• 7 Posts
  • 704 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: December 20th, 2023

help-circle



  • The expenses are mostly upfront though. I’ve spent like $400 on a relatively fancy NAS and two 3TB WD Red CMR drives five years ago, and since then, there was that.

    Of course, depending on your use case, there could be extra expenses as well, some of them recurring:

    • Bigger drives
    • Backup storage (I already had a place I could back up to)
    • Domain name and DNS records (if you expose it to the public Web with a URL; you can otherwise just use a VPN tunnel to access NAS from outside the home network, which is free unless you do anything fancy)
    • Some kind of paid software (if you don’t enjoy the perfectly good collection of open-source apps)
    • Etc.

    Now, for the streaming alternative:

    • Netflix Standard: $18/mo
    • Spotify: $12/mo
    • Total: $30/mo, or $360/yr. Just these two services alone.

    Your NAS system will pay off in a little over a year (maybe two years if you go all in with huge drives, fancy NAS configs, extra expenses here and there), and it’s smooth sailing from there.

    My unit works for 5 years already with no maintenance, is still fully supported by the manufacturer, and I don’t expect to replace it in a few more years.








  • all existing Nvidia systems suddenly disappeared because Linus said something somewhere

    Sure, if I would buy/upgrade my PC now, I would go AMD for the graphics - it’s just less hassle this way, and open drivers are nice to have.

    But it just so happened that I purchased my PC 5 years before I switched to Linux. It’s a perfectly functional machine I don’t feel the need to replace, and with many people coming over from Windows right now amid Windows 10 support termination, many more find themselves in a similar situation.

    Building a new PC just for Linux is expensive, stupid, and not ecologically conscious. As Linux shows itself as a more democratic and old hardware-friendly option, supporting Nvidia GPUs, old or new, is a must, even if Nvidia itself gets hostile at times.



  • No need to advertise Prism - using it already :)

    Also, UltimMC is a decent offline fork for pirates and privacy enthusiasts (Disclaimer: I do not promote piracy and own a legal Minecraft license)

    I’m so lost and then I try to play like a Beta 1.7.3 player and everyone else just goes “the fuck are you doing?”

    Happily, I joined Minecraft when it was already 1.7.2 (release versioning, not Beta), so my ways are not THAT outdated, and obviously I never had issues with 1.7.10 because it’s literally my first version with two minor updates. Who would have known that it will all stop there…

    Also, I struck some delicate balance with mods at version 1.21.1, but it is for sure still a much different experience.




  • Easy. Democrats are sponsored by billionaires. So are Republicans, but they can be openly supportive of billionaires, while Democrats have to show they’re here “for the people”. If Democrats would get serious about anti-billionaire social policies, they would lose funding and media coverage overnight.

    Just look at how they desperately try to tank Mamdani, despite the fact he is fully aligned with Democratic party lines and is immensely popular. Dems know that his “for the people” reputation, even if it’s one mayor of one city, will make billionaires upset, and desperately try to reverse course. Also, other, way less popular candidates got more campaign funds, with much higher average donations - guess who got involved.



  • I see. But sometimes, progress really makes lesser problems than there were before.

    We have cheap and generally eco-friendly solar, we install plenty of wind, and now we have a much more ecological way to store the power, too.

    The rich care about their profits, and if eco-friendly tech delivers that, they’ll be all-in. Some fossil kings will try to stop it, but at this point, this trend is irreversible, because others among the rich are ready to destroy them.



  • Here’s the thing: sodium chloride aka table salt is extremely abundant. We are not expected to run out of it in any measurable timeframe, and the effect of sodium mining on the oceans or ecosystems at large is negligible.

    Same cannot be said of lithium, which currently forms the backbone of battery tech. It is rare, and its extraction is extremely polluting. In fact, lithium is responsible for a huge chunk of renewable energy’s ecological footprint.

    Switching to sodium technology is like switching from silver to sand. It’s just one thing we truly have enough of.