matlag

Yep, that’s textbook big tech strategy: -Build up the hype -Get the product out there, make sure as many orgs and people start using it as possible. Make it free or sell at loss if necessary -Oh yes, we broke a few laws for this. If we don’t get a waiver, we’ll have to close the service for everyone, do you realize the impact?

That’s Facebook on privacy, Uber on workers rights, etc. Now N+1th: OpenAI on copyright.

In these companies, does anyone check the licenses in details to make sure using them is ok for the company?

Meta will get at least the metadata: meaning they will record who was in which call connecting from where.

For example, if one member is visiting a client, Meta may be able to infer the relation between the 2 companies.

If any of the people in the room click “report”, then the discussion is sent for review without the encryption protection

I’m pretty sure their user agreement translates to “you agree to let us do whatever the f*ck we want with the data you’re purposely disclosing to us”.

And last but not least: if Meta decides to wipe the archives, any info get lost?

There a reasons large companies ban unauthorized apps to talk about work.

XMPP is so bad it was the baseline for Whatsapp. You know: that minor platform that feels like IRC and never took off. A lot of the techno around you are old stuff that evolved, “new” techno usually comes with new unexpected issues. Then they mature, get better and… old?

That’s why you get “don’t put living animals in the microwave oven” in the instructions.

If Tesla didn’t explicitely wrote “don’t put your f***ing finger in the way on purpose after multiple attempts to close it!” he may have a chance.

He will plead a trauma from the loss of trust in his beloved car brand and the credibility damage on his Youtube channel and ask for M$.

The flowers were delivered by Doordash The victim arrived in an Uber ambulance.

The part-time doctor (student) mentioned that the hospital’s rooms are now managed by Airbnb.

250$ of tips were collected along the process, but now it’s not clear who pocketed them.

I’m sorry if that’s harsh, but my feedback would be: drop that chart!

It’s daunting, it’s going to freak out many newbies. Too much choice kills the choice.

You have one “default” at the bottom, Mint, so stick to that. Tell the newbies they can switch anytime to something else once they’re a bit more comfortable with the Linux-world. And if I’m not mistaken, you can install and try the main DEs with Mint also. Or you can recommend Ubuntu, or any other newbie friendly distro. Just pick one and don’t lose them over what they could see as an important difficult decision before they even get started.

Mozilla downsizes as it refocuses on Firefox and AI drops multiple products and layoff 60 so that its current budget can accomodate the stratospheric compensation of its new CEO.

What’s interesting here is they no longer need to hack and crack devices through loopholes and backdoors schemes.

All the data they need are already collected by private corporations with the pro-active collaboratron of the users themselves (“Click here to agree to the terms and conditions”).

Assume the communication with the app it through Internet. The car must have a 4G chip (too early to see 5G in cars, I think?). So no matter what you pay, it won’t work when 4G is retired. With marketing pushing to get new standards always faster, 4G may not last another 20years.

Anyway, bear in mind that once you subscribe, they will most likely collect detailed data about how you use the features and sell that as well…

Nuclear plants consist mainly of a shitton of concrete (and only the best sort is good enough). The production of that concrete causes a terrible amount of carbon emissions upfront.

Actually, if you compare them to solar or wind at equivalent service, it’s not that straightforward:

Renewables installed capacity is nowhere close to their actual production, nuclear can produce its nominal capacity in a very steady way.

Wind turbines also need a lot of concrete, and much more metal for equivalent output. Solar panels need a lot of metals.

Renewables need a backup source to manage their intermittency. It’s most often batteries and fossil plants these days. I don’t think I need to comment on fossil plants, but batteries production also has a very significant carbon emission budget, and is most often not included in comparisons. Besides, you need to charge the batteries, that’s even more capacity required to get on par with the nuclear plant.

With all of these in consideration, IPCC includes nuclear power along with solar and wind as a way to reduce energy emissions.

Don’t know if that covers your need, but at least their angle is privacy:

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

Not going to happen. They charge such an insanely high premium vs real cost for a very primitive messaging system, they’re not letting that go!

For example:

https://farm.bot/

There are others. Plenty of small/medium businesses just don’t have the resources to develop small computers and the matching software stack. In that regards, the RPi is an appealing choice.

Inflation reduces the value of money at the bank: the money saved as well as the money borrowed.

In an ideal world, wages are indexed on inflation (way of calculating inflation in this context can be discussed), and inflation is kept above present targets levels (central banks try to keep it at 2% these days).

That makes your debts easier to reimburse, and limits returns on savings. Have you ever noticed that people who keep talking about the “value of work” actually push for low wages and no or low taxes on capital gains, so actually wants the capital to make more money than work?

