity of the data.

    There were a LOT of divorces following that leak, citing the hack as proof of infidelity, but the reality is that the leakers could have added people to the data explicitly to facilitate uneven divorce settlements (e.g. adding a woman to the site in order to give the husband a means to demand no split of assets).

    As much as it would be great to imagine hacktivist crusaders going after cheaters, there was a lot of money moved on the back of that leak, and in fact one of the problems with Ashley Madison was that prior to the hack it was used to essentially extort non-users, because anyone could create a profile with any email, but if someone created a profile of you, you had to both verify yourself with your ID (which they saved), and pay them money to delete it (which the leak revealed they didn’t actually do anyways).

  • sovereignty != isolation

    Microsoft sucks, but what exactly is the threat you’re trying to mitigate by not putting their Office suite on GH? Microsoft deciding to disappear it or take control of it one day? MS does a ton of business in Europe, so they have a lot more to risk than PR history for tools that the devs would all still have on their machines (and thus could migrate at any time to another code repo).

    There’s not a readily-available European alternative to Github, and no, Codeberg is not one, because the value of GH is not just hosting code, it’s being a well-known place to find code. If you want a “European alternative” to GH, you’d first need to create an internationally-famous, known-by-all-developers platform. But that’s not “in scope” for their EU-Office tool.