I know there’s doubt as to the validity of the claims. I only want to say this: when “AI” takes jobs, who is there to plug things in to make the “AI” machine go?

Sounds like Amazon fucked around and found out… Allegedly.

I work in IT and far be it for me to tell you what OS to use on your own computer.

The only thing I want to die right now, is the AI bubble. Just pop already. Holy fuck what a worthless endeavor this has been.

We live in wild times

I’ve been meaning to donate to those guys.

I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can’t be cheap to keep that stuff online.

From a neutral viewpoint, the world is more divided than ever, no matter what values you have, there’s someone who opposes them with few, if any exceptions. Those opposing viewpoints have only grown in strength and number on the Internet, for years.

Additionally, the “us vs them” mentality of everyone is blinding them to even understanding why someone would disagree with their viewpoint. Of course that’s not everyone, but it’s a growing and very loud group.

Political violence is also starting to run rampant. Escalation after escalation. It keeps building.

So in this time of having a global voice, that can reach hundreds of millions of people with a single tweet or comment or thread or post or whatever, and with so much growing hatred among different political groups, it’s unsurprising to me that conflict is rising.

Additionally, Lemmy is growing. Not everyone that joins Lemmy will be the same type of person that joined Lemmy after the Reddit API incident. That influx of people had a very similar value set, because they almost all came here from Reddit for the same reason. So there’s at least a good amount of overlap in everyone’s values.

Over time, more and more diverse people have been joining Lemmy, and it’s not surprising that they have differing opinions on a lot of things.

This outcome was pretty much inevitable.

As far as I’m concerned, as long as it’s done respectfully and civilly, then disagree. Debate. Try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even if you don’t agree with it.

This is a completely valid concern. I recently moved my homelab from core 2 era xeons (not second Gen core i-series… Core2), over to Xeon E5 v4 processors. I looked today and the systems take about the same amount of power, but now instead of six cores, I have 10, and they’re newer, faster in every way…

Power draw didn’t change but now I can run something like 3-4x the workloads, which means I can cut the size by 1/3rd and I would drop power consumption and gain more computing power.

There is absolutely a limit to what’s useful. You won’t find anyone running a Pentium 3 anymore, even with Linux. It’s just not sensible.

I’d argue that anything core i-series 4th Gen or older, probably needs to be decommissioned soon, if not already. Most of the workloads that you could use that stuff for can easily be handled by a raspberry Pi, which will use less than 1/10th the power to do it.

Basically, if what you’re doing can be 100% completed in whole on a pi, either you need to upgrade, or simply move it to a pi. Simple as that. Anything else is just burning power and heating your home with little benefit.

A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that’s flooding the market.

It’s a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.

I’ve seen worse deals. The platform itself is probably worth that much (meaning the mainboard, chassis, and all the accompanying stuff like heatsinks and power supplies)… 6th gen CPUs are probably dirt cheap, assuming those systems use a socketed CPU, and you wanted to upgrade to something more than an i3. I can’t imagine RAM would be much more.

You can probably turn these into very decent little machines for under $100 each and a bit of effort.

It really depends on whether you need the extra capability for a bit of effort or you’re fine with the i3 with 4G RAM.

I usually want to replace the storage on a used system with something new or refurbished because of wear and tear, but that’s me. Still, that’s not a bad deal. Free would be a great deal, but I’m not sure you could ask for better.

My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they’re showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.

Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it’s usually fine.

Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.

Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.

That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.

It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS it was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.

Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.

That’s fair. The Wi-Fi problem of everyone dogpiling everything onto it, needs to be solved for. We either need to make it easier for people to use alternatives, or we’re going to continue to see growing demand for more Wi-Fi spectrum allocations that will never quite be enough.

Powerline holds promise if they can get the technology to a functional level where each household can get setup with powerline in such a way that it works adequately, and is cheap/easy for end users. then the tech industry would need to basically build the standard into power supplies. Even power units for cellphones, tablets, laptops, etc, could have powerline integrated so you’re off Wi-Fi while charging, and the power brick would operate a bit like a USB connected charging dock…

But all of this is based on an easy to deploy, consumer friendly way to add powerline networking that doesn’t suck… So far, the companies making powerline adapters have not solved that problem.

You see, people in rentals have more reason to want to run wires, because usually the wireless airspace in rentals is more saturated than other locations.

There’s more interfering devices and networks in an apartment buildings just simply due to the density of people. Everyone wants/needs their own Wi-Fi, and because of the relatively limited bandwidth available on all the bands, you’re very likely to be stomping on someone else or have them stomp on you.

I actually knew a guy who took the time to hack into all of his neighbors Wi-Fi networks to change everyone’s wireless channel settings so that he would have a clearer Wi-Fi channel for himself. This was back in the mid to late 2010s some time. That person has since relocated, and they never had any malicious intent for the people they “hacked” into. Either way, the fact that he felt like he needed to do it is the point. There’s a lot of networks and a lot of interference in those situations.