A low inflation allows big money to hoard more and more. Higher inflation means money that’s not actively contributing to the economy will lose its value over time, and that’s exactly what you, at the bottom of the ladder, want (and considering top of the ladder is hundreds of billions of $, ever 6 figures employees are bottom of the ladder).

Too high inflation leads to an uncontrolled spiral. Deflation is also very bad (no investment will ever happen if your money just appreciate by doing nothing). But the 2% target is not to protect you. It’s made for money to make more money.

But about the link between wages and inflation: what we have today is a situation where we let cost of life dramatically outpace wage growth. So where did the inflation come from? Profits! That needs to be rebalanced.

From 1945 to the early 80’s (before the €), France and some other countries minmum wages were indexed on inflation. If doing so would instantly crash an economy, we would have noticed…

“Collapse” meaning what, exactly? Do you mean run out of storage from the volume of content, or that processing all the messages is too taxing?

Years back, I setup a Synapse’s server on my personal server (Yunohost). At some point, I joined the “big” Matrix room. Bad idea: RAM and CPU usage went through the roof. I had to kill the server but even that took forever as the system was struggling with the load.

But don’t just take my words for it:

https://github.com/matrix-org/synapse/issues/7339

Last comment is from less than one year ago. I was told things should be better with newer servers (Dendrite, Conduit, etc.), but I’ve not tried these yet. They’re still in development.

How does it scale differently than Matrix?

The Matrix protocol is a replication system: your server will have to process all events in the room one or more users attend(s) to. There is a benefit to this: you can’t shut down a room by shutting down any server: all the other ones are just as “primary” as the original. Drawback: your humble personal server is now on the hook.

XMPP rooms are more conventional: a room is located on one server. That’s an “old” model, but it scales.

https://www.ejabberd.im/benchmark/index.html

That’s for the host. For other attendees, it’s much lower.

I don’t think I atteld any public room out there with 3k users, so I can’t report my first hand experience, this is the best I found. But I never had to check for load issue on a small server (running Metronome and many more services).

Out of curiosity, why do you say this?

I don’t use the Fediverse the way I engage with individual people. If I want a closer relation with someone, I don’t want to be bound to yet-another-messenging system, let alone on multiple accounts

And another reason is I may not want to be bothered by people I don’t know, regardless how much I could appreciate reading and/or exchanging with them in the Fediverse.

Ignoring or declining requests from strangers can leave a lot to interpretation and then frustration. Remove the button and no one is tempted to press it the be disappointed with the outcome. Less drama.

And that’s only considering well intended people.

But these are my humble 2cents.

French here. If you learn in Belgium or Switzerland, they have “septante” and “nonante” for 70 and 90.

It’s for sure more intuitive, but you have to admit that saying “four-twenty-twelve” (non-french speakers: that’s literal translation for 92) is sooooo cool!

What I don’t like with Matrix is the load it puts on the server. It basically copies 100% of a room content to any server having one or more users registered in the room.

So if you’re on a small server, and one user decides to join a 10k+ large room, your server may collapse under the load as it tries to stay in sync with the room’s activity. This is deterrent to self-hosting or family/club/small party servers.

XMPP, on the other hand, has proven to be highly scalable, has E2EE, federation and some bridging services.

The only thing XMPP does NOT have is a single reference multiplatform client with all basic features for 2023 (1:1 chat, chat rooms, voice/video 1:1, and voice/video conference) than anyone can use without wondering if the features-set is the same as the persons you’re talking to.

And while we’re there: I’m not even sure I want a messaging account linked to any of my Fediverse accounts…

Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!

All bills targeting your freedom are labelled “child porn” or “terrorism”.

After terrorists attack in France, state of emergency was declared, special powers to restrainesuspicious powers at home. We MUST protect people frometerrorists, right? If you’re against that, which side are you on? Very first usage of the power: restrain non-violent eco-activists to their home so that they don’t disturb the COP.

That pattern repeats over and over. They’re counting on you being sensitive to “child porn”, I bet you the initial list will include “eco-terrorists” sites (label used on anyone attending a climate protest they tried to prevent), political activists sites (you try to be anonymous on Internet? That’s SO suspicious!).

I’m sorry for what happened to you, but ri seriously doubt this bill is really intended to prevent that.

I wouldn’t set expectations too high though: for the retirement bill, there were many protests, millions of people in the streets, all surveys showing a very strong reject by the people, and the reaction was basically: “I got elected, I do whatever the f**k I want!”.

Short of a revolution, nothing can change their mind. I’d rather push other parties to include this in their program for the next elections: repel this absurdity.