No screenshots, but I had an old server with a pair of mirrored 8GB Seagates hosting a particularly specialized service on a very beefy and regularly maintained UPS and it had a server uptime of 21 years (had not been rebooted since somewhere around 1999) when I finally decommissioned it about 5 years ago, both disks would’ve been the same. It was on the public internet the whole time too, running Debian Slink with kernel 2.0.36, which had been awkwardly patched and rebuilt somehow to make the service (itself already obsolete at that time) actually work. I don’t know why I remember all this, but I do.

I do remember monitoring the SMART status at various points and the drive bearings must’ve been pretty cooked because those two drives were always running at 50-60C and I had a big old box fan pointed at the thing with the side panel off.

This example is also why I don’t always buy into the cult of “you must always regularly update all software immediately all the time”. Old software is not always bad software, same with old hardware. Sometimes it’s genuinely possible to have a bulletproof system. The problem is you never really know you do, until it either enters survivorship bias or becomes catastrophically proven otherwise. But you can make educated guesses, and if you’re going to naively assume that your old software must have exploitable security holes it seems equally naive to me to assume that updates must never have exploitable security holes. I think the risk calculus has to be done on a case-by-case basis.

I’ll answer your question first, but I have some issues with the framing you’re using around that question. The two other main methods of practical temperature management available to us are evaporative cooling and geothermal. Your body has a built-in evaporative cooling mechanism called sweat. Fans take advantage of this. But not everyone has equally effective bodies for this, not all climates are particularly effective for it (high humidity makes it extremely ineffective) and not everyone finds it comfortable for their situation. Swamp coolers are a different form of evaporative cooling that move the evaporation process onto a substrate which then cools things down with a fan. You can also find natural evaporative cooling working for you in many places, for example around large bodies of water. There is an externalized cost here if you’re trying to make evaporative cooling work in an environment that’s unsuitable for it, and the cost of fresh water is a significant line item on the energy budget too. Don’t neglect that by assuming evaporative cooling is a clear win that is automatically preferable to an air conditioner. All these evaporative solutions share the reality that they’re going to add (often very significant amounts of) humidity to the air. Air conditioning on the other hand can actually remove humidity from the air, and is one of the few practical methods of doing that. It’s solving the issue in a different way, but it’s a significant and important difference.

The other option is geothermal. This is genuinely underutilized today and I think we can certainly save a lot of energy budget by accessing stable and susprisingly comfortable temperatures underground basically year-round. Geothermal heat pumps (which use air conditioning technology) are by far the most practical way of doing this in our current situation, but older solutions involving buildings that are deeper in the ground or that have airflow going through the ground can provide access to this temperature too – with the caveat that you’ll often run into problems with water, flooding, or condensation/mold unless you’re in a particular sort of environment where this is not a concern.

As for the framing: You have to look at it systemically I think. We do a lot of things that seem dumb on the surface, and sometimes they are dumb, but more often they are making tradeoffs for particular reasons and a lot of times those turn out to be the right tradeoffs, there’s just a lot of complexity to the system that you’re glossing over. You can certainly argue those reasons, and try a different path, as long as you understand them first. Some of the reasons might be invalid or the tradeoff might not be the right trade, but I don’t see the benefit in making blanket value judgements without understanding what they are and why they’re happening. But I think you’ll find it more challenging than it seems to come up with a better solution in the long run.

What is your specific objection to air conditioners? Temperature is a huge line item on any energy budget, and it has to be managed somehow. There are few places on the planet where humans can live year-round without some form of temperature management, and quite often that requires energy. Firewood is not always a given and not perfectly sustainable at least the way we use it. An air conditioner is not propaganda it is a tool, and you have to figure out if it’s the right tool for the job but that’s never going to be a binary true/false. I think saying you’re “completely opposed” to them and calling them propaganda might be blinding yourself to what the actual goal is and what tools you can use to get there.

Using an air conditioner to live in a hot place is, at least as I understand it, still more energy efficient than using any kind of heater or even a heat pump (which is just an air conditioner in reverse) to live in a cold place, and hot places also have more readily available sources of other energy, typically, so this is not necessarily the wrong choice as transmitting energy long distances is not always a good call either. But you have to understand the tradeoffs you are making. This is why it might seem like propaganda, but it might just be that someone’s done the math and come out to this answer. If you are looking at different numbers, or missing some of those numbers, you might come to a different conclusion, but the air conditioner itself is not the problem, the disagreement in the numbers and the context you are putting those numbers is going to be the root cause you need to figure out.

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Not what OP is using obviously, but AMD X3D CPUs and Mac systems can be quite competitive for AI if you’re lacking VRAM. Not all CPUs struggle with inference, and some GPUs aren’t so hot at it either. GPUs are generally better, especially the really high-end ones, but throwing in low- and mid-range cards and high-end CPUs stuff starts to look somewhat muddier.

Yes, I don’t hate the technology, I hate all the evil companies abusing this technology for profit, fascism and death, which is very close to all of them.

But they are not the only ones working on the technology, and even though they have stolen many of people’s entire lives worth of work for making these models and not only didn’t compensate them, but in many cases replaced them and terminated their employment, in many cases we are stealing it right the fuck back from them and making it open to everybody, because fuck them. It doesn’t belong to them in the first place, it belongs to all of us. We can’t put the genie back in the lamp or the toothpaste back in the tube, but we can make sure we are keeping our own data for ourselves once we take these monstrous, bloated, oligarchs down. We will not the libraries of Alexandria burn down again, and we won’t let them have the only copies.

I won’t pretend I don’t have various issues with open weight models using this technology, but they’re more like “I don’t like systemd’s philosophy or developers” level of issues, not “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

With the evil companies, I absolutely DO have “I think they will destroy democracy, civilization and possibly all of humanity” level of issues.

