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From the video “websites are still websites. Videos are still videos”. The problem of course is that this is not true.
The problem is that technology is still our servant. What are we asking it to do?
First, this video itself. If this same story was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image. It would not be a 1080p or 4K YouTube video. That, in a nutshell is the real problem. The OP, by posting this video, has already chosen a side in that fight. But let’s compare apples to apples.
20 years ago, a web page was made up up a few dozen kb of HTML, a dozen kb of CSS, and a few 100 kb of JavaScript. Images were few, low resolution, and low bit depth. The fonts used were probably bitmaps and installed locally. The “computing power” was on the server. It was all sent as clear text. The networks were too slow to send much more. Today, a website sends me megabytes, maybe dozens of megabytes, of JavaScript. And I am probably downloading a bucket of vector fonts too. Not only is the “web application” much, much fancier but now all the “computing power” is expected to be in my browser (on my computer). And all the “assets” like images and video have to be local too. Instead of small 8 bit GIFs, I have huge high-resolution 24 bit AVIF and PNG files. I am rendering SVG and font vector files at high resolutions on my local CPU / GPU. Maybe there is an animated background. To cap things off, everything is encrypted with 2048 bit or 4096 bit keys. It is not that my local computer or my local operating system has become less efficient (like the video implies). It is that the websites have become 100 times more difficult to render. Browse some of those old websites (if you can find them). They are blazing fast and take very little RAM.
And what were videos? YouTube was probably 360p with a video codec designed to be easy to decompress on an underpowered client. Now, YouTube is 4K or at least 1080p and in a codec that is much more computationally intensive to render. It has to be to support storage of these otherwise immense files. A 4K file is literally 40 times the number of pixels in 360p. This is before we consider that the color space probably went from 16 bits to 24 or 32 as well. So, back to 100 times harder like above.
And the premise that “20 years ago” that you were running your web browser and a file manager and a command line all while editing a video on your laptop is nonsense. You had a 1280x800 screen. If you were editing a video, it was probably the only thing you had running. And again, what resolution and color depth were these videos you were making? Were you even editing video? Be honest. How many “content creators” were there then. The multimedia we were editing was probably audio only. The video work we did was more transcoding (maybe cutting out ads) than it was “video editing” like today.
If this same message was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image.
And you know what, my 10 year old computer can still do the modern stuff and it absolutely blazes though the old stuff.
If this were a blog post, I could have a hundred similar tabs open on that 2 GB of RAM he talks about.
So, it is not that computers and software are built wastefully. It is that users expect things they did not expect before. If you are willing to watch 360p YouTube, read mostly text blog posts with the ads tuned off, make simply edited videos in the same 360p resolution, and run a simple Wayland compositor or X11 Window Manager, a totally up-to-date Linux distro will run just as well on your old hardware as you remember. At least, pretty close.
The only really truly wasteful step has been the move to 64 bit instead of 32 bit. We could save at least a third of the RAM used for any modern task if it were 32 bit. But, 32 bit only gives us 4 GB of RAM, which means I could get a 32 bit computer that performs like 6 or 7 GB 64 bit system today. But of course that is not nearly enough. As the YouTube author states, they need 16 GB for the huge videos he is editing. So, 64 bit is not wasted either I guess.
And, of course, on a Windows machine, a third of my RAM and 20% of my CPU is dedicated to running a bunch of crap that ships with my OS to serve the goals of the OS provider, not me the user. But that is an entirely different problem (or, this is his point, I concede this point to him).
An additional message in this video is about “freedom” and “exponential complexity” and “commercial masters”. Of course, there is some truth there. But again, step back.
This video starts with the OP editing a video in KDENLIVE on Linux. What video editing software and OS was he using 20 or 30 years ago as he says. Be honest. We have more freedom and more non-commercial choice than ever before. It is not even remotely arguable.
And complexity. If I install a distro today with say XFCE as a desktop environment, what is the complexity compared to the early 2000s or late 90s? Try to configure your video card and monitor and get back to me. Explain how to configure your WiFi in 1999. If anything, a Linux distro is less complex and daunting now than before.
There’s still plenty of inefficiencies to criticize.
Electron apps bundle an entire browser dedicated just to running the app. That takes up storage space and requires loading multiple instances of electron in memory if you’re running multiple electronic apps. Would be better if these apps could all share the same dynamically linked Chromium instance to run. Web apps are a decent alternative, but can lack desktop integration.
Rise of interpreted languages like JavaScript, though this is mitigated by JIT compilation.
Of course there is lots to criticize. And it does not get worse than electron. But it is pretty easy to run a fairly lean desktop in 2025. And bloated applications are not a new invention.
I guess we can talk about the “rise” of interpreted languages. As long as we ignore that the Lingua Franca of the 8 bit era was BASiC I guess. Or Logo! We also have to ignore hugely popular languages in their era like Perl 5, Lisp, TCL, Scheme, and PHP. How about all those Bash scripts? And Javascript is less interpreted than it used to be as you say. I assume you mean Python but it is over 30 years old and PyPy is a thing. Most newer languages are JIT or fully compiled. Rust, Go, Swift, Carbon, and Zig are all compiled languages. Kotlin, Gleam, and Elixir are JIT. What are all the new interpreted languages? If anything, I would say the trend is towards performance and efficiency.
JavaScript works against his point in a big way. Javascript was released 30 years ago and yet javascript code runs dramatically faster (on the same hardware) in a modern web browser than it will on one from back then. JavaScript engines are VERY heavily optimized and browser devs will move mountains for another percent or two. And WASM is even faster.