The irony is that if everyone put up a couple of access points at relatively low power each, then they would interfere less with their neighbors, and with their neighbors doing the same, they would be interfered with less, and everyone would have a better time with it. I don’t think I’ve met someone besides myself, who didn’t buy the biggest and most powerful Wi-Fi router they could, and crank the amplitude up to 11 just to push signal through walls and overpower the signals coming from their neighbors. With everyone doing this, is a race to see who has the most powerful Wi-Fi to drown out everyone else. These two ideas are in direct conflict with eachother.

I ran two wireless N access points when I lived in an apartment. I identified pretty early on that there was a wet wall in the middle of my unit, in the kitchen, which sat between the bedrooms and the living room. The washroom had a different wet wall, and that was in the corner of the unit, so no problems there. I basically placed one access point on each side of the wet wall, one in the living room, the other in the bedroom, and enabled all of the roaming features I possibly could. I didn’t really ever notice any trouble switching between access points on my phone while moving around the place, so the two acted as a single network, and I never had an issue with dead spots. The system I used also monitored channel usage, and would change the wifi channels if the channel got busy, so I didn’t really have any trouble with people interfering with me. It wasn’t the fastest, but neither was the Internet, we only got about 50mbps service there.

By all accounts, apartments should be the one place that needs alternatives the most, but I have yet to find any apartment that has Ethernet built in.

802.11 AC “wave 2” was a pretty important step up, using mu-mimo. Then nothing of interest happened with Wi-Fi 6. 6e just added 6ghz, which is good but you hit the problem of cost versus compatibility. There simply are not many 6ghz capable devices yet, so the argument is kind of a wash.

Wi-Fi 7 just dropped, again, with minimal changes.

Wi-Fi 8 I’m sure will be similar.

And all of the extra speed you could get from your fancy pants Wi-Fi 6/7/8/whatever router is pretty much negated by the early 802.11ac (or earlier) devices hanging out on your network, pulling the basic rate down as far as the router will allow so that the majority of the available airtime is spent sending broadcasts and beacons.

I work with technology for a living and honestly, the last two really exciting things I saw in wifi were mu-mimo and 6ghz being opened up. Everything else is iterative changes, and most of the speed advertisements are bullshit. It assumes perfect signal with the widest possible supported channel width with all radio chains engaged. Considering that most devices (mobile devices and laptops particularly) are either 1x1 or 2x2 for radio chains, you’ll never ever see the bandwidth advertised.

Really quickly, you need all the right things in place to get the advertised speed, 160 (or 320) MHz wide channels, good luck finding one that doesn’t have a nontrivial amount of interference on it… A sender and receiver with 3x3 or 4x4, and a clear channel with a low noise floor and no other networks or devices interfering with the signal.

Not only that, but the advertised speed is an aggregate of all of the radios at once, so rinse and repeat for each supported band.

You could go to a lot of effort to achieve all of this by basically turning your house into a Faraday cage, but even that’s not perfect and the stuff inside the house is still going to cause interference… Or you could settle for lower single link performance and just… Get a handful of access points so that the load is spread out and no single node is handling too much traffic.

I’ve been working in tech too long.

Oh. I have no doubt that a lot of people are vulnerable to the exploit, but I’m entertained by the fact that you can stop the exploit by simply removing a chat app.

Lol. It relies on WhatsApp.

Depends on the type of fiber and all that. It can be insanely complex.

But this is possible, yes.

You are the subset of people who happen to be in a situation where they’re working as they should. I’m going to guess that you’re not in North America, and live somewhere with 240v power outlets.

In any country that uses 120v, usually it’s split phase power, and if your powerline adapters are sharing a phase with something that’s inductive or crossing the split in the phase, generally they’re going to be rubbish. So you basically need a degree in electrical engineering to figure out what circuits are on what side of the split phase, and what is on each circuit that may be an inductive load, and could interfere, just for them to perform like they should.

There’s a whole lot more to it, and I’m simplifying a lot here, but that’s the overview of the problem.

With UK power circuits, there are fewer breakers and everything is fed from a single phase of 240v. That makes it much more likely that you’ll have a good experience with powerline. Just have to avoid the circuit with stuff like your air conditioner (if you have one) and stuff like the fridge, and generally you do quite well with powerline.

Ethernet is still better tho. Heh.

This is the information I couldn’t really squeeze in without side tracking my entire point.

There are “good” extenders, that use different channels/radios, but the cheap ones people buy are not those.

This is correct. You might want to look into a point of entry filter for MoCA, since you don’t want to share your Internet with your neighbors.

Last time I looked, which was a while ago, I couldn’t really find any, but hopefully that’s been sorted out in your area.

Basically the point of entry filter stops the signals from the MoCA link from crossing, so you would want to put that between the outside box and the first splitter.