Barx [none/use name]

This article is about one study, by CCDH, who did not publish much of anything about their methodology. CCDH’s CEO was an anti-Corbynite that fed into the false accusations of antisemitism against the left for having solidarity with Palestinians and CCDH continues to prominently focus on antisemitism and trying to blur the line between antisemitism and antizionism. The faction that he supported is currently in power in Labour and are supporters of Israel during this genocide.

I would not trust them to make good calls on what is an accurate community note vs. not. Community notes are all over the place but on average depict a bazinga liberal position, which is not actually the most accurate one. Having looked at their “study” paper, their first and most promindnt criterion for accuracy was whether community note aligned with fact-checking websites. Fact-checking websites are, to put it bluntly, bullshit, and really just reflect the author’s opinion.

For example, one of the things they claim is election misinformation is the claim that voting systems are unreliable. They are saying this is an inaccurate or misleading claim. In the US, it is accurate to say that it’s voting systems are unreliable. They are frequently run using voting machines from private companies, black boxes with no real way to verify their results that are actually implemented in most places, and polling stations often only gave 1 or 2, so when they break people are disenfranchised. Every computer security expert audit says you should not trust these systems and should use paper ballots with manual observable recounts. The allegation of misinformation is really about what is perceived to be voter suppression, of people feeling like they shouldn’t vote because it won’t count anyways. This is not actually misinformation, though: the voting machines are unreliable, that is the actual problem in this situation, not the use of repeating a fact in your favor.

It is salient that at no point do they highlight the naked propaganda for Zionism that has been rampant on social media, including about elections. This was presumably filtered out early on by their selection of what counts as a topic of interest for their analysis.

Finally, the clear purpose of CCDH is to lobby for having more oversight on social media, including large, centralized moderation teams that have historically been cozy with liberal governments.

Per the article, “divisive” here just means that the US, sponsored of the aforementioned genocide, does its usual complaining about its critics.

Lifesavers because they are some sick Os

Really sticking it to those… friendly Russian kernel maintainers. Really doing your part for your individual Two Minutes Hate.

So presumably, as a consistent person that is outrages by invasions and death, you call for the expulsion of all Americans and Usraelis, right?

Ohhh. Well the big parts that grab stuff are mandibles. They aren’t legs but they originate, evolutinarily speaking, from legs. Same with antennae! The parts closer to the head do the eating but sometimes mandibles help with that.

For venomous arthropods sometimes it’s the mandibles that have the venom (like spiders, where they are called Chelicerae), for some it’s saliva and they use various mouthparts (the water bug uses a proboscus), for some it’s their tail end (like ants), etc etc.

The lower left is a toe biter water bug with one of the most painful venoms on the planet

lmao okay buddy

“Israel” is a terrorist state and always has been. As an occupier, the resistance has the right to oppose it by all means deemed necessary.

I haven’t but you might want to check out https://lyrion.org, which will likely have more community support for running on Linux.

Peak performance

You need oxidants to live. Issues stemming from oxidants are about levels of free radicals getting too high in the wrong places for too long.

Getting good sleep, eating a balanced diet, reducing stress, and getting enough exercise are the best ways to reduce the chances of such a scenario. Realistically, these things are also just a way to maximize wellness and health overall and it is probably not very useful for most people to think of this in terms of oxidation.

Oxidative stress happens every time you exercise. People need exercise to have better health. Oxidative stress is actually a necessary part of a healthy life.

If aliens exist they would probably have many things just as strange. They would also need a way to harvest energy via some cycle. It is possible they would require even more reactive substances to live.

When we and other known organisms take energy from food we are actually taking molecules with higher-energy electrons, converting them into the high-energy molecules our cellular processes can use to do make cell things happen, and producing very similar molecules with lower-energy electrons. Rather than infinitely accumulating these molecules, our cells dump low-energy electrons onto another molecule that is amenable and thereby convert into a molecule ready to accept high-energy molecules from food (with a bunch of steps in between).

For us, as aerobes, the electron acceptor at the end of respiration is oxygen.

