If they don’t respect the law or the will of the people when they put the god forsaken thing up, why are we beholden to the law and the will of the shareholders when we insist that doing it in spite of us is a Bad Idea?

Shoelaces have a “proper” knot while headphones do not. If we were tying our shoes into the abominations I pull out of my pocket, maybe that’d play out differently.

If you want to use it for fun, someone suggested a Luanti server, and you can also find a lot of really easy to set up game servers using a tool like LinuxGSM. Most games they support require very minimal configuration if any.

If you want to use it for something educational, depending on the age range of the kids, you might be able to use it to teach computing skills. For example, you could set it up as a pubnix/tilde where kids can get shell access, basically a remote connection to the command line, and you or someone can set up some services for them. Pubnixes tend to provide things like chat over IRC, something like a forum maybe over something a lot like Usenet, a webserver where users can host their own webpage they had to design themselves, less commonly but good for the kids would be voice chat with something like Mumble, they often have an array of programming tools, collaborative tools like calendars or something akin to Google Docs… It could be a good place for technically inclined kids to learn about computers, servers, Linux, programming, basic web development, etc. All the services could be kept internal to keep strangers away from the kids, maybe remote access strictly through accounts only given in person to members. If you’re interested in something like that, I might be able to help. Feel free to DM me or check out the Tildeverse to get an idea of what sort of things tildes and pubnixes offer their users.

Don’t worry, with all these data centers going up, they’ll have enough hardware power to track the rest of us, too, not just the women.

I never really had any issues with mine. I did have it die after about two years when it just stopped charging and/or turning on, never was quite sure where the issue was. But I bought it refurbished and on a steep discount, so I felt I got my money’s worth out of it at least and that that was just an inherent risk of cheap refurbished tech. My only real complaint was that it managed the battery really poorly when I tried to put Linux on it, but it ended up being useful to keep one Windows machine around for the occasional one off use, so even that worked out for me in the long run. As someone who’d prefer to run Linux on everything I can, I have to admit I had like zero problems with it until it died.

But if I had to use one with Windows 11 on it, I’d rather learn to live on my smartphone.

I used one in school a couple years ago, and I can’t deny it was pretty great for it. I like to handwrite my notes, and any math-heavy assignments are way easier to just handwrite, so I used it so all my notes and homework and textbooks could be saved digitally and automatically get backed up to cloud storage. I still use it occasionally as a super light and portable laptop occasionally, but I use a desktop far more often these days.

GOG is strictly anti-DRM, so you’ll never get Denuvo-enable games there. You miiiiiight get them after Denuvo gets pulled out since that often happens after… 6 months? A year or two? But the sort of publisher that wants Denuvo included is probably the same kind to refuse a totally DRM-free release.

Yeah, a much smaller heat source will produce a much smaller heat bubble. 100 MW is an amount of power that’s difficult to comprehend. A home in the US consumes an average of ~11 MW in an entire year. Every single hour that a 100 MW data center operates, it consumes enough power for a little over 9 homes to run ALL YEAR. Every single day, enough power for almost 225 homes to run for a YEAR. The heat output of a data center is orders of magnitude higher than a parking lot.

I said over 90% because I couldn’t remember the correct figure. I wanted to be as accurate as I could be with full confidence. If you think something I said was inaccurate, feel free to correct me, but so far, it looks like I was right but could have been more precise if I’d wanted to spend even more time fact checking.

I mean I’m sure they’d like to just ship safe code in the first place. But if that’s not their expertise and they demonstrate that repeatedly, we gotta take steps ourselves. Secure is obviously best, but I’d rather have insecure Jellyfin behind a VPN than no Jellyfin at all.

No, it’ll all happen inside the data center. The problem with that is computers hate all that heat, so they pipe it all away and dump it outside to the best of their ability. The data center may not be 6 miles wide, but then the wind starts blowing the heat around. Hell, even on a perfectly still day, heat would radiate out. They’re making enough heat to keep every single home in a city of 500,000+ people comfortable in winter, so it’s either that or the data center turns into the world’s largest oven.

My understanding is that some tiny portion, like 1-2%, is actually used in a meaningful way to do calculations to do what you want, but that could incorrect. Or it may be that that tiny portion still inevitably turns to heat, just indirectly somehow. I’m not sure, though, you could be right.

Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that’s equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.

Edit: and keep in mind, that’s HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that’s heating for over 600,000 people.

True, but unless that new group is willing to step up and invest in physical device production to directly compete, I don’t think it’s going to be the same. The type of people buying a dedicated NAS with a custom OS are looking for as close to a plug and play solution ad they can get. They’re less inclined to reinstall the OS on their new NAS, and the market is probably going to favor the now proprietary version TrueNAS sells, especially if they take steps to make it difficult to replace the OS on their devices.

Yeah, no, they couldn’t do it to the kernel. But that’s not really the interesting part of their product. It’s all the software that they as a company hold the copyright to. If they solely hold copyright on all their own code or if they have permission to relicense from their contributors, they can take any or all of their products closed source, and when I say “their products” I specifically mean the things they as a company produce, which they built on top of open source projects that they don’t control.

This probably doesn’t apply to TrueNAS, but technically, it’s possible to close a GPL project. You’d need the permission of every last contributor to relicense their code, or they’d have to rewrite all the code they can’t get relicensed (e.g., someone said no or already died), or they could do it if they never accepted any pull requests because they would then be the sole copyright holder and have the freedom to relicense at their whim.

I can’t vouch for TrueNAS, but most open source projects accept pull requests because free labor, whether they’re corporate projects or not, so I’d assume they can’t freely relicense without a hell of a headache, so yeah, it’s probably staying open for the foreseeable future.

Yeah, some of us really don’t want our home PCs directly contributing to the surveillance state, and we sure as hell don’t appreciate pre-compliance to the demands of increasingly fascistic states.

That’s better, at least. GrapheneOS users should be fine at least since there are extensive restrictions on Play. Other Android ROMs may have issues, though. Maybe not if they use MicroG.

GrapheneOS is built on AOSP, which is where the change is being made. Graphene and other custom ROMs will need to maintain a fork that cuts out the feature if they want to avoid. Google is also starting to close off Android to make that more difficult, so it’ll become a genuine project to maintain the fork well.

Pretty sure it’s a change to AOSP, the basis for every single Android ROM in existence.