My wallet certainly doesn't appreciate them.

Or is it just me?

the biggest practical advantage to renewable energy is that we can produce it ourselves and become independent of crises that happen in another part of the world. for example the iran war.

for digital infrastructure, it's the same. if facebook changes their policy to surveill all citizens in a new way, that creates a shock for everyone else. if we can self-host our services, then we become independent. so it's like solar-panels in the back yard, but for digital infrastructure.

It's hard to put this into words succinctly. But when I was a kid before the Internet, the library was the main source of human knowledge, and it was very organized through the Dewey Decimal System which imposed a kind of tree-like hierarchy across a wide spectrum of topics. And while I imagined that one day this might all wind up served by computers, I thought this organization would survive the transition. But it didn't.

I suppose in the early days of the Internet, they tried? Yahoo was kind of an Internet directory in the beginning, and the Whole Internet catalog was another such effort. But these eventually fell apart and we had to resort to search engines to find anything. Frankly, it's a bit like the early days of personal computing when we used flat file systems instead of hierarchical ones with proper directory trees. When you were limited to what could fit on a floppy, this wasn't such a big burden. But the Internet as it stands might as well be a giant flat file system.

Today, even the search engines are failing us, and we are turning to AI. In the pre-Internet era, we had sort of an equivalent to this also. They were called librarians. But a librarian's job was made easier by the fact that all the books were carefully organized by topic. For AI, it's as though the library were just a massive pile of books tossed around haphazardly and the librarian had to make sense of it enough to pull whatever you're looking for out of the chaos. Is it at all surprising, then, that it takes a huge amount of energy and computing resources to make any of this work?

• spyware is when they take data from you that you didn't want to give
• adware is when they give data to you that you didn't want to have
• bloatware is when the software's just in the way, making the whole system slow, sluggish and inefficient

summarily these can be called crapware

Just imagine the 3310 with 2nm technology and a modern battery that fills up the then available space. It would run forever(tm)

This alone should explain why history is full of catastrophes.

that's why i always add a small image to my posts, like this:

just saying

the image is often not related to the post, or only somewhat related, but people when they see things understand things faster, even if the thing they're seeing is not identical to what's written in text. because that's how the brain works. same thing as if you're standing up and walking around a bit to think about things. it often helps, because the body decides that if one part of the body is active (legs), then the others should too (brain). even if the functionality between them is not connected in this moment.

— Sun Tzu

Do you have too many kitchen appliances? Is your blender taking up too much space on your counter? Are you tired of cleaning the blender all the time? You're in luck, you already have a blender installed IN YOUR SINK! Just add one little valve on the output of your garage disposal and you can switch from clearing out a clogged drain to making a delicious smoothie in seconds! When you're done, flip the valve back to drain mode, squirt your favorite dish soap in and let her rip, all clean! Don't fall for unnecessary appliance marketing like all the other sheep, just buy our patented "Sewer/Blender Valve"!