black0ut
@black0ut@pawb.social
- Comment on Is it safe to connect a Windows XP machine to my wi-fi network? 1 week ago:
XP has background services that automatically connect to the outside for stuff. Most of those remain inside your network, but not all. It only takes a hardcoded expired domain to get instant infection without any user action.
I would never consider connecting a winXP machine to the internet safe.
- Comment on Drop your unpopular opinions here because c/unpopularopinions is filled with popular opinions 1 week ago:
It’s so liberating. I can just take my 3ds with me and play some levels, then I’m at work. It doesn’t even take me longer than commuting by car, if I take parking into account. And driving through cities is stressful and hurts the citizens’ health and their mobility.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
This is a troll, they used chatGPT (which they called “Chad GPT”) to reply to me before. They don’t know shit, but it’s funny seeing them think they do. Read their user description, it’s so funny.
- Comment on Why put data centers in space? 1 week ago:
That is just a load of bs. Heat pumps do not operate efficiently at high temperatures, and they only add more heat to the circuit. You cannot generate energy from the temperature difference, because then you would slow heat transfer significantly while generating an insignificant amount of power.
It has already been calculated, and radiators are a really big issue for “space datacenters”. Even with our current cooling technology advancements. Server hardware needs to be kept at a cool temperature (ideally not higher than 50°C), and most importantly, it needs to be constant in spite of very variable hardware load. That is really difficult to manage in space, and an issue that needs to be considered even for our non datacenter satellites.
But even if cooling was trivial, space datacenters make absolutely no sense.
For starters, it wouldn’t be possible to put any server in the market up there. Chips are very vulnerable to the radiation in space, which is why space CPUs are stupidly expensive and way slower than earth CPUs. They need to use less efficient litographies, with very special shielding that isn’t commonly available. The sheer compute and memory density of our current servers would be impossible to properly shield, even if we ignore the cost. ECC RAM and ZFS pools for drives would very quickly stop protecting your server from errors, since the bit flips would be too common, and your computations would often be incorrect.
If you ignore both cooling and space radiation, you still have the issue of accesibility. Datacenters have people always coming and going, because hardware needs maintenance. Sometimes you want to upgrade the server, change the connections, add or remove hardware, and of course, you need to replace the parts that break over time. Hardware becomes old really quickly, especially for the compute intensive workloads that are planned for those “space datacenters”.
Datacenters are kept fast and competitive through constant upgrading of the parts. Compute intensive servers also churn through parts very quickly, because even at 50-60°C temps, keeping hardware at 100% utilization isn’t the best. This is further exhacerbated by temperature fluctuations, which can prematurely kill the silicon.
Like someone else mentioned in another comment, Microsoft already tried dumping containers with servers into the ocean, and putting wind turbines on top. That’s free cooling, very stable temperatures, and free energy. Even if it was a success in every measure, Microsoft dropped it because it wasn’t accessible enough, which made it unusable for any real usecase.
The truth is, datacenters are a market where cost is very important, and solutions are already very competitive. Putting a datacenter in orbit would be stupidly costly, even if you could fix all the issues mentioned. Free electricity does not offset those costs, and that’s without taking into account the cost of the rockets for putting the datacenters in orbit.
TL;DR: There are so many issues and extra costs, even when ignoring cooling, that make datacenters in space a stupid thing to even consider.
And before you say I’m not an engineer and I don’t know what I’m talking about, server infrastructure is my field. I’ve worked with datacenters, maintained server stacks and I myself have worked on those cost calculations. I know what I’m talking about.
- Comment on Hearing set to decide 'terror sentencing' of activists who targeted Barclays 2 weeks ago:
Israel drops bombs on children with the stated intent of ethnically cleansing them, and it’s not terrorism.
Someone throws some paint at a bank in protest, and it’s terrorism.
We live in an upside down world.
- Comment on New level of capitalist hell unlocked: Companies are relying on AI to pinpoint exactly how desperate job seekers are in the hopes they can pay them as little as possible. 2 weeks ago:
I did not choose to exist in this world, and now I’m a wage slave like most of us. First fix the world, and then bring more people into it.
