the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.

This is so weird to me. Aren’t people at all curious? Like, I would never try to fix a car’s engine, but I have a basic understanding of how one works. I wouldn’t install a toilet, but I know about J-traps. I wouldn’t write my own 3D engine, but I know the basics of how they work.

Files and folder is such a fundamental and basic thing. Where’s the basic curiosity?

Most music files may be MP3s, but music files are rare these days. I wouldn’t be surprised if most people under 30 have never interacted with a music file at all, they just use streaming services.

This is the better version of the joke.

deleted by creator

Average ebook size: 2.5 MB or so.

Meta downloaded 81 TB, or 81,000,000 MB.

81,000,000 / 2.5 = Approx 30 million books.

30,000,000 books * $250,000 per offence = $7.5 trillion

(are you sure you’re from programming.dev?)

Worth noting that when Google was founded, Microsoft was in the middle of a long antitrust investigation, which was documenting every illegal thing they had done to maintain their monopoly and hurt every company that challenged it.

The “evil” in the Don’t Be Evil motto was widely seen as a reference to that company and that behaviour. From early on, Google saw Microsoft as a threat. They ran Linux servers, and tried to make sure as few employees as possible were running Microsoft on their desktops and laptops. A lot of internal tools were developed to try to avoid any kind of dependency on Microsoft, including ones that eventually became available externally like Google Docs etc.

Now, 25ish years later, it’s Google who are being investigated for leveraging their monopoly in a way that hurts consumers. IMO, they still never stooped as low as Microsoft did. Google paid Apple and Mozilla billions to be the default search engine. Microsoft used lawsuits and patents to try to drive their competition out of business. But, it’s still a monopoly that harms the world.

Anyhow, I’m glad that Google originally had the “Don’t be evil” motto, and also had this bit about AI principles that avoid the risk of harm. They act like useful warrant canaries because when they’re removed you know something’s up.

Lick the boot.

Cargo bikes exist, and trains are effectively public transit for cargo.

True, and this is something that Bluesky actually seems to do better. Your posts are stored in a “PDS” (personal data store), so in theory they’re not tied to any particular instance.

I hope that a future version of the Fediverse design / ActivityPub considers how to handle this issue. Still, I’d much rather lose my past posts than lose my social graph. Past posts can probably be archived, but it’s much harder to track down people you used to be mutuals with on a different account and follow each-other.

You doubt what’s true? That transportation / shipping is a major contributor to climate change?

“the transportation sector contributes 20.2% of global CO2 emissions”

https://www.undp.org/policy-centre/istanbul/press-releases/windrose-technology-supports-undp-research-universities-zero-emission-trucks-zets

International cargo container shipping is only about 2% of global CO2, but that’s still 10% of all transportation-related output coming from shipping alone. Imagine if every 1 in 10 vehicles you saw on the road was a little boat, that’s how much international shipping contributes to CO2.

You shouldn’t convert everything to EVs overnight. EVs aren’t the answer, public transport and alternative transport like biking is the answer. A nasty deisel-based bus almost certainly contributes less to climate change than 30 personal EVs, especially if you consider the entire life cycle.

Transport is going to be the hardest thing to convert to not use fossil fuels, because the biggest advantage of fossil fuels is the massive energy density of the fuel. An EV has to lug massive batteries around with it everywhere it goes, but a gasoline car just needs a relatively small fuel tank. For small personal vehicles it might be possible to accept the compromise, but it’s going to be a lot harder to get rid of fossil fuels for buses, trains and especially airplanes and ships. So, the answer there is not to switch to EVs, it’s to reduce the use as much as possible. Stop flying around the world. Stop ordering things from overseas. Stop driving personal vehicles and take public transit.

Right now, the biggest sector contributing to global CO2 is electricity and heat production, but solar and wind are getting so cheap that it’s just a matter of time for those to be converted. You don’t even need to give incentives, the cheapest solution is now the cleanest. The energy density of the fuel doesn’t matter in those cases. But, transport’s going to be a harder problem, and it’s the one we should be working on now.

It’s good that shipping is cheap in some ways. The problem is that it’s cheap because it uses the absolute worst kinds of fuels that are incredibly polluting. The fact that shipping is incredibly cheap is a major reason why the climate is changing.

The difference is that you can easily move to another Mastodon instance, and it’s designed so that when you do that your followers / followees come with you.

What annoys me is that people are buying the idea that BlueSky is federated.

Not only is it not federated, the very architecture they designed means that it’s probably not federateable, at least not by normal users.

The way they designed it, a relay is required to collect and forward every single BlueSky post. That means, as the service grows, it becomes more and more impossible for anybody but a company to run a relay. Someone did some calculations back in November when it was a significantly smaller network, and they calculated that at a minimum it costs a few hundred dollars, possibly as much as 1000 bucks a month just to handle the disk storage needs for a relay on a leased server. The more the network grows, the more those costs skyrocket.

What good does it do to have a network that theoretically can be federated, but practically costs so much to run a single node that nobody except a for-profit company can manage it?

He’s already gone. But, regardless, why sign up for yet another corporate social media site when every single one of them becomes enshittified after a few years. Are they just planning to abandon Bluesky eventually too? Or just hoping that this time it’s different?

These better stay up even though Trump “paused” his tariff threats. Until he fully backs down and cancels them, Canada shouldn’t be selling US booze.

Nice list!

Unfortunately, this is also how counter-tariffs work.

He wouldn’t save all the humans, just the ones who passed his absurd purity tests.

Does a Bat’leth count?

Get Quark on the viewscreen, the Nox can handle this. If he won’t answer, get Voyager’s Doctor on the line, it might be hard to reach him in Atlantis though. And, we know who really handles replicator problems, it’s not LaForge, it’s O’Brien, and if you can reach him, he might pretend he’s just some simple farmer, but believe me, he’s still an engineer at heart.