After having recently restored some stuff from an aging external hdd, i’m seriously considering getting a few dvdr discs and burning the important things every now and then.

I know they don’t last forever either, but - just as a random example that has definitely never happened to me hahaha - you can drop them from a height of 3 feet and still get files off them!

I mostly agree - however there are physical/mechanical reasons behind the use of some of those. For example, Phillips head screws will ‘cam out’ (driver will slip out of the screw head) rather than get over-torqued, which is useful in various situations - although TIL this was not actually an intentional design feature!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cam_out

Hex keys are better than a Robertson (square head) in tight spaces with something like an Allan key, and, in my experience anyway, Robertson can take a fair bit of torque, so they’re great for sinking into softwood - and also for getting out again, even when they’ve been painted over.

Flathead screws, on the other hand, should launched into the sun

Unfortunately, Meta is listed as one of their partners

Corporations and surveillance?

Yep absolutely, and even those numbers likely represent raw emissions figures vastly lower than the true impact these data centres are having on global emissions.

For example, that Google report talks about EACs - here’s a great podcast episode that explains why these kinds of accounting methods are a complete disaster:

Reveal: It’s Not Easy Going Green

https://revealnews.org/podcast/its-not-easy-going-green-update-2023/

This is very similar to my story - end of support for win7 meant putting Mint on the HTPC.

Soon after that, it was the old laptop my spouse was about to chuck out. Cinnamon was a little sluggish, so I eventually landed on Debian + XFCE

And when I discovered I could get my desktop’s audio interface working on Linux (it’s firewire, and by most people’s standards, ancient), it was game over for Windows.

I don’t know what Freetrack is but I hope it gets implemented for you :)

I agree that it can be difficult for people to hear that a place they enjoy has issues with anti-Blackness. It can feel like a personal attack, and most people consider themselves ‘not-racist’.

I think the real thing to strive for is to be ‘anti-racist’, rather than ‘not-racist’. We all ultimately have prejudices - the point is are we able to simultaneously be honest with ourselves, forgive ourselves, and improve.

In many ways, the overall reaction to this piece actually proves many of its points. The overall reaction seems to have been to deny that the problem exists and refuse to investigate further (or, as you point out, to recognize that the Fediverse being discussed extends beyond Lemmy).

Additionally, some of the reactions here are themselves examples of anti-Blackness (e.g. accusations of so-called “reverse racism” and the like, as well as the ‘knee-jerk’ downvotes you describe). Which makes me less inclined to think of Lemmy as any kind of bastion of anti-racism!

Is there a reason you seem to be upset by this piece? This is a forum for discussion about the Fediverse. Seems entirely appropriate to me.

This may be true of your own experience on Lemmy, but on microblogging software such as Mastodon it is most definitely not the case.

Low bandwidth mode - what a great idea, thanks for pointing it out!

Thanks! Yeah tbh the gemlog is really just a mirror of the blog, but for the record it’s gemini://gemini.patatas.ca

I hear you on this - Akkoma does this by default, but the issue there is, let’s say someone on a tiny server posts an image, even a relatively small one - if it gets boosted by an account with 10k followers, that small server will effectively get DDOSed, assuming enough of those clients are online.

That’s a good question. The best answer is, I don’t know!

But if I had to guess, based on the small amount I’ve learned:

larger servers most likely benefit from economies of scale. They’ll be using CDNs, and will often have several people on their server following any given remote account, rather than just one. So the per-client energy use is almost certainly lower than for small servers.

But it’s still tough to know whether it’s the client or server using more energy. IIRC with video streaming, the end user’s device was a big factor in overall consumption - but it’s not like the server is chugging away 24/7 fetching media for you like a Fediverse server is.

For single-user servers, or servers with only a few accounts, I expect the server (and all the network infrastructure in between two servers) is doing a lot more work than the client(s) - unless it’s like, the server is on a raspberry Pi and the client is running on a powerful desktop for a lot of the day, or something. Again, many factors at play.

Really though, the question I start to ask in all this is more about, which parts of the system are the most difficult to justify?___

Nice. Yeah Gemini is pretty cool, and that actually reminds me, I have to publish this piece on my gemlog as well ;)

Haven’t tried tootik either but thanks for pointing me to it, will check it out!