Just in case somebody’s trying to compress the unredacted Epstein files. Gotcha.

Compression doesn’t require a server; it can run entirely in your browser.

… why should it even require a browser?

Transmission doesn’t really require any new technology that’s not already in use. Just need to build more of what we already use every day. More high tension power lines, over longer distances, more interconnects between grids, more capacity in those interconnects.

If you really want to go full power on this (and especially if you want your solar power to be continuous generation 24/7) you’ll need to develop a bit of new tech. Well, not so much new tech as just scaling existing tech to be massive. A truly gargantuan transmission line across the Bering Strait could link the two hemispheres into a single worldwide grid. (Though Australia and other more isolated islands might still have to have separate grids and couldn’t take advantage of this as ‘easily’.) If you build that, then you can have a global power grid that the sun is shining on 24 hours a day, so even if solar power was your only power source and even if you had no grid storage capacity, the power grid could still operate all day every day, with that big hemisphere interconnect transmitting power from the day side to the night side, switching direction of flow twice a day.

i read articles about improved battery technology monthly

For grid-level energy storage, we don’t really need any new battery technology. Yes, it might be nice to have cheaper, greener, higher-capacity, more durable batteries, but we don’t need that to make grid-scale storage work. Even our lunky old lead-acid batteries that have been around for over 100 years would do just fine. We just need to build MORE of them. Like, a lot more. (Plus chargers and inverters to change the AC grid power to storable DC and back again.)

But lead-acid batteries have limited life cycles!

They do. But you don’t throw them away when they reach the end of their life cycle – you recycle them. Even completely worn-out and absolutely useless lead-acid batteries can be recycled, recovering 99% of the materials in them. And you can use those materials to build fresh new batteries, likely on a massive scale, running continuously, always recycling the oldest batteries on the grid and shipping out fresh newly made batteries to replace them. Aside from the energy the recycling (and transportation) processes use, it’s pretty much a closed loop system. Recycling and replacing the batteries just becomes a regular maintenance task.

I don’t know if it will last as the fediverse scales, though…

“No ads” might last, with a little effort. Larger instances might start including ads in order to pay for the substantial server resources needed to run them, but you could always just use a smaller instance without ads – or even run your own, private instance without ads – and posts from the other ad-supported instances would still federate to you and vice versa, allowing you to participate without ads.

No ‘content creators’ trying to grab your attention for money, though… That can never last. The more popular the service gets, the more such people will come to it, looking to take advantage of the wider audience available here. And, honestly, the fediverse might be even weaker against that. While some instances might make rules against it, they’ll go to instances that don’t have rules against it, or poorly moderated instances, or they’ll make their own new ones. You can always block them, sure, but new ones will pop up faster than you can block them if it gets popular enough. At least as long as Capitalism lasts, whenever there’s a large group of people, others will come to try to sell things to those people or extract money from them in other ways.

figure out grid scale storage, fusion or build nuclear power

You don’t necessarily need that, actually. Another option is to invest in a larger, wider grid with more interconnects and more long-range transmission capacity.

Maybe the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing where you are … but the sun is shining somewhere, and the wind is blowing somewhere. If you can transmit the power from those places to where you are (and vice versa) then you really don’t need nearly as much storage capacity or continuous generation. If you can transmit power from farther away, that can really help even out the random variability in renewable power sources by averaging them out over a much wider area.

Another often-overlooked constant source of renewable energy is geothermal. Geothermal power plants can be extremely green and efficient, and their power capacity basically never changes at all. They’re only viable in certain places that have geothermal hot spots, of course … but once again, you can solve that by increasing long-range transmission capacity. Build massive geothermal plants in the few places where they’re viable, and then transmit that power to all the places where geothermal isn’t viable.

It can also be hazardous for electricians or DIY home repairs if they don’t know about it.

Oh, you think you’re safe because you turned the house’s power off at the main breaker? Forgot about the solar panels backfeeding into the panel – all the circuits are still live!

(Or, even more fun, only half the breakers in the panel are still live, since the solar panels are only feeding into one of the two phases. So maybe you test to make sure the power is off by turning on the lights, and the lights don’t turn on so you think you’re safe. But the power outlets you’re about to work on are on a different circuit, one that’s on the same phase as the solar, so they’re still live. Fun stuff!)

All that’s to say… You should definitely still do home solar if you can. But document it well, and establish ways to disconnect power to ensure safety!

Well, they could be cheaper.

Or the power company – the only one you’re allowed to do business with – could lower their production costs but leave your rates the same, pocketing the difference as profit.

Mint is actually one of the ones I tried before. It did not like my multi-GPU setup, though. Could only use one GPU at a time, which means I could only use a maximum of 4 monitors.

Maybe I’ll try it again, though, when I upgrade to a more sensible monitor/GPU setup.

Plus, it will divert Russian personnel, fuel, and other resources away from Ukraine.

You could be totally screwed in that assignment just by having a very common name.

I finally got my GF on Linux, and she’s not far off.

Posting this from Kubuntu Studio and … it’s not bad, really. Everything works fine. I even have a couple Snap packages installed … on purpose. (Though, generally, I do try to avoid snaps.) The bloat might be relevant in lighter systems (which is why I have a different distro on my shitty old chromebook), but this is a massive workstation PC that could handle 10x the bloat without noticeably slowing down, so who cares?

(The reason I’m using Ubuntu is because after trying several distros, Ubuntu is for some reason the only one where my stupid, insane, 6-monitor multi-GPU setup worked properly, right out of the box. I eventually intend to go to 4 huge monitors instead of 6 smaller ones, which means I’ll be able to drop down to a reasonable, rational choice of using only one GPU instead of two different ones. At that point, maybe I’ll try distro-hopping again. Though, honestly, “exactly like Ubuntu, but without Canonical and without Snaps” would be what I’m looking for. Would definitely prefer to stick with apt package management, since that’s what I’m used to at this point. Maybe I’ll try straight-up Debian? But I don’t really like the way Debian splits its repositories, where you basically have to choose between “extremely outdated” and “bleeding edge” with no “as up to date as possible, while still being well-tested and stable” option in between. For all of Ubuntu’s faults, I think they actually do a pretty good job of maintaining that balance between stability and being up-to-date.)

Really slow download speeds?

or let ignorant people post YOUR image to FB

Yeah … good luck with that.

The person you replied to thinks their shopping list is somehow immune to advertising

Yep. They only buy things on their list, okay.

So which brand of that thing are you going to buy? The one you recognize most and are most familiar with, maybe?

It’s cute how you think deleting your account will stop them.

Great. So now Facebook can become a literal ghost town.

I wonder how advertisers paying for ads on Facebook feel about paying to advertise to dead people?

When you want to do GPU processing for AI, crypto, video editing, etc, though, this gets reversed.

Getting Cuda working on Linux with an nvidia card is relatively painless. Just a few well-documented commands, worked on the first try.

I could never get AMD’s equivalent to work on Linux, though, and it led me down a horrible rabbit-hole of trying a dozen different driver versions from a dozen different places, all with their own unique and quirky ways of installing… And it still never did work.

Yep, either way, your job is toast.

AI succeeds: AI takes your job.

AI fails: Economy crashes and you lose your job due to the crash.

But you won’t be able to afford it because the market crash means you lose your job.