The US is moving to reclaim the Bagram airbase from the Taliban after losing it during the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan, Donald Trump announced.
“We’re trying to get it back, by the way,” Mr Trump told reporters during a joint press conference with Sir Keir Starmer in Aylesbury on Thursday.
The Bagram base was the largest operated by the US in Afghanistan and is strategically important in countering China’s growing influence in the region.
Mr Trump suggested that he was negotiating with the Taliban to retake ownership, adding: “We’re trying to get it back because they need things from us. We want that base back.”
I have never been to the USA and know too little about inner naunces to propose anything. But revolution is always a good way to explain to politicians who the people are, who the politicians are, and how it all works.
Here’s the thing: I’m with you. I agree as an American that the only thing that can stop this train is a wholehearted, full-throated rejection of everything this administration represents. That comes with a couple of issues, though, and the first is that the body politic here is intensely complacent; much too comfortable to be driven to action. The fact of the matter is that disapproval of Trump is the majority view, and even at the beginning of his second term that was still about a dead even split, but not even Trump’s atrocious performance in his first term was enough to galvanize a large portion of the US voter base in the 2024 election, despite it clearly being a critical inflection point. Unfortunately, if it doesn’t affect their life immediately and directly, a large portion of America simply doesn’t give a shit. Overcoming that apathy is likely going to require something large, noticeable, bombastic, demonstrably wrong, and personally painful, and by that point there’s a good chance it’ll be too late. Additionally, any revolution or unrest is likely to be heavily suppressed by the second issue: the US police state and its willingness to use deadly force, regardless of the severity of the situation. Between police forces, riot police, swat teams, the national guard, domestic surveillance, and now the might of the US military turned on its own populace, the Trump administration has all the tools to make any true resistance deeply costly and incredibly painful. Talk of resistance, of revolution, of taking up arms against this fascist takeover is easy, but the feasibility of a clean revolution in the face of the US police, military, and intelligence apparatus is doubtful. More likely we would end up with either civil war or insurgency, fighting an asymmetric campaign against an overwhelming force. We know that the US is vulnerable to such tactics (see: US expeditionary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East), but we also know that those tactics are incredibly costly, and require a populace that is highly motivated by what they perceive to be an existential threat.
The key here, in my opinion, is the military. Historically, he who controls the military, controls the state. The victors of coups and revolutions practically always have the military on their side, and for good reason; very few things are as persuasive as the threat of a bullet. Morale in the US military right now seems to be low, and if we can manage to break the trained obedience to hierarchy, we might just have a chance, but without them, I don’t see a way forward. Even every citizen striking and causing a complete shutdown of the US economy would just be likely to lead to threats being made to and examples being made of them, and getting people onboard for that is unlikely to be feasible from a fundamental level, given that the majority of America lives paycheck to paycheck.
I don’t want to be fatalistic or claim that this can’t be done or that we shouldn’t be doing anything about it; we should, and have a moral obligation to act, but the reality of the situation is that the time to act while avoiding discomfort was last November, and the viable options available to us now are going to hurt, and will likely only get more painful as time goes on. That makes people hesitant to act, and until such a time as they have more to lose from inaction than they do from action, I don’t expect that to change.
Nothing like letting the Taliban know "Oh yeah we are trying to take that back" on public channels so they can get everything nice and reinforced and ready for you and make it as much of a pain in the ass as possible.
And most likely no strategy is behind the killings.
Probably some fascist (not necessarily who we think it may be) has control over the military assets there and is making impromptu orders based on daily political and personal urges .
Based on the date, this is like reporting the second one, imo. A third wouldn't be at all surprising though, the Serial-Killer-in-Chief won't stop until someone forces him to.
Yemen's Ansar Allah movement, also known as the Houthis, carried out a hypersonic missile attack on Tel Aviv and a drone attack on Ilan and Asaf Ramon International Airport after Israeli strikes on the port of Al-Hudaydah, Houthi military spokesman Y…
"lemmy.ca" oh - completely unrelated tho - that reminds me of the horror the other day i had when i was browsing lemmy, as usual, and happened upon a COMPLETE TRAINWRECK OF A THREAD in the comments of a post, the absolute redditness of it making me wretch and fall ill on the floor, convulsing even. Unbeknownst to me i had straid far from my familiar circles to where a typical .world user was arguing on the semantics of ableism with an apparently typical .ca user. it was disgusting to say the least.
As in, responded to NATO - the most prolific invader in the world, involved in at least one high-profile genocide - doing a coup in Ukraine and trying to bring up its weapons to the border with its most populated areas? Also, it's cute how you are completely fine with Ukraine invading Iraq and Syria, so please don't pretend as if you care about anybody invading anybody.
You literally came here to shill for the invaders of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Iran, and many other places, and to tell us how the rest of the world should roll over and die for your empire.
But hey, let's hear what you think Russia should have done in response to your empire's aggression.
Zelensky's actions only make no sense if one thinks he is doing what's best for Ukraine and ukrainians and is still intrerested in winning this war. In my opinion it's been quite obvious that Zelensky's and the goal of his close circle is to fight this war, not to make peace and ride this war as long as possible. Not to victory, because that seemed unlikely in 2022 and it seems almost impossible now. The goal is to stay in saddle until the collapse comes and then flee with the money and remain Ukraine's western recognize president in exile for life and keep living large with all the money he has and will have. If peace comes through peace agreement he will be the president that lost Ukraine and has to step down and the radicals who kept him in power will probably kill him as a traitor for betraying Ukraine.
Zelensky's goal therefore is not victory, but control. Control over the goverment and especially the military, ideological batalions and intelligence apparatus and such. Those will keep the war going, Russians away from Kiev, people in line and his political opponents silent. Those will help him ride out this war.
I didn’t have “possible nuclear exchange in the Middle East” on my bingo card for this year 😐
Edit: and yeah, that’d probably quickly spiral out of control into WW3. Maybe the Star Trek timeline is actually gonna pan out…? Sucks that we have to live through the horrifying part 🙁
Not really. With this defense pact, if Israel gets wild and decides to attack Saudi Arabia for some reason, Pakistan would go in on SA’s side… which would probably trigger all of Israel’s neighbors to attack Israel… which would probably trigger Israel to start nuking its neighbors… which would very plausibly include SA… which would trigger Pakistan to nuke Israel. And then you have WW3, because things would absolutely spiral from there.
There is a 0% chance Pakistan launches a nuclear missle to their west. India will launch their full aresenal yhe moment they detect a missle launch from Pakistan
I agree. Yet these defense pacts against a specific ‘enemy’ usually leads to a spiral of conflicts. We want LESS layers of emnity in the middle east. Not more.
sure but we have to be ok with pacts even if our propaganda and agitation have “sold” us that those are the bad guys. they’re likely no more bad than our “side” and progress like this is safer than not. look at nato keeping russia at bay?
No no when we do it it's a defense block to protect Freedom loving people when they do it it's a defense pack that's designed to spiral into war. Big difference.
Israel is comiting the final solution in gaza then they will take all palestine to finally start the plan for greater israel which some extreme visionaries include part of saudi. If you don't want more problem in the region you should keep cslling westetn countries to stop isrsel right now
I feel I should I comment on the title a bit. It's a genocide. And the 'Our Genocide' part is not a representation of Israeli sentiment, nor what the interviews showed, but a report of a specific group. The last part becomes clear in the video though.
Reporter Matthew Cassel speaks to Israelis in Tel Aviv, to see what they think of the war, famine and genocide happening next door, and the growing international condemnation against it
Democrats also want the U.S. to officially condemn plans by Israel to construct settlements in the West Bank, which the letter says is "designed to end Palestinian and Israeli aspirations for a two-state solution.
What actions did dems do when they was in power to punish Israel for the settlement building and settler violence/terrorism?
Looks slick, sounds sweet. Maybe there's deeper lore, but all I think of is the Librem 5 when I hear about hardware kill switches. Might consider it if it includes amenities like a decently replaceable battery, headphone jack, micro SD slot, and relockable bootloader.
So this kill switch will auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI? right? RIGHT?
Btw, if you dont understand their text, let me translate it for you
We took out loans from a bunch of venture capitalists in order to make a phone with a weird gimmick which is completely unnecessary since our OS collects your Data by default and dosent care about your Privacy at all anyway, just so we can please a crowd of tech hippies who have no idea about actual privacy but want to look cool by switching off their Camera after posting their 24/7 location on facebook and letting ChatGPT analyze their breakup text. (Also btw we have to somehow pay back those millions by raising our stock prizes, so stay tuned for our cloud selling your unencrypted photos because we have to enshittify).
The only reason to have hardware switches is if you fear that you've been compromised. And if you've been compromised, why would you continue to use a compromised phone for things that need your location or access to your camera?
And if you go in with the expectation of „this phone is going to be compromised”, just remove the Camera and everything and attach a Webcam or Mic for whenever you really need it. This way you can actually verify easily if its on, instead of having a mm button that can be easily toggled while putting the phone away
They are worse then Linaege. Linaege at least supports local system backups. With /e/, you have to use their own unencrypted servers.
(Also btw they support Phones with not anymore updated firmware, which partially allows script kiddies with a flipper zero to exploit your chipset)
I can tattoo „privacy first” on the inside of my asscheek. Dosent mean it actually means anything.
Like I said, /e/ is not at all better than LinaegeOS, but instead takes the OK LinaegeOS, adds their own insecure services, removes everything that could be more secure, and misrepresents what is essentially a LinaegeOS Flavor as
As I was reading the Murena’s terms of use I discovered that the voice to text feature introduced with e/OS/ 3.0 is using the Open AI API. That means our voice is sent to Open AI so they can translate it to text.
Please tell me, where I can enable Seedvault or another local backup service without having to root my phone first or use apps like shiziku.
YES, I HAVE to use Murena services in order to back up my /e/ is phone without compromising security via root or shizuku. Prove me wrong, and send me a fucking video about it.
While I appreciate your desire to improve privacy for yourself and others, you are again inventing things (optional service as if everybody using /e/OS had it, relying on Murena services where not everybody does it) from your very narrow perspective as if it was the truth. Again I imagine your ultimate goal is to help people to find a better alternative (which is something I hope too) but I can't spend more energy arguing with made up problems. I hope others who do read your words and are exhilarated by your passion and the strength of your words do still go check the source of the claims you make but I don't want to have this kind of conversations again so safer to block. Take care of yourself.
Edit: to clarify, Google is the enemy. Meta is the enemy. Amazon is the enemy. etc, not you, not me, not Murena, not LineageOS, not whatever tiny project of the Internet is trying to do slightly less worst than BigTech and surveillance capitalism.
auto delete all the telemetry /e/ collects by default, including the Voice data Sent to OpenAI?
You are back with your FUD. I don't know what you have against /e/OS specifically or if you are genuinely paranoid but in this specific instance you are making stuff up! I clarified in lemmy.ml/post/35472063 so maybe a language barrier because the post you linked to was in French but the STT service is
NOT on by default
for paying customers only (0 chance that a random person would activate it and thus be shocked)
tries to anonymize the data
So... that's not even telemetry, that's like activating a service which the company explicitly said relied on OpenAI in the first place, people STILL paid for it AND activated it. They can't be surprised that it's sending anything to OpenAI then.
Come on, help us make this community better. We have enough problems with BigTech, small tech and more that we do NOT need to invent problems!
PS: also the reasoning about the presence on kill switch is ... just plain silly. The PinePhones are running Linux, no Android, no /e/OS/ or whoever actor you might dislikes, OSes built by others, e.g. PmOS, Ubuntu, etc and yet still have hardware kill switches.
/e/ OS does a little trolling and sends all your Text to Voice data to OpenAI for processing and Speech generation.
First of all, to anyone downvoting my Comments about /e/ being a piece of shit, because...
they advertise themselves as degoogled, but instead let you connect to Google/Microsoft/etc services
replace all the propriatery not at all Secure Services from Google, with.... Drumroll please.... Propriatery and not at all Secure Services from themselves and actively encourage it.
They are For-profit
and being MORE out of date then even Fairphones stock roms.
... I told you so. Dm your Instance admin, pay them to send the DB entries of your Downvotes on a Thumb drive (or anything else from SSD to 3.5 inchHDD, depending on your preferences), and shove it up your rectum.
But a TL;DR:
/E/ is not Private. They just switch one bad comany to another one.
This is a Private OS. They should not have this integration, since there are more than enough FOSS alternatives.
for paying customers only
Dosent change my point.
tries to anonymize the data
Tries. Tries. Tries.
They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.
It being sandboxed doesn't prevent it from doing whatever the fuck it wants within the confines of the sandbox, and that sandbox has to be pretty wide to be functional.
Like, which is worse:
An os that ships with an opt-in kinda privacy unfriendly locked behind a paywall.
An os that ships google play services, which you need to give all sorts of permissions for apps to function, and requires a google account.
To quote you:
They claim to be private. They incorporate a non private Service even though there are valid alternatives. Thats where this discussion starts and ends.
See how that applies to graphene shipping google play services instead of microG?
Not commenting on the other stuff but people should get used to the fact that anonymized private data is still private, so a so-called privacy app should not be leaking or disclosing or selling it. It might be LESS invasive than personally identifiable data, but it's not NON-invasive.
Who is willing to pay for it after all? Almost certainly, someone who is up to no good. And if you can think of a way it can possibly be misused, then enabling that misuse is invasive.
I'll preface my answer to clarify that I'm against surveillance capitalism and privacy Zuckering. I say that in the open, do not use Google services, Amazon, have my own PeerTube instance, IoT at home is HomeAssistant with ZigBee, etc. So my goal here is NOT to cut some slack to anyone.
I started with this because I'm not actually sure what you are referring to. Since my initial comment is about Murena STT I'll assume it's that but if not please correct me. This specific service... is not a compromise I would accept. So I'm in NO way advocating for me. The only thing I'm clarifying is that this service is not something one can "stumble upon" and enable without paying attention. That's why I put such recurring emphasis on it. It's not coherent with "sharing all data" or imagining a scenario where somebody buys an /e/OS phone Murena and somehow ending up getting their data leaked (due to the potentially imperfect anonymization) to OpenAI. One has to activate it and to do so one must be a Murena services paying customer. This is not the case when "just" installing /e/OS. So once again I'm not saying Murena is perfect, not even that it did the right choice (according to my own privacy preferences) my relying on OpenAI, and yet that problem is not relevant to most people who use /e/OS.
To make a quick a analogy it's like installing WhatsApp on a privacy OS phone. Sure you technically can do that but if you do and complain about how Meta is collecting your data then you did it on yourself, you can't blame the OS developers.
I don't understand what you're saying above, but my point is that disclosing any info to adversaries is invasive even if the anonymization is 100% perfect. The potential imperfection makes it worse, but that's a side issue.
An example is polling. Some terrible politician X wants to know what voters think of issue Y, like "35% in favor". So she hires a polling firm to call people and ask their opinions about Y, with the result being completely anonymized and aggregated, again, like "35% in favor". What will X do with that info? Something bad, of course! We said at the beginning that they are terrible!
So do you want to cooperate with such a poll, that X commissioned to serve an evil purpose? Of course not! Or at least, I hope of course not. In that case, what do you think of software that effectively enrolls you in such a poll against your wishes?
If your private activity is being statistically reported to your adversaries, your privacy is being invaded even if there is zero PII in what the adversary gets. This is infosec 101. A quotation due to Silvio Micali is "a good disguise does not reveal the person's height". Statistically summarized information is still information, and calling it otherwise is self-serving nonsense. You want to give the adversary NO information. Anonymization is irrrelevant.
My point isn't really about the implementation per se (I'm aware of the limitation since at least 2011 by reading then Link Prediction by De-anonymization: How We Won the Kaggle Social Network Challenge so more than a decade ago) but rather that the "solution" Murena offers is not a mandatory service. If people want to use it, they can. I do not want to, I do NOT have to. I'm not arguing that their solution is good, or bad, only that it's optional.
This paper describes the winning entry to the IJCNN 2011 Social Network Challenge run by Kaggle.com. The goal of the contest was to promote research on real-world link prediction, and the dataset was a graph obtained by crawling the popular Flickr so…
Well they say "kill switches are located beneath the battery cover and can be switched with a paperclip or similar tool, so it is not easy to switch them regularly, but for shifting the camera and microphone OFF for longer times they are very suitable"
Got a CMF1 with /e/OS since ~February (cf my history of comments to see the ups and downs, overall happy with both) ... and I admit I'm tempted. I obviously don't need it and having a relative cheap (~350EUR) feels pretty nice to me. Maybe if I want an upgrade later on but for now I'll stick to what I have.
Murena SHIFTphone 8: The sustainable, modular smartphone with privacy-focused /e/OS and a hardware kill switch. Enjoy a 6.67″ AMOLED display and expandable storage up to 512GB.
Jesus, the constant attempt at undermining murena by some users with falsehoods and misrepresentation is quite concerning here. Reminiscent of certain private OS devs having public mtdowns.
Indeed, it's quite tiring especially when IMHO the goal is to decouple from large dominating actors that are obviously worst. I think the initial motivation is positive, namely genuinely improve privacy, but it goes to such extreme that no compromise is possible (which even that is fine) to actually inventing scenarii that aren't real to make the point.
TL;DR: let's focus on doing better than the popular worst offenders (random recent example) and eventually keep on improving without pushing imperfect projects down
Google misled users about their privacy and now owes them $425m, says court
A court ordered Google to pay $425 million after finding the company misled 98 million users about data collection through its "Web & App Activity" setting1. The case revealed Google continued gathering user data via Firebase, a monitoring database embedded in 97% of top Android apps and 54% of leading iOS apps, even after users disabled data collection1.
Google's internal communications showed the company was "intentionally vague" about its data collection practices because being transparent "could sound alarming to users," according to district judge Richard Seeborg1.
This ruling adds to Google's recent privacy settlements, including: - $392 million paid to 40 states in 2023 for location tracking violations - $40 million to Washington state for similar location tracking issues - $1.38 billion to Texas in 2025 over location tracking and incognito mode claims1
Google plans to appeal the $425 million verdict, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda stating "This decision misunderstands how our products work" and asserting that Google honors user privacy choices1.
Please just officially support Linux mobile on it as an option. I don't care if it buggy and barely usable, most Android phone companies actively make it almost impossible to install anything other than Android.
They all use the base package from the chipset vendor. It only supports android and only for a given number of years. I wouldn't be surprised if the license was massively invasive.
Basically, there's no drivers and no documentation for most mobile hardware outside of manufacturer contracts.
Can someone clarify: according to Murena's website, they use /e/OS, which is what they call "degoogled" Android. I would assume degoogled means no Play Store. If that's the case, what's going to happen next year, when Google starts blocking installing .apks by unverified developers? Which, I'm assuming, is a good chunk of developers who have apps on F-Droid.
Indeed, by default AFAICT they provide ~~Aurora Store and F-Droid~~ App Lounge (edited: was a little while so I forgot, I install F-Droid on every Android device I have as a reflex).
Regarding the consequence... well I don't know the future. Maybe alternative stores will have a "trick" so that they are considered verified and thus can install other .apk, or maybe it won't matter for rooted phones anyway.
No worries Google's actions against installing apks from outside the Play Store will only influence Android, not any of the other operating systems that are based on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)
Presumably google is going to block app installation via a google service. If you do not have google services in your phone there's nothing to block you.
