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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

    In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

    I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.


  • I use to say “all extremes call for their opposite”. Since almost no information ever transpires about this whole scandal, the opposite is to release all the names to the public. It was to be expected. If we were trusting the justice system, this would seem inappropriate. But we have what we have, and making the whole list public is the only guarantee we have that not one of the “bad” guy can escape public’s attention. That of course, is valid only if the list is comprehensive and some names have not already been taken out.

    It is indeed unfortunate that a lot of people who didn’t deserve and didn’t want any bad attention will get some.

    I’m not saying I agree with the move. I’m saying it was to be expected.

    [Edit made: grammar & missing words]


  • Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.

    Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:

    Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.

    Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.

    Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.

    With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.


  • Scientists have not been hyperbolic. If anything, so far, they’ve been very cautious abut their statements.

    I still remember reading headlines about “likelihood of global warming” then “probably caused by human activities” because 90% level of confidence is not enough, you need more data until you can reach 95% or 98% confidence before boldly writng “most probably”.

    But in their “probably” they predicted we would see more floods, droughts, violent storms, all of these happening one after the other causing devastation.

    And Ô surprise: we see floods, droughts and storms following each other and causing devastation. Yet our leaders will claim “no one could have predicted all of that would happen at once!”.

    Now they start telling us our civilization could collapse (“could” must be what? 75% confidence level???)

    We’re going to spend 20-25 years claiming they exagerate, another 20-25 years saying “well, they maybe right, but we can’t change things too fast because that would be unreasonable and the people would not accept it”.

    By the time, we will start reading articles stating no matter what we do now, we can only push out the end a bit, but we’re doomed. And the first reactions will be “those damned scientists always exagerate and use hyperboles”.




  • “Collapse” meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?

    Years back, I setup a Synapse’s server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the “big” Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.

    But don’t just take my words for it:

    https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339

    Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I’ve not tried these yet. They’re still in development.

    How does it scale differently than Matrix?

    The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can’t shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as “primary” as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.

    XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That’s an “old” model, but it scales.

    https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html

    That’s for the host. For other attendees, it’s much lower.

    I don’t think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can’t report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).

    Out of curiosity, why do you say this?

    I don’t use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don’t want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts

    And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don’t know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.

    Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.

    And that’s only considering well intended people.

    But these are my humble 2cents.



  • I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

    People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

    But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

    Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”