matlag

You should be more undersantding. Since Trump is now enraged because people call Musk the President, Musk needs to find a backup country where he’ll be called the leader before Trump kicks him out. That’s all just risk mitigation!

If these tracks are in the US, so I am. So I shoot the other guy with the gun(s) I usually carry around when I go out and then pull the lever.

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?

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$.

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”).

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.

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.

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…

Could we define a trade-off system? Classic broadcasting can take way too long to send out a large catalog. Streaming is, as you say, a heavy resources consuming system.

So how about a combo of a box or a software that can follow a broadcast N times faster than human, and broadcast N movies/series episodes a day? The application let you pick what you’d like to get on your box/app, and then it’s like classic video recording, but on steroids.

It would be like live-streaming, but at 2, 3, 10 times the normal speed. No human needs to follow that.

Of course, you still have the issue of glitches, communication interruption, but we’ve dealt with those for years, and there are certainly ways to indeed stream the missing parts, or use rediffusion.

You read it first here. I’m off to file for a patent and make billions (or not…)

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.

I don’t know who, in his sane mind, can claim there will never be periods of time with no sun and no wind at the same time. https://notrickszone.com/2022/12/07/plunging-towards-darkness-germany-sees-week-long-wind-sun-lull-as-energy-supply-dwindles/

You need a pilotable generator matching renewables. You can’t do without it. The only question is how much of it you need to plan. Existing approaches are storage: batteries, hydro where it’s possible (you pump the water up a dam to store back energy) and backup generators: coal, gas, and in some future plans, hydrogen.

None of these is a perfect solution (well, nothing is a perfect solution).

• Hydro: that’s the ideal, but obviously, you need a very large body of water, and heavy construction. But it ends up being a very clean energy with long lifetime.
• Batteries: lifetime considerably reduced, requires very large amount of precious minerals (today, car industry assume they’ll get ~100% of lithium extracted, aeronautic assumes they’ll get as much as they need without counting, and then you have the energy sector counting on very large quantities as well ; there won’t be enough we can extract for everyone, and lithium mines are all but clean).
• Backup generators: no need to comment on fossil fuel, but hydrogen has a big issue: it is very inefficient, ~30%. So if you need it 10% of the time, you need to plan 30% more capacity of renewable, and that’s assuming you can pilot it all the way from total shutdown to 100% capacity, probably very optimistic. You will need to have it running at some minimum levels, that’s even more renewables you need to keep it running.

It is not completely true that nuclear needs to run at fixed level. Depending on their design, some plants are pilotable and some are not. But I don’t think (I’ll be happily corrected if needed) any had the flexibility you need to be used with renewable (quick large variations).

So the ideal mix is, IMHO, a baseline provided by nuclear, and a mix of renewable and complements to produce the difference.

Bonus: there is a “method” promoted by some (ignorant) politics they call “proliferation” (“foisonnement”, not sure I’m translating that the best). This is utter BS…

The idea is there will always be sun or wind somewhere in a super-grid spreading through Europe. If you think about it for 1 minute, that means that small part of Europe where there is wind will power, for a more or less short time, a large portion of the whole Europe?? Not only is that totally insane from the capacity point of view, but it also completely neglects the grid’s stability and electricity transportation issue. It is very difficult to transport electricity over very large distances without disturbing the grid. Ask Germany, they spend massively on infrastructures right now without counting on proliferation. That would raise the requirements further…

Ok, so obviously, you’re not well aware of how the new European open market works, and why France ended up paying part of consumer’s bills.

France uses to have a state-owned company, EDF, producing and distributing electricity in France. EDF had a monopole. France had the cheapest electricity of Europe, and EDF was profitable. Sink that in, when you say nuclear is expensive:

EDF was delivering the cheapest electricity of Europe and was profitable.

A decision from the European Union was taken to force all members to switch to an open market. French government at the time was conservative, so they happily went along with it. Everyone “knows” that private sector always does better than whatever has “public” or “state” in its description.

