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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Hmm i get where your friend is coming from but he’s literally falling for the corporate bait lol. he’s talking about “efficiency” like it’s a physics equation but forgetting how these companies actually run.

    first of all big data centers are “efficient” on paper but they waste half their energy just on cooling and massive hvac systems. a small server or a vps slice doesn’t have that industrial overhead. and more importantly—the e-waste. google and meta bin their servers every 3 years to keep that “efficiency” high. self-hosters are out here running mastodon on 10-year-old laptops that were headed for a landfill. reusing “obsolete” tech is way greener than building a brand new “optimized” server from scratch. also look at what they’re actually processing. google/meta are data gluttons—they’re burning megawatts just to track your every click and serve you ads. an “inefficient” federated node that only handles your actual messages is still way better for the planet than a “perfect” machine processing petabytes of surveillance crap. it’s like saying a bus is more efficient than a bike because it carries more people, but the bus is driving in circles for no reason. but honestly the efficiency argument is a total distraction. like okay cool maybe a massive machine is 5% more optimized… so what? we’re talking about the literal infrastructure of human freedom. if we don’t build these decentralized networks now and get used to hosting our own shit we are literally handing the keys of our entire lives to 3 or 4 giant corporations and the state.

    Once they have total control over every byte you send and every person you talk to “environmental friendliness” is gonna be the absolute last thing on your mind. you’ll be living in a digital cage where you can’t even organize a protest or share an opinion without an algorithm deleting it. id rather have a “less efficient” network that actually belongs to us than a perfectly green digital gulag where we have zero rights.

    Worrying about the carbon footprint of a home server while the world is sliding into techno-fascism is like worrying about the fuel efficiency of the bus taking you to a labor camp. it’s completely missing the point. if we don’t have the infrastructure to resist today we won’t have a future to be “green” in tomorrow.













  • anon5621@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlTowards a Sovereign Mobile Stack
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    1 month ago

    It one of reason why i don’t like entire arm stack and ideas they put it in it. It wild garden without any standardised and closed gardgen of which vendor and mostly and the worst part is that most people are totally okay with it because 'the battery life is great. ​We are literally regressing thirty years in terms of hardware ownership. On x86, there’s an expectation of a ‘common language’ between the OS and the silicon, but the ARM ecosystem is a fragmented disaster of proprietary silos. Because there’s no UEFI and no ACPI for the vast majority of consumer ARM chips, the hardware can’t even describe itself to the operating system. You’re stuck relying on Device Trees hard-coded maps of the hardware that are almost always closed-source or trapped in some vendor’s stagnant 5.x kernel fork.

    If the manufacturer decides to stop supporting your device, it doesn’t matter if the silicon is still powerful; it becomes a paperweight because you can’t just ‘install a clean OS’ on it. You’re a tenant on your own device, praying that some developer on a forum spends a year reverse-engineering the proprietary blobs just so you can get basic GPU acceleration or Wi-Fi working on a mainline kernel. ​

    We’ve traded the ‘General Purpose Computer’ for a disposable appliance model. We’re letting vendors kill off the concept of standardized firmware in exchange for slightly better efficiency, and by the time people realize they don’t actually own the ‘stack’ they paid for, it’ll be too late to demand an open standard. It’s a walled garden where the walls are made of undocumented registers and signed bootloaders that treat the owner like an intruder