Rather than act to end Israel's genocide in Gaza, western leaders rally behind a French-Saudi scheme for fictive statehood that entrenches Israeli supremacy and props up the PA
Five hours after Charlie Kirk was shot this week, an Atlanta man got a phone call from an Illinois police officer asking about a photo he shared with a couple of close friends on a private Discord chat. The Atlanta man, who asked not to be identified, says the post was merely a confirmation that he had purchased the same T-shirt that the accused killer wore (from an Illinois-based online shop).
Social media companies are generally forbidden by law from divulging users’ private communications to the government without a traditional legal process (e.g., court order). But there’s an exception: in perceived emergencies, social media platforms can proactively and “voluntarily” hand over private messages in response to what’s called an “emergency disclosure request” (EDR).
Discord, I am told, did not respond to any EDR here; but when I asked them directly if they’d provided law enforcement with information to traditional legal process, they declined to respond on-record.
The FBI, or the intelligence community, evidently is monitoring Discord private messaging, even from people who have broken no law.
Full blown Orwellian world. Run for local government and stop this shit.
The largest populated areas are left leaning. If they ae controlled by democratic socialist, we can restrict this shit. Just by pure numbers.
I saw this coming in 1999 when Scott McNealy inadvertantly spilled the beans on what his hateful industry was up to, and I have been extremely cautious about what I've been posting ever since. People have called me a paranoid crackpot for decades. I guess I hate to tell you I told you so...
At the Monday night launch of Sun Microsystems' new Jini technology, CEO Scott McNealy calls consumer privacy a non-issue. The Federal Trade Commission has another view. By Polly Sprenger.
De-google and open source has been my push this year. I'm not the most knowledgeable but I don't trust these companies.
I stopped using social media for almost 20 years. Only anonymous chats like this are used. Everything goes through a VPN and I always think that someone else is reading my stuff.
Ask yourself: can you say or post absolutely everything that falls under free speech - i.e. not calls to violence of civil disturbance? Do you feel like you can safely talk about all subjects without being cancelled or sued?
As soon as you start thinking twice about whether you can say something safely, that's censorship. Censorship isn't someone breathing over your neck saying "Be careful what you say", it's you self-censoring so you don't get into trouble.
not a single person gives a shit about charlie kirk; the whole crackdown is because politicians got a glimpse ofhow people will react when they die and they don't like it.
They don't give a shit about that either. Trump has been trying to goat people into violence and he final got his wish (possibly by his own people). They are seizing on that. That is why he moved the national guard into memphis TN. He wants marshall law to hold power forever.
Since we're making corrections, the word is "goad," not "goat." You try to "goad" people into behavior or choices they wouldn't normally make.
I try not to correct people much anymore if their message is still pretty obvious. I realized that offering too many corrections could cause people to post less, and I didn't want to be the cause of that. But the fact that you were already willing to edit goaded me into suggesting another correction.
Using ICE and the national guard to overthrow the people. Well you always need a secret police force and military to tale over. He just picked the dumbest ones.
Todays news outlets if sent back to 1945: Underrated painter shot in the head by maniacal racist in Berlin. German outrage over frantic celebrations across Europe.
Ken Klippenstein has done amazing work and broke multiple stories.
This is not a smear against discord but a reveal of how the government is operating. If you don't think it is a privacy issue then you don't know what privacy is. Being a fan boy doesn't change what is happening.
Use discord all you want but your point is baseless about the story.
Apologies, I wasn't criticizing the article, or you for sharing it. It's a tricky sentence, especially if English isn't your first language - the "but" changes the subject. Article is definitely privacy related.
What isn't privacy related is my opinion about subtack. I don't mean to derail, so will let anyone reading this look up why ss sucks and make their own decision.
Gotcha. SS has a troubling history. One could argue journalist have a open door policy.
How do you say one is a journalist while another isn't? Today, anyone can be a journalist and a lot of traditional journalist are doing their own thing.
Even credible outlets are changing. The New Your Times was considered top tier but now..... lord have mercy. Billionaires are buying up and interfering with the companies. And then we have private equity firms, the lice found on the flies that eat shit.
Yes, I wonder what journalists ("professional" and otherwise) are supposed to do. Everyone going their own way and splintering off into many little voices doesn't feel like the right answer, but publishers are beholden to investors and can be bought out by billionaires. I suppose there are publishers/agencies that have maintained their integrity like 404 Media, or Al Jazeera.
Maybe this is just the burden of anyone in a democracy: to constantly weigh the quality of the sources of information you're using to form opinions which spawn action.
Getting funding from South Korea might be an option. They probably want the Trump Regime to go away, so that they can carry on business without a toddler doing stupid shit.
If a civil war happens, I suspect the Blue States would get a great deal of foreign support. "Fuck that guy", would be a big part of that. The other part being "I want a reliable business partner." Kinda like how the Confederates were boned internationally when it came to trade. Plus, it would be an easy way to earn favors with whatever institution that displaces Trumpkins.
I used to subscribe to several SS newsletters that switched to Ghost, which is how I found out about it. But I wouldn't have even noticed if they hadn't told me.
You may as well assume that anything done on public social media is being read, searched and filtered in real-time by law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Given the trajectory of this administration in persecuting people for their political affiliation, dumping commercial social media should be an imperative for everyone who isn't goose stepping.
That's been the case for 10 years. Unless it's e2ee, it's public record and can be tied to your real name with a minimal amount of paperwork.
Before I comment anything anywhere, I imagine it being read in a court room in a monotone voice. Bip bop dippity dop, the judge in this case is a swell person and I hope they have a lovely day!
Sounds like a CSAM case for a motivated partisan prosecutor.
People break the law, as it is written, way more than they think. Selective enforcement to target political rival groups is very much in the playbook here.
It is less safe to speak in public today than it was 2 years ago, and it is only getting worse. Protecting your privacy also means protecting yourself from mob justice when they decide you're the new target group.
Discord is private social media, and most users think their messages aren't shared with government without a warrant. Of course it's possible in this case Discord didn't even provide the messages "to police", but that the police just subscribe to their commercial data-sharing and enjoy the same real-time access that way.
It was said in a Discord chat. Discord chats are not private, you agree to that in the TOS when you sign up.
There are always people monitoring the chats, voice and video, looking for illegal activities. Something was said in that conversation that their algorithm flagged for human review and that person sent it to law enforcement.
You have zero privacy on any social media. Everything that you write is viewable by the service owner and they actively look for things to report to law enforcement.
Companies pay lip service to your privacy, but at the end of the day they’ll turn you in the instant it suits them. If you want privacy, you use encryption so that your privacy is guaranteed by mathematics.
Sad fact that we live in a world that his death accomplished more then his life. We all knew he was a Trump asset but I never thought it would be like this.
I really do worry tools like whatever the naperville pd using here are going result in a lot of damage and upturned lives once their use becomes more casual, like god knows what's going to happen with the president declaring random political views terrorism
no real court orders were involved, the article mentions a EDR wasn't invoked, no push back from discord over what sounds like some sort of dump or access to all images uploaded to the service
Lol, okay. As the vast majority of people have no clue and no interest in utilizing those tools. No interest in understanding threat vectors and cryptography. Cooked was a bit glibb, but the general "we", I do not see your optimism.
"Privacy is a right"... sure, so is healthcare and shelter... I am sure those policies are going global really soon.
As the vast majority of people have no clue and no interest in utilizing those tools.
I can't agree more. A few family members got really paranoid about their communications being monitored after Trump was elected again, so I offered to show them Signal or Element. Nah, no interest, "too hard". They still text even with the fucking US government itself warning people it's a very insecure medium.
I'm hoping that disinterest changes after a few people get locked up based on social media PMs, but don't have all that much hope.
With words, you dopy twat. You can watch Kirk right now, getting his ass handed to him in debate on youtube. Stop acting like murder is the only option you have.
Americans are weird dude, even their leftists are gun happy and to the rest of us around the world it’s baffling. But they were born and steeped in this lunacy so they don’t see the problem
Yes, so just the capitalist states and mercenaries should have guns. . . before you say "total disarmament," not gonna happen, arms are how the capitalists enforce property domination. It's impossible to abolish class without guns because they're going to forever wield guns to protect their class positions. Thus, under no pretext.
You guys are all talk, if you had guns to oppose tyranny then wtf are you waiting for!? Get to it, Americans are being thrown in gulags and free speech is being surpressed, so grab your guns and get to work ffs!
Words are sufficient only in a system that prioritizes broad wellbeing (as opposed to prioritizing the billionaires), when such a system works well, is healthy, is valued by most, etc.
We don't have it. We have a "every man for himself" and "got mine, fuck you" system.
I hate to say it, if anyone wants something in our system now, they have to take it by fiat and force. The fascists get it. They use the methods that work, it's just that their desired end state is intolerable shit for most. If their end state had freedom and human rights for everyone, most would forgive the methods.
Stop saying fascists, youve all used that word to fucking much and it now means fuck all.
People are still going on holidays, people are still buying houses, people are still getting jobs and paying rent and every thing else people have always done. Youre just spreading nonsense to play your part in the dumb as fuck culture wars. YOU and people like you, are why Trump is a thing. Yes, thats right, YOU. You, who plays the dumb games of culture wars, who calls a person who dont like star wars a fucking nazi. You created this nightmare world were extremism is everywhere.
Ofc you are an enlightened centrist-libtard-to be gefreiter @ einsatzgruppen. Go on, blame the left, suck up the narrative, surely history started yesterday and nothing similar to this ever happened. Grow a fucking brain or follow your leader, either way gtfo
No, the spreading of hate was the talking heads who told you he said things he never said. All the grifters and influencers and main stream news outlets who cherry picked the things he said, to make him look much worse than he is.
Like when he said that people accept that people die so they can have the 2A. You think thats extremism, yet dont ever bother to repeat the rest of what he said, when talking about the shit that society puts up with to have things. Like cars, we accept that 50k people a year will die because we want to drive cars. Its the same argument, but you take it away and all of sudden hes some nutjob claiming kids dying is a good thing.
Take away the 2A and you are at the mercy of a tyrannical government. The price of that safe guard is that some people will die. Exact same thing with cars, and knives, and whatever else. Everything has a cost. EVERYTHING. That was his point. And youd be dumb to disagree with it.
You can argue that we dont need guns, theres nothing wrong with that. But the logic is there.
You don't seem to understand that we are already using words, and it's getting us nowhere. These people understand that we want to use words, and they have weaponized our need for peaceful discussion against us.
Peaceful negotiations only work when both sides are operating in good faith. Not only are the MAGAs not operating in good faith, they view that as an enormous weakness to be exploited. So they tease us along, offering opportunities to negotiate, but they are just distractions, to keep their grift and oppression going longer, and deepening.
Hopefully, we will eventually negotiate our way out of this, but it is looking more and more unlikely by the day. Anyone who has read any history knows that sooner or later, it will almost certainly take some level of violence to unseat the MAGA disease that is afflicting the world.
We should start getting used to that idea now, before we need it for real.
So, dopey twat was being kind? Its fucking scary how radicalised you are. Absolute nutjobs. But hey, at least you didnt wish I would die... I guess youve got that going for you...
You guys are all talk, you just want guns to shoot at stuff cause it’s cool. You keep saying you need guns to stand up to tyrants, well get the fuck to it! What are you waiting for??? Hes literally cancelling free speech and throwing Americans into gulags, what the fuck are you waiting for???
Socialist Democrates whant's to destroy e2ee in sweden to both parties is anti encryption and pro mass surveillance. They are fighting against eachother of "who can introduce most surveillance and police state laws first"
Tjis is really the only thing anyone should pay attention to. Assassinating Peter Theil is a good first step to stopping this surveillance state. He wants to destroy humans to make way for transhumans. The war has begun.
That's what happens when you let billionaires operate unchecked. Billionaires have the ability to operate like an independent nation of one, fucking up the works for real nations who are trying to take care of their people.
Billionaires should either be prohibited, or their expenditures should be tightly regulated. Make them get permission from a regulatory panel before they can spend their money.
"No, you already have a yacht, you don't need another. Just for being shitty enough to request a SECOND yacht, that money will be earmarked to build homeless shelters instead. Anything else?"
Kurds have been Erdoğan'a greatest friends over the years. When Erdoğan called for a referendum in 2010 to abolish the independent judiciary (the infamous "yetmez ama evet" referandum), support from Kurdish nationalists was critical for Erdoğan's victory.
One thing that happened was that the Turkish leader Erdogan, visited Trump during his first administration, and after the meeting, Erdogan's security force attacked people who were legally protesting. A visiting head-of-state's private security came to America and beat-up legal protesters on American soil - and the Trump administration did nothing.
More like all humans really, these bastards just happen to be cops. But unlike the US, they arrested the cops immediately, and they are even keeping them (except the driver) in jail before trial. So some cops over there are doing thier job at least.
Denmark did not invite the United States to take part in a large-scale international military exercise on Greenland this week, as it had previously, as tensions remain high over President Donald Trump’s intention to acquire the Danish territory.
The exercise, the largest in Greenland’s modern history, comes amid increased interest in the Arctic region and its vast natural resources from other large powers, such as Russia and China.
It included contributions from the militaries of several European NATO allies, according to the Danish military. More than 550 people and soldiers took part, including more than 70 from France, Germany, Norway and Sweden.
It comes as the Arctic region is becoming more of a priority to various superpowers, friend and foe. Greenland is the world's largest island that is not a continent, and beyond its strategic potential, the island is rich in natural resources, home to 25 of the 34 minerals categorized as “critical raw materials” by the European Commission. Some of these minerals include those essential to the production of phones and computer chips.
Anderson emphasized the potential threat of Russia and China to reporters.
“We need Greenland for national security and even international security,” Trump said during an address to Congress in March, pointing to the influence of other global powers in the Arctic, specifically Russia and China. “And I think we’re going to get it one way or the other,” he added. Trump is trying to boost production of computer chips in the United States, which rely on minerals present in Greenland for production
Danish officials have made it clear that Trump’s interest in the region is not welcome.
Lavrov is just pissed that Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and set off the chain of events that led to the US entering WWII, defeating the Nazis, and getting The Bomb first.
The Soviets had promised at Yalta to enter the war in the Pacific within 3 months of the war ending in Europe. And they did launch an attack on Manchuria at 3 months to the day. Hardly feet dragging.
In fact, them being about to launch the attack, was one of the deciding factors on Truman dropping the nukes on Japan. He wanted to prevent the Soviets fron capturing territory that they would be reluctant to give up in the end. And he also knew that the USSR entering the war in the pacific would be what really pushed Japan to surrender. He didn't want to lose the opportunity to show off the new toys to scare the Soviets.
So not doing something until being forced into a commitment and then waiting until the last possible moment to Honor that commitment is somehow not feet dragging to you?
I don't really get the point of this comment... I'm no fan of the USSR, but am I supposed to be mad at them about this? They weren't at war with Japan. They were a little busy defending their homeland, and I don't believe Japan ever directly attacked them (someone will probably prove me wrong about this).
"Curse those lazy Soviets for not immediately starting a two front war after losing 11 million people to the Nazis. Respecting the agreements made at the Yalta conference regarding an invasion of Japan, to the letter, was ACTUALLY mendacious."
You realize that after losing 11 million people in a enduring and cataclysmic war, it may take some time to prepare for a war on the totally opposite front?
I dont even know why I'm engaging with this whitewashing. This isn't even what the OP is about.
The fact of the matter is that Japan has not handled the outcome of WWII well at all. Namely the Nanjing Massacre.
By this i mean, grandma checking her email and the IT pro with 10 NAS setup are the perfect linux users.
But us in the middle who pretend we're smart...its a damn hard road. And then helping others to switch when youre not yet a pro is even harder, though a good learning experience.
Getting games to work perfectly, audio issues, Bluetooth issues, vr setups are far harder to do, running older obscure software, hooking up obscure hardware, using external drives, music production, these are some examples of things that will be extremely hard on linux vs windows for the majority of middle users.
However id say it is worth it if you like learning thousands of weird terms and phrases and putting in many hours of frustration to solve a problem. (Have you tried using floop to Docker the peeble?). It is very satisfying fixing an issue and figuring out why it happened!
Still, when im forced to use windows I see how bad its become, so im sticking with linux!
I had a crisis too some years ago, when Windows 7 was the shit, I heard Windows 7 was very good (for Windows). So I tried to dual boot Windows 7, goddam a load of crap!! I'll never believe anyone claiming Windows is good again. The structure of security is a bloody mess, providing worse security, while taking control away from the owner of the system. And lack of package manager makes it ask for updates at the most inopportune moments. Just a tiny program like Adobe reader was super invasive, and was a major pain in the ass.
Windows is not in any way user friendly, it's just what most people are used to.
Window XP was probably the best and last good Windows version... 10 was kinda okay without all the telemetry shit and bloatware.
Windows 11 feels like macOS with extra steps + spyware on every move, click, clipboard copylpast.... Wouldn't go near that stuff even with full protection and debloat ^^ Just remove that shit and install linux instead.
Yeah I feel you... Sorry about that :/ ! At work you probably don't have a choice, however at home, you are free to choose whatever makes you comfortable.
A few months ago I wrote out some recommendations around the same theme here. Extracts:
A good start is to install tldr. You use it like man, but it gives you shorter explanations – or rather, a short list of illustrative examples.
Going further, check out Fish instead of Bash. I haven’t use Fish yet, but it’s said to be much better for learning Linux commands as a beginner. Later on, you may switch to Zsh. In any case, hitting Tab once or twice will often give you a list of possible completions to the command you are typing.
Also, I hugely recommend reading at least one book about Linux. I'm now almost through with the O’Reilly book “Classic Shell Scripting” by Robbins and Beebe (ISBN 9780596005955). Despite the fact that it's 20 years old, it helped me hugely – primarily with the shell and its commands, but also with understanding things like file structure.
It presupposes some familiarity with Unix-like systems and with the shell, so if one’s just starting out, the book “Learning the Unix Operating System” may be better.
External drives? Usually on most distros and file managers, it’s just one click.
I have had a bit of a horrid time with Bluetooth, though, especially when it comes to audio. However, I will say Linux allows you to do some nuts things with Bluetooth like emulate a Nintendo Switch controller with NXBT, allowing you to use a PlayStation controller on a Switch with a spare laptop.
As for audio, I feel like life has gotten much better for the layman since Pipewire.
I don’t think VR setups are that common, and the Venn diagram of VR owners and Linux users has to be even smaller. I’ve probably only known 2 people who actually own a headset, and both of them were standalone Oculus affairs.
Overall, I feel like it’s possible to conceptually understand Linux and which config file is while, while Windows registry is an incomprehensible beast. Also, it feels like Linux tends to have better errors that correlate to a specific problem, whereas the same Windows error could be caused by many different things and lead you on a wild goose chase through forum posts filled with generic advice and dead ends.
Not to say you are wrong in general, just a personal anecdote: i run Debian, everytime i need to upgrade from one major Version to the next I work for a day, dont get it done, cry, and then setup all my 3 PCs from scratch. (And NO a rolling release like arch or tumbleweed is not the solution, as I am not smart enough to manage different versions of dependencies and everything breaks at somepoint, Debian is at least stable between the major releases) My vive wireless will not work under Linux so I need to keep a dual boot windows on the workhorse which is difficult to maintain itself sometimes. And on my low spec PC audio is never synched with video and no matter what I do I don't get it fixed
I love Linux for its philosophy and hate Microsoft for theirs, I will go back under no circumstances and agree that Linux gives better error messages and docs to fix things, but I never needed to do that with Microsoft. I never needed to open the registry apart from escaping out of box setup...
