That must be why Google’s greenhouse emissions went up 50% in five years. ChatGPT’s legendary efficiency.

Keep defending those power wasting glorified autocomplete. In no way are we doomed as a species.

We can just continue tu pump more and more into the air. “AI” will surely find a solution for that anyway.

It probably consumes as much energy as a family house for a day just to come up with that program. That’s what happens.

In fact, I did a Google search and didn’t have any choice but to have an “AI” answer, even if I don’t want it. Here’s what it says:

Each ChatGPT query is estimated to use around 10 times more electricity than a traditional Google search, with a single query consuming approximately 3 watt-hours, compared to 0.3 watt-hours for a Google search. This translates to a daily energy consumption of over half a million kilowatts, equivalent to the power used by 180,000 US households.

It became untenable well before that for certain people. It’s all stuff that can be changed or disabled but the Start Menu in Windows 10 with the tiles, and its default search on Bing was infuriating. I do tech support and some clients just don’t bother to deactivate it. There is also the whole thing about Microsoft removing parts of the old Control Panel and its utilities.

But another aspect of why they may also be losing market is how bad they have been with other architectures, like ARM. Windows for ARM seems to be lacking a lot. Even though they have been slowly getting better with emulation, they are still very much behind macOS and Linux. And I’m just a level 1 tech, but it seems like ARM devices and other low power architectures will slowly replace the old home desktops. They may have made a big mistake there.

But they still hold the corporate world and governments by the balls so, it’s gonna be interesting to see.

I’m not sure how my install works, as I just found a script that installed everything for me and it worked on different SBCs. However, when I look into “About”, HA says the installation method is supervised. And according to the article, this is precisely what is going to stop being supported.

Home Assistant is deprecating two installation methods, meaning they will continue working for now, but support will end in six months with the release of Home Assistant 2025.12. This includes Home Assistant Core, which runs in a Python environment, and Home Assistant Supervised, which involves running your own operating system underneath Home Assistant.

This is what I do. I have an Orange Pi 3b as a file server but it also runs HA in a docker image on top of that. I guess I’ll just wait and see if it stops working. If so I’ll try to reinstall using whatever “new/official/supported” method they want, and if not working, I’ll jut give up on HA.

Meh, I guess I will need to find a new way to install Home Assistant on my Orange Pi.

The instructions I found apparently uses the supervised version even if it’s running in docker.

It’s been a while since I looked into installing/reinstalling HA but AFAIK using anything else than a Raspberry Pi seems discouraged, which is… discouraging.

It was the same on the municipal level for me. I can call 311 or write to them, but it was kind of nice to be able to tweet at my neighbourhood and have people interacting with them and me on local issues.

I thought the reverse at some point until I realized that a couple of woodpeckers were making sounds similar to squirrels. I was laying in my tent one morning and heard those calls and thought some squirrels were “fighting”, but then they started pecking at a tree so I realized what they were.

Also, the first time I went in the Caribbean I thought birds were making such a ruckus in the evening but it was actually a small frog called Eleutherodactylus martinicensis.

I’m sure it also has nothing to do with the fact that it’s a woman.

Lately, Firefox + uBlock Origin and YouTube on Linux is sometimes horribly slow for me. It uses all the CPU and chokes my computers. Sometimes it’s even difficult to just seek in the video, as it’s so sluggish.

It seems to vary depending on the type of ads. It’s not “random” because a video that has this behavior will always do it, even if I restart FF, while others will be fine.

I thought it was my old computer at first, or that I was out of memory, but the same thing happens on my modern Ryzen.

Although I notice it less and less, so maybe it was a bug with YT + uBlock.

And it’s only on my Linux computers. On Android, FF + uBlock works super well.

My pet peeve about ads everywhere now is on Android.

Your Android phone doesn’t come with a voice recorder? Download one, with ads every time you record.

You want a different calculator? Ads!

Flashlight app? Ads!

Notepad? Ads!

And people just apparently accept ads in nearly every app, even the most basic ones.

I don’t remember the Sound Recorder, or Notepad having ads. But because people are now used to ads everywhere, it’s certainly coming as MS is trying to jam ads in everywhere possible in Windows too, now.

I’m so grateful for Linux. The apps I get through apt-get don’t make me watch ads. Unfortunately even if based on Linux, the Android world is so infuriatingly crammed with ads.

I wish I could find a “phone” or portable device in that format, with an OS that works like “true” Linux.

Rule #2 says to respect the firing sequence or else you’ll blow up, but IRL those assholes don’t respect any rule and are still not exploding. Also, rules #4 says that the goal is conquering the galaxy. Maybe it’s the losers that die on Mars?

Apparently people were wearing “hats” on their heads before it became impractical and unnecessary with people taking cars to go anywhere that’s more than a few feet away.

Then you can stay on forums that needs to be refreshed, or uuuh… isn’t there a proprietary IRC like thing for young people, something like Disco? Or Discom. Or Discord? Apparently it’s much like IRC but without the freedom.

I use TheLounge which saves and display history for me.

Convos also does that.

I am still on IRC, have my own server, and use TheLounge as a client. We can paste mp3s, mp4s and images on the channels. It just works fine for us.

IRC still exists. There’s nothing stopping anyone from joining a server and a few channels.

Where I live temperatures can reach -30C in winter and 30C in summer, so storing anything “sensible” in a shed is a very bad idea. Everything has to be stored in a controlled environment or it will quickly get moldy and rusty.

However, I kept my old 5.25" diskettes in a box where they were a bit squeezed together and they obviously didn’t like that. It could also just be time. Anyways, a few years ago I decided to copy everything on hard drives and some diskettes were now unreadable.

I waited too long to backup them and now it’s too late for some of them.

And even stored “properly”, I also have burned CDs from the early 2000 that are also unreadable. It’s unfortunate but there’s nothing I can do now, except to learn and remember the lesson.

I’m always baffled by people that find old computers stored in barns and still working. Where I am I don’t think they would last more than two winters with this kind of temperature and humidity variation.

The hunt for the cofounders of torrent site The Pirate Bay was a lengthy game of cat-and-mouse, spanning several continents. In the end, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Gottfrid Svartholm all ended up in prison.

How often do you switch email address and provider?

Mine still takes several seconds to boot android TV just so it can display the HDMI input, even if not connected to internet. It has to be always plugged on the power because if there is a power cut, it needs to boot android TV again.

My old dumb TV did that in a second without booting an entire OS. Next time I need a big screen, it will be a computer monitor.

That’s excellent for their clients. I’m guessing it set a precedent and the industry stopped trying anything else.

I didn’t follow the most recent developments here in Canada but AFAIK, a decade ago the industry tried to sue individuals that were “pirating”, and lost because they couldn’t proof that an IP could be associated with a single person, or something like that. Then the industry pretty much stopped trying to sue individuals from that point. They still send the threatening letters, but they don’t do anything else because past experiences with our courts didn’t go well for them.

Of course, there is a very very slim chance that the industry will try to sue a few individuals to scare others and create a new precedent, but it’s going to be a civil suit because it’s not even criminal here.