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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You could get around with a normal file share service (assuming you already are using one) via tinyurl or similar redirect. I don’t know how much the free services track you or if they have other security implications, but I have couple of domains laying around and it would be pretty trivial to just create HTTP redirect from “class-a.up.mydomain.foo” to my nextcloud upload link.


  • Or put data centers where the air itself is colder. There’s been small-scale studies on how servers work on greenhouses at the Finnish winter and they are just fine with air cooling at below zero temperatures. I’ve also ran my own homelab in an non insulated attic without issues. The only problem is that if your hardware shuts down it starts to gather ice, so you need to move them in a warm location during maintenance, but they’ll run just fine even at -30C as long as they’re shielded from elements other than temperature.

    And in colder climate the excess heat is a resource in itself as you can pump it into district heating loops and not just dump it to the environment.


  • Also when sodium hydroxide reacts with acid it releases CO2 and it affects growth of at least some fungus. Also, if a brick sized fuel cell can provide 1kWh and single transatlantic flight consumes at least 20MWh you’d need a pile big enough to build a house which doesn’t sound feasible.

    But I’m not a chemist either, I suppose it boils down to comparing negative effects between this new cell against kerosine. Plus there’s always the case which affects any new kind of storing energy where it’ll be indefinetly ‘ready for market in next 5 years’.


  • it will waste less space in the recycling bin

    In here pretty much every bottle and can for beverages has a deposit included in them. 0,10€ for small (<1l I think) plastic bottles, 0,15€ for cans. They’re included in the shelf price and when you bring them back to the recycling you’ll get your deposit back. Then the recycling machine crushes all to pallets and they’re hauled to a factory which then makes new stuff out of the plastic and aluminium.

    No need to throw them away. In here the return rate is >90% and even if you don’t care about the few coins it’s common to leave the empty bottles on top of or next to a recycling bin where others can pick them up and return.



  • That’s something along the lines I do as well, but your methods are far more in depth than mine. I just glance around documentations, how active the development is and get a rough idea if the thing is just a single person hobby-project or something which has a bit more momentum.

    And it of course also depends on if I’m looking for solutions just for myself or is it for others and spesifically if it’s work related. But full audits? No. There’s no way my lifetime would be enough to audit everything I use and even with infinite time I don’t have the skills to do that (which of course wouldn’t be an issue if I had infinite time, but I don’t see that happening).



  • You could save yourself cents per year!

    That’s pretty much it. Maybe even tens of cents. In pre-USB era that actually made sense, Nokia chargers with a barrel jack (and other that era wall-warts) consumed even several watts on idle but (assuming a good quality) modern USB-bricks are way more efficient. They still consume a non-zero amount of power when plugged in but you’re not going to see that on your power bill. You’ll waste far mor energy if you forget your bathroom lights on overnight, even with LED bulbs.


  • But surely in order to “feel things” you would need a nervous system right? When you feel pain from touching something very hot, it’s your nerves that are sending those pain signals to your brain… right?

    On that case, on our meatsacks, yes. But there’s also emotional pain which can cause physical pain or other effects too and that doesn’t require nerves at all. Also there’s nothing stopping from an AI robot to have nervous system too, it would just have different kind of sensors and a CAN bus or something instead of organic stuff. There’s already co-operation robots on factories which have sensors to detect if they are touching something in order to keep humans safe and from there it’s not too far fetched to program it to feel “pain” if forces are big enough.

    And that all boils down to on how you define consciousness, feelings, pain response and all that stuff. “Behold! I’ve brought you a man!” I yell while holding a chiken.



  • You don’t even need to push. Just wait a while until the toddler finds something else to focus on and forget what happened today.

    It was some time ago but a response from Canadian supplier to US customer went few rounds on social media. They informed that the item customer was buying was under a tariff and gave options to either pay up the tariffs, cancel the sale with no extra cost or just wait for few days and see what happens. And the really stupid part is that it was (and largely is) a viable strategy, at least on customer sales. For businesses that’s obviously a total nightmare, but that’s just one example on how ridiculous any kind of trade with the US is right now.



  • You’re not wrong, but my personal experience is that it can also lead you down in a pretty convincing but totally wrong direction. I’m not a professional coder, but have at least some experience and I’ve tried the LLM approach on trying to figure out which library/command set/whatever I should use for problem at hand. Sometimes it gives useful answers, sometimes it’s totally wrong which is easy to spot and at worst it gives you something which (at least to me) seems like it could work. And on the last case I then spend more or less time figuring out how to use the thing it proposed, fail, eventually read the actual old fashioned documentation and notice that the proposed solution is somewhat related to my problem but totally wrong.

    And on that point I would have actually saved time if I did things the old fashion way (which is getting more and more annoying as search engines get worse and worse). There’s legitimate use cases too of course, but you really need to have at least some idea on what you’re doing to evaluate the answers LLMs give you.




  • Their bases have been about where the tent villages now are for decades. They’re training grounds for new conscripts until they’re moved to die in some ditch in Ukraine. Who knows why they’re more active now, maybe Ukraine is getting pretty good to hit their targets deep in Russia so they need to move further away from the front line or whatever.

    This has absolutely nothing to do with Finland, beyond the fact that our border just happens to be nearby. And should they actually try start an active war with NATO from there, these grounds are mostly in reach of Finnish artillery and our artillery is pretty damn efficient on what they do.


  • There’s still things like that on my workplace today. I think there’s some older, rarely used CNC with Win98 on the controller. We just keep spares around when they break, but that’s cheaper than replacing the whole machinery. Also there’s some XP stations running software for an industrial machine which would cost quarter of a million to replace. Some of those need access to network drives and such but they live in a strictly isolated VLAN.

    And, as far as I’ve told at least, there was no option at any point to upgrade just the computers on those things. It’s always the whole assembly line or whatever they’re connected to. There’s not many companies willing to throw hundreds of thousands every 3-5 years to replace perfectly working equipment.


  • Delete windows partition with your preferred tool and update-grub should remove the item from boot menu. Then, depending on your partitioning schema, you can either create a new partition in the empty space and mount it however you like or expand your existing linux partition, but options there depend on how your partitioning has been originally built and if you can leverage things like LVM or ZFS when expanding the usable storage.

    And, while pretty obvious, make sure to only delete the correct partition and all data stored on that will be lost, so make sure you don’t have anything important on windows side of things.