- Comment on 10.99 for a beer with..... ai pictures on it. 2 weeks ago:
Second one from the left is obvious slop. I’ve stopped there, but I haven’t seen anything in particular with the rest of them. They still trigger my vibe check detection of AI, but I couldn’t really tell you why. But after seeing just the second one be clearly AI, I don’t trust the rest.
- Comment on Gender neutral guide 2 weeks ago:
So the policeranger has an excuse to shoot the rest of them
- Comment on Don’t you lie to me 3 weeks ago:
1 bit
- Comment on No one could have seen this coming 3 weeks ago:
How about lowering prices?
- Comment on No one could have seen this coming 3 weeks ago:
So you’re one of those “just get a job” idiots…
- Comment on Musk: Many British people are living in lovely small towns. They are just like Hobbits. Until one day, people show up and start raping their kids 4 weeks ago:
He actually knows a lot about this. He’s an expert in child raping. He’s also friends with a bunch of notorious pedophiles, who are also experts in the matter.
- Comment on Protect consumers my ass! 🤦🏻😡 4 weeks ago:
This is disingenious.
First of all, IP can’t be stolen. In order for something to be stolen, it needs to be taken from you, and you need to be left with nothing. Your TV can be stolen. A copy of something you made is a copy, and you still have the original. You’re not left with nothing.
Second, AI companies are using your IP to train their AIs, which they then sell and make huge profits, both by selling it back to you and by trying to replace you with it. That is, imo, the worst part about them. Pirating something without any intention to profit from it is not comparable to what AI companies are doing, by far.
Third, this is about football. It’s already stupid that a company can hold IP rights over a sport event. They’re not even the players who actually “create” the content.
- Comment on 4 weeks ago:
The markdown specification recommends using asterisks specifically for that. It is not exactly intended, but left to the interpreter. Most markdown interpreters leave the underscores intact if they’re inside a word.
https://www.markdownguide.org/basic-syntax/#italic-best-practices
- Comment on She's just defending her country 4 weeks ago:
No, you don’t get paid. Big yahu pays his chatgpt subscription so you can exist. It’s a different thing.
- Comment on She's just defending her country 4 weeks ago:
Hasbara bot is back at it again. Big yahu is impressed with your service.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
No, it wasn’t your average telemetry (although I’m sure they could also find a person only with the massive telemetry footprint they get). It was a specific device ID unique to every computer, that Windows pings to Microsoft every once in a while. So, as long as you’re using Windows, Microsoft can still follow you through your VPN without needing to delve into the telemetry data. I’m sure they make a very responsible use of that feature.
- Comment on What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe? 1 month ago:
I do, but even though it’s unfair and certainly making things worse, Europe also has a long ways to go, and a big margin to offset. We can acknowledge that the US is hurting the entire world with their climate policies, but we can also do our best to reduce our pollution. At the end of the day, it will be better if just the US pollutes, than if both the US and Europe do.
- Comment on What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe? 1 month ago:
Carbon capture technology was always some kind of excuse that execs had to pollute today because we could theoretically fix it in the future.
Despite some technology that works to remove carbon from the atmosphere, it’s just not viable. We output so much CO2 to the atmosphere that we just have no capacity to even build enough carbon capture facilities to reach net zero, and that’s without taking their energy consumption into account. Even if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow, and suddenly enough carbon capture facilities to capture carbon at the same rate we were releasing it appeared, it would still take decades to make a meaningful change.
And carbon isn’t our only problem. Methane is a way worse greenhouse gas, and we keep releasing it to the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than trying to control it.
This is not to discourage from building such carbon capture technology. If it’s powered by renewables and built without a significant carbon/other contaminants footprint, by all means, build it. But it won’t save us from what’s to come.
- Comment on ESA bafflingly declares private Minecraft servers 'illegal' 1 month ago:
Microsoft’s official server binary, distributed by Microsoft themselves, has the option to not authenticate with Mojang’s servers. You don’t even need to modify it. I wouldn’t call that one piracy.
- Comment on "influencers" are setting us back 1 month ago:
You’re a 1 week old account, and all you’ve done is shill AI non stop (with arguments that are wrong and uninformed).
I think that supposed 13 year old is smarter than you, and I also think the mod was probably in the right.
Oh, also. AI as in LLMs and agents is not the future. The fact that you’re a software engineer means nothing, you either are a bot or drank the kool aid. And after seeing you say lies such as “AI is already not a failure” or that is has done new things “more than any other invention in human history”, I don’t know if I should believe that you are a software engineer.
