Case in point, Microsoft’s water use shot up from 6.4 million cubic meters in 2022 to 7.8 in 2023, in large part due to the “construction of more data centers.”

By way of comparison, the California almond industry uses 3.5 billion cubic meters of water per year. Describing datacenters as using “astronomical amounts of water” is a plain and simple lie.

Moreover, datacenters can be cooled with water that’s not suitable for most other uses. Google’s Finland datacenter is cooled with seawater, for example.

Zuckerberg has a moral defect. Evil is not a medical problem.

I trust my city government a hell of a lot more than I trust the incoming federal administration.

If it’s unified under the federal government, then an asshole president can mess with it.

If it’s distributed, with states and major cities having their own instances, then it’s more asshole-resistant.

Try text.

Even in a home poker game, it is not possible for all the players to go home having made a profit, whereas that is very possible in the stock market due to growth, labor, and natural resources.

(The coal miner who gets a wage and black lung is not a player in the stock market. Neither is the sun, which provides free energy to agribusiness.)

In gambling, the house always wins, by extracting value from the players. In stock trading, the players (capitalists) collectively always win, by extracting value from labor, technological growth, and natural resources. These are not the same picture.

Sure, you can take on as much risk as you like using derivatives, and emulate a gambler using the stock market as a source of randomness (volatility). But that’s not how most traders behave, and it’s not how most traders’ payoffs work.

As the article mentions, Red Hat is IBM.

For what it’s worth, getting in the habit of making excuses for one’s use is part of alcoholism.

SLS and Yggdrasil came out in '92; Slackware in '93; Red Hat in '95.

The Debian project started in '93, but the first stable release wasn’t until '96, along with Linux kernel version 2.0.

Ubuntu didn’t come along until 2004.

So you’re into sending the police after the writers, directors, and producers of the Saw movies, but not the audiences?

I dunno man, that’s still too fascist for my tastes, but you can keep fantasizing about it. I promise I won’t try to send the police after you for your perverted fantasies of state power.

I hate torture-porn movies like the Saw series, but a lot of people are fans of them. Should I worry that those people are likely to commit kidnapping, torture, and murder? Should I advocate that the makers or watchers of those movies be investigated for kidnapping, torture, and murder — without any evidence that a crime was committed?

We don’t send the cops after people for liking murder stories, theft stories, industrial sabotage stories, or treason stories. We shouldn’t send the cops after people for liking stories of Harry Potter getting fucked by Severus Snape either.

I think you should be more careful to distinguish fantasy from reality. Most fiction readers and writers have no problem doing so.

I’m just saying, police investigation of fiction creators and readers for the content of their fiction is way over the line of a lot of social and political norms.

(Also, I think you’ll find that police abuse children a lot more than pervy fiction fans do; so really, who should be investigating whom? Investigation into crime is supposed to start with evidence that a crime actually occurred — not with your personal disgust towards someone’s reading matter.)

Just to be clear, are you saying that people should be investigated by the police for fictional stories that they read?

Gotta admit, I originally wrote “old farts” and “young shits”, and decided that was too rude.

Federated platforms don’t die to corporate-type enshittification. They die to spam or elitism.

If operators fail to collaborate on keeping spam down, the platform becomes unusable or greatly-diminished due to spam. See Usenet for example — yes, it’s still around, but it’s greatly diminished from the 1990s. New projects and organizations don’t tell participants to subscribe to a Usenet newsgroup for discussion. (Curiously, email mailing-lists have outlived Usenet in this way, at least for technical projects. While email is federated, any given mailing-list is centralized.)

If the technology isn’t developed with an eye to new users’ needs and new use cases, because it’s “good enough” for the existing established users, the platform becomes dated and gets replaced by something trendy and corporate. This is IRC vs. Discord and Slack. IRC has a higher barrier to entry and infamously doesn’t work well on mobile — but it’s good enough for the old farts who care about it, while the young farts move to Discord instead.

In the future, all Windows apps will be part of Windows App.

Fun fact: While mudita is Pali for “vicarious joy”, it’s also Spanish for “little mute girl”.

If your kids’ school laptops are surveilled, they’re surveilled by someone. Let’s call that someone Joe. Joe is a person who took a low-paying job that lets him surveil your kids. Joe likes his job, because he gets to surveil your kids. He gets to turn on the camera and look in your kids’ room. He gets to read the chat messages your kids send to their classmates.

Your kids would be better off without Joe in their lives. Joe is not a source of security. Joe is not protecting your kids; Joe is a threat to them.

“A story shared by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, uncovered that the current leaders of Signal, an allegedly ‘secure’ messaging app, are activists used by the US state department for regime change abroad,” Durov wrote on his own Telegram channel.

In fact, the folks running Signal — notably Moxie Marlinspike and Meredith Whittaker — have a long history of effective security & privacy activism. Whittaker was one of the organizers of the Google Walkouts, one of the more effective pieces of tech worker activism in recent history. And Moxie has bumped heads with the US intelligence community more than once, and famously with the Saudis too.