User experience for someone with high technical expectations for what should be possible (vr, games, hi-fi cinema, CAD, DAW) but only moderate technical skills (I can navigate GUIs and make basic use of the terminal (grep, nano, apt) but if I try to understand English primary source docs I don't get it as after ~7 years of Linux I still only know about 30% of the necessary concepts and vocabulary just isn't that good.... Like, Damm, its hard for someone without any technical training who only has a few hours a month to work on his PC (meaning having time to fix and learn stuff, not just using the PC) to get the stuff done which is a no brainer on win
I mostly say so because I recently upgraded from 12 to 13 with almost no issues; the only issue was something with Apache that ended up being a quick fix. I followed the official Debian guide and temporarily remove third party repos and packages.
Havent brought myself to upgrade to 13 yet, but from 11 to 12 i followed to official guidlines, and when trying to reinstall my packages after kernel upgrade stuff got messed up. Packages didnt recognize their own config files anymore, wine completley behaved random, apt was flooded with error messages, the blzrry glassy Theme in I had in KDE plasma didn't reinstall properly leaving my desktop looking horrible, half programs not working and some weird driver(?) behavior ( hanging Indefinitly when trying to shut down the system and stuff like that)
Maybe all would have been fixable for someone smart enough, for me it was easier to start again from scratch.
Did you restart the computer after the upgrade and before reinstalling third party repo packages?
The “half the programs not working” kind of sounds like you had packages compiled for a newer libc and the like but the newer libc wasn’t in memory yet because you hadn’t restarted.
Was a while ago, i think i did. All I know is I worked trough the whole doc to upgrade start to finish because I didn't know which sections apply to me and which don't, it was like ten hours of work trying t o understand everything which, holly shit, wasn't easy and when I finally got completely through it didn't work as expected.
Not that I think the docs were wrong, I am aware that I was the problem there, but it sometimes bothers me when people act like Linux is super easy and even grandma can understand and use it while I, the most techy persons in my peer group, give it my all and still dont even manage a simple upgrade, which would be absolutely no problem on the corporate OSs
Huh. I guess 3 years of Debian usage has just gotten me used to stuff like that.
I can see where one might go wrong; there’s a lot of sections in that guide with contingencies only meant for specific situations, like upgrading from a USB or optical disc.
My nvidia drivers used to break sometimes but I just switched to dkms drivers and I have had a stable experience for years. Only downside is the upgrade takes a bit longer.
Gonna be real, I haven't had to bother with my OS for the past two months, so I disagree with a lot of this post. The take I disagree with the most is that things that would be difficult regardless of OS are somehow "harder" in Linux though. Getting old games to run on Windows is also a massive PITA, and oftentimes can be easier on Linux since you can always just run a WINE instance using whatever version of Windows the game was originally intended for. Same for old obscure software, anything from like the XP era does not play nice with Windows 11 in my experience. It sounds like the bigger issue is that you have learned a lot about Windows, and haven't learned a lot about Linux, so your knowledge base for Windows is better.
The actual issue I think is huge for your hypothetical "middle user" is hardware based. Some hardware is just better for running high performance applications on Linux than others. In my fancy, shiny, top of the line rig, my experience in getting games to work is I download them and run them with Proton. I've done no troubleshooting, barely use any applications other than Steam for gaming, and so far have not found a game I wanna play that doesn't work. On my old Nvidia-based rig that I replaced, however, it was the exact opposite story. Nothing ever worked, I was constantly looking through error logs and trying to troubleshoot, and most of the time the answer was hardware that wasn't properly supported.
Thats not what i experienced.... Trying to run sketchup with wine, 3 days trial and error, doesn't work even though winehq says its possible Using vive wireless? Not possible at all! or playing league, hard before vanguard, impossible after... Updating between major versions? Always breaks my setup and makes me start from scratch Using zoom for work with sharing desktop? Huge pita and u need to deepdive in Wayland to get I running (I didn't so I switched back to x)! Install a non native daw like ableton and get it running without crashes and usable latency? Impossible! Using your rack audio interface? Not possible as there is no Linux driver and pipewire only recognizes half of the functions
I have a ryzen 5 12 core and a Vega 64, so hardware is decent and clearly not the problem here.
I am aware that those problems often stem from programs not being designed for Linux, not Linux itself being bad, but the effect is sadly the same: using halfbacked freeware or study IT to get it running, nothing apart from Mozilla "just works"
Still, when im forced to use windows I see how bad its become, so im sticking with linux!
That's the right attitude. A lot of the comfort of Windows comes down to habit and mere exposure. Every Windows user who dives beyond the surface also spends a lot of time learning, but with the added burden of having to sift through every forum post suggesting sFc /ScAnNoW. And if you keep the same hardware for a few years, the Linux experience ages like a fine wine as drivers improve and features get some subtle polish.
Sometimes I wonder if my health takes a toll each time I help someone set up Windows. I can literally feel my heart rate increase as I go through the privacy-related settings.
I had that very experience somewhat recently. I had to set up Windows 10 on a laptop for a friend. I had been using Linux on my main PC for probably five years at that point, so I was “un-used to” Windows. Oh boy that was a dreadful experience. It was a lot like “no, no, no, no, don’t want that, stop it, turn that off, be quiet”, and then logging in and getting the final pieces finished? Headache-inducing. “Try this!”, “try that!”, “did you know you could do THIS?”, “subscribe to this product you should use!”
And then the preloaded “suggested software”, the search bar with “suggested/trending” garbage I did NOT want to see? Yeah it was not pleasant. I think unless I’m doing it professionally? I’m not going to accept that task again. I’m glad I do not have to use that software on my main PC anymore. It seemed to have gotten worse since I stopped using it five years ago.
You've used Windows for so long that you don't remember how it was when you first started using it.
This isn't different than what you are doing with Linux. The flow gets better and better and you will acquire the experience needed to navigate the issues. It takes time, that's all.
True, but there's a lot of stuff in the free software ecosystem that is just jank.
I expect things not to work at this point and don't get surprised when they don't. It's part of how we pour way more resources into abusive technologies over ethical ones. We can continue to be part of the problem (like a useful idiot), or pick our heads up and work towards the solution.
If you stick to popular free software, the jank is limited.
The Linux userspaces have a lot of enthusiastic people that create their own software and share it, and thus it seems like there is lot of janky stuff (because there is).
It feels like Windows has been captured by corporations and so the market is competitive. There isn't much space for enthusiast developpers to tackle a different vision of a popular software.
So yeah, I agree with you, lots of janky software in Linux, but that's the beauty of it IMO. If you stick to popular softwares, the jank is somewhat equivalent to Windows.
True, but there’s a lot of stuff in the free software ecosystem that is just jank.
A lot of free software is built to scratch the authors itch. If you choose to use it as well, that's on you. There's nothing stopping you from forking it and making it work how you want it... except time.
Yeah, my linux experience usually seems like its hanging on a thin thread at all times. If stuff is actually working, im super grateful and hope it doesn't break itself on the next reboot.
Im not sure why everyone else seems to have a perfect error free experience except for me xD or they are just lying. And I dont use Intel or Nvidia so I should have it easy!
This is very true. Linux is great if you just want to check email, or if you want to compile your kernel or dig into incredibly esoteric config files. But if you want to do something between those 2 extremes, the learning curve is extremely steep. My Windows box and Mac Mini both do all the things I want them to, but my Linux box keeps breaking and I don't trust it with anything important. I usually try to do things on Linux first, but when it inevitably breaks I switch over to Mac and get it done in a tenth of the time.
I'm sure I could get my Linux box to do everything I want. I'm busy and I don't want to fight with it and spend all my time learning about its eccentricities. I want to point and click and occasionally modify a text file.
and the IT pro with 10 NAS setup are the perfect linux users.
Well I'm closer to that. I'm an "IT pro" (I pay my bills by writing software) and I did learn CS at uni... and yet it's STILL damn hard!
I think that might be the part that "grandma" (bit sexist and ageist there but going with the example) finds it hard is a given but that professionals are struggling daily is somehow hidden away.
I can give you examples from just yesterday :
my deGoogled Android phone rejected my SIM card yesterday "SIM 1 not allowed"
my home IoT server stopped working
and few others smaller problems. So... I had to find ways to fix that which lead me to learn that :
some bug into HomeAssistant (my IoT server gateway) led me to restart its container, without having to restart the device itself
my Android ROM has a "Reset Network Settings" within the "Reset Options" menu
The irony is that some people who are not professional might even know about the later one but I didn't. So... my whole point :
TL;DR: IT is hard for everyone because it's complex (lots of moving parts) and always changing ("updates" are not just "better" but different) so we ALL must keep on learning.
I know ZFS is not the same as raid. but for most folk it services the same purpose. ZFS is a file system with raid like functionality hence i said for a software raid option it is good. meaning using RAIDZ and not hardware RAID. And yes ZFS can do so much more then raid which is amazing.
I was moving plex from my NAS to a dedicated box this weekend and spend 3 hours going crazy on why my movie library wasn't showing up. After a break and looking through fstab, I realized "novie" wasn't a share....
Remember kids, always work from the simplest solution up
the “grandma”/casual users never try anything complicated or different so nothing goes wrong.
the “pro” users either know what they are doing well enough to not make a mistake or to fix it when it goes wrong.
the middle users will always have it harder, they are trying things beyond the margins of “easy” so of course things go wrong and they don’t know how to fix it.
Anecdotal example: just yesterday I found out that I broke my file picker function in five out of six web browsers, by loading an Xcompose file with some definitions that GTK apparently doesn’t like. It took me about 5 hours of poking at things to figure out that a change I did a week ago, broke a function I hardly ever use. So I did fix it eventually but I it took me a week to notice and then hours to track down what was going on.
Is there any chance at all that the casual users would be using a compose key, let alone loading a custom definition file for it? Hell no!
But here’s the secret: there is nobody out there who is the perfect expert who never makes a mistake and knows all things. We’re all out here pushing boundaries; the only difference is where those boundaries are.
Yeah when you're in the middle you kind of know enough to be able to get around the safeguards and properly break things, but not always how to fix them again necessarily.
As a more advanced user, I have to say, the problems don't stop. Computers will never be "solved". They just keep making new puzzles forever. That's whats fun.
The more advanced you get, well you can solve the easy problems off the top of your head, but now you have new problems and there are zero search results for your error message. If you can't figure it out from the docs or irc you just have to read source code.
I try to document stuff as I find it, even if it means resurrecting an ancient thread. I often search for things and get one result, and it's me answering my own question a few years ago.
I've done that before too! Last year I was having a very specific issue and I was googling it, found someone who had the exact problem I had like 5 years ago, and it turned out to be me from my old account back when I used to use reddit lol.
This is strictly my personal experience and is not meant to negate someone else's experience.
I disagree, as a middle user myself, I've had much less problems since the switch to Linux. I don't own a VR setup, so can't speak to that, but I have used basically everything else you've mentioned since switching without issues. Older software seems to work better on Linux than windows 11 in my experience. The rare stumble I've had was easily remedied by searching forums and wikis.
Most windows problems I've had to search for solutions in the last several years led to either blind registry changes, following some useless wizard that rarely fixes the problem, or a nothing-burger circle where the OP ended up either giving up entirely or re-installing windows to avoid the problem. I've very much had better luck actually fixing a problem in Linux than just avoiding it.
I’ve found Linux easier and a much better user experience than windows 10 or 11.
If you use a straightforward distro that doesn’t let you do stupid stuff (like Bazzite or Fedora Kinoite or any other atomic distro), Linux becomes easy.
I’m on the opposite end with Nixos. Hard as fuck to use but god is it stable. Especially when you start leaning into things like impermanence and flakes. Crazy learning curve / upfront effort
Atomic distros made my coming back to Linux a dream. I don't want the hassle and I don't want to break shit. That was fun in my youth, now I want shit that works.
The nice thing is that Linux is always improving and Windows is always in retrograde. The more users Linux has, the faster it will improve. If the current state of Linux is acceptable enough for you as a user, then it should be possible to get your foot in the door and ride the wave upwards. If not, wait for the wave to reach your comfort level. People always say is the year of the Linux desktop but IMO the real year of the Linux desktop was like 4 or 5 years ago now, and hopefully that captured momentum will keep going until critical mass is achieved (optimistically, I think we're basically already there).
This is so true. It's been good enough for me for so many years at this point, and yet it just keeps getting better. The whole experience is so much nicer now than it was years ago, which was better than years before that, etc.
It sometimes is, but then sometimes Linux is not to blame.
Yesterday I was installing CachyOS on my son's laptop, because that's what he chose to use instead of Windows 10. The desktop came up fine, but no wifi adaptor was detected. I could try another more mainstream distro, but I wanted my kid to have what he chose. So we went troubleshooting. Googled the laptop model, found the adaptor, found the matching kernel module, checked the logs... and there it was, a cryptic error -110. Googled that and there was an answer: disable Windows Fast Boot.
It turns out that Windows locks the wifi adaptor when shutting down in Fast Boot mode. So after disabling it and a couple of reboots later, CachyOS was installing flawlessly.
It served as a lesson for me and an example for my kid to persevere and learn more.
Linux IS a lot of work to keep up with. But it's also way better to use after that work is done. And won't be enshittified against your will with every update, unlike Windows.
That's half the fun though isn't? I'll tinker on my arch or nixos machines all the time just changing things, playing around with customization, trying out repos and what have you. I love just trying out new stuff people have made and seeing if I can use it for my workflow.
That love of tinkering is why I've landed on not using an immutable distro for my first time installing Linux since the 00s. CachyOS is what I landed on; now I just need to catch up on work so I can take a day to tinker with my setup.
For context, I semi-broke my current Windows 11 install by trying to manually edit the registry to remove all traces of a piece of invasive, uninstallable bloatware (that comes direct from ASRock... the bastards) I accidentally installed. Turns out my sound drivers are from the same company, so when I deleted all entries with that company in the search terms, I FUBARed my Bluetooth audio and 3.5mm microphone. And didn't backup the registry.
I like to tinker, and if I need to reinstall my OS anyway, so now is the time to finally switch!
I got a new laptop with Windows 11 at work yesterday. This is the first time I've used 11. I must say, it's not really that bad. Once you cut out all the enshittification, which our IT department does, it's pretty decent. I would never dream of putting it in any of my own machines, of course.
Yeah, I installed Enterprise edition on my desktop, which allows you to cut out all the bloat and spyware. But it takes a long time to do, and I'm not sure I got everything since Windows Updates can change anything.
Ive been having a good time with PopOS/Linux made for a specific machine. Its my daily driver.
I know its cheating a bit, but having something completely supported is so nice when I just want to sit down and compute. Ive had the same system76 machine for 6 years now and its still VERY fast. No issues with drivers (cause they fully support it) and made of generic parts.
I use an easy out of the box linux so its not much work even before comparing to windows. This is why my advice for people talking about dual booting to install linux on their old laptop if they still have it as I find linux on your last machine is faster than windows on your current. It also makes it easier to always have linux available for people used to windows who need to use the linux enough to realize how nice it is nowadays.
I was raised in the xp/windows 7 era. I switched to Arch Linux this year and have never been more satisfied with my computer. If i get stuck, the wiki and other nerds are happy to come to the rescue.
I loved XP, but i havent used it since i was like 13. I kept it well into the vista era. That pc finally died right before windows 8. That one pissed me off. It was so clearly meant for tablets and still being crammed into non-touch screens
Sure is. I have to change my display driver from one version to another, to be able to play different games. Otherwise, some games freeze my system within few seconds of launching the game (also happens during local video full-screen playback). The linux guys will tell me, "oh, it's just because your distro install was corrupt", or "definitely a hardware issue", "PSU failing / GPU failing", etc. but no, that's just how linux works. there will always be some system configurations that are bound to have these problems. this is similar to linux users "choosing" not to play the games that don't work on linux distributions.
I was troubleshooting some audio hardware and decided that I should try it on windows, to make sure it was hardware and not software. So I tried to download an install disc image that I could put on my thumb drive and it was surprisingly hard, then I got driver failures, then I lost count of all the boxes I had to uncheck, then finally after like 2 hours I was greeted by ads on my desktop. Just a really bad experience overall. I cannot fathom why anyone uses that piece of crap.
Anyway so I figured out it was a Linux problem because of course it was just plug-and-play on Windows, and I found my misconfiguration and fixed it in 10 seconds, and I thought about the tech literacy of the average person, and realized that is why people use windows. They don't care about shit except least resistance. That was the first time I've booted windows since 2020 though, so here's hoping it was the last time.
I grew up with DOS and used Windows 1 (barely, DOS was better), 3.1, 95, 98, etc... But curiosity made me try a bunch of OS in the beginning of the 2000s, like BeOS, QNX, and Linux (Kheops, Mandrake, SuSE). I dual booted for many years, keeping Linux as my main OS but having to boot Windows for games. I preferred Linux but I was pretty much OS agnostic for a while. I even worked as level 1 tech support for many years, helping people with Windows and Office products.
But then came Windows 8, 10, and now 11, + Office 365 + OneDrive. It's very difficult to stand any of those new versions, with the ads, the constant peddling for Microsoft products, the "forced" login with a Microsoft account, the updates whenever they feel like it if you don't pay enough for Windows, if the updates are not breaking something. A few years ago I was helping a friend and discovered a version of Windows 7 where you can't even change the wallpaper.
TBF, I knew it was coming. Anyone in IT knew for years that Microsoft planned of having everything subscription based. To me, every new versions of Windows or Office, or Teams, is now more intolerable than the previous one.
Anyway, at some point I stopped gaming/dual booting and pretty much kept exclusively on Linux. My workplace used Windows, and I use Linux at home. I've been using Debian for 15 years now and despite minor issues with sound recently, since pipewire, every time I use Windows, I'm reminded of how much worse it could be.
Recently I quit my job as a level 1 tech. I can't help people with Microsoft products anymore. Having calls from people telling me they cannot delete files from their OneDrive when it tells them it's full, then discover it's a bug and users with their drives full cannot delete anything, is just disconcerting. Before all that, I could at least see/understand the reason why things were working like they did; I could help and explain it to the users. Now, I'm as frustrated as they are when I use Microsoft products.
Today on my win11 work system, the windows menu stopped producing output when I typed into it and webpages stopped loading. Had to perform a full system restart to get it to work again.
I have to use a windows machine at work and without fail I have to restart it by early afternoon because it has nearly ground to a halt. Usually right when a client turns up and wants to see their work.
Still windows but if you remove the bloatware, its "a turd" but it smells less. If that helps. Windows is terrible, I agree, but for those who need to use it, any software like startallback, or something like the chris titus tool should be recommended.
I build cross platform desktop software professionally.
Because of this I have to use and pretty deeply understand the inner workings of every OS.
I can state as absolute fact that every major operating system including Linux is an absolute pile of hot garbage.
The difference is that macOS and windows are garbage on purpose. There were deliberate decisions to enshitify them for profit. They spent time and money making the OS worse on purpose.
On Linux most of the shitty parts were designed with good intentions but just kinda suck (Wayland for example).
Oh come on X11 is hot garbage the reason it was abandoned. It is so stupid that people think something designed in the 70s and patches to hell is still secure in the modern world.