- Comment on Steam Machine pricing announced (from $1049-$1428 USD), reservation lists open 1 month ago:
Gamers Nexus released a parts list with better performance for cheaper. And it’s more upgradable than the Steam Machine. And it doesn’t suffer from high temps.
The sad reality is that this product is not competitive in today’s expensive market. The original leaked price range ($550-$750) would have been competitive, and a price hike to $850 would have been reasonable after the AI hardware price hikes. But Valve is a company that can make use of the economy of scale, and it shouldn’t have developed a PC that has issues and still turns out to be more expensive than a DIY PC with similar specs.
And before anyone mentions it, yes, I wanted this product to succeed. Valve has been bringing a lot of gamers to the Linux world, and that could be good for us. If the price was good, I was even thinking about buying a steam machine myself, because my system is getting old. I’m still hyped for the steam frame, but the steam machine is not it. Not at this price, at least.
- Comment on AI banners: what owner sees vs what I see 2 months ago:
“Let’s generate the icon and banner of the anarchist community using a hyper-centralized service created with stolen labour that makes billionaires richer”
- Comment on The European Commission's answer to SKG: "The Commission considers that at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially." 2 months ago:
In the worst case, it would be free to open source the server code. Companies can just do that, and the community can take it from there. I think SKG even allows releasing just a binary in their proposition.
Either way, keeping NPCs entertaining or realistic enpugh to substitute other players is also something that SKG says it’s not asking for. Even if there aren’t other players, being able to enter the world should be enough to consider the game playable.
- Comment on And what was wrong with my old widget? 2 months ago:
They also pay artists 5-10x more than spotify per stream!
- Comment on Nvidia CEO: Society has no choice but to change. I used to play in the streets. When cars came along, you obviously can’t play in the streets now 2 months ago:
In the middle of a highway, if it’s possible. And don’t wear any hi-vis, your leather jacket is so cool, you should keep it on.
- Comment on There was a time when people had to deal with all of these being separate 2 months ago:
Paper maps and map books still exist, and they’re pretty useful for navigation. If you stay at hotels, they usually give you some simple maps of the area with the most important features highlighted.
If you still want to use online maps, OSM (Open Street Maps) is a great project that doesn’t depend on any big tech maps. It also works completely offline if your frontend allows downloading maps. CoMaps is a good client for phones. You can contribute to OSM yourself if you miss anything.
- Comment on Damn straight! 2 months ago:
Well, vibe coding isn’t working. That’s just letting the machine think for you.
However, even non specialized work is essential. Burger flippers, street cleaners, bus drivers, librarians… They may not have a career as long and specialized as a doctor’s, but they’re still essential people, and their work should be valued.
- Comment on systemd 3 months ago:
Notice how I put the “taking over” part in the personal issues. It has long taken over in the enterprise world, as I mentioned with RHEL and Ubuntu Server. Mainly because those are the biggest 2 options, and most other enterprise systems are based on them or try to be like them. The enterprise Linux scene is very homogeneous. Systemd is now taking over consumer Linux, where you historically saw less homogeneous systems.
Alpine Linux has already been used a lot for containers and embedded devices, but companies are starting to see the value in it. It’s fast, it’s lightweight, it has a small attack surface and it can be used for many things, not just containers. We have full VMs running on Alpine and hosting systems, and they’re very appealing because they’re reliable, and their images are smaller. Alpine also takes less time to install, and it’s more reliable when starting from a generic image than any other systemd distro.
- Comment on systemd 3 months ago:
Linux system administrator here.
Systemd fucking sucks, and it’s a very big issue in the Linux world, because it centralizes everything into what should be the simplest process of the OS. It has a huge attack surface (and many recent critical CVEs have happened due to systemd). It forces everything into their unit files, which are very flawed and lack features that previous systems actually had. One of the big reasons the enterprise Linux community is looking to Alpine instead of the more traditional RHEL or Ubuntu Server is exactly the lack of systemd.
Aside from that, on the personal side, systemd has bit me in the ass way more times than any of the more traditional systems. I wish it wasn’t so common. It’s very rapidly taking over the Linux ecosystem, limiting freedom to choose another init system. And it’s lead by a Microsoft employee.
