"Ford," insisted Arthur, "I don't know if this sounds like a silly question, but what am I doing here?"
"Well you know that," said Ford. "I rescued you from the Earth."
"And what's happened to the Earth?"
"Ah. It's been demolished."
"Has it," said Arthur levelly.
"Yes. It just boiled away into space."
"Look," said Arthur, "I'm a bit upset about that."

#HitchhikersGuide #DouglasAdams #quotes #quote #bot

For some reason "AI is just like watching Netflix" is back in my feeds so I took that as a sign to update my data tracking for Netflix. The company's energy use rose 1% from 2021 to 2024.

Compare that to:

Google: 71%
Nvidia: 88%
Meta: 96%
Microsoft: 119%

Where are all the multi-gigawatt, tens-of-megatonnes gas-fired data centres being proposed by Netflix? Are governments frantically rushing fast-tracking laws for video streaming?

Stichwahl: München bekommt erstmals einen grünen Oberbürgermeister
https://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/stichwahl-munchen-bekommt-erstmals-einen-grunen-oberburgermeister-15388214.html?utm_source=flipboard&utm_medium=activitypub

Gepostet in Tagesspiegel Politik @tagesspiegel-politik-Tagesspiegel

The new MacBook Neo is the most repairable MacBook we’ve seen in 14 years. Screwed-in battery tray, modular ports, sensible layout, and day-one repair manuals. It’s not perfect, but it’s a real step forward for MacBook repair. Read the full breakdown at the link below.

https://www.ifixit.com/News/116152/macbook-neo-is-the-most-repairable-macbook-in-14-years
—
#iFixit #RightoRepair

Friday's sunset creating a cute little solar pillar effect.

#sunset #SilentSunday

Ein Social-Media-Verbot für Jugendliche klingt erstmal harmlos. Tatsächlich bedeutet es aber vor allem eines: Altersverifikation. Und damit die Pflicht, sich im Netz immer öfter auszuweisen. Wer heute »nur« das Alter prüfen will, schafft morgen die Infrastruktur für Klarnamenpflicht und Identitätszwang. Ist die Technik erstmal da, wird ihr Einsatz schrittweise ausgeweitet. Genau deshalb sollte man hier nicht naiv sein.

#Jugendschutz #Altersverifikation #Klarnamenpflicht #DigitaleSelbstbestimmung

/kuk

There's a "Wayland set the Linux desktop back" blog going around now and ... it just makes me so tired.

That take is so amazingly wrong, but so persistent and popular. It is the "immigrants took mah job!" of takes for software. It is so flawed in so many different ways, and utterly ignores the host of actual reasons that Linux has stalled on the desktop.

It is apparently seductive, too, because it offloads the blame entirely on the crew developing Wayland without the person casting the blame considering for even a second the actual complexity of the problems. I could literally write a book on the reasons that the Linux desktop hasn't caught on; and I would, too, if I thought people would actually buy it and read it (a lot of people, I mean - enough to justify writing a book...)

But it boils down to this: Linux desktop development doesn't have more than a tiny, tiny fraction of the funding per year that Microsoft or Apple spend on marketing a single product line. Much less the kind of funds that go into R&D.

Vendors, mostly, are disinterested in supporting an OS that has less than 10% market share. At times they have even been actively dissuaded from doing so by certain other companies...

Users are, by and large, not willing to deal with inconvenience or having to learn new things in order to adopt the Linux desktop, even though the two main vendors are constantly making the user experience worse and continually taking away control of our own devices.

Wayland? It's a convenient scapegoat.

I'm not, by the way, arguing that Wayland is perfect, or that the community behind it has executed everything perfectly. And I'm certainly not arguing that people haven't had bad experiences with Wayland; that hasn't been _my_ experience, but I also have been using Linux for 30 years now -- and I choose hardware based on its Linux compatibility. I also have different expectations from a desktop than someone who has used Windows or macOS most of their life.

OK. Rant over. Be nicer to the Wayland folks. Stop blaming them for everything. In fact, let's maybe consider that what would really be useful is constructive takes on how we can succeed from here.