It’s what they should do really. Make the consequences of the law as visible as possible.

So long, Elon…

Trade-in deals mostly suck around here. I hand my ‘old’ phones down to friends and family, who hand theirs down to their kids. Their kids usually get a ‘new’ phone when their old one has stopped working or is really, really showing its age. I assume this system is representative of a quite sizeable part of society, so I’m not sure how much to read into those trade-in statistics.

+1 for Jitsi. Works well, user-friendly, lots of features without looking complicated, not too resource-hungry, lots of ways to extend it. All the other person needs it to click a link, enter a name and allow microphone/camera usage one time. There’s also an app for Android and iOS, though you can just as well use a mobile browser.

Well the half-good news is, judging by Palantir’s track record of managing large public projects elsewhere, that project is bound to bankrupt the US once and for all so people can build something new. The bad news is, it’s probably only going to happen late within the first fifteen years of the ‘two-year’ contract.

The knowledge is still there, it’s just that the LLM has been instructed not to divulge it, and these instructions are often imperfect and can sometimes be circumvented accidentally or on purpose.

I know most people find it unrealistic that underpaid sweatshop-style manufacturing could ever be moved to the US, but considering the rate at which social safety nets, employee rights and unions are deconstructed, the idea might not be that far-fetched. Already many people work two or more jobs to make ends meet, jobs such as waiting are already grossly underpaid and borderline degrading in many cases, and people are still eager to do that work because the alternative would be for them and their families to go hungry or homeless. Who’s to say sewing cheap dresses 12-14 hours a day is such a bad pospect in comparison?

Well, Nvidia plans to move manufacturing to the US, and Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche has pledged a 50 billion investment in US facilities, so there are at least some ass-kissers.
What happens after these announcements remains to be seen.

and people like me are why Linux has even gotten to where it’s at today.

Not true. There are tons of nice developers out there. And I for one wouldn’t want to work in a team where an attitude like yours is prevalent.

You know, downcasting and/or insulting people just because they don’t live up to your personal standards is a pretty shitty thing to do.

To answer the question in the title: my money’s on an old white man with homophobic and misogynistic tendencies.

Apologies for butting in here, but this brings up an IMHO very important point:

The general public HAVE NO FUCKING CLUE that the Fediverse exists.

If I may be so bold as to add: …and they like it that way.

When it comes to online stuff, most people are lazy, very very ignorant and anywhere inbetween politely indifferent and openly hostile towards any attempt to educate them. They want to look at cat videos and pr0n, collect likes for their food pics and chat with their grandkids. The technology behind all that is a nuisance, not a tool.
By and large, I think those people can’t be helped, because they’re happy with the status quo. If anything, you’re the enemy for wanting to take away their beloved Tiktok and WhatsApp.

That means our largest efforts - self-hosting, the Fediverse, … will probably always be a bit of a parallel universe to the Internet at large.
This is sad for humanity in general, but it makes enshittification of those services both technically more difficult and (due to its small size and enshittification-resistant populace) less commercially viable.
And small doesn’t equal insignificant.

So what I’m saying is, we shouldn’t see the Fediverse etc. as a replacement for everything, but as a safe space for refugees. And that’s what it excels at.

I run my own mail server since sometime late last century, and it’s gotten progressively more difficult over the years. Not setting up the server, that part is easy. Hardening it is a bit more work. But what’s making it nearly impossible is the big players’ anti-spam (or should that be in quotes) measures.
My mail server checks all the boxes it should - TLS, SPF, DomainKeys, DMARC, a domain name that’s been around for decades, same hostname and IP address for years, never been on any block list, … yet still e-mails relayed by it are tagged as spam for increasingly ridiculous reasons: it’s a residential IP (actually it’s not), the PTR record doesn’t match the A/AAA record (yes, that server has multiple jobs and multiple host names - not that unusual), the domain name is suspicious (same owner and tech-c for decades, same IP and SPF records for years), … if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect that MS, Google etc. just use their spam filters to make life difficult for anyone outside their oligopoly. But that’s probably just beause I’m a cynic.

“Give a man a cleaning rag and he will stare at it helplessly. Give him a pressure washer and he will clean everything as far as the cable will reach.”

The other day a Swiss newspaper published a study that a temperature increase of 4°C would probably cost us (on average) about 40% of our wealth globally.
Mind you, that was a single study that had to make a lot of assumptions about the coming decades. But working with these ballpark figures and assuming the 40% hit will be distributed evenly, most middle-class people will probably manage somehow, though they definitely won’t be middle-class anymore by today’s standards. The rich will likely be inconvenienced (more indoor golf halls and huge water bill for the pool) but generally fine.
As for those just getting by somehow…

Good point, and I agree that the “it’s too late anyway” rhetoric was probably just an easy excuse, though it looks a lot like it’s actually too late now to stop or even reverse global warming.

This should of course not be an excuse to forgo damage control, but I think the situation has changed. Whether that encourages you to fight harder and try to save what’s left, or just give up and have fun while it lasts is entirely up to you…

I honestly have no idea. The one time I tried asking it a question, it asked me to log into my X account, which is about as far as I got.

I’ll say. I’d have expected him to be using Grok, not ChatGPT.

Home ACs are just wasteful.

I don’t know, ours eats 400-500W to cool the entire ground floor, which is a fraction of what the solar panels produce on a sunny day, and a fraction of the surplus energy we have no choice but to sell the utility company for a pittance.
In spring and autumn it can also heat the inside and has a COP of between 4 and 5 then, so much more efficient than a regular electric heater and probably more environmentally friendly than if the central heating would burn more oil - the circulation pump alone uses close to 400W.

Of course we could live without it (people have lived in the house without an A/C before), but it’s much more agreeable like this, not to mention that it allows us to use the winter garden as an office in summer, which has a great view over the garden and allows us to keep an eye on the dogs. There are many much less sensible ways to use that energy than the A/C.

Back to the battery, some EVs can be used as battery storage (vehicle to house, vehicle to grid or vehicle to load). Maybe one of those would make it more viable to have both an EV and storage space for your harvested sun? Not mavy EVs can do it at present, but it may pay to keep an eye on new models.

I don’t know if you’ve already heard of them or if they’re even available where you live, but if it’s the cold air that bugs you, there are water-cooled ceiling plates that work just as well as a conventional A/C. An office I used to work at had them and they were lovely. They cost quite a bit more though.

As an alternative if you just want to avoid feeding surplus energy into the grid, what about a battery of 5-20kWh? It could store more energy than the A/C uses during the day, probably costs about the same or less, and you can use that energy at night.