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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The UK’s average energy price is high, but it’s also very variable as when it’s cloudy and calm 20% of demand needs to be imported from France/Norway so wholesale energy is very expensive, but when it’s sunny and windy wholesale energy is free or even at negative cost and 20% of generation gets exported to France/Norway, where their energy is more expensive

    If you have the option to run datacentres at minimal or even negative energy cost maybe 20% of the time, then shift load elsewhere the rest of the time, then that may be a reasonable proposition





  • Yeah even gpt4o couldn’t keep track of encounters, run battles etc. in my case…

    I think if you wanted to do it mechanically consistently you’d probably need to integrate it into a vtt where you give it context and potentially fine-tune it to give quest related summaries & gming rather than just “stuff”


  • That’s not even applicable here, and I thought we’d moved past spouting that on every post when it became apparent that meta actually weren’t trying to kill the fediverse

    The whole point is developing products to an open source standard, adding unneeded or complex features to ensure competition can’t keep up and gain market share, then shutting down your product and killing the whole standard.

    How does buying a company that makes proprietary products then closing down that company even come close to being the same thing?




  • I don’t think you understand how it works… An upload:download ratio must average (not simple mean, but that’s because ratios are nonlinear - I can’t recall the mean type but it’s the nth root of multiplying them all together) 1 in a system where all uploads and downloads are logged in the same tracker. It doesn’t matter who the uploader or downloader is or how recently they made their account. That’s what I meant by a closed system.

    An open system would be where you download parts or all of a given torrent via another tracker, and the same with upload. The private tracker only logs what you downloaded and uploaded though it, so your ratio from the perspective of that tracker is different to in reality.

    Even if you ignore the first 5 files or 15GB or whatever for new users, if you have those files then great but do you really want to turn it into a betting game of seeding supply and leeching demand?


  • I was referring to ones which explicitly require you to have a >1 ratio to download files, which do absolutely have leniency when you sign up, but the average ratio is 1 by definition assuming a closed system and so it’s infeasible for the majority to get >1. Often they have freeleach days but that requires you to be around on that day and also download stuff you don’t want to seed it, rather than just slightly reducing the required ratio (also IMO having a required ratio of any form is bad as it encourages people to turn off seeding after that point, generally I’ll seed stuff which has <5 seeders or low availability of parts I have, as seeding them to 100x is way more valuable than seeding 1000 files which have hundreds of seeders all with 100% availability to 1x)

    I accept they want to keep leaches out though, so if they required a ratio of 0.5-0.75 that’d be fine, but from my experience most “entry level” private ones don’t, and most non-entry level ones either have closed signups or a requirement to be signed up with an existing private tracker in which things are either ridiculously over or underseeded with no inbetween, so it’s hard to build up a ratio.



  • Are those the trackers which demand you have accounts with other private trackers before you join or the ones which demand everyone have a >1 ratio to download anything which is impossible by definition, so everyone either gets huge seedboxes, cheats the ratio or has to download niche but big files from other sites and switch out the tracker to artificially up the ratio?

    I’m sure there are actually good private trackers, but I’ve found there are open/effectively open (sign up only with no verification/requirements) trackers with better communities than any restricted one I’ve found


  • Oh yeah I absolutely agree with monopoly abuse being a bad thing with a huge caveat that it’s so much worse for essential services and not quite as bad for extras, like youtube. I personally can’t see any competition to youtube being able to provide a better service - it’s in a similar niche to Netflix where they were great until they got competition at which point the userbase and content fragmented, which meant they had to provide a worse service to make money as the content rights agreements made it into several small monopolies and so they were literally unable to compete, which is frankly worse




  • Wikipedia’s job isn’t free to be anti- or pro- anything, it’s to show facts free from bias, even if you and most other readers agree with that bias.

    Of course the facts can clearly show something to be almost objectively evil to anyone capable of understanding them, but it’s not for Wikipedia to perform any analysis of those facts - saying “Israel has killed X civilians in attacks which many of their allies claimed were completely avoidable [citation]” in an article featured on the front page is perfectly valid, however a big banner with a Palestinian flag is not as it’s a (fair) interpretation of the facts and not simply a presentation of them.



  • It’s not so much a circlejerk as much as a knowledge that KDE plasma is the most approachable DE with the most polished first experience for the majority of new users

    The reason it gets interpreted as Gnome bad is that both Plasma and Gnome both mainly target users who want something that just works out of the box and doesn’t have a steep learning curve, however KDE have managed to keep up better with what new users want in recent years while Gnome has fallen into a semi-trap of doing what their current/older users want. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad distro, frankly it’s great for their current users, however it does little for newer users who may not find it as intuitive as other DEs, therefore making it a worse default DE for “off-the-shelf” distros targeting new Linux users.

    At the end of the day though, it is about personal choice, and nobody’s saying i3 isn’t better for powerusers or that LXDE doesn’t run faster, but if you have the knowledge that you want to install one of those or the many other DEs available, then you can just find the iso/distro/package with that DE and install it rather than just clicking the all-in-one-guaranteed-to-work-lts download button on the distro’s homepage


  • I believe none except colonising space… The others are so far off that we don’t even know for sure if they’re even possible, what’s going to go wrong or whether we’re looking in the complete wrong direction, meanwhile you’re dismissing the only realistic one in the next 250 years because we’re close enough that we actually know how hard it is.

    There’s something to be said about chasing after things that are impossible as the possible seems too hard, but I’m not enough of a philosopher for that.