Does the US even have refinery capacity to make a cost difference for power customers like data centers

As others, my basic home lab NAS plans are grounding to a stop because of worsening prices. Next up, phones are going to be even more expensive. Video game console price increases again

I loved last.fm. Used it for like a decade until I stopped caring about logging every time I listened to something. Was real good at finding music I liked. I used to view it as a reflection of me and then I got older and stopped caring about public reflections of myself

It’s internet explorer vs Netscape navigator. Even Safari. Gemini gets pushed by Android phones. MS lost the smartphone OS war. Also lost TVs. Also lost home assistant speaker/mics. Microsoft and every other company without a major mobile OS under their unbrella is fighting a battle with a major handicap against Google

From my memories, the price of appliances haven’t changed much in the last couple of decades. They maintain or increase margins with cheaper parts, less QA, looser performance tolerances while keeping the same sticker price. Whatever the quality sacrifice equivalent word for shrinkflation

Most obvious thing to ever happen since ads being added to Instagram feeds. It’s a search engine replacement. It was going to end up with basic advertisments eventually. Then targeted advertisements. Then sponsored results as sneaky as they can be in the case of suggesting the best solution/product. Free open source models and stuff like proton and duckduckgo if you really want to use AI search engines

Practically everyone I’m friends with hates imperialism and colonialism but loves the benefits of visiting poor countries that were victims of imperialism/colonialism and feeling special because of the money they bring and the lack of developed domestic entertainment/art industries so that theirs and their countries artist/entertainers are way more competitive there

Everyone’s pretty hypocritical. People that get mad at other people for working for Google are extra and easily ignored. Damn all those Boeing and Airbus employees for working for huge military contractors. When a company gets big enough, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re lobbying for something terrible to benefit themselves.

I’m continuously confused how these standards don’t seem to apply to bank tellers, finance in general, large chain retail, fast food, large agriculture companies, fashion industry, film industry, music industry, alcohol, pharmaceutical, … etc

Some people fight the most inconsequential battles. If you work for JP Morgan Chase and someone gives you the cold shoulder or lectures you because so, ignore them. It’s such a small crowd that’s like that that it won’t change your lifestyle. It’s not like if you quit and struggled to find work and started to teeter on ruin that they’d be there for you. And someone like that probably fights so many small inconsequence battles that they’d be exhausting to be around anyways. And fighting such small inconsequential battles produces so little. Tagging, down with the oligarchy in a bathroom stall or sidewalk day to day. It’s small bubble activism

Besides myself being on Linux, I used to mix Linux and Windows since like 2010 but fully transitioned like 3 years ago, I’m still regularly using a laptop from 2016 as a zoom calls and internet browsing laptop. It gets too hot to have in my lap and the battery lasts like 30 minutes. That’s a dual core integrated graphics chip from 2016. Anyone with a discrete graphics card easily has a solid workstation PC. If you’re not gaming or your not doing something that really benefits from strong hardware, you’re good. No need to upgrade. If you’re not playing new AAA games at 4k maxed, you may be good. This is just same news as how people are holding onto their cell phones longer than before

If you don’t have an RSS feed with Puget, I’d recommend. They post a lot of benchmarks for practical uses. From data center to workstation. IT related software to stuff like Premiere Pro or Blender

Like the other person, in the west it’s being pushed as a Christian thing but it’s pretty indiscriminate. Heavily rural conservative Christian pastors, evangelicals, southern baptist, etc - really push the idea of Nigeria as some christian genocide thing to push fear in US christians and probably drive attendance and donations

These days it’s more about tradition nomadic groups vs the settled towns. Similar issues along the Sahel like in Sudan with the janjaweed groups in the past to today’s civil war. Nigeria has a significant problem with bandits and those pastoral nomads that come into heavy conflict with their staunch beliefs in their rights to have their animals graze as has been tradition for who knows how many thousands of years.

