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BrightCandle

@BrightCandle@lemmy.world

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BrightCandle ,

When I look at how much Nigel Farage has been platformed in the UK the press helped manufacture the consent for Brexit and the big far right swing that is coming with it. What were quite isolated social media views have become very mainstream and on the TV all the time. Society is now quite open about a lot of far right talking points. Social media is a part of the media landscape but it didn't make the far right figures popular that was all the traditional presses doing.

Even now they cover and platform Nigel Farage about 100x as much as they do any Green candidate, and yet the Greens hold more MP and council seats. Same with the Lib Dems who are bigger than Reform and yet the press is constantly platforming Reform. Its hard to look at traditional media and see anything but a big swing to the right in the last decade and they have led every step of the way.

BrightCandle ,

I feel like we need a better model. Reddits/Lemmys algorithm makes long conversations impossible and forums make long conversations dominate and this causes a lot of additional disruption. There has to be a design that meets a middle ground that can take over which better represents both the ephemeral nature of news and article discussion while also supporting a number of long standing more detailed discussions which expel low effort content.

BrightCandle ,

You only really get the choice between misinformed or uninformed, there is no option where you can be informed enough on the topics you need to know about.

While they are right that misinformation in social media is causing a lot of the problem I think misinformation in the press is also driving people to seek information in social media. You can't have governments and the press repeatedly proven to be lying and have the population accept that version of reality they push. What replaces it is a variety of conspiracy theories, some are just genuine conspiracies but definitely not in the mainstream press. This second aspect the research is consistently ignoring and it matters because its a large part of what is driving people to conspiracy theories. Fake news is not about Trumpnews or theonion its about the mainstream media however much they try to deflect from it.

Networking Gear Recommendations? (starting from scratch)

Hi, I hope its appropriate to ask this here, considering this is the most active community closest to this topic (Networking). I am moving places shortly and will need to start from scratch will all networking equipment. Including router and wifi-extenders. Am wondering what the general consencus is around networking gear, what...

BrightCandle ,

Ideally for your router you want something that runs an open source firmware (OpenWRT, DD-WRT, OPNSense, FreshTomato). Its better because you get a completely unlocked everything you need system with security patches for the hardware's true lifetime. Every router company stops with the security updates after a few years and then at some point it becomes part of a bot net or one of this mass hack events. Its best not to play in that game and instead run some open source firmware from the outset.

The best way to start is to look at the website for openwrt.org and use their filtering to find a device that supports your needs (at least 5 LAN ethernet ports I guess and some wifi but AC sounds like it will do). The other option is a more typical 4 LAN port router which will give you a lot more options and then add a switch to that, doesn't sound like you care too much about it being managed or >1gbps so they are also dirt cheap.

BrightCandle ,

Pretty much all technology goes through the same odd shape of adoption.

https://www.infusedinnovations.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Screen-Shot-2020-10-10-at-8.46.48-AM-1.png

What is often really hard to tell is where you are until your definitely in the trough of Disillusionment. We could be practically very early on the way up and human level or above AI is coming or near the peak of Inflated expectations and its about to crash down before finally finding a use that is less hype and more worthwhile. The regulation will certainly slow things down a bit towards the peak.

I am not sure whether slightly better chat bots that still lie and image generators that do look reasonably good is the peak or just the beginning. Progress has been dramatic in the past years since invention but the cost of training is now immense and it requires a breakthrough to make big steps of improvement and I am not sure if we are going to make that. A lot of billionaire money riding on it.

BrightCandle , (edited )

They are still going for big building size reactors that have site specific details even if the core is built in a "factory". This still doesn't scale well.

I wonder if it can be economical to go smaller still and ship a reactor and power generation (TRG maybe or a small turbine) that then doesn't require much other than connecting wiring and plumbing and its encased in at least one security layer covered in sensors if something goes wrong its all contained. Then its just a single lorry with a box you wire in. That has a chance of being scalable and easy to deploy and I can't help but think there is a market for ~0.5-10 KW reactors if they can get the lowest end down to about $20,000, it would compete OK with solar and wind price wise.

I suspect no one has bothered because the regulatory overhead means it has to be big enough to be worth it and like Wind power scales enormously with the size of the plant. But what I want is a tiny reactor in my basement, add a few batteries for dealing with the duck curve and you have something that will sit there producing power for 25 years and a contract for it be repaired and ultimately collected at end of life.

You can sort of do this today using the Tritium glow sticks and solar cells but it doesn't last long enough and the price is not competitive. Going more directly to the band gap in a silicon or something else semi-conductive and a long lived nuclear material could maybe get a little closer price wise.

BrightCandle ,

Metube is great and also has some browser plugins as well so it's as simple as right click and send to metube on a YouTube link. Wish there was one for android too but alas not yet that I have seen.

BrightCandle ,

It doesn't really make much sense to go faster than silicon node changes unless there is a lot of optimisation on architecture that needs doing. Historically all these refreshes between nodes were largely pointless with small benefits and preparing them took development effort away from the big changes. It's progress in silicon that matters and brings the performance improvements and moving to a faster cadence hasn't historically worked out well.