Oxygen as an electron receptor is newer than several others. Anaerobes came first. It was only after photosynthesis had produced a ton of atmospheric oxygen that it became a viable option, really. But it O2 is a comparatively good electron acceptor because the process in which it accepts those electrons allows cells to grab quite a bit of energy from that last step. It is fairly “electron needy” compared to earlier electron acceptors.

So, basically, aerobes get more energy per food unit (sugar molecule) than the vast majority of other creatures. You need it to live because it is an essential part of how your cells get food, namely, how it can recycle molecules at the last step of the respiration cycle.

The dietary antioxidant fad is mostly BS. They’re supposedly meant to counteract oxidative stress and specifically free radicals. Both of those things are part of a healthy life and you would die without them. So any real impact is not so simple as “just counteract those bad things”. Dietary antioxidants don’t always lead to higher intracellular antioxidant levels, either.

Some dietary antioxidants so lead to higher intracellular levels and may help buffer oxidative stress (like from exercise) but there isn’t much evidence that it doesn’t just boil down to “eating your vegetables is good for you”.

Nice! Maybe just something to keep in your back pocket if the CPU keeps maxing out for long periods then.

That’s a good point! I don’t know if the platform allows you to configure ffmpeg very deeply but you may be able to tell it to do decode only.

I guess it also depends on how the platform works when it comes to encoding. Does it pre-encode a set of videos and take a storage hit in exchange for only encoding once? Maybe it isn’t so bad to use CPU. Is there a lot of reencoding on-the-fly to save space? Maybe it isn’t so bad to have a hardware-encoded stream.

Quality of encoding is also one of those things where it only matters in certain cases depending on what quality means. If you are encoding something to use as an archive, like a blu-ray to h.265 and the h.265 will be your main file for personal use, then you may want a very nice encoding. Or if you did something none of us would ever condone like making a sharing a high quality rip.

On the other hand if is just encoding from, say, 4K to 720p to save bandwidth for a mobile stream, it (1) won’t need to limit the quality of your archived highest-resolution video (this could either be a rae source file or a high quality software encoding) and (2) may be sufficiently high quality with a hardware encoding that nobody will ever notice the difference from a software encode. I’ve done personal-use on-the-fly transcoding exactly like this and have never noticed a quality problem that wasn’t just “oh the client selected 480p for me” and could be fixed by selecting a higher resolution.

Looks like a Zen 4. The ASPEED is really basic, it is just there so that you can plug a monitor into a server. But the other VGA device is the iGPU for the Zen 4 (Raphael) so it should support transcoding per VCN 3.1 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Core_Next

So overall, good news! The iGPU likely will help with performance. I’m not sure what the cost vs. performance ratio is for a dedicated GPU in this situation but it is probably useful to try out this iGPU to see if it helps!

The next steps might be fiddly or might work automagically. If all goes well you can just figure out which /dev device is the right one (I’m guessing there’s card0 and card1) and provide this info to whatever software configures transcoding on this platform (I’ve never run peertube). If things don’t work right away you may need to fiddle with kernel modules and iommu things requiring restarts. I’ve had to do something similar before but I did require isolatating the GPU to its own iommu, but that was specifically for virtualization do you may not need to go that far.

If you do need to troubleshoot it will probably be about this exact iGPU’s kernel module settings. Happy to help with any troubleshooting!

If the card supports it, it will show up as a direct rendering interface under /dev. Something like /dev/dri/card0.

Its presence, name, and capabilities will depend on:

• The GPU itself

• Whether the kernel modules are loaded

• Whether those kernel modules support the device in this way.

The first step I would recommend is doing lspci to see what GPUs are available.

As a heads up, the user Ideology has pointed out that Hetzner has been taking down queer Mastodon servers so it’s one to avoid.

Transcoding is often the main computational work of video streaming and GPUs can make this much faster because many of them have hardware transcoding built-in. For example, the basic GPUs built into consumer intel chips (and not server chips) often have H.264 hardware transcoding capabilities. If you make the right interfaces available to the software that wants to transcode, it will transcode a h.264 video 5-10X faster without really hitting the CPU.