There is a good chance that it was also designed this way on purpose. Almost everything I have heard people complain about on Wayland boils down to “it does not do that on purpose for security reasons”. In order to get around the purposeful constraints, you need to design extension protocols to create desired functionality and not all of those have been built. It is still on purpose though.
You may simply disagree with the priorities. Which is what enshitification for profit is as well of course.
IDK I think Wayland will be great some day. But right now we're between x11 and Wayland an both options suck.
I'm just over here trying to record my desktop and take screenshots haha.
“it does not do that on purpose for security reasons”.
I understand the motivations here but my priorities do not align with this. Not once in my life has someone recorded my desktop without my permission. I support the idea of having a secure environment but its just a pretty bad UX in the meantime.
Dont take this the wrong way. I think Wayland is a good idea in general. I just wish there was something else to hold us over in the meantime and x11 isnt really that.
I also feel the same about wayland... I think wayland is designed for good purpose but its architecture kinda sucks. I'm curious what do you think should be done to improve unix windowing systems.
... but as you mention the alternative is ALSO a lot of work PLUS frustrations.
So between learned helplessness and tiring empowerment the choice remains obvious.
FWIW whenever it feels like it's "too much" I reminder myself how I browse through obscure man pages decades ago... to still find them useful today! It's crazy that so long after learning about tools like more or grep is useful on :
a desktop
a console (SteamDeck)
a mobile phone (which basically didn't exist back then)
depends what you do, tbh. If you try to get a 3D program (that works well in Windows) to work on Linux, or try to get a game running as smooth as it is on Windows, then you are in for a lot of work.
But if your usage involves: simple web browser / email, codes, file operations. Then Linux is just plug and play, even much simpler than Windows. No ads, no constant updates nagging.
Linux just leaves you alone, if you mess some thing up it is you fault. On my Win 11 laptop, I got logged off by the damn OS just for it to display a popup with something bullshit like "Sign in to OneDrive to protect your PC"
You’re wrong about the games part. Most of us have no issues with that because of proton. As long as the game doesn’t require kernel level anti-cheat malware.
And yeah, 3D program written for windows is not going to run on Linux natively without issues. That’s common sense. It’s up to the developers to support more platforms, and that will happen with market share.
I use Garuda, which is an Arch-based distribution. Regressions are inevitable, though in my experience any actual issues arising from updates are quite infrequent. I’ve only once ever had to use Snapper to restore my system after a borked update in the some three and a half years I’ve used it. Keep in mind that this is a rolling release distribution, so new code isn’t always thoroughly tested before it’s sent out. I generally prefer new software, because I like playing games so new features and enhancements are important to me (on my main PC. I often install Arch for fun on other computers, but I thought for my ThinkPad? It’s older, maybe I’d like it to run Debian).
But any time I have a minor hiccup (that usually gets resolved after an update or reboot), I remember how much worse it could be. I’d much prefer the rare slight complication to the ads, telemetry, nags, intrusive updates, excessive bloat, and lack of control.
I’ve said before, that after using Linux on my main PC and not touching Windows? Windows really does feel like I’m not using my PC, something I never really noticed before I made the switch five years ago. I used to have no problems with modern Windows, but now it’s hard for me to tolerate. Old Windows is generally okay. I collect old computers, so versions like Windows 95, 98, 2000, and XP are fun.
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Ogni tanto, per risolvere problemi pratici merdosi, mi invento soluzioni tecniche complesse e cursate… del tipo di reimplementare la API di WordPress dentro HTMLy per poter gestire il blog basato su quello con la app di WordPress… ma, questo è uno spoiler che non dovrei fare, almeno fintanto che non finisco di lavorarci, cazzarolina. Tuttavia, […]
sistemazioni contro il malore in HTMLy per scrivere decente (nuova funzione per editor Markdown a schermo intero)
Ogni tanto, per risolvere problemi pratici merdosi, mi invento soluzioni tecniche complesse e cursate… del tipo di reimplementare la API di WordPress dentro HTMLy per poter gestire il blog basato su quello con la app di WordPress… ma, questo è uno spoiler che non dovrei fare, almeno fintanto che non finisco di lavorarci, cazzarolina. Tuttavia, qualche altra volta, se il caso vuole, mi escono piuttosto soluzioni tecniche semplici ed eleganti… come, in questo caso, aggiustare l’editor di post già presente in HTMLy, senza sostituirlo, per risolvere i problemi pratici merdosi in un modo banalissimo: aggiungere una modalità fullscreen. 🤯
L’editor Markdown base dentro quel coso, fatto di una semplice <textarea> con una barra degli strumenti bonus (e scorciatoie da tastiera) per la formattazione, con un’anteprima a parte (che, tra l’altro, non è accurata rispetto a come il Markdown viene poi renderizzato dal frontend del sito, ma questa è un’altra rogna), per qualche motivo infatti non mi ha mai completamente convinto, ma non mi sono mai messa a riflettere abbastanza da capire come mai ciò fosse il caso… Almeno fino a prima di adesso (cioè, di qualche giorno fa), quando ho capito che il problema è il layout assoluto della pagina admin; non l’editor intrinsecamente, insomma, ma il contesto in cui questo è inserito. 👌
In breve, pensandoci, tutti gli editor di testo normali e i programmi di videoscrittura, e le interfacce di blogging di conseguenza, non hanno ‘sta cosa dove la pagina è un form classico con tremila campi, che scrolla pure verticalmente perché ovviamente è bella grande, e il contenuto sta in una delle tante scatoline… bensì è circa tutto il contrario, cioè che il contenuto è al primo posto e tutto il resto sta attorno. In qualcosa come il Blocco note di Windows, questo “attorno” è solo barra dei menu + barra di stato, mentre in WordPress è una serie di tasti importanti sopra e campi misti di lato (o in un menu a parte nella app Android), su Word è la barra gigante in alto, e così via… 🎐
Ma quindi, la soluzione a questo apparentemente insignificante dettaglio di UI/UX, che però mi causa (e penso a molti causerebbe) dei mal di testa (o, almeno, uno stato di controvoglianza nell’uso), — come sempre, perché le interfacce fatte per bene sono invisibili, mentre quelle che non lo sono causano sempre dolore — potrebbe sintetizzarsi in, semplicemente, aggiungere una funzione per cui il campo di testo dell’editor possa andare a finestra intera, prendendo precisamente tutto lo spazio, e non di più o di meno (più la barra degli strumenti fissata). ⚗️
Ora, ovviamente l’ideale massimo sarebbe in ogni caso solo rifare da capo l’intera pagina per farle avere alla base una struttura decente, ma significherebbe appunto ricostruire tutto; e sicuramente con JavaScript potrei riuscirci senza dover rompere ogni cosa, ma per ora chiaramente non c’ho voglia. Già questa piccola modifica tanto basterà per alleviare tantissimo il mal di capa causato da quello che spesso è un doppio scrolling (specialmente su mobile, dove la sofferenza viene credo triplicata), della pagina + l’area di testo (che non si ridimensiona mai automaticamente), o in alternativa il dover scrollare troppo la pagina per raggiungere altri campi se l’area fosse alta quanto il contenuto… e le controindicazioni sono assolutamente zero, quindi ho fatto subito una pull request al capo del progetto, fiduciosa che verrà accettata (quando si sveglia domani, che lui è indonesiano, quindi ora starà nel lettino). 🔧
Pure a livello di codice, ribadisco, non è stato difficile; è bastato un po’ di puro CSS per dichiarare il layout, e del JavaScript integrato nell’editor già esistente per attivare e disattivare l’ambaradan a necessità, col bottoncino o con la combinazione da tastiera che ho registrato (CTRL+P). Per mobile ho in realtà aggiunto anche una proprietà del meta viewport che ho scoperto letteralmente stasera, cioè interactive-widget=resizes-content, per indicare al browser (almeno, per Chromium e Safari si, su Firefox chi lo sa) di ridurre il l’area della pagina quando la tastiera virtuale è aperta, così da evitare un altro doppio scrolling che altrimenti ci sarebbe… e ora si che è comodo lì, pare nativo! 👄
Va detto comunque che l’idea di base non l’ho inventata io, anche se mi è dovuta comunque arrivare come intuizione personale perché io potessi considerarla (poiché non arriva mai nessuno da me a suggerirmi le cose in anticipo e semplificarmi così le missioni, mannaggia alla polvere). Infatti, pensandoci lo fa anche un plugin di cui non ricordo il nome che ho sulla mia DokuWiki, che aggiunge un tasto al campo di editing anch’esso semplice vecchio stile da <textarea>buttata in una pagina alla bene e meglio, per mandare a schermo intero… ma quell’implementazione è mezza rotta e meno elegante di cosa ho fatto io qui, che ho riutilizzato gli elementi già presenti nel DOM, senza duplicare il campo di testo o fare strane scemenze. Detto questo, però, è proprio strano che questa idea non solo non sia mai venuta al grande capo di HTMLy, ma nemmeno ad altri contributori… non esistono issue o pull request al riguardo, a parte qualcuno che vorrebbe sostituire l’intero editor Markdown con altri più avanzati (che no, non risolverebbe direttamente questo specifico mal di cervello, e lo so perché sulla mia installazione ci ho provato; non è la mancanza di WYSIWYG che mi uccide, è il layout che scrolla e fa cose che bleh… ma ora grazie al cielo non più). 🙌
Since I started to use HTMLy, the Markdown editor has always felt kind of strange to me for long posts. After a bit of reflecting, I noticed that this is because any other normal text or blog edito...
Israel's culture minister has threatened to axe funding for the country's national film awards after The Sea, a story about a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, won its top award.
Yea I wouldn't bother. I think the reply to the top comment says "if you don't support our cultural genocide movement you're a white supremacist. In general I have just stopped rooting for the human species.
Tens of thousands of Argentines filled the streets of downtown Buenos Aires on Wednesday to demand increased funding for universities and pediatric care, which have suffered cuts under libertarian President Javier Milei's austerity measures.
Milei's popularity has declined following his deep budget cuts, and he is dealing with the fallout from a corruption scandal and a legislative defeat in Buenos Aires provincial elections earlier this month.
Milei faces high-stakes midterm elections in October, in which his party aims to secure enough seats to keep the opposition-controlled Congress from overriding his vetoes.
Tens of thousands of Argentines flooded the streets of Buenos Aires on Wednesday, demanding increased funding for public universities and pediatric hospitals, sectors hit hard by President Javier Milei’s sweeping austerity measures.
Yes, in the sense that printing less money reduces inflation. This isn't exactly a shock.
The big issue is what he has sacrificed to get there. Poverty rates initially spiked, causing a lot of people to burn through their savings. Now the poverty rate has fallen, but people below the poverty line report having even less to spend than before.
And of course he slashed the budgets of a lot of services, so people are feeling that too.
They are, if your definition of working is that inflation is down. No question inflation is way down. Unfortunately employment rates are also way down, and poverty is way up.
So are they working? Depends on the metric you look at. Reducing inflation is, in a vacuum, a significant success; though taken in combination with the secondary harms of austerity, it’s probably a net negative for many people, if not most people.
That is particularly unfitting in this case though. Because the people that voted Milei are still in favour and the people that didnt are still against him. The people protesting are not the ones who voted him.
I've been trying to find an AI note taker for when I have calls for work so I don't miss anything because my boss likes to ramble through a bunch of tasks at once. I'm looking for one of those background note takers that will be triggered whenever I get a slack or Google meets call, and I don't have to add it to the call for it to work. I'd prefer something open source but not a deal breaker there. The ones I've found when I search for a Linux note taker never seem to have a Linux version for downloading.
Has anyone had any luck finding a good Linux one or had success with a Windows one with wine?
Use ffmpeg to record audio from your desktop (which will include the meeting) then pass it to whisper.cpp or other text-to-speech FLOSS solutions. No need for "AI" or Windows software for that kind of tasks.
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
China's steel exports are set to hit an all-time high this year, defying predictions that unprecedented trade barriers would drive down shipments
Exports will grow 4% to 9% this year to hit between 115 million and 120 million metric tons, according to forecasts from 11 analysts
Rising exports of semi-finished products are also drawing opposition from the Chinese government. Beijing wants steelmakers to add value and is weighing higher export taxes to discourage shipments of lower-value steel.
The vast majority of students rely on laptops – and increasingly AI – to help with their university work. But a small number are going analogue and eschewing tech almost entirely in a bid to re-engage their brains
"He goes to the library with nothing but his “pen and paper,” and stays there until his essay is done. “Then I’m free to doomscroll Instagram on my phone without any guilt"
He doesn't seem very opposed to technology if he just goes straight home and doomscrolls
Are laptops really new technology to this kid if they've existed for his entire life?
$5 says it's the "what's a computer" kid from like a decade ago
"'laptop'? it's like a foldable but with half a screen??? and why is this keyboard broken, all the keys move?? how do I get an overwatch skin for it?? this is awful"
What a pedantic (and incorrect) take. Luddite can absolutely mean a person who purposefully avoids technology.
I’m sure I’ll get downvoted, but words can have multiple meanings and take on new meanings over time. Luddite is one of them. This article used it properly.
And anyone who disagrees with me can kiss my linguistics-degree-holding ass.
Yeah, there's this stereotype that professional/qualified linguistics are like super prescriptive but in reality most either don't give a shit or are interested in informal language
In your defense, the statement specifies "modern-day Luddite" which compares it to the historical Luddite bands and excludes the first meaning of the Oxford dictionary.
As “someone who gets distracted very easily,” he made the change to reclaim his attention span. Ditching his laptop gave him an environment where “YouTube isn’t around the corner” and he can focus on his reading.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
Reminds me a lot of fellow classmates at my college who I discovered hate online classes because they say they can't stay focused. So I don't know how these "luddite" students plan to not get distracted when their job will most likely involve sitting in front of a computer.
This is just avoiding the issue of having a short attention span.
I used to be easily distracted during online lectures yet had little difficulty following live lectures. It's a fundamentally different experience, for whatever reason.
Also, the attention span has to be trained. And training it by working without a distracting computer sounds like a good idea.
I had the opposite experience, in person lectures drove me crazy as an unmedicated adhder, I'd be constantly chiming in and answering every question, my legs would be going wild under the table and I'd usually be just doing something else most of the time on the laptop. Online is much much easier to listen to and get invested in at your own time and pace because you can be eating or vaping while watching at 3AM or whatever and nobody gives a fuck
Nah, that shit woulda never helped me and I wouldn't even know where to start and I never have, we had laptops open on lectures so I just wrote small programs about whatever concepts the lecturer talked about but to sit in the same place for 2 hours it was borderline impossible.
After entering the workforce it was just pure torture sitting in the office waiting to die 8 hours a day, I went through like a full character arc from arrogant to humble to desperate to hate at others to hate at self to finally worldly and gradually radicalized against the onslaught of alienation.
I came back for my masters in 2020 and it was fairly sweet all online.
Thankfully now many years later I WFH. Uni is far behind. Haven't handwritten anything in years, I'm almost curious to try it
sitting in the office waiting to die 8 hours a day
That is exactly why I absolutely thrived in manufacturing. Well, the right type of manufacturing. I'd rather die than work in an office. I lasted exactly one month at my one and only desk job before I had to quit and find something different.
I don't write often anymore either, but recently tried to write a letter to someone, wow after a few sentences could I notice how out of practice I was. I 'jot things down' all the time, but a letter, paragraphs, whew.
I think it's tough, because many degree jobs are all desk jobs, so it's like, you want the degree and good money, but the work, doesn't sound fun. Im glad wfh has helped though, thats great
That sounds like he's just not going to be well adjusted for the modern world where distractions will always be available. You don't get over a love for a drug by making it unavailable, you get over it by having it everywhere, yet refusing it.
Attention span is cultivated, so is discipline. Reading about it is theory. Forcing oneself to do it, in increasingly sizable chunks, is praxis. I'm talking to myself here, too.
I absolutely love doing everything on the computer and can’t stand writing things by hand anymore. I’ve always learned simply by listening — instructors that force students to take notes were the worst because I would be too busy scrambling to write things down than actually listening and learning.
All of this goes out the window when it comes to foreign language though. I have to do everything old school: textbooks, pencil and paper, and if it’s a non-Latin character set I have to write the same characters over and over for hours.
For me I always wrote as i listened, still do often. I rarely read the notes back.
'Revision' was just writing a whole new set of notes either from memory or from sources. Then, never reading that set of notes.
Massive waste of paper and ink, but it's part of how i pay attention. Most of my lecturers did provide printouts of all the slides, but I'd scribble all over them anyway.
I always take notes, listening shmistening it's in one ear out the other, reading and writing helps me absorb information much easier, but I never did take notes when we were forced to use pen and paper, once we switched to laptops in high school, I could note down every word because typing is so much easier and faster.
I realized that when i tried to cheat on a test in school, that when i prepared a cheat sheet, i didn't actually need it afterwards - that only applies when writing the sheet by hand.
I really like this idea, but its difficult. when I used to attend uni it was more feasible but in 2025 all of my courses require online submissions, discussion, and materials. I can rent a laptop from the library, but only for 4 hours at a time. Of course there are desktops, but realistically if you want work from home you need a computer/tablet. That said I still just borrow my partners and haven't bothered to buy one.
I got myself a remarkable after seeing a colleague use one and thinking they were cool. An astonishing price for what is essentially a kindle that you can write on, but that is essentially the entirety of its functionality right there. No web browser, no ebook integration, no keyboard, just a thing for scribbling notes with a big battery life. No distractions.
As such, it's completely ideal for my work diary, meeting notes, D'n'D notes, maps for games that I've been playing, random scribbles, all sorts. Quite a lot lighter than the thousands of sheets of paper that would be required otherwise. Also not as rude as popping open a laptop when you're meeting someone - they can see you're just making notes and writing to-dos.
When I was in undergrad I had to write lots of essays by hand. I’d say about every other course in one of my majors had midterms and finals that were a single question essay to be completed in class during the testing period. I figured that was pretty typical.
Nick, a philosophy student at the University of Cambridge, stopped using his laptop for university work in the last year of his undergraduate degree. He still types his essays, but lecture notes, revision, and essay planning are all done by hand.
The second sentence contradicts the first:
stopped using his laptop for university work
then
He still types his essays
So basically he's not taking a laptop in to the lecture hall to take notes etc but is still using a computer to complete his work. Which makes sense as pen & paper in that environment is way more practical anyway.
All assignments are submitted electronically now, and if he's in philosophy, he will also have to follow formatting requirements like font, font size, margins, and spacing. Practically, he's doing as much as he is allowed off-computer.
They're still using computers to do their university work and submit it though. It's more about them not using a laptop in a lecture hall and using pen and paper instead. That's not really a big deal considering that's probably what most people were doing anyway up until relatively recently.
Yeah, the way he does it is basically how everyone did it even 10 years ago. The tools were mostly the same then as they are now, with the exception of AI and the fact that handwriting wasn't as big a thing anymore when today's undergrads were in school. If you have a fluid and moderately quick handwriting, paper notes will typically be easier to take and more useful for revising the material later on.
Social media erupted with bewildered reactions from attendees. Some praised the band for forcing a conversation about surveillance that most people avoid, while others expressed discomfort with the unexpected data capture.
Unlike typical concert technology that enhances your experience, this facial recognition system explicitly confronted attendees with the reality of data capture. The band made visible what usually happens invisibly—your face being recorded, analyzed, and potentially stored by systems you never explicitly agreed to interact with.
