• 8 Posts
  • 305 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2023

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  • “Can’t share item,” was the header. “You cannot share this item because it has been flagged as inappropriate,” read the body text.

    FAFO.

    We’ve been fanfaring for a decade and a fucking half for people not to see “the cloud” as a miracle solution, and to use it carefully. We’ve been warning that it is a blatant invitation to vendor lock in, that it is singlehandedly creating oligopolies, and that exactly this would happen.

    Did people listen? No. Did they aggressively confront (or passive-aggressively ostracise) us? You bet your bottom dollar they did.

    And now? Now they come around with surprised_pika.gif faces and whine to whoever listens that they are victims, and that they couldn’t “possibly have seen this coming”.

    No. They are enablers of abusers, they themselves abused anyone with even a modicum of common sense, and they brought this upon themselves a thousand times over.

    FAFO. And at this point, reading such story fills me with the most powerful schadenfreude I have ever experienced.

    "Well well well if it isn't the consequences of my own actions" meme





  • 7heo@lemmy.mltoPrivacy@lemmy.mlYoutube is now unusable without a frontend
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    7 months ago

    This is the way. And I might add, Unix desktop. Let’s not start bikeshedding between FOSS Unix distributions out of dogmatic reasons (I’m sure you didn’t mean to specifically single out “Linux” here, but I wish we would stop opposing “Linux” and other Unixes like BSD, Illumos, etc).

    The point is, voting with your data for software that is defending your interests, and respecting your rights.

    Edit: Dang, I didn’t expect to get so much slack for “Unix as opposed to Unix-Like”. I absolutely meant “Unix-Like”, but my point is that it shouldn’t matter. Most software is trying to be compatible, these days, and Linux isn’t (in spite of all that marketing material) an OS. It is a kernel. So semantics for semantics, can it even be compared to something it is not? I merely tried to be inclusive.










  • 7heo@lemmy.mltoTechnology@lemmy.worldAmazon builds AI model to optimize packaging
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    7 months ago

    I think you’re overstating the compute power […]

    I don’t actually think so. A100 GPUs in server chassis have a 400 or 500W TDP depending on the configuration, and even if I’m assuming 400, with 4 per watercooled 1U chassis, a 47U rack with those would consume about 100kW with power supply efficiency and whatnot.

    Running those for a day only would be 2.4GWh.

    Now, I’m not assuming Amazon would own 100s of those racks at every DC, but they probably would use at least a couple of such racks to train their model (time is money, right?). And training them for a week with just two of those would be 35GWh, and I can only extrapolate from there.

    So I don’t think that going to TWh is such an overstatement.

    […] and understating the amount of cardboard Amazon uses

    That, very possibly.

    I have seldom used Amazon ever, maybe 5 times tops, and I can only remember two times. Those two times, I ordered a smartphone and a bunch of electronics supplies, and I don’t remember the packaging being excessive. But I know from plenty of memes that they regularly overdo it. That, coupled with the insane amount of shit people order online… And yes, I believe you are right on that one.

    Even so, as long as it is cardboard, or paper, and not plastic and glue, it isn’t a big ecological issue.

    However, that makes no difference to Amazon financially, cost is cost, and they only care about that.

    But let’s not pretend they are doing a good thing then. It is a cost effective measure for them, that ends up worsening the situation for everyone else, because the tradeoff is good economically, and terrible ecologically.

    If they wanted to do a good thing, they could use machine learning to optimise the combining of deliveries in the same area, to save on petrol, and by extension, pollution from their vehicles, but that would actually worsen the customer experience, and end up costing them more than it would save them, so that’s never gonna happen.


  • IMHO the issue is two folds:

    1. The makefile were never supposed to do more than determine which build tools to call (and how) for a given target. Meaning that in very many cases, makefile are abused to do way too much. I’d argue that you should try to keep your make targets only one line long. Anything bigger and you’re likely doing it wrong (and ought to move it in a shell script, that gets called from the makefile).
    2. It is really challenging to write portable makefiles. There’s BSD make and GNU make, and then there are different tools on different systems. Different dependencies. Different libs. Etc. Not easy.