You can build Rust applications on Windows 95 and they are faster than C++ was back then. Not everyone has given up on performance.
Modern code can be much more parallel and asynchronous (faster). And there is a strong recent focus on memory safety and efficiency.
Networking and file systems are both much faster and more efficient than they used to be.
And of course modern processors are not just faster but have many more performance focussed instructions (SIMD, AVX, vector extensions, etc). And we have hardware acceleration for media codecs and of course virtualization which speed up applications dramatically. And technologies like hypervisor clusters and containers can lead to significantly better resource utilization in practice.
Anyway, his point is obvious and of course true to an extent. Not nearly to extent he claims though.
Israel's military said it struck on Monday several tanks in the Suweida province of southern Syria, where dozens have been killed in clashes between Sunni Bedouin tribes and Druze fighters.
The military struck "several tanks a short while ago in the area of Sami village (in the Suweida region) in southern Syria. To be continued", the military's Arabic language spokesman Avichay Adraee posted on X.
The announcement comes after reports that six members of Syria's security forces deployed to halt deadly sectarian clashes were killed in the predominantly Druze city of Suweida, a security source told Reuters.
Sunday's fighting between Druze militiamen and Bedouin tribal fighters was the first time that sectarian violence erupted inside the city of Suweida itself, following months of tensions in the province.
The death toll from the ongoing clashes has risen to 89, according to one Syrian monitor but The New Arab could not verify the figure.
La nuna estraro de UEA estas la plej nerespondema dum la pli ol 20-jara historio de Libera Folio – nur en esceptaj okazoj ni ricevis ajnan reagon al niaj demandoj. La sekva estraro ankoraŭ ne estas elektita, sed la kandidatoj jam sekvas la saman praktikon. El la naŭ kandidatoj nur unu respondis al demandoj senditaj de Libera Folio.
Marko Elez, a 25-year-old employee at Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), has been granted access to sensitive databases at the U.S.
Celebrate Christopher Dalby (Robonuggie), whose 500+ FreeBSD videos have been invaluable to beginners and experts alike, inspiring many to explore the system.
Christopher Dalby (aka Robonuggie) is one of the most significant and prolific video contributors to FreeBSD. To date, he’s published over 500 videos, covering a vast range of topics and providing important information for both beginners (with tutorials, walkthroughs, etc.) and those looking to delve deeper into the subjects he addresses. Many people I’ve spoken with have confirmed they started exploring FreeBSD thanks to him and his videos.
The entire FreeBSD community is grateful to him, and I’m happy to share his latest video, “What Can You Do With FreeBSD?“
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On a recent episode of the Dot Social podcast, John O'Nolan of Ghost said;
"For the size of the group [working on federating long form articles], which as you say is not large, man, we are spread across Mastodon DMs sometimes, an email thread other times, a Discord backchannel on the other hand, it's all over the place. We could get more organised here I think, but it's a start."
The fragmentation of dev discussions is something I hear about a lot lately. Forum federation could be a solution!
Imagine every federated software project has its own forum space. Smaller projects might be content with a dedicated category on a community-hosted dev forum. More well-resourced projects might host their own instance of Discourse or NodeBB or whatever suits them.
Cross-project forums like SocialHub can then have a dedicated category for each software they know about, and use forum federation to sync that with the home forum space preferred by that project.
Eg the Discourse category on SocialHub is synced with the ActivityPub tag on meta.discourse.org. Any post in that SH category appears on Meta with that tag, and vice-versa.
With enough careful plumbing, that solves the fragmentation of public dev discussion across forums. But a lot of potentially insightful chats start in micro-posting threads. Adding a limited ability to start a new forum topic, by mentioning the relevent category or tag actor (eg @discourse@socialhub.ActivityPub.rocks), could bring those in too.
However, most of the examples John gives are private chats (fedi DMs, email, Discord, etc). I encourage devs to gird their loins and apply the 'release early, release often' principle to dev chat. Make public the default for dev chatter, unless it really is sensitive.
That said, with some careful work, support could be added for federating private conversations between forums too. Ideally in a way where AP actors could be included, that automatically open the chat to trusted groups.
Rediscovering the Magic of the Blogosphere, with John O’Nolan and Matthias Pfefferle
Social networks were built on short posts designed for speed and scale. But what if the next era of the web was built for something deeper?
Two of the social web’s “longformers” are working on this. John O’Nolan, the founder and CEO of Ghost, and Matthias Pfefferle, the developer behind the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress, are at the forefront of integrating social features with blogs, newsletters, essays — anything that doesn’t fit in a box of 500 characters or less.
In this episode of Dot Social, they talk with Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about rediscovering the magic of the blogosphere; why formatting, identity, and interoperability are tricky problems to solve; and where writing belongs in the next chapter of the internet.
Highlights of this conversation: 1:24 Why should writers and bloggers care about this topic? 8:35 How the plugin has been received 12:15 Building social into blogs 17:35 Will this increase discovery? 20:15 Models for discovery 23:03 Tumblr in its heyday and status of integration 25:17 How they’re thinking about AT Proto 33:20 Thoughts on bridging 37:16 Core principles around integrating long-form content into protocol 44:06 Leveraging lessons from email? 46:16 Need for collaboration 49:10 Rough edges 52:50 New experiences
🔎 You can find John at john.onolan.org/ and Matthias at pfefferle.dev/. ✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @[url=https://flipboard.social/users/mike]Mike McCue[/url] and @mmccue.bsky.social. 🌊 Catch the wave! Surf the social web and create your own custom feeds at surf.social, a new beta from the people at Flipboard. about.surf.social/
Webworker, podcaster and blogger, advocate of