The audience split predictably along ideological lines. Privacy advocates called it a boundary violation disguised as art. Others viewed it as necessary shock therapy for our sleepwalking acceptance of facial recognition in everyday spaces. Both reactions prove the intervention achieved its disruptive goal.
Your relationship with facial recognition technology just got more complicated. Every venue, every event, every public space potentially captures your likeness. Massive Attack simply made the invisible visible—and deeply uncomfortable. The question now isn’t whether this was art or privacy violation, but whether you’re ready to confront how normalized surveillance has become in your daily life.
The singer has always been about exposing problems the media won’t cover. I think it actually led to a schism and a few of the members leaving about two decades ago.
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I wonder how long they can run this before their backend database vendor cuts them off with some flimsy pretext because this kind of thing is bad for business.
No backend database needed for what they did. It was just highlighting where the faces are in a shot of the crowd, same as modern smartphone cameras do, but with a surveillance-type UI around it.
Thanks, I just watched the video linked by @spizzat2@lemmy.zip and I see that now. It’s actually a little disappointing and I’d love to see the same kind of public spectacle on hard mode with real-time doxxing from a commercial backend. That would be far more provocative.
I think the article hugely understated that nuance.
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Most people don't know the difference, as made clear by the reactions of the public, comments on other social platforms, and the wording of the articles. So it's just as powerful as it was.
I will agree that it was still powerful. All of the phone videos would memorialize any real doxxing so it’s maybe just as well that they didn’t do it.
I think it would be better with minor obfuscation like F***e L***e for Firstname Lastname. Something instantly recognizable to the victims/participants but not for the entire audience.
At first I was imagining it was picking out faces from the crowd and matching them with social media pictures which it was then broadcasting to the crowd. THAT would get people's attention!
Yes, but depending on the country that could be (public + illegal) if it lists [what is legally considered] personal sensitive information or accidentally reveals someone's secret like the Coldplay incident.
It would be fascinating, but IMO unnecessary and unethical.
Perfectly legal for “event security” to deploy facial recognition and watch live movement tracking annotated with real names and possibly other information purchased from a data broker, as long as it’s all done in secret. But illegal to let large numbers of people see the screen (maybe by mirroring it to the jumbotron). What a world.
Yeah, it should at least try to get their name. If it could include their job, income, family members, etc. that'd be great. It's pretty trivially possible. Maybe don't include address, because they could turn out poorly, but they should show how easy it is to get data on people.
To be clear, the system picked out faces in the crowd, in the "yes, this is a face" sense. They were labeled in what appears to be random terms like positive, kind, nostalgic, bee keeper, gif animator, extreme ironer. No personal identification.
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Yeah this article is hot garbage. What "biometric data" are they talking about??? Just images of people's faces? My understanding is that it's super commonplace in public locations, are people really that surprised?
Yes, while its generally common on this platform, we are early adopters for tech so we understand it first. The general public gets exposure much slower, especially when there is efforts to subvert it for profit.
Attention and time are limited, those that focus on tech know things first. Its the same as a chef knowing about food more than the average person.
An image is a quantization of reality. An image alone is biometric data if it's a picture of a face, fingerprint, or any other identifiable feature of a person.
Ah, i have it set to block 3rd party frames (anywhere, since almost only ad stuff uses this) and 3rd-party scripts (on mobile, breaks some things), probably that's why.
I managed to work around it by unchecking "wait with pageload until all the blocklist are loaded" in ublock origin. Seems to work like normal now, though I'm unsure if that is actually a fix. I guess it might have some negative side effects like some ads coming through.
The only people offended by this are the ones who dont yet understand that this is happening constantly all over the place without your consent already.
No of course not. But in order to be able to not accept it, you have to know about it in the first place. Thats what this is perfect for. No harm done, lots of eyes opened.
The point is that, if you're going to a concert of that size, this technology is being used whether you like it (or know about it) or not. Massive Attack was never going to be able to play venues the size that they do without at least tacitly allowing this to happen. Like literally, the venues would likely not allow them to play.
So I think doing this is better than just letting it happen and staying quiet.
Nah, not anymore. These tools are starting to be used by police without any remorse, so an ever increasing amount of people are aware. Its being used against immigrants, journalists, activists, etc. so the normie and privacy nerd worlds are starting to overlap.
But don't the people who get caught, disappear in the gullet of the prison slavery system and never heard from again ? And if allowed the walk the streets again, they know talking about it puts a target on their back and the police will come smash the cardboard box they're sleeping in at night. And that's until they start with the involuntary lethals injections for those who "refuse ressources" as Fox & Friends put it
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It’s a great way to showcase that these things are in use and will be in use in places with bad privacy laws (and by those that ignore such laws). Most people don’t want to think that this happens on a daily basis, it’s logical for them when you tell them, but they’re busy with their lives and they don’t actually see it being done with their own eyes.
Now tell them how this data is connected to your ticket and your face/video being analyzed after the fact, which is then sold off to become what is basically an quantification of you as a person to judge you and determine what your addictions, views and flaws are, in order to expoit it to make you as miserable as possible. And people won’t really believe it since it’s uncomfortable to believe in. Showing someone’s face makes it more believable and difficult to ignore.
The public were just nice to them while they were being evaluated for termination....... What is wrong with the populace of ipswitch ? Are they all cattle already ?
This article gives me vibes that someone wrote a few lines outlining the situation and asked the AI to write the article itself. Interestingly though, I think most people would just rather read the outline, less time wasted and less llm.
A part that screams AI would be:
This wasn’t subtle venue security—your biometric data became part of the artistic statement, whether you consented or not.
"This isn't this--it's that" is an extremely common AI sentence structure, further exposed by the fact that the part before the em-dash doesn't even make sense to begin with. No one was asking themselves whether it was part of subtle venue security.
As a sidenote, sometimes I read sentences like this and I wonder "could this ever even have been written by a human?" I think that there's a very low chance that this article didn't have at least some amount of AI involved, but I know that somewhere out there there must be some people who actually write like this. And that's kind of sad.
tbh I don't even know why I even wrote this, the entire article appears to be one big example of generic AI writing
Citizen, this is the warm embrace of Father State and Mother Country taking care of you. Everywhere. All the time. We care about you. We worry about you. And if we feel like you need help, we will help.
Citizen, we have detected Bad Thought, as well as sarcasm. Have no fear, re-education drones as well as Correct Thought beams are headed your way! Please take this time to make sure the correct flags and slogans are on prominent display.
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I definitely parsed the headline wrong at first! But c'mon, even if you've never heard of the band, the second sentence of the article links to their webpage...
Good. People don't understand implications until it happens to them. Suddenly they don't like this security features anymore because it became personal.
If you live in a city (not only) anywhere, you are on at least 5-10 security cams when you leave your home on the way to work or the store, more counting those in your workplace and the store. Unknown how much are with face recognition soft. Think of it, you are tagget.
Senior independent rights investigators appointed by the Human Rights Council alleged on Tuesday that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide, a charge flatly rejected by Tel Aviv.
No Merzie. If politicians can’t separate Israel from Jews and criticize the former yet protect the latter, then don’t be surprised Pikachu if other people don’t either. It is you who’s equating the two, making Jews vulnerable to accusations of genocide, even if they loath Israel themselves.
Other way around. The thing Israel is being criticized for is causing hatred of Jews. Want to protect Jews? Stop the genocide. But Germany has a blind spot for this big enough to drive a whole second holocaust through.
One in six intersex people was physically assaulted in the year 2022, an EU agency report said. Intersex people are the only LGBTIQ group that has not experienced a drop in discrimination since an earlier survey in 2019.
How are 40% of respondents being harassed at work for being intersex? How do people even find out?
Only about 30% of the people surveyed identify as cis, and around 15% describe their orientation as heterosexual, so I'm sure that they definitely face many of the same struggles that the LGBTQIA+ community faces as a whole.
But why would discrimination at large be decreasing, except for intersex people? Maybe they're feeling more empowered to come out, and people don't know how to react? I would even expect, if anything, that bigots would be more understanding of someone for whom Nature made life "visibly" harder, but maybe I'm just naive.
In any case, it doesn't seem like the study sheds enough light on this, hopefully more studies will follow so that we can find a way to do better.
I have 3 machines I've switched to Linux: an old laptop with Mint, and my primary laptop and PC runing Ubuntu Studio. I use Protonvpn on all 3.
Today I had my app manager on Mint and Discover on Ubuntu showing new updates. I installed Mint's first, via the manager and Proton was an update. It mentioned it would uninstall a few proton things so I figured it had to uninstall them in order to install the new update. Protonvpn stopped working after, it looked uninstalled but my killswitch was still active (so no internet at all and no access to open the vpn app). I had to find out how to kill the network processes via ncmli (good new info to learn!) and do a roundabout uninstall through a process I found in an old Proton post as just uninstalling it with normal commands didn't work, restart the laptop then reinstall Protonvpn.
So on my laptop and PC, I updated via terminal instead, using sudo apt update/upgrade. All smooth and no issues.
Was my Mint problem a one-off glitch or is there a real difference when updating via update manager vs the terminal?
Edit: Thanks guys, seems the general consensus is yes, but some of ya's say no haha. I knew going into the question that having Mint screw up with manager and Ubuntu Studio work with terminal opens a lot of os possibilities beyond simply manager vs terminal.
Next Proton update, I'm going to try the terminal on Mint instead of manager, and the manager on my Ubuntu Studio laptop instead of terminal and see if anything screws up.
Hopefully I can piggyback with a similar question that came to me recently. Similar to how Ubuntu/Mint work, Fedora KDE can be updated through the Discover store or directly via the dnf command. But after updating system packages via Discover, it prompts me to restart the PC to finish the update. What is it actually doing? Why does DNF not do that?
Some stuff needs a restart to use the new libraries and such when those things are already in use, since it doesn't actually delete those until they stop being used. For example, if you get a new kernel, it won't just delete your old one until you're done using it. Terminal tools usually assume that you know this, so they won't prompt you.
Some things only get applied once you restart. Take the kernel for example. It will be used once restarted. It is safe to restart at a later time but you would still be running a older kernel at that point.
So technically the update is done but not everything is using it yet. Dnf does tell you you should restart for some things to be applied. The choice is yours to do so.
On Ubuntu, I’m not sure about “Discover”, but I use the GUI called “Software Updater”. This is just a GUI on top of apt/apt-get which I can also use from the command line.
Not sure about Mint, but I would expect it to be very much similar.
on my manjaro machine updating via terminal doesn't cover some updates. Opening the software manager reveals missed updates. stuff like gear level and freedesktop.org. couldn't tell ya why.
on my fedora kde machine, it misses stuff from Discover. also not sure why.
on mint, terminal covers everything. same on debian.
The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.
I opened up the code....Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that'll do.
It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you'd hope for a tool.
there is. if the updater gui integrates with packagekit and systemd, it can start an offline update that reboots your system and installs the updates while nothing else is running.
kind of like on windows, except that this is one of the things where windows made the right call. complex software does not handle it well if its program libraries and assets are being replaced by newer ones that the running version cannot understand.
its still kind of a new thing, not all distros make use of it yet, but Fedora does, and it's not a Fedora custom solution but something that most distros can have.
automatic filesystem snapshots and rollback can be integrated to this too, and then bye bye to updates breaking the whole system.
For Mint in particular, there is a difference. There are some ubuntu packages they don't want applied, and the command line does apply them. While their packagekit gui app, doesn't. They always suggest we use their app. Also, the app updates spices, and flatpaks.
An analysis of coral reefs in the tropical western Atlantic suggests that nearly all will be eroding by 2100 if global warming exceeds 2 °C, which will worsen the effects of sea-level rise.
they generate about 3,800kWh per year. We also use about 3,800kWh of electricity each year
Obviously, we can't use all the power produced over summer and we need to buy power in winter. So here's my question: How big a battery would we need in order to be completely self-sufficient?
O, god, it's going to be huge. You really can't do the off-grid thing unless you have enough power production to satiate you over any given 3-day moving window. Trying to store power from summer until winter is going to be too expensive, instead buy more panel.
This isn't even going into the fact batteries lose charge slowly. So any power generated in summer will be much diminished by winter, even if you have big enough batteries.
You also lose some energy to heat while charging and discharging. And depending on load profiles, you might not be able to load all of your excess solar power at once (depends on how many Watts the battery can be charged at) or fulfill your power requirement with battery alone (depends on how many Watts your battery can deliver).
I’m a fan of small scale wind, if there’s climate and space for it. 20hrs a day of a (small) 500w adds up really quickly compared to more panels, especially in grey winter weather. The problem is that there’s a bigger difference between megawatt scale solar vs homeowner scale, and megawatt scale wind vs homeowner scale, so there’s limited investment.
Wind isn’t great small scale. You rarely can get high enough for constant wind energy. They are noisy. They don’t produce a lot. In many or even most cases solar will be better than wind.
I’d go so far as building both sun oriented and a solar “fence” line going north/south to get more non-peak solar before putting up small-scale wind.
I have seen some wild priced on Ali, in your link the 75Ah and the 210Ah are priced the same, so I guess it's for the smaller one, 30€ for ~0.225kWh or 133€/kWh.
Could be wrong ofc, but it sort of fits what I thought it would roughly be.
Whats an average, perhaps even gratuitous, level of consumption per household? 24kwh if you are running a clothes drier and an AC nonstop? Lets go nuts, say you are a DIY enthusiast and hosting your own servers, so 36kwh daily.
3192€-4788€ to be and you can be effectively energy independent with a small solar system.
Triple that and you are truly energy independent are any where south of the English channel. I mean obviously its money out of pocket, but its a fixed cost that you pay now, instead of a variable cost that continuously goes up. It just seems basic.
Using half-worn car battery packs seems optimal for home use.
I'm not putting cobalt based (NMC or NCA) batteries bolted to the inside my house. Thats nearly exclusively what car battery packs are. Thermal runaway is too great a risk to bolt that much energy to a wall in the house. I am comfortable with LFP in the house though.
How big a battery would we need in order to be completely self-sufficient?
Exactly. Haven't read all details of the link,so I react your comment, and have immersed myself a bit in this earlier.
You need to change your way of thinking and energy usage. Start with your daily energy supply and then change your energy consumption pattern to day time use Then, with for example a dynamic energy contract or if you can spare solar energy, buy or store cheap electricity in your storage ( battery ). The energy management system ( charge / uncharge and which cells) is very important.
Also, realize that battery life is tied to charge cycles and need replacing like every 10 years when talking about the better quality Lithium battery . Sodium systems could and maybe should be used in parallel, if you want more storage, safety and longevity (20 years).
It is yet all quite expensive, though imo having a half day reserve like 5 - 10 kwh, battery, would already create more independence (at around € 3K to € 10 K in Europe) .
Seems to me his panel capacity is to small anyway. We have 11 kWh panels, and yes in the summer we routinely produce 4 times more than we use, and we have a 7.5 kWh battery But November December and January it's not even close to enough.
In the Winter you can easily have a week with near zero production: Our Import / export from grid last year: November 215 / 59 kWh December 300 15 kWh January 268 / 34 kWh
Despite we have almost 3 times the capacity, and produce more than twice what we use per year, and we have a decent battery and believe it or not, even the shortest day we can produce enough power for a whole 24 hour day if it's a clear day! But we can also have clouds for 14 days! But for those months we imported 783 kWh and exported 108 that could have been used with bigger battery. But the net import was still 675 kWh!! For those 3 months, and that's the minimum size battery we could have managed with, and then we even need 10% extra to compensate for charge/discharge losses.
TLDR: Minimum 740 kWh battery in our case, and that's without heating, because we use wood pellets.
That means it would require at least the equivalent of 10 high end fully electric car batteries. But also a very hefty inverter, which AFAIK ads about 50% the price of the battery.
PS: Already in February we exported more than we imported.
Damn, those winter numbers mean full off-grid is quite difficult with pure solar. A propane or diesel generator to occasionally top off the batteries would be required for winter.
It is not remotely close to economically viable to go off grid, and the exports of solar power to the grid pay for the connection anyway. The reason to have a battery is that it lasts through the night, or even with a smaller system, it can handle dinner time, which is the most expensive time of day to buy electricity. Now if you live in some remote area without a grid, a generator is a way better option than a huge battery. Maybe if you live somewhere very sunny, like Spain and especially southern parts of USA you can probably do it with a modest battery that can handle a couple of days. In the summer we can make enough electricity on by far the most cloudy days, but in the winter, the sun can't penetrate the clouds nearly as well. Admittedly London is south of where I live, which is close to the most southern part of Denmark, but on the other hand London is infamous for grey weather with heavy clouds.
You could probably get by with a gas generator and only run it 2-3 times/year in many areas. It's not 100% green, but it could get you off grid for a fraction of the price.
Power the generator with vegetable oil. There are multi fuel generators that are designed to work well with that kind of fuel. You could also use them for heating which is very useful in Northern regions where you usually need heating and electricity during winter.
OK I didn't see that, that's bigger than I expected, we make about 12.5 MWh per year on our 11.2 kWh panels = 1.1 MWh per kWh capacity. Your system is 5.1 kWh but you only make 3.8 MWh per year = 0.75 MWh per kWh capacity. Meaning we have 50% higher yield per kWh rated capacity!
So our production remains 3.3 times higher than yours, despite we only have twice the capacity. But our panels are pretty optimally placed towards the south.
Considering you are further south compared to us, I'm surprised your yield is so low, despite London is infamous for being cloudy.
last time I checked I was using around 4600-5800kwh from May to August. the rest of the year its 3300-4200.
I live in a dual zoned 5200sqft home and my average power bill is around $900.
I've had solar sales try to talk me into solar panels but once they see my consumption they stop answering my calls lol. could be because I told them I'll buy once I can get net zero.
I have personally never seen a bill of more than 60€ per month. I have some friends living in bigger houses, not apartments, and they tell they can get over 100 fairly frequently, the bigger ones more in the North can get over 200 in the winters, but even still, I’ve never even heard of anything reaching 300.
But I’m in my thirties and don’t really know anyone from beyond upper middle class. That might help explain my experience if it happens to be the outlier, but just reading the responses to this, I might not be the outlier here.
Anything four figures is just crazy surreal to me. I can not even imagine what it takes to reach that kind of electric usage. Or maybe it’s just extremely expensive, not the usage itself being crazy? I would think living in a place where sustaining one’s existence requires that kind of resource usage would be very hostile against settling and building in general?
But if it’s just personal usage rather than the regional climate or whatever, and an insane price of electricity isn’t the main reason, then I don’t even know what to say. That’s crazy.
I grew up poor. like, "take a nap for dinner" poor. I was afforded great opportunities that allowed me to become comfortably wealthy, as in I can freely go to the store and just buy groceries without concern. This is important because I always promised myself that when I grew up I would live comfortably.
I keep my house between 68F-72F year round. I don't open my windows because I have terrible allergies (that my kids have also inherited). at least half of my bill is just heating and cooling. the other half is likely a mix of the servers and the regular appliances.
I have family ranging from 30-60 years old. when I told them how much I spend on power their eyes popped out. they don't run their hvacs as much as I do, and actually use their windows and attic fans. they also don't have the allergic reactions I have either so 🤷.
in my old home, 1600sqft, our highest bill was around $300, and that was still high for the area. our neighbors were average between $100-$150. they were in their 70s though, so likely they didn't use their hvac as much either, nor the technology I was running.