I think it’s to a degree recognized in law for pastoral rights for nomads but it’s pretty non-compatible with modern city/property rights society and they’re hyper aggressive to a point where it’s probably many taking advantage of historic rights to pretty much be bandits. Nigeria has an insanely complex web of different violent dissident groups throughout the country

Someday the evangelical Muslims may be the primary aggressor again in the future but today it seems to be the pastoral nomads and generic bandit groups. Boko Haram is way smaller than it was like 15 years ago. Maybe a backseat these days to the ISIS affiliate that’s spread around the surrounding countries substantially like if I recall correctly, Burkina Faso and Mali. ISIS in Nigeria isn’t to the degree as those two. Not even close yet. ISIS or Al Qaeda affiliates. Incredibly complex and hard to keep up with

It’ll be about as significant as chromeos so good for schools while professionaland enthusiast stuck working on them will do so by running regular Linux applications like you do on chromos. I’d say it’s a stronger plus for Linux desktops than Android. Google really can’t get out of their way with their NIH syndrome for desktops. Like 15 years of attempting to do desktop Linux but in a way users likely won’t use the Linux desktop designed and often free software. I’d love to see this introduce people to Digikam, Darktable, Krita, GIMP, Kdenlive at the expense of Google Photos and adobe apps

It’s certainly just going to end up being used as an advertising tool. Like the recent hype of trying to get people let AI do holiday shopping for them. Like the AI saw you opened paint, have you considered a subscription for Adobe cloud. You searched for cake recipes on Google and clicked links, why not sub to copilot+. It’ll have text to speech AI as well

It’s still worse than before. Really need to break mobile away from Google and Apple. Preferably as close to standard Linux as possible

1080p to 4k was a big improvement in my opinion. I still have a mix of 1080p and 4k equipment. 4k to 8k is real minor to me because 4k TVs are varying degrees of HDR now. Brightness range per zone/pixel and wider color gamut. 8K someday because someday the only TVs you should be buying for the price will be 4k but content picture quality, 4k with quality HDR brightness, contrast, color gamut - minor difference. Just need high quality sources. When I encode something, I use fairly high bitrate AV1. Another 5-7 years and I expect to be encoding everything new at AV2

This has been simmering for like 30 years it was just easy to ignore because US politics is like a spectator sport to feel good about your own country. Should be no surprise that white and/or Christian nationalism wouldn’t look much different in Europe

Chat control is definitely going to pass eventually in my lifetime. Resiliency for secure and private communications will continue to develop. Anonymity will be needed too. Right now our governments instead of trying to inspire patriotism through improving living standards for the masses are focusing on information and communication control

The Nobel peace prize has got to be one one of the most nonsense rewards in history. A prize legendary for giving it to warmongers and war lords

For those that don’t follow the going ons in Africa. Kagame is pretty much a dictator with western backing. Rwanda funds rebel groups in neighboring countries that happen to staff a lot of well armed, trained, uniformed “rebels.” These rebel groups happen to rapidly take mineral rich regions and adjacent cities. Those minerals then manage to make it to Europe and the US. African countries that oppose Rwandan expansion happen to be treated as examples of despotic regimes in Africa that need to be sanctioned

They pretty much do the same thing as Israel where they use the military and financial support of western countries to pilliage neighbors to build up tourist attractions and market themselves as the beacon of democracy in Africa

edit: I still want to clarify that although almost every historical post-1950 dictator/genocidal despot in Africa pretty got their start as a puppet of Europeans, the politics extends much more than just Europeans playing the great game in Africa. Like the whole Ethiopia-Eritrea-Somalia conflict exists regardless of Europe. Al Shabbab and other rebel groups in Nigeria exist regardless of Europe. Sudan though - that’s a very multifaceted proxy war involving western Europe, Russia, USA, Saudia Arabia, Egypt, UAE, …

The whole Francophone Africa is currently exiting the trainwreck era of French dominance and racing towards another trainwreck

Regardless what happens in the future, maybe this time we won’t fool ourselves into some more white savior nonsense and end up setting whole regions back another century by playing kingmaker for another resource puppet king

You can buy the cheapest brand and run a different OS than the companies software. Like I have a TerraMaster NAS. Use what you want on it

At least 200 years of making everything worse. At least starting with Afghanistan/Durrani