But how would you introduce competition when virtually no one else produces any electricity? How to kickstart it? That’s where bright people went very very creative.

Production and distribution of electricity was split as separate activities. EDF spinned off the distribution part of its work. In parallel, a quota of nuclear production was allocated to new companies, “electricity suppliers”, so that they got something to sell at an affordable price.

That’s where it starts to be interesting: to guarantee a margin to electricity suppliers, so that they would make enough money to invest in production, the daily price of electricity on the market is set to the marginal cost of the most expensive power plant that’s turned on. Do you follow me? If today, 99% of electricity is coming from a nuclear power plant, but you need to start a coal power plant to provide the last 1%, all 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the coal power plant! I am not kidding, I am not making that shit up!

Why prices exploded since last year? Well, you’ve heard about gas prices, right? Every day a gas power plan is turned on with gas prices through the roof, 100% of the electricity that day is billed at the cost of the gas power plant. That’s why France started subsidizing the consumers bills, because most of them could not afford a x6, 7, 10 on their electricity bills.

But at least, we do have competition now, don’t we? Well… not on the production side…

No condition on investment was given to the electricity supplier. Read that again. Guess what happened. Electricity suppliers were buying most of their electricity at a cheap regulated cost from EDF and selling it with a big profit to consumers, all while producing nothing themselves. Why would they?? Money is trickling down to them for free!

Even better: as they were more competitive than EDF, thanks to having 0 maintenance and 0 investment to make, and cheap electricity to resell, their customers base grew. Then they found out that they were not getting enough cheap electricity, and they faced a dilemma: buy a larger share of electricity from other real producers, that would have increased their cost, or cap their customers base (or of course, invest in production, but who wants to do that, right?).

They did neither of these. They pleaded to the current government to get MORE cheap electricity from EDF. And the government did that: forced EDF to allocate more of its cheap nuclear electricity to them, increasing the quota. Needless to say that if EDF needed more electricity for their own customers, they were answered that they could buy the more expensive electricity from outside, or invest in more capacity. Makes sense, right? The exact opposite of what the system was supposed to do.

Now, the very best part: when gas price exploded, even the small fraction of electricity bought by the electricity suppliers impacted their cost. It was unacceptable to them. So they raised their rate to be above EDF, or even outright cancelled contracts with their customers, so that customers would go back to EDF (EDF cannot refuse contracts, and is not allowed to adjust its own rates). But… electricity suppliers do not have to give up on their quota from EDF… so…

EDF had to buy back the electricity EDF produces, to companies producing nothing, at the rate of the market, of course, not the rate at which EDF is forced to sell that electricity to these companies. So it’s even better now. EDF sells them electricity (which is a virtual sale, electricity still goes from EDF plants to households like it did before). These companies sell it back to EDF with a big margin. Dream business, isn’t it?

So France does not subsidize bills because nuclear is too expensive.

France literally subsidizes a scam scheme, in which most of the money going to parasitic companies producing nothing.

Actually, in a nuclear power plan, except the tank itself (not sure I’m translating “cuve” properly, every part can be upgraded.

“Lifetime exceeded” in a nuclear reactor is a misleading statement. The truth is we don’t know how long they can last. We know some minimum lifetimes only, by being cautious.

Example: you build the first plants, and you “slap” them with a 40 years lifetime. Why 40 years? Because we have enough records and historical data to back the structure and materials with enough confidence they will last 40 years at least. Beyond 40 years, we start venturing in uncertainty. That doesn’t mean we even trust the 40 years. Every 10 years, a power plant is getting fully audited to get an authorization to run for the next 10 years (and there are less deep regular audits as well).

Later, with more data, and more reference, you can establish that the structure and material have proven to have an even longer lifetime, and you can extend it (50, 60 years). It may come with extra-conditions, though. But there is a certain confidence that with the proper funding, France could keep its plants up and running for a lot longer than the initial 40 years.

Ironically, France shutdown the oldest reactors that just had received the very latest upgrade, making it also the most modern reactors in service.