Thats awful, im so sorry. Our entire house is usually $200ish but it jumped to $400ish because they put in a data center nearby and are using residents to subsidize it
could be because I told them I’ll buy once I can get net zero.
I'm not following your logic. You aren't willing to accept any savings unless you can completely zero out your power bill? Judging from your consumption I'm assuming a good chunk of that is for cooling your home? If so that means you're likely in a pretty great place to harvest solar power. You'd reach payback of your investment on your array much faster than most, and be saving money for probably 35 years or more with little to no additional investment.
Making some guesses for how much your electricity rates are, and how much you're consuming (assuming much from cooling), you might be a full payback in less than 7 years if you took advantage of the tax credit. Then, every month after that you'd be gaining money back.
my house is over 120 years old. it still has knob and tube in half the house. I have even found gas lines for the old sconces, that were "conveniently" used as grounds for said knob and tube in some places. the house is a nightmare, electrically speaking. the only new-ish electrical are the HVAC systems, the 200amp panel, and the basement (where the rack lives).
for me to get proper solar installed, it would cost more than the house cost to buy. For me to find it in any way cost effective, I would need my $900 a month power bill to pay for the $200k loan on top of my mortgage.
As someone who electrically renovated houses without beeing an electrician. If you find an electrician who is willing to work with you: do a full planning of the house. (What lines go where etc) ask them to go over this, and pay them for their time. If all goes well this will cost them an evening or three (depending how many flaws they find in your design). Do the wiring and drilling raw sockets yourself. Buy the top sockets wholesale, then have the electrician make a fixed price for installing sockets and wiring your fuse box , it will be much cheaper.
appreciate the sound advice. I've rewired plenty of houses that I'm comfortable with DIMS and know most of the NEC.
the problem is time and effort. I'm getting older and just don't have the drive I used to have 20 years ago. the biggest problem is the house is still mostly original plaster lathe which is a huge pita for running new electrical across four floors. add to that the other litany of projects I have to do plus daily life/work. it's a lot.
if I was 10 years younger I'd probably start one room at a time, but I'm old enough now that I look forward to taking my daily naps before bedtime.
I reserved myself to a modest retirement when I bought this house because I knew the risks going in.
Basically why the grid exists to begin with. You're not supposed to be solving these engineering problems on a household budget inside a single home.
You'd be better off simply reducing your consumption or finding alternative methods of power (nat gas or maybe wind or geothermal) during the longer winter nights.
If you really want to go crazy, you should consider investing in a bigger home with better insulation and roommates. An apartment/condo block can at least leverage economies of scale, if you're dead set on DIY. More people benefiting from the setup dilutes the cost per person.
Agreed this is the best option. Economy of scales and our consumers wishes should dictate the Grids plan to incorporate cheap energy ( and emergency) storages.
And, also like you said, change your energy life style and insulate your house wherever you can.
I'm very ignorant on this subject, but couldn't you just sell excess to grid and get it back for a minimal markup? Seems like a good governmemt incentive to even supplement an even exchange program. Scaling things to everyone having their own giant batteries seems like a waste of the existing infrastructure.
I'm very ignorant on this subject, but couldn't you just sell excess to grid and get it back for a minimal markup?
Sure, but it depends on the incentives in your country. Afaik, excess energy could be sold, but you'll have to checkout your local incentives and energy suppliers for specifics. In most parts of Europe, the are scaling down the prices for excess energy. Therefore, battery systems are being forwarded in some cases as sort of solution for solar panels maintaining like ca. 80% +? integrity efficiency over 20 to 30 years.
For example, I read that in The Netherlands the solar panel market has crashed completely or is crashing. Note here that saturation of the market ( many existing solar panels) can also cause that.
You need to find out;
energy usage
insulation options and materials
costs /benefits
energy contracts and energy incentives.
check out current physical electricity wiring and fuses in the house
DIY or professional?
budget etc
TLDR: dont buy solarpanels if you want to be rich. And buy them according and after you've done everything possible to insulate your house, whether in the colder or warmer climates. The efficiency, added value, and comfort reached by insulation outweighs everything else. Then , after doing that, check your kwh usage, and buy solars according to that.
Hope this is helpful, but seems you need to go outthere and do some exploration on the topic.
And buy them according and after you’ve done everything possible to insulate your house, whether in the colder or warmer climates.
In the USA there are silly rules that you can only get 120% capacity of your last years worth grid consumption as solar installed. So if one were to follow your advice and do all the energy efficient improvement prior to solar, then you would be restricted to getting a much smaller array. I understand why they have the rule, but its easy to circumvent by just having artificially oversized consumption for a year in your house, and you can then get the larger array you want before then doing all the energy improvements post-array installation.
It’s also important to check whether solar overcacity is worthwhile in the UsA. Her3 it is not( anymore).
I'll say generally speaking in most places it isn't, however, once you go solar, you may increase your electricity usage as you move away from carbon based energy. Before solar we had natural gas furnace heating and two gasoline cars. Now we have two EVs and a cold climate heat pump with zero natural gas and zero gasoline consumption. So I wanted the larger solar capacity to cover the increases in electricity we knew we'd have.
Its worked out pretty well. We have fairly large electricity bills ($400ish) in Jan and Feb, a small bill in March, and usually a tiny bill (under $10) in April. Then no bills for the rest of the year. Also keep in mind that is TOTAL energy costs, no gas or gasoline bought anymore.
(Author here) Yes, this is how it works in the UK. I sell my excess electricity back to the grid. The selling price is a bit smaller than the buying price.
I recently got a solar system and came to the conclusion that if you can sell power back to the grid (not everyone can) for some reasonable percentage of what it costs to buy it, then it will always be worth it to be connected (assuming you already are).
Quite simply, if you have enough solar capacity to get you through the winter (no house is going to have months of battery storage), then you will always be creating far more than you need in the summer. Selling this excess will easily cover any costs associated to being on the grid.
Also at current prices batteries are good for backup power only, it's always cheaper to sell excess power to the grid in the day and buy it back at night than it is to have battery capacity to get through the night. I worked out it would take 40 years for our battery to pay for itself (assuming the battery kept a constant battery capacity for 40 years...) but less than 10 years for the rest of the system to pay for itself.
We can't, but we can do net metering, meaning we can offset costs but not get paid. So the best investment is to pay nothing through Dec. 31 and keep costs manageable at the start of the year (net metering ends with the calendar year).
Net metering is potentially better, as you are effectively getting free night usage based ob day generation. My setup pays me, but I get paid 20c per Kw (NZ dollar) and pay about 30c to buy, so there's a 10c difference. Just as long as whatever you lose on 31st Dec is not too high, you'd be better off than me.
Only while there's a surplus. Our net metering arrangement effectively forfeits any surplus at the end of the year. It obviously can vary by region and how much you'd get from surplus vs specifics of the net metering policy, but I think getting paid for surplus is simpler and easier to plan around.
I disagree, but in not in your situation so I can be wrong.
Unless you are producing way, way more electricity than you can use I think net metering is a great arrangement for the customer. (Not so much for the utility company)
The electricity is usually bought by the utility company at a much lower cost than what the customer is paying. Because the generation cost is only a percentage of the cost, there is taxes, maintenance of the grid ...
For example in France we pay 0.1952€/kWh, but the utility is buying the solar electricity produced by household at 0.04€/kWh.
Meanwhile with net metering your electricity is virtually bought at the same price as what you are buying your electricity for.
We pay a daily lines maintenance charge of 60c, then 29c/kWh during the day and a little under 27c for off peak night time. Then add 15% tax to these. These are in NZD, so almost halve them to get USD (e.g. 60cNZD is 35cUSD)
We also get about 17.5c for each kWh sold to the grid. So to sell it in the day and buy back at night is a 10c additional cost. A 10kWh battery can save a max of $1 per night, meaning it's really hard to make your money back on a battery that's $10-15k NZD on it's own.
We have a national grid that is shared by all power companies, and is open to all. Power companies just buy and sell power on the grid based on a spot pricing system. Because of this, we have very easy movement between power companies, and have dozens to choose from, leading to a lot of competition. Mine is a tiny company that specialises in solar, having sell to grid rates well above most companies.
The company that did our solar install had their top recommended companies, they worked out the best for us, and organised getting set up with them. Was I pretty nice experience to have everything taken care of like that!
battery and solar at the home level is what makes the most sense.
60% of the planet lives between the subtropics and tropics. There is way more than plenty of sunlight hitting our earth to support all of our energy demands, and any naysaying around battery technology is missing the forest for the trees.
I don't need to get through winter, I just need to get from dusk to when the cheap energy is starts. Currently that's about 4kwh - or a small portion of my car battery before or recharges on the cheap rate.
What I want to do is find out what the maximum size battery I would need in order to store all of summer's electricity for use in winter.
I mean, I think that it's probably not a good idea for this guy to try to go fully off-grid if he has access to the grid, but for the sake of discussion, if one were honestly wanting to try it and one is in the UK, I'd think that one is probably rather better off adding a wind turbine, since some of the time that the sun isn't shining, the wind is blowing.
Is the UK getting windier? Wind speeds in the UK have been on a downward trend in recent years, with the first quarter of the year usually the being windiest.
Small wind turbines are really, really poor. You need to go high to access the good air-streams and wide to get useful efficiency out of the turbine. Any wind turbine you put on your roof will vastly under-perform for the cost spent on it.
O, absolutely. The reality is the only reasonably economic way to do off-grid is with solar, battery, and a diesel or propane generator to top off the batteries when solar isn't cutting it.
Sure, why not. But I was thinking a 4/5G router takes very little power, then a steam deck doesn't take that much either. If that is all you need, few hundred w solar panels and a decent sized camping battery will probably do just fine. You don't need to store a years worth of energy in one go if you can produce more than you use which helps during lower output times.
Then if your employer is mandating return to office, charge the battery there. Make the fuckers pay for it.
I lived without a fridge for several months before, it's not that difficult. Half the things I keep in a fridge don't really need it anyway, like chutney and jam would last a fairly long time without it. Eggs in the UK don't need the fridge either. IIRC the US wash off the protective layer on them so they do have to go in the fridge there.
That's not really a viable option, you need to be able to wash your clothes, and make your dinner, and cool your food, and have light to see. Sure it's possible to reduce it, but there is a limit where it becomes extremely inconvenient.
LEDs use very little power, with the cabin in the woods idea I would think its fairly safe to say a log fire is used for cooking, same thing to heat some water for cleaning. Fridge really doesn't use much power if you look for something energy efficient, or just don't have one. Its not like you can't live without it.
I would have thought saying cabin in the woods kinda implies not having some things and living a simpler lifestyle?
Not true, a wind turbine is dirt cheap for the power it can generate compared to solar panels. Here the problem is regulation that makes it impossible if you have neighbors within 500 m. If it wasn't for regulation a wind turbine would be a clearly better investment than solar panels. A huge advantage with turbines is also that it tend to generate power when you need it the most for heating your house.
That's because they are big mechanical whirring machines. Solar panels are dead quiet and don't throw intermittent shade and have a very low risk of causing damage in the surrounding. There's good reasons they are forbidden for the average household to put on top of the chimney...
I could probably get away with putting solar panels on my roof but I think my neighbours would have something to say about a wind turbine. They're pretty loud.
You can plug your system into a free platform like opensolar, which allows you to play with the design to see what the effect of upgrades would be during the course of the year.
Something very important that anti-nuclear but otherwise environmental minded people should realize is this sentence: " There's no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025." Also applies to grid storage. There does not exist a chemical energy storage solution that can substitute for "baseload" power. It's purely theoretical much like fusion power. Sure maybe in 50 years, but right now IT DOESN'T EXIST. Economically, practically, or even theoretically.
Why do I bring this up? Because I've seen too many people think that solar and wind can replace all traditional power plants. But if you are anti-nuclear, you are just advocating for more fossil fuels. Every megawatt of wind or solar, has a megawatt of coal or gas behind it and thus we are increasing our greenhouse gas emission everytime we build "green" generation unless we also build Nuclear power plants. /soapbox
I agree with this assessment of battery technology, I'm curious what your thoughts on storage through other means, such as dams, kinetic batteries, heat batteries, that style of thing? I understand that it'd be a massive undertaking, but if we really put our nose to the grindstone we might be able to pull off a good amount of power storage through methods that already exist.
Another myth is that hydroelectric is "green." It's absolutely not. The huge amount of land required to build something like the hoover dam or the three-gorges dam is massively destructive to the existing ecology. It's often overlooked, but land use has to be part of any environmentally sound analysis.
I would say that while the Hoover Dam, or the Three-gorges dam by themselves are acceptable, they are wholly impossible solutions for grid level storage for the entire united states/China. How practical do you think it would be to build thousands of hoover dams?
Other options like kinetic batteries etc, all come down to energy density. The highest energy density options that humans can harness are nuclear Isotopes like Uranium 238, or Plutonium 239 (what powers the voyager probes) After that is lithium batteries at ~<1% density of a nuclear battery. Everything else is fractions of a percent as efficient. Sure there are some specific use cases where a huge fly-wheel makes sense to build (data centers for example) but those cases are highly specific, and cannot be scaled out to "grid-level." The amount of resources required per kilowatt is way too high, and you'd be better off just building some more power-plants.
Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption. That’s known as pumped hydroelectric energy storage, and it requires having paired reservoirs in close geographic proximity with a substantial elevation difference. It’s not an ideal technology for several reasons, but it’s the largest type of grid-scale storage currently deployed. Fundamentally it’s gravitational potential energy storage using water as the transport medium.
A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
Nuclear isn’t a good option to balance out the variability of wind and solar because it’s slow to ramp up and down. Nuclear is much better suited to baseline generation.
There are plenty of other wacky energy storage ideas out there, such as pumping compressed air into depleted natural gas mines, and letting it drive turbines on its way back out. That might also be riddled with problems, but it’s disingenuous to claim that chemical energy storage is the only (non-) option and therefore increasing wind and solar necessarily also increase fossil fuel scaling.
Again, i'm talking energy density. All those other wacky ideas aren't viable at all. Yes I know that the hoover dam is for generation, but the idea of pumped reserve power is literally identical to hydroelectric generation. The only difference is we would have a man-made solar/wind powered pump fill the resevoir, instead a natural source of solar power fill the resevoir. Either way, it's a huge amount of land use for it to be considered "green."
Additionally I never claimed nuclear power should be used as a peak generation, it should 100% used for baseload replacing all of our fossil fuel generators, with huge taxes being applied to carbon generators.
As an aside:
A higher-efficiency but not yet fully proven technology also uses gravity and elevation differences, but relies on train rails and massive cars. Here’s one company leading the charge, as it were.
This idea is trash and as far as I can tell the hypothetical existence of this is an oil industry fud campaign. The only viable version of this is pumped hydro, which has the land use problem I've already described.
Pumped hydroelectric storage obviously works with the same kind of turbines as dams located on rivers, but the land use is far from “literally identical”. For one, I agree with you that damming rivers is generally a bad thing. Large dam sites are chosen to min-max construction effort and reservoir capacity, and usually double as flood control. A grid storage project only needs to hold enough water for its daily power use, and it doesn’t need to be located directly on a water course. That’s not to say that there are unlimited suitable sites, but it’s more flexible.
Pumped hydro storage is quite green in its lack of carbon emissions and ability to time-shift green generation capacity to match grid demand timing. Land use is a consideration, but large anything requires land. You haven’t actually attacked the weakest part of pumped hydro, which is that there just aren’t very many geographically suitable locations for it.
You’ve also neglected to acknowledge the pesky spent nuclear fuel storage problem, which is unsolved and distinctly not eco-friendly. There are potentially better paths available such as the thorium fuel cycle, but they all either have no economic traction or are actively opposed by various governments (which don’t have any good solutions for existing spent fuel).
The solution to nuclear waste is recycling it, which was something France has done quite successfully. The US can't do it because of cold-war era treaties, but realistically it's because Nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy in our society and obviously there are trillions of dollars in the fossil fuel status quo. As an aside, the aftermath of Chernobyl shows exactly how eco-friendly massive radiation events are, Prypiat is a lush nature reserve now. Human activity is much worse for any given area then radiation is.
Non recycled radioactive waste could be incinerated like we do with Coal and no one seems to be upset about it. /s
nuclear power is the only thing that can threaten fossil fuel primacy
Solar and wind are cheap and easy to build now, and a huge threat to fossil fuel primacy, which in turn makes them a threat to the dominance of the petrodollar as the world’s reserve currency. That’s why the Trump administration has gone all-out to quash their momentum.
Spent nuclear fuel reprocessing is theoretically possible but not politically or economically viable at present. Neither is 100,000+ year storage that has been the concept of a plan of record in the US for decades. I’m not saying that nuclear is inherently unworkable, but your net viewpoint doesn’t seem to be based in reality.
The disaster response in Chernobyl was absolutely heroic but also incredibly lucky. If the melted core had reached the water underneath the concrete pad, the steam explosion would have spread the core atmospherically with devastating results. You’re making light of the disaster that was, and ignoring how close it came to being so much larger. Furthermore, the enormous irresponsibility of the Russian military’s damage to the sarcophagus cannot be overstated. If maintaining isolation for a few decades is difficult, there’s just no chance over 100,000+ years.
But I don’t think you’re arguing in good faith, so I’m done here. I hope you can find your way to more nuanced views in the future.
Hoover Dam does generate power, but it’s not an energy storage project to time-shift intermittent clean energy generation to match grid consumption
All hydro is automatically "time shifting storage" when new solar is added to power the daytime. Just turn on the turbines at evening peak full blast, and at night. Average global capacity factor of hydro is 45% because the water reservoir is not sufficient to go full blast 24/7/365. Obviously, hydro time shifting is also highly complementary to wind.
Hoover dam’s water release schedule is driven by requests from water rightsholders further downstream. Power generation is great, but the dam’s primary design purpose has always been facilitating agricultural irrigation.
That said, I bet you’re right that the water flow rate could be varied throughout each day to help balance electric grid needs. I assume that will likely come into play as we get further along the path to intermittent green power generation.
The longest one is in Brazil, and is about 2400km long. With that kind of reach, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, wind in Nebraska can power New York, and every single existing hydro dam along the way can provide storage.
These problems are solved. We do not need new nuclear.
Building a dam causes massive amounts of ecological damage, plus unless you're building it in the middle of nowhere you're probably going to be turning people out of their homes, out of their entire towns. We could never build enough dams to be able to meet demand so even trying would be pointless. You would be destroying huge amounts of landscape for no reason.
Kinetic batteries can only store power up to a point, the more power you want them to store the larger they need to be. Again to compensate for base load you would have to have a either a lot of kinetic batteries or a few enormous ones. Plus they are maintenance intensive since they are giant spinning things, or great big heavy falling things.
Heat batteries are a good idea and have relatively little in the way of downsides, but they only work where it's hot, not just sunny but hot. So the number of places you can build them is limited.
If only we could get hold of some astrophage or something.
A country like France would need around 20 truly massive STEPs like Grand’Maison to provide for a single winter night (~60GW for ~14h). That’s 100-200km² to put under water, a massive ecological disaster, and a massive hazard.
And you must find a way to produce enough energy and find enough water to recharge your STEPs in the next 10h before the next night.
And that’s with the current France needs, having only 25-30% of its energy being decarbonized electricity, it’s getting even worse if we go to electrical heating and transports.
