matlag

So you admit that Israel just carried out a terrorist attack in Lebanon? Or is bombing and killing citizens is terrorism when “they” do it, not when “we” do it?

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?

You wish. Orban controls all the media there now. You can be sure the narrative is “Ukraine is just punishing them unfairly for calling for a ceasefire and negociations” or anothe nice story that will make them look bad.

Alternative answer: "We understand your issue and will fix it as time and priorities allow. Please note that customers paying for support always get higher priority. Given MS contributions to the project, this ticket was ranked 42nd in our priority list.

Have a pleasant day! FFMPEG support team"

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.

In theory, yes, you could make a mess, and any firmware is supposed to be certified to allow the device to be used.

In practice, this has been a convenient excuse to keep a whole chip with a separate OS in every smartphone, and it is very difficult to isolate from the rest of the system (see Graphene OS efforts).

I say all firmware should be opensource. Whether you’re allowed to change them or not is a separate question… for now.

Half of the job is to fix issues with existing suff, the other half is to make working stuff more complicated and problematic (aka “upgrade”), so that we’re still paid to do the first half.

I kind of hope it’s real. Down that path at some point they’ll decide the whole Internet and all modern technologies are satanist and leave Internet for good. They can embrace the Amish lifestyle, it’s a win for the rest of us.

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

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

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.

“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.

I think it’s worse than that. We humans are inherently selfish and self-preserving.

People who live far away from any coal mines do not feel threatened by coal, because it will not impact them directly (besides fu**ing up the planet, of course, but that’s another issue humans have with big pictures and long term effect correlation to present small scale actions).

But most people can’t tell where a nuclear plant can be built, so it could be close enough to expose them to a risk of disaster?

Therefore: “Nuclear is more dangerous than coal (for my personal case)”

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…

10 years from now, you might be in a situation where the grid is unstable and capacity is insufficient in front of demand. You will also be facing potential renewal of existing solar panels, wind farms, batteries storage, etc.

If you lack capacity, any attempt at industry relocation locally will be a pipe-dream.

And at that time, you’ll say either “it’s too late to rely on nuclear now” or “fortunately we’re about to get these new power plants running”. You’re not building any nuclear power plan for immediate needs, you’re building for the next decades.

Meanwhile, one country will be ready to take on “clean production” and be very attractive to industrial projects because it already planned all of that years ago and companies will be able to claim “green manufacturing”. That country is… China!

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!

Besides panicking a few regional managers, this can only be a bad news for Meta if other countries, or even better, the EU follows them.

100kUSD/day for a 5.4M inhabitants country, that scales to 8.3M$/day for the total 450M inhabitants EU has (yes: I know that’s not how it works, I’m doing a very gross approximation here).

That’s would be 3B$/year. Now we’re talking!

Good Post overall, no need to attack my sanity though :-)

I was not targeting you, rather the idea itself. But it came out terrible and there are definitely better way to express an opinion. So my apologies for that one!

Any sources on any of that? That’s a lot of „you just know that“ information, and I do consider myself well informed. I am not from France though.

Hmm… sources, yes. In something that’s not in French is a tad more difficult, but I found these:

https://www.enerdata.net/publications/daily-energy-news/france-mandates-edf-sell-100-twh-power-under-arenh-scheme-2023.html https://www.reuters.com/article/france-electricity-regulator-idUSL8N1PR6H5

I found that one about EDF regaining customers, losing money in 2022. It includes an addendum: the quota it has to sell was set back to 100TWh. But sorry, you’ll have to use a translation service… https://www.leprogres.fr/economie/2022/10/27/pourquoi-edf-gagne-des-abonnes-mais-perd-des-milliards

neither of those points addresses the costs of energy production I quoted above. Those are, to the best of my knowledge, approximately correct. It may very well have been that nuclear was competitive in the past, it isn’t anymore.

I am all but convinced any of this will last. Pressure on solar panel has increased, it is deeply connected to the semiconductor’s industry. In the coming decades, it will raise questions on water usage, minerals, etc.

Wind farms occupy very large surfaces, and they already compete with other usage of the land. Dismantling them is problematic too: a large body of concrete is left behind in the ground.

getting scammed by some middle man seems to be a fate that all modern democracies share, though who the middle man is varies country by country :-)

Unfortunately, can’t but agree, though it’s infuriating every time.

I consider the marginal cost thing to be one of the best acts from the EU. Maybe not in France, but overall it rewards the most efficient energy producer massively, which currently is solar. Those companies can use the excess money to reinvest.

They don’t reinvest (in France, I mean). They just cash the money. Keeping EDF as a state-owned monopoly has been working great for France for decades. The same model works great in Québec. There was no need to change it. EDF being state-owned, you can require it to invest in whatever you want: give it target on renewables, etc. What we have here instead is parasitic companies. Crushing majority of the production investment still comes from EDF, and their investment capacity is fading as their finances are gutted in the name of an “open market” ideology.