I have no personal experience with that. It must be really nice.

I don’t think you grasp the sheer scale of humanity’s ongoing and relentless efforts to exceed even the most optimistic projections of any possibly sustainable boundaries, without any regard for anything beyond their completely myopic perception of their immediate needs in the present moment, but I do appreciate the context you’re providing.

It will be a miracle solution until the elevated water temperatures start affecting the ecosystem downstream and potentially the health of the river as a whole, if not the effectiveness of the system itself. Then people will realize that actually perhaps it wasn’t so miraculous after all, and like all engineering choices, is a compromise between what we’re getting from it and what we’re giving up. We could even point at the new algae problem in the reflecting pool as an example of such unintended consequences from heating the water above traditional norms. For some of the same reasons you shouldn’t dump raw sewage into the river, it’s not an infinite garbage disposal, it can’t just endlessly absorb your waste whether it’s domestic, biological or heat or anything else. You’re not getting rid of it, you’re just making it someone else’s, somewhere else’s problem, potentially at some other time. But maybe it’s a reasonable solution for right now, it might be better than the alternatives, maybe the tradeoffs are pretty minor or even legitimately ignorable when weighed against the benefits. But as long as we cling to the insane idea of endless, infinite economic growth, they’re only ignorable until it that growth makes it inevitable that someday they’re not, and calling it miraculous feels a lot like pretending there aren’t any downsides, and I don’t really like that in principle.

Yeah it’s really upsetting. Some of the most genuinely intelligent and insightful people I know have talked exactly like that (many still do), and I know they’re people because a) I’ve met some of them, and b) they were doing this before generative AI was a thing. Generative AI stole the natural styles and voices of our best and brightest and is wearing them like a fucking Edgar suit. It’s sick.

That’s fair, thanks for cleaning up the mess and sorry for being part of it.

Thanks for letting me and everyone else know you’re childish and stupid enough to be worth blocking.

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You do not need to rummage in about:config, there is literally a checkbox for it in settings. Maybe this was not the case when you tried it, I don’t know.

If you’re talking about Librewolf’s “resist fingerprinting”:

1. That is done for a very good reason (unfortunately, it’s not Librewolf’s fault that most websites are assholes and have found ways to uniquely identify every individual on every system)
2. You can very, very easily turn it off per-site, or browser-wide, or it has many configuration options in-between if it really bothers you that much.

Not personally. I prefer to run bare metal whenever possible. It helps me understand how everything connects, it’s the difference between being handed someone else’s completed Lego sculpture and building it yourself, it takes a lot longer but you’ll have way more appreciation for it after building it and a much more thorough understanding of how it’s all put together and what’s involved, and you’re a lot better equipped to fix it if a piece breaks off.

I self-host Nextcloud and use it extensively (if not primarily) for Calendar. All my calendars are hosted and synced with WebDav and I use a variety of clients but mainly Thunderbird desktop.

I use a single centralized database running directly on the host (postgres) and make it accessible to the docker clusters.

Pros: It’s all in one place to backup all important data for every service, I find this a much easier and more reliable way to backup all services, and I’m confident if you tried it you would too. The application data becomes a first-class citizen instead of hiding inside some nameless docker volume. Significantly less database overhead. Consistent database version and tools.

Cons: Lots. You need to manage and backup the database. You need to manage the database users and passwords too. Making the DB accessible to the docker clusters is nontrivial and can be fragile. You can no longer use the default “official” docker compose files, since they will almost never support an actual database service without several modifications, they’re always built for spinning up their own docker container database. So you’re going to be doing a bunch of work setting up users and passwords and performing extensive surgery on the docker-compose before you even start up the application, which adds a lot of friction, with lots of opportunity for error. All things considered, it’s actually quite painful. Technically if one application abuses your database hard enough and exhausts its memory to crash it or something it would affect other applications too, but that’s true of any services running on shared hardware abusing anything on that hardware, so it’s not a realistically concerning con.

I consider it worthwhile, but I might be wrong. Also I hate docker in general. I understand why people use it. It’s the same reason I use it. But I still hate it. I think system installations are so much easier to manage in the long run, but initially more work, and you need to invest that work at a time when you’re not even sure if you really want to run this application or if it’s going to be compatible with the rest of your environment. So docker is the easy solution. But then you’re basically trapped in dockerland. It’s not that bad, I just hate it in principle. I wish there were a better way.

If you have an option in the BIOS or drivers to set the battery charging threshhold to stop charging at 80% or possibly even lower (I believe Lithium Ion/Polymer cells are happiest at around 40-60% state of charge, which is why they are usually shipped that way). Sometimes this feature exists, but only vaguely described as “battery life optimization” or some similar wankery that they never properly explain.

You can also just remove the battery entirely if it will be always plugged in, but setting it to a low/modest maximum charge gives you a nice, reliable, built-in UPS in case of power interruptions.

This is FUD. Dell workstation class laptops are absolutely designed for running at full power with the lid closed (and for use with a docking station, in fact). That’s why it’s called a “workstation”. Business class laptops are a totally different beast than consumer-grade/“gaming” laptops. They are typically quite durable, quite tolerant, and quite repairable. Exceptions, obviously, exist, and we don’t know the exact model OP is talking about, but there’s no reason to assume they will have any issues running it as intended.

I run several old consumer grade laptops as light servers, permanently closed, and they’ve been perfectly fine for years.

i18n is definitely a real thing and it’s often even used as an abbreviation in repos, folder structures and filenames related to internationalization/translation, I don’t love it, but it is definitely in real world use. l10n is one I’ve seen before and is also a real thing, but much less common (and even less acceptable in my opinion). a11y is not one I’ve ever seen before.