Powering an entire country without hydro, geo, nuclear or fossils is just plain science fiction. And hydro and geo cannot be built everywhere, so realistically, you either go fossils, or nuclear to have clean electricity.
Yikes. If words have no meaning, then sure. But there is no world where radioactive elements that come from stars have anything to do with fossil fuels that come from decayed biomass.
I'm pro-nuclear energy in theory. But I've got to ask - where do you get them spicy rocks from? Do you have to dig them up from a mine? Do they regularly replenish themselves? Does the energy generation have to be constantly checked for pollution leaks?
OK, they may not literally be fossilised bio-matter - but the end result is pretty much the same. Scar the landscape as you dig, release pollutants as you refine, hope you don't run out of material, make sure someone else pays to clean up the mess.
Yes mining still exists. Unlike how Solar Panels and Wind Turbines grow like plants and replenish year over year with no other industrial process required right?
But again, you don't appreciate the energy density that is contained in a reactor fuel. The volume of material is minuscule compared to coal. While oil/gas are a lot better then coal energy density-wise, they have the significant downside of greenhouse gases and causing global warming.
It isn't so much limited by the geography but is made far more cost effective because of it. A long valley with a narrow exit means you don't need to build much dam and store a vast amount of water.
As far as distance from populated areas, I dunno, I live in the UK so its kinda close enough not to matter too much.
Not if you do HVDC lines. Which are a good idea, anyway. In fact, we might not need to build a single new bit of hydro if we have a good set of HVDC lines.
Do some quick math. How much pumped hydro in terms of acre-feet would be required to power a hypothetical city like Chicago at night? Where would this theoretical reservoir be built?
I guess if you don't understand units of water per area, then there is no reason to expect you to be able to do any kind of critical analysis about why "pumped hydro" is a problem.
Dude, people can laugh at a term while still being able to do "critical analysis" 🙄 "foot pound" sounds funny too. People can giggle about Uranus and still be astronomers.
That's a completely unnecessary way to do things. The mistake you're making is that this specific way must provide all power.
It doesn't. You combine methods for a reason. The wind blows at times when the sun isn't shining, and vice versa. We have weather data stretching back many decades to tell us how much a given region will give us of each. From there, you can calculate the maximum lull where neither is providing enough. Have enough storage to cover that lull, and double it as a safety factor.
Getting to 95% water/wind/solar with this method is relatively easy and would be an extraordinary change. Getting all the way to 100% is possible, just more difficult.
It's very infuriating talking to people about this because they never really accept that nuclear power is necessary. They spend all their time complaining about how it's dangerous (it isn't) and how it's very expensive, and how you don't have a lot of control over its output capacity. And yeah, all of those are true, but so what, the only other option is to burn some dead trees which obviously we don't want to do.
Just because nuclear has downsides doesn't mean you can ignore it, unless of course you want to invent fusion just to spite me, in which case I'll be fine with that.
The new tack is to conflate nuclear energy with fossil fuels. As in assuming that nuclear energy is "legacy" power generation, and that obviously we need to use modern gernation like solar and wind, and magical grid-level storage technologies that don't exist. Also ignore that baseload power is still required, and is currently fulfilled with Natural Gas and Coal.
There is absolutely nothing required about baseload power. It's there because the economics of generating power favored it in the past. You could build a baseload plant that spits out a GW or so all day, everyday for relatively cheap.
That economic advantage is no longer there, and no longer relevant.
Honestly it's like talking to a conspiracy theorist.
What are you talking about, what's "an accounting thing" do you even know what base load is? Go look up brownouts, actually for that matter go look up the term baseload because I don't think you're using it right
In the past, coal and nuclear were perceived to be the cheapest resources, and the prior electricity system structure relied upon large power plants without valuing flexibility. Today, low natural gas prices, declining renewables costs, flat electricity demand due to more efficient energy use, and stronger climate and public health protections are all driving an irreversible shift in the underlying economics of the electricity industry. As a result, the term “baseload”—which historically has been used to refer to coal and nuclear plants—is no longer useful.
Yes if you ignore all externalities the "economics" means that you can use Natural Gas "peaking" plants instead. But one of the main advantages of nuclear power is zero green-house gas emissions.
If fossil fuels were taxed appropriately, the economics of them wouldn't be viable anymore. A modest tax of a $million USD per ton of CO2 would fix up that price discrepancy.
Most of this is being driven by renewables. Natural gas gets mentioned because its price has dropped due to fracking, but it's not a strictly necessary part of this argument, either. Water/wind/solar solutions have undercut even the plummet in natural gas prices.
Nuclear has no place. Nobody is building it, and it's not because regulators are blocking it. It's also completely unnecessary.
France built the fuck out of it, 71% of their power is nuclear. Works darn well.
it’s not because regulators are blocking it
In the US, the over-regulation makes it horrifically expensive. Every plant is bespoke instead of mass produced, with exchangeable parts, personnel, and knowledge. Mass produce nuclear plants and the costs come way down.
Water/wind/solar solutions have undercut even the plummet in natural gas prices.
Wind and solar are paired with natural gas. People still want power in the winter and at night and right now that is natural gas. By opposing nuclear, you ensure it will continue to be natural gas paired with wind and solar.
Well I'm not going to buy the book to find out what they are so all I'm going to go ahead and say is this. Yes there are solutions such as battery storage (although they do tend to be extremely explodey) and using the power to pump water around, or using mirrors to heat up salt in insulated containers, but they are all very specific solutions that will only work in very particular situations, which we don't always have.
Almost like we can have many solutions where one of them is workable in any given situation.
Edit: also, as for "explody" batteries, that's a factor of certain lithium chemistries. It's not even all lithium chemistries. Sodium and flow batteries are usually better options for grid storage, anyway, and neither has particularly notable safety issues.
In US, and EU is having similar nightmare, nuclear was last built at $15/watt. Installing solar is under $1/watt, and for 20 equivalent hours of nuclear per day (less demand at night means not full production even if available) equivalent to $5/watt-day. $1/watt capital costs is 2c/kwh for solar, and for full day production needs 10c/kwh. All before financing. Nuclear is 30c/kwh. It adds 10 extra years of construction financing, requires political bribes to suppress alternative supply whenever they decide to begin operations, uranium purchases/disposal, expensive skilled operations staff, security, disaster insurance.
Solar does need batteries for time shifting its daily supply. At current LFP prices of $100/kwh, 1c/kwh full cycle is prefinancing cost. and so 3c/kwh if triple the charging/discharging daily capacity. 6 hours of storage is a very high number in power systems. It will capture all energy from a northern summer. It will rarely fully discharge with any time shifting incentives to daytime (much higher convenience to consumers and industry) providing resilience to rainy days. A 2c/kwh value (before financing which is apples to apples comparison to nucclear) means a 5gw solar + 30gwh (much lower if enough private EVs are available for time shifting needs) battery costs 12c/kwh or $8B vs a $15B equivalent 1GW nuclear solution. Both last 60 years due to low battery charge/discharge rates and capacity cycle use, with much lower maintenance costs/downtime for life extension costs for solar/battery system vs keeping a nuclear reactor operational. No/minimal operations costs.
It’s very infuriating talking to people about this
Yes. Nuclear shills are frauds who should be frustrated in their theft of the commons.
Well, unfortunately some people are using nuclear as an excuse to argue that we don't need any renewables at all and that they should be banned entirely. They do this because they know that nuclear faces extreme regulatory and societal challenges and it would allow coal, diesel and gas to continue unabated.
So it creates a backlash where renewable advocates feel they have to fight nuclear to survive.
Show it. Tell me where the grid-level storage exists for a city like Tokyo, or NYC, or Chicago, or Mexico City, or Paris, or London. Hell pick your own city, show me where it exists right now today.
See, that's a trap that keeps the argument within a frame where you can win. That's not how it works.
What you're doing is focusing on a singular solution, and then showing why it can't solve all the problems. Each individual solution is attacked on its own, and then nuclear ends up being the only option.
Except that's a dumb way of going about it.
Each of these solutions has pros and cons. You use the pros of one to cover the cons of another.
As one example I mentioned elsewhere in the thread, Brazil has an HDVC line 2400km long. With that kind of reach, solar in Arizona can power Chicago, wind in Nebraska can power New York, and every single existing hydro dam along the way can provide storage. What you end up with is the possibility of not needing to build a single MWh of new storage or hydro dams. If nothing else, you don't need very much. Long distance transmission is thus very important, but it tends to get left out of these discussions because it's boring.
I'll leave you with an excerpt from "No Miracles Needed", written by Mark Z Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering:
On July 11, 2011, I was invited to a dinner at the Axis Café and Gallery in San Francisco to discuss the potential of renewable energy as an alternative to natural gas hydrofracking in New York State. Little did I know it at the time, but that dinner would set off a chain reaction of events that turned a scientific theory, that the world has the technical and economic ability to run on 100 percent clean, renewable energy and storage for all purposes, into a mass popular movement to do just that. The movement catalyzed an explosion of worldwide country, state, and city laws and proposed laws, including the Green New Deal, and business commitments. Ten years after that meeting, critics were no longer mocking our ideas as pie-in-the-sky and tooth-fairy-esque. They were no longer claiming that transitioning to more than 20 percent renewables would cripple power grids. Instead, the discussion had changed to what is the cost of 100 percent renewables, how fast can we get there, and should we leave a few percent for non-renewables?
This was from the first edition of the book published in 2023. So quite contrary to your claim that "there’s no practical way to build domestic batteries with this capacity using the technology of 2025", the technology has existed for over a decade. We just need to build it. And we are building it, just not as fast as we need to.
Meanwhile, the NRC continues to stamp permits for new nuclear, but nobody is building. There's a reason for that, too.
I can dismiss the the other solutions that are worse then pumped hydro because pumped hydro is actually the best case scenario for grid-level storage and it requires A LOT of space. Anything else, batteries, pneumatic mines etc etc are going to be worse in terms of space by orders of magnitude, not to mention the actual costs. Hand waving the need for grid-level storage by saying we would us hydro shows you don't understand the scale of the problem.
That excerpt from that engineer is great, but WHERE IS THE STORAGE? Show it to me on a map. You can't because it does not exist. New Nuclear plants are being built, finally, but there is a reason that no grid-level storage exists. It's literally not possible today. There exists a pilot battery plant in Australia, and there exists a few megawatts of storage in Scotland, but these are few and far between and none of them are suitable for massive deployment.
I can dismiss the the other solutions that are worse then pumped hydro because pumped hydro is actually the best case scenario for grid-level storage and it requires A LOT of space.
It's like you didn't even read the bit about how HVDC makes this a non-issue.
. . . but WHERE IS THE STORAGE? Show it to me on a map. You can’t because it does not exist.
It's in every hydro dam that's already built in between Arizona and New York. If we even do need more, there is plenty of land to use.
How about this: I throw out everything I said about synergizing different solutions. We just have solar and storage. No long distance transmission or wind. How much does that cost to power a city?
That study has been done. Going by Lazard's levelized cost of energy 2025 report, the most optimistic cost to build new nuclear is $141/MWh--and keep in mind that I'm giving nuclear the best case scenario here. A solar+storage solution that would provide 97% of the power needed for Las Vegas would cost $104/MWh. "But that's sunny desert with lots of empty land around it", I hear you say. The bigger deal is that Washington DC could have 81% of power done at $124/MWh. Northern city where it snows a lot, and it's still more viable than nuclear.
"But 81% isn't 100%". No, please stop. You get to 81% before you get to 100%. This isn't even the best way to get to 100%.
This study has a comprehensive wind/water/solar solution fighting with two arms tied behind its back, and it's still kicking nuclear's ass.
. . . New Nuclear plants are being built, finally
Nope, not in the US, they aren't.
Here's a map of NRC licenses. The green pips are the ones where licenses are already approved. Here's the list and where they are at:
William States - Licensed to go ahead in 2016. Canceled in 2017 with a contributing factor being the bankruptcy of Westinghouse (which itself happened because of cost overruns at the Vogtle nuclear plant build)
Turkey Point - Licensed new builds in 2018. No news on actually going forward.
North Anna - Licensed new builds in 2017. No news on actually going forward.
PSEG - Issued an early site permit, but not the full license. The ESP was set in 2016 with no movement noted since then.
Fermi - This was licensed just in the past few months. They want to have it in operation by 2032, which, lol, no it isn't.
That's not a list of success stories. Add the Vogtle debacle to the list and it's all a bucket of failure.
The AP1000 design at Vogtle was supposed to prevent the need for botique engineering that had been a problem with reactors in the past. You could use one design everywhere. That was hoped to prevent all these cost and schedule overruns. It didn't. In addition to Vogtle, it was also built in China at the Sanmen and Haiyang plants. Like Vogtle, Sanmen went over budget and over schedule, but managed in the end. There's less information about what happened at Haiyang, but the timeline of beginning construction and reaching first criticality is roughly the same as Sanmen; we can assume it went about the same.
There's a very clear reason why this is happening, and it comes down to this chart:
This is a list of megaprojects and their tendency to go overbudget. Everything from rail to mining to airports. The third worst budgetary offender is nuclear power at a mean cost overrun of 120%. It managed to be better than Olympic Games, at least. The very worst is the related issue of nuclear storage at a whopping 238% mean budget overrun.
Way down at the bottom, you will find solar, power transmission, and wind. Solar projects have a mean overrun of 1%, energy transmission 8%, and wind 13%.
That should make it very clear why the list above has approved licenses with no actual movement. Who the hell would want to put their money into that? You can invest in wind or solar, have a very good chance of it staying within budget, and it will be making revenue within 6-12 months. You put that in nuclear, and you better hope that other investors will pitch in when the budget doubles, or else you have to do it if you hope to see your money again. In the very best case scenario, you're not going to see a cent of revenue for at least 5 years, but probably more like 10.
Meanwhile, old nuclear is being taken offline because it's too expensive. If it's not even worthwhile to keep what we have, what hope is there for building new?
It’s in every hydro dam that’s already built in between Arizona and New York. If we even do need more, there is plenty of land to use.
This is the key factor I'm talking about. There is not "plenty of land" for hydro storage, and flooding the amount of land required to provide grid level storage is an ecological disaster. Plus your analysis of mega-project like nuclear plants going over budget and over-time absolutely applies to any grid-level storage project you would need to go 100% solar/wind.
But just for fun, how much space would the grid level storage projects take up? I'll let you use Hydro because it's the best case scenario that exists today as far as energy density.
But beyond that what is your point, that humans shouldn't build big projects, and any attempt to do so is "boneheaded?" Capitalism can't build big projects I agree, but the problem isn't the projects themselves it's the profit-motive.
Author's diagram is about summer. Fall, winter, spring is about heating-degree days. If you're heating your home with electricity, you'll not get there with batteries.
So, working towards a solution, there are other ways to store excess energy than in batteries. One example is sand, which can be heated to very high temperatures. Insulate a sand container well and its storage can do a lot of home-heating.
The sand storage is used for district heating. It's not much of a substitute for single homes that have electrical heating or are off-grid.
It's a great way to balance both the electrical and the heating grids so that more electricity from renewables can be used to offset other means of heat production, but it needs to be done by the district heating supplier. I doubt it makes sense for individual houses.
Suburbs are fine for district heating, but it's a massive long term investment.
For UK in particular, I also think proper insulation and triple/quadruple window panes are much needed to curb with the increasingly scorching summers and freezing winters. I was surprised to see soo many houses with single paned windows in London.
Not at all. First, (hot) water batteries are excellent for home heat storage. Sand/dirt is even more storage per volume required, and completely complimentary in sending hot water through it (pipes) to make it hotter. No combustion heat means less air exchanges, and a 300C rock/dirt/sand pit has losses that radiate through house.
When I was a kid my parents had electric resistance heat with some very effective thermal storage.
Each room had a unit about the size of a typical radiator. The unit was basically an insulated box with a small circulation fan. I’m not sure what was inside but always assumed some form of brick - they weren’t expensive so it couldn’t be anything exotic. At night when electric rates were low, whatever was inside the units was heated up. During the day, the only power usage was a small circulation fan controlled by the thermostat.
I just got a heat pump installed and thought thermal storage would be worth considering since I was also looking into solar, but contractors acted like they never heard of it, and there really didn’t seem to be any consumer units available.
The solar panels are another story. I don’t see how such a scammy (in the us) industry even exists. They make it really hard to give them my money
Asbestos is great at insulating really hot things so was used on boilers , especially ships and industrial to insulate the hot pipes and improve efficiency. However in this case we need something with thermal mass: any sand or rock might do, or water, or oil, or a modern phase change material. That material next to the heater will get hot but the entire mass won’t, so can be insulated with standard materials. There’s no point in something like asbestos
An important part of my point was also that what I assume were cheap materials was enough to take advantage of nightly time of use metering. In upstate NY, a standard “radiator” per room was sufficient, similar to hot water or steam heat
Storage heaters can help those on time-of-use tariffs (such as Economy 7 and Economy 10) to save money with cheaper off-peak electricity. Find out how storage heaters work, and what type of storage heater is right for your home.
It's practical for someone with limited space for panels on a small room, but I ran these calculations by moving almost all loads to daytime, sizing the panel array to the (minimum daily usage + efficiency losses) * buffer factor for days long storms or equipment failure.
Start with the comparitively cheap panels if you have the space, move electrical loads to the daytime and design the house for thermal momentum, and size storage to the minimum inclusive efficiency losses times buffer. If you have the roof space the panels are the cheapest part and you should usually way, way over panel.
The most important thing is having thermal mass enough or living in a climate that allows your home to not need thermal input or extraction at night. Heat is expensive and exponentially moreso if you need to produce it from conventional storage.
It is possible that, not too long in the future, every home could also have a 1 MegaWatt-hour battery. They would be able to capture all the excess solar power generated in a year.
Braindead strategy, that most likely is discrete fossil fuel shilling, for purposes of making decision inpractical.
The cost of storage as a baselines is how much you can charge/discharge per day. Bonus for smaller (= cheaper) that can have more discharge/charge than its capacity per day. Plus the resilience/reserve capacity value which is a convenience factor. Resilience alternatives include fire places or gas generators (that are not expected to be used often) which tend to be cheap per kw. But noise, smell, variable costs, and startup effort are all inconveniences. Driving an EV to a public charger can be a similar inconvenience level to a generator for resilience value. If a 1mwh battery is used 10kwh/day it costs 100 times more per kwh than a 10kwh battery.
OP gives an example of 12kwh summer use (no AC?) which is very high for most people, but can include cooking and floodlights.
The braindead analysis parts are "because 100 days of 10kwh surpluses happen, I need 1mwh battery". Actual battery storage requirements are the lowest theoretical winter solar production over 1-2 weeks, together with running pumps for heat (stored mostly in fall) distribution. A 10kwh/day maximum deficit for 1 week straight, with 60 day average deficit of 5kwh/day (without requiring additional heat input), means that any consideration for a large static battery should stop at 70kwh. This is sharply reduced with 1 or 2 EVs where summer surpluses are free fuel, and EV provides backcharging at 3kw whenever needed. 30kwh battery is plenty to charge an EV overnight (300km range for small car) before next day's sunlight exceeds needs. Even less battery with 2nd lightly used EV, but 30kwh will be cheaper than un-needed EV.