BrightCandle ,

I don't think modern Raspberry pi's make much sense unless you are using GPIOs or really need the low power consumption. The 3 and the 4 were OK price wise but the pi 5 is quite close to all these N100 mini computers and they are a lot more performance and expansion compared to a raspberry pi 5 and still quite low power.

Either a Topton or similar N100 based machine or a mini PC second hand is the way to go at the ~$100 mark. The mini PC will be faster and probably more expandable and cheaper but also more power consumption.

BrightCandle ,

Late last year they were talking about $40 for a KWH which compared very favourably to LifePO4 that was more like $130 at the time and Li-ion that was more like $200. However right now on alibaba you can get a 200Ah battery for about $60 and the LifePO4 300Ah are now down in the $50 range which is an incredible drop in the space of 6 months. So in practice they are less dense and more expensive but I think its new technology introduction pricing and at some point it should be about a third cheaper than LifePO4 for the same capacity, all be it a bit bigger and heavier and quite considerably cheaper than Li-ion for the same capacity.

The small 18650 and other small sized cells have started appearing on aliexpress as well so its possible to get those too butt they are a lot more expensive than a basic Li-ion 18650 at the moment for a lot less capacity. I think its mostly the bigger cells that most people interested in Sodium Ion will be wanting (home battery and grid storage solutions and some of the low/mid range cars) more than small cells since typically the smaller stuff you want to maximise capacity even if it costs a bit more and most will want li-ion and ideally the newer nearly solid state li-ion that doubles capacity per KG.

BrightCandle ,

Not so much f16s but the more modern planes can do 16G where the pilot can't really do more than 9G. But once unshackled from a pilot a lot of instrument weight and pilot survival can be stripped from a plane design and the airframe built to withstand much more, with titanium airframes I see no reason we can't make planes do sustained unstable turns in excess of 20G.

BrightCandle ,

Another possibility for cheap VPS is Contabo they are quite good value. Netcup is good value as well.

BrightCandle ,

That is a breach of GDPR, default has to be opt out. We don't need new laws we just need the existing one enforced.

BrightCandle ,

I used Invidious for about a year and it was a constant string of bugs. Every release was a risk and quite often updates would get lost or the database would explode in size and consume all the drive space. Its not a project I currently use or recommend until it stabilises.

BrightCandle ,

Most of the cookie banners are breaking GDPR. The requirement under GDPR is that privacy must be the default and users can select to opt in. So most of the banners you come across that default to all tracking are against the law already. The legislation didn't stop them being annoying in this way but a few prosecutions for the breaches and dark patterns would set things off on a better path.

BrightCandle , (edited )

I have used Bitcoin a number of times for international purchases. Its not really got to the point of currency so much as a medium mostly of speculation and often interchange for crime but it can improve your privacy. The user experience of the payments isn't the best but international transfers are often hard to do anyway and in that particular field it can often be a lot quicker, cheaper and easier.

BrightCandle ,

It has been slowly improving. It used to be a lot worse but I have a lot less issues with it now than I did before all the changes. Its not the fastest best way to do anything, there are better calendar, file sync, email etc etc applications out there in every category that run better but its also quite an easy way to make a lot of things happen.

BrightCandle ,

For many people they actually represent a better experience. If you mostly use the car below the range of the battery in your local area and can charge at home then you mostly eliminate the need to travel to fill up stations. Its kind of nice to not have to put petrol into the vehicle every week and have to deal with it being near empty and being forced to refill. It just gets charged cheaply overnight on greener power.

The modern EVs get a lot of range in a 15-30 minute charge too. The reality is a 250 mile EV requires one stop to drive for 8-10 hours. Most people aren't going to do that without a break in the middle. Even if you were going to go non-stop compared to an ICE its only another 30 minutes of journey time extra and it will cost you less to do it. So long as there are enough charge points, and these days their typically are in a lot of countries, then its not really a massive problem.

In many ways they are more convenient on most peoples average usage and the range anxiety goes away when you realise what we are really talking about in terms of long journeys and how long charging in practice will add.

Despite Booming Economy And Record Profits Google, Amazon, Microsoft And More Lay Off Over 42,000 So Far In 2024 (finance.yahoo.com)

Despite Booming Economy And Record Profits Google, Amazon, Microsoft And More Lay Off Over 42,000 So Far In 2024::Despite a booming U.S. economy and significant advancements in the tech sector, including a robust performance by companies like Nvidia Corp. and a thriving artificial intelligence (AI) industry, tech companies have...

BrightCandle ,

GDP is doing just fine, its just that there is a class warfare where wages are being suppressed significantly by corporations with State help and so most people are getting poorer as the wealthiest get richer faster than ever before.

BrightCandle ,

As far as I am concerned Copilot is a giant theft of open source code and breaches the license. I expect in the future a lot of repositories will be used to poison these AI agents just as is happening with images. The agents will get better but the quality of what they produce will also be poisoned and get worse precisely due to the theft.

BrightCandle ,

I recently bought a BE200 for upgrading a very old laptop that came with N wifi with a 4500U CPU. That is pretty old these days! After a driver install both the wifi adapter and bluetooth work as expected. I don't know if I get wifi 7 speeds and throughput yet as this got upgraded before the network and router did but I think it was worth sharing that it does work on old laptops.

BrightCandle ,

Hugo? As in your generated site or you have some sort of service that costs hugo that generates and deploys your site or something else?

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