Instead of relying on batteries for heat generation, which is where $100k 1mwh delusion proposition comes, heat generated from solar stored in under $1/kwh hot water and dirt storage. Outside of winter, this also provides completely unlimited showers and hot tub use, and a $10-20k heat pump and heating system (fossil fuel systems often cost the same) and insulation improvements is the the unquestionable non-distracting path.
That scales down to the home level easily. Box filled with cement dust, dirt, sand, gypsum, gravel is all free material. Water gets more heat lift from heat pumps, but can't store as much heat in a volume as dirt. Both are highly complimentary, because delivering hot water to everywhere in a home is efficient, quiet, dust free, heat. But if you are lucky enough to have centralized option, that is easier.
hot water to everywhere in a home is efficient, quiet
Have you never lived in an apartment building?
I don't know why we haven't come up with better solutions for piping. Or maybe it's just because this building was built very cheaply. But anyway... the pipes make quite a loud banging sound if you shut them fast enough. And a lot of whoooshing in the walls just when using hot water.
High rise apartment buildings have a challenge with pumping water up more than 3-5 floors. This can be solved with intermediate storage on floors, but for high rises, forced air is the usual solution. Heat storage still works well enough with forced air, but water is much better due to internal piping through heat source, where air volume is harder to do there, and if gaining heat from outer shell, then insulation meant to keep heat in is not as good at heat transfer. Water is most perfect heat fluid in world. Air not so much.
And a lot of whoooshing in the walls just when using hot water.
This doesn't apply for heat delivery. Tends to be continuous. A faucet is different.
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It takes an extremely large volume of any of these materials to store any useful amount of heat to get you through a cold night or something. The volume looks more like a room than a box, unless you can somehow make it molten that is
I did math for Toronto, Canada. 2000l of hot water was enough (2m^3^). Winters here have gotten cloudier from great lakes warming. Instead of more water as a buffer, dirt is much more space efficient, and just needs the hot water routed through it to get heat transfer.
The volume looks more like a room than a box, unless you can somehow make it molten that is
If hydronic heating system was already being directed towards outer walls instead of straight up from water storage, then a tall "hot dirt" storage, and dual cold water mixing valves (pre and post dirt flow) next to each other, it's less in additional storage costs per heat unit than water, though it does use more electricity to input heat compared to heat pump.
No need for temperatures higher than melting/softening point of copper to get useful heat storage for a home. Just water can be enough if you have the room.
I looked into one of these thermal systems for my own place but the outlay is just massive for the 11 weeks a year I really need heat, and the rest of the year it's just a stupidly oversized hot water heater that is cooking my glycol and DC pumps.
I ended up paneling up and putting a dumb 9kw resistive boiler for my hydronic floors. The house slab is the battery and although inefficient in terms of strict energy use, winter sun on my cheap pallet of panels dumps plenty into the slab all day. I do have to light the stove if we get a snow storm for a day or two though
Yes. Hydronic flooring is cheap at construction time. Complicated if drilling into finished ceilings/floor with thicker under floor space making. But instead of 9kw of winter electricity you are forced to import, it is free fall surplus generation. 100w of pump circulation.
But you are saying, a resistive boiler made more sense than a heat pump, with the hydronic floor conversion. At first I thought you were just saying resistive heating electric floor. The latter, to me, would be the cheapest capital outlay conversion, and then a heat pump would beat a resistive boiler on operation costs if hydronic.
Yeah I already had the hydronic floors and ran numbers on heating the floors off thermal solar panels, propane, heat pump, and the resistive boiler. The thermal panels made the least sense because they are useless eight months of the year.
The heat pump might have worked but when I really needed it my semi-outdoor closet would be in single digits and full of water supply pipes so the heat pump would be least efficient when I needed it most, and would not help keep the closet warm.
The resistive boiler meant I could add a bunch of panels to run it during the day and get the floors up to 85F, then run all electric appliances with no worries during the day the rest of the year with the extra capacity. So instead of being net positive generation from 10am to 4pm in summer, its now 8 am to 6pm with way more than I can use at peak.
(OP here) Sorry mate, are you accusing me of being in the pocket of Big Oil? Here's everything I've written about solar over the last decade - shkspr.mobi/blog/tag/solar/ - feel free to point out where I've said "yay fossil fuels!"
I didn't include AC because that's not a thing in the UK.
Oh, and I don't use electricity for primary heating. Solar thermal is pretty useless in my part of the world because you don't need much hot water in summer (mmmm! Cold showers!)
As I said in my post, this is a purely theoretical discussion about what future technology might look like. Your argument is like someone from 2001 going "a recordable CD can hold 650MB - so you only need two for a really long car trip. There's no way people in the future will have 1TB hard drives! For anything else, just use AM radio."
Basically, one of us is braindead - and I'm not so sure it is me!
Ok, to be polite, you were just mistaken in portraying a 1 mwh battery as a reasonable idea. It is just so absurdly stupid that motives for the proposal need to be looked at. I accept your admission of stupid instead of evil.
However if you can get water between two places it can work quite well. You need to live close to a big change in altitude and do a bit of geoengineering to create the upper and lower reservoirs, which can be destructive to local ecology, but not as much as a dam.
Located 2.5 km offshore from Toronto, the Hydrostor Corp. underwater compressed air energy storage systemis designed to store electricity during off-peak hours when demand is low and electricity is cheapest, and return the stored electricity during t…
It's an idea that's been played with a few times, but there are many energy loss points in such a system, as well as logistics for keeping the "stack" from falling over. The best so far is pumping water up to an artificial lake, but that's still not very efficient.
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Potential energy (in joules) is mass (in g) times height (in meters) times 9.8 m/s^2 .
So in order to store the 30 kWh per day that the typical American house uses, you'd need to convert the 30 kWh into 108,000,000 joules, and divide by 9.8, to determine how you'd want to store that energy. You'd need the height times mass to be about 11 million. ~~So do you take a 1500 kg weight (about the weight of a Toyota Camry) and raise it about 7.3 meters (about 2 stories in a typical residential home)?~~ (this is wrong, it's only 0.001 as much as the energy needed, see edit below)
And if that's only one day's worth of energy, how would you store a month's worth? Or the 3800kwh (13.68 x 10^9 joules) discussed in the article?
At that point, we're talking about raising 10 Camrys 93 meters into the air, just for one household. Without accounting for the lost energy and inefficiencies in the charging/discharging cycle.
Chemical energy is way easier to store.
Edit: whoops I was off by using grams instead of kg. It actually needs to be 1000 times the weight or 1000 the height. The two story Camry is around a tablet battery's worth of storage, not very much at all.
Hmm… this might be easier to do with an electric car. Put it on an inclined track, and then drive uphill to store energy, and go downhill to release the energy.
With an EV you can have 80%-90% of days covered, and top up with EV. You also get to dump daily surpluses into EV, and you can think of covering winter heating with solar and a heat pump. Easier if you have a fireplace for extreme cold possibility.
Storing heat with fall surpluses is path to get winter heating covered. Heat pump can make hot water very efficiently, and resistance heating can make a pile of dirt 300+C. Radiant floor heating is most efficient because water is distributed around 30C. This means your 90C water volume is 60C effective heat storage that is generated at 600% efficiency in fall, and 300% efficiency in typical UK winter, and your dirt heat storage can be 5x more dense.
A 2nd EV even if not frequently used during the day can be an attractive option, especially if used, and tax credits will go away soon, or have gone away (makes used prices lower) can be much easier than home batteries, and much cheaper if it remains uninsured/unused, and resale value doesn't go down much because of few miles driven. Where utility service includes a high fixed monthly charge, ($50/month in Toronto), $12000 over 20 years savings creates high incentive to remove electric utility. Gas utility has similar fixed vs variable equation, but for Toronto, heat is somewhat reasonable from high supply on our continent.
Not really. As I say in my article, our roof is full. On a bad day in winter, we might generate 0.5kWh (assuming the panels aren't covered in snow). So we'd need 20x the panels - there's no room for that.
There was an article posted somewhere on Lemmy a few months back where someone tried to do similar calculations for the US as a whole. What I took from the result was 95% renewable was achievable and still cheaper than fossil fuels. However the over provisioning of renewables and over double the storage needed to reliably achievable 100% made that infeasible with today’s proving and technology. Basically you can install storage to cover when the sun is not shining but it’s much more difficult to cover weeks of gloominess
Solar isn't the only renewable choice, though. It's just the easiest to do on an individual level. Also, there are plenty of areas for which weeks of gloominess will never (on human timescales) be an issue.
To be completely off grid you would ideally want to be able to go at least a week with minimal to no power generation. Personally that would mean I would need at least 100kWh of batteries.
I would also then want/need a petrol generator powerful enough to power everything that would usually run in a normal day, so that meant be a 15000W one which would be very expensive.
I've been using Speech Note (github link) for months, but it often gets things wildly wrong.
I thought it was my mic, so I got one that's crystal clear. I also tried a ton of different models, and other than being slow (or fast), their accuracy is usually pretty similar.
But I'm still needing to take a lot of time to edit the results, and I wonder if there's something I should be doing to get better results.
On other speech-to-text platforms (like Futo keyboard on Android), the results are fast and very accurate. I have a hard time believing that Speech Note can't be as good.
Can any other users share their experience?
UPDATE: Ok, the best model that I've found for Speech Note is the WhisterCpp FUTO English-244, which, funny enough, is the model I use on Futo Keyboard for Android. It's not the fastest, but fast enough. It is quite accurate, and that means less time editing text.
Had enough issues with it to not find it helpful. But I'm not a native English speaker and support for my local language is so-so, so might as well be me that's the problem.
I’m not a native English speaker, but neither people nor other robots have problems understanding me - in person or over a microphone. Speech Note hadn’t shown good results, unfortunately. I really wanted to use it, because on my Android phone I use voice input all the time.
It’s using my Nvidia GPU to do the LLM thing, so that may be the difference.
This could be!
Interestingly enough, I was playing around with LLama, as they have speech to text to interact with their chat bot, and it converts in near real-time with very good accuracy. So I do know that things can be fast and accurate, but I wish it was in Speech Note. LOL
For now, I may just to STT through my phone on a shared document with my laptop.
Like everything else, the same laws and rules they have hidden behind to justify and protect their absolute dogshit behavior will be the first things the regime will get rid of for protecting anyone other than their in-group.
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
It doesn't shut the Fediverse; it just means each user needs to run their own instance so that the "user" doing the speech and the "publisher" liable for it are one in the same.
Yeah, it's the online forums and gaming communities that radicalized me and not the legion of drooling idiots destroying my country at the direction (or at least to the delight) of foreign adversaries. Good job, detective.
Elon sieg heilling twice and then signal boosting facists and illegally cutting democratically approved and institutionally valid spending, that hasn't radicalized anyone.
Totally normal behavior.
It's gotta be the video games and the dark web. What's dark web? It is any web space I don't know about. Duh.
I am not a fan of a few billionaires locking up every freedom we used to have so they can keep trucking toward the world's first trillionaire.
Do I want people to die? Nope. Live forever, or of old age or whatever. Do I want people to stop belittling others and spreading hatred and lies and for them to cease it forever? Yes. Do I wish that Kirk saw the light or the end of a gravy train and apologized publicly and disavowed all his bs? I wanted this more than anything. I would also love to see the other propagandists and conspiracists maybe think hard about consequences of their actions and cease their lies, but I live in the real world, unlike them.
Edit: Thanks for all the replies. I asked this out of laziness and apparently trying this is not a lazy thing to do. I'm not Bilbo Baggins seeking an adventure. Will go with 11 > 12 > 13 way, though might stay at 12 for a while at this point. You know, lazy. 😀
Edit 2: Updated to 12. Haven't checked all the configs yet but so far so good, at least every function I expect works. If I finish this checking sequence, I might go for 13 soon too.
Edit 3: Updated to 13 as well. It actually took shorter than updating from 11 to 12. Though for some reason Jellyfin is marked as obsolete, however it works and I couldn't care less. My things are working and hopefully I won't see problems. If I do, I'll check them one by one at this point since it's a small home server.
Gotta add this: I had 325 packages on Debian 11, and now I have 450 packages on Debian 13. Some of them are marked as obsolete but must review them one by one. I feel like this upgrade process brake my minimalism and introduced some bloat but gotta care about that later.
Likely not. I've tried skipping a release once by accident (I didn't pay enough attention) and it ended with a bricked system and a full reinstall. Don't do it.
Major version changes for any software from the OS right down to a simple notepad app should update as sequentially as possible (11>12>13>etc). Skipping over versions is just asking for trouble, as it's rarely tested throughly.
It might work, but why risk it.
An example: if 12 makes a big database change but you skip over that version, 13 may not recognize the databases left by 11 because 12 had the code to recognize and reformat the old database while that code was seen as unnecessary and removed from 13.
Stuff like this is also why you can't always revert to an older version while keeping the data/databases from the newer software.
Yeah, that makes sense. Major changes in software are no joke. If it wasn't my actual server I could've tried it though, could be a fun thing to pass time.
It seems nobody really tested 11 to 13, or maybe any kind of major-version-skipping and you won't find direct experiences here.
Your best bet is to follow the official procedure, so 11 -> 12 -> 13. I'll leave you with the official upgrade guide for 11 to 12 and 12 to 13.
It seems longer than it is, as not every step is actually required for every system. When upgrading VMs, a snapshot pre-upgrade can also help you skip backup-steps in the guides.
Debian migrated to new paths for security non-free firmware in repositories from 11 to 12, and apt goes to v3 in 12 to 13, which changes the format of sources. There is a new apt modernize-sources command, but it assumes your paths are correct.
If you know what you're doing, you can do this by correcting the repo paths and do the without-new-packages upgrade, but be prepared to fix apt.
If you're a casual user, maybe stick with 11>12>13.
I know what I'm doing but looking at every comment here, it's not a wise thing to do it seems. So casual or not 11 > 12 > 13 is the proper and most likely still the easiest way. It's a good thing that I asked before doing some potentially mad thing.
Honestly, there were so many fundamental changes in the 13 upgrade for certain packages that I had to fix on a couple of machines that I'd be hesitant to try no-scoping the 11 > 13 upgrade.
I flew by the seat of my pants and managed to pull off 10 directly to 12, but I wouldn't do it for this one.
Well, if there are issues like even in normal upgrade, it's better not to jump on a thing like this.
Still, it's good to know that this is technically possible, though it's not for a lazy person who just wants to update his server. Gotta check Debian changelog.
I did it by accident last week on a long running VM. It was rough because I also had the official docker repo as a source. I was stuck in a partial state for a while and only a lot of googling helped. Only recommended if you're bored.
Oh, partial upgrade is the worst. Technically it's still supported until next year as oldoldstable so it should be fine to directly upgrade if you ask me but I understand the changes affect many things and upgrade process actually check things from the previous version, so if one upgrade directly it might go bad. That's probably why Arch Linux can get borked if you haven't updated for a long time.
For fixed-release distros (Debian/Ubuntu), the upgrade path is usually sequential.
The main implication: if you skip, you’re outside the tested upgrade path. That can mean broken packages, orphaned configs, security regressions, or a system that simply won’t boot. Sometimes you can force it and it’ll work, but it’s a gamble...
As someone who went through the 12-13 upgrade last week. Do not go directly. I had to rollback twice during the 12-13 upgrade(thank you timeshift) so I couldn't imagine trying to run an 11-13 upgrade.
Hey. I'm going through this right now. My server was 11, and I wanted to go to 13. I definitely didn't want to get into a situation where the server required hours and hours of repair.
I'm halfway there. The upgrade to 12 went smoothly. The biggest headache was glances, first from the lack of web interface (which I was ready for), and the lack of RAID support (not ready). I might do the switch to 13 next week.
I feel like 13 introduced more changes than 12. By the way, I finally took the leap and upgraded to 13. Kinda YOLO'd though and it needs some fixing in configs but currently everything I expect works, so this will be a very slow fixing process I reckon. 😀
When I upgraded the desktop and laptop machines, I didn't run into many issues. Had to reinstall the Nvidia drivers on the game machine. And deal with glances, but I mentioned that before.
I'll probably update the server to 13 next week.
I had to rewrite part of my php-based photo management system, as it relied on a library that was originally written for php 4 or 5 and hasn't been updated. Fortunately that wasn't too hard. There might be other things lurking like that, but they aren't critical problems - I can deal with them at leisure.
I’m wouldn’t do it. Debian isn’t something that likes big jumps like that. Consider an immutable distro if you want to be able to leap around that way.
I heard some people use openSUSE MicroOS as their servers but my servers were always Debian and I'm quite happy about it. Though immutable server sounds nice. But I wouldn't consider anything until my server is completely broken, so there is that. 😀
Lembot_0004
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in reply to Lembot_0004 • • •Here’s the thing: I’m with you. I agree as an American that the only thing that can stop this train is a wholehearted, full-throated rejection of everything this administration represents. That comes with a couple of issues, though, and the first is that the body politic here is intensely complacent; much too comfortable to be driven to action. The fact of the matter is that disapproval of Trump is the majority view, and even at the beginning of his second term that was still about a dead even split, but not even Trump’s atrocious performance in his first term was enough to galvanize a large portion of the US voter base in the 2024 election, despite it clearly being a critical inflection point. Unfortunately, if it doesn’t affect their life immediately and directly, a large portion of America simply doesn’t give a shit. Overcoming that apathy is likely going to require something large, noticeable, bombastic, demonstrably wrong, and personally painful, and by that point there’s a good chance it’ll be too late. Additionally, any revolution or unrest is likely to be heavily suppressed by the second issue: the US police state and its willingness to use deadly force, regardless of the severity of the situation. Between police forces, riot police, swat teams, the national guard, domestic surveillance, and now the might of the US military turned on its own populace, the Trump administration has all the tools to make any true resistance deeply costly and incredibly painful. Talk of resistance, of revolution, of taking up arms against this fascist takeover is easy, but the feasibility of a clean revolution in the face of the US police, military, and intelligence apparatus is doubtful. More likely we would end up with either civil war or insurgency, fighting an asymmetric campaign against an overwhelming force. We know that the US is vulnerable to such tactics (see: US expeditionary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East), but we also know that those tactics are incredibly costly, and require a populace that is highly motivated by what they perceive to be an existential threat.
The key here, in my opinion, is the military. Historically, he who controls the military, controls the state. The victors of coups and revolutions practically always have the military on their side, and for good reason; very few things are as persuasive as the threat of a bullet. Morale in the US military right now seems to be low, and if we can manage to break the trained obedience to hierarchy, we might just have a chance, but without them, I don’t see a way forward. Even every citizen striking and causing a complete shutdown of the US economy would just be likely to lead to threats being made to and examples being made of them, and getting people onboard for that is unlikely to be feasible from a fundamental level, given that the majority of America lives paycheck to paycheck.
I don’t want to be fatalistic or claim that this can’t be done or that we shouldn’t be doing anything about it; we should, and have a moral obligation to act, but the reality of the situation is that the time to act while avoiding discomfort was last November, and the viable options available to us now are going to hurt, and will likely only get more painful as time goes on. That makes people hesitant to act, and until such a time as they have more to lose from inaction than they do from action, I don’t expect that to change.
God, do I hope I’m wrong, though.
frongt
in reply to Lee Duna • • •Now whose administration was it that signed the withdrawal deal, I wonder?
Oh that's right. Donald Trump's.
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in reply to abigscaryhobo • • •More troops getting slaughtered by the nut jobs means less troops at home shooting minorities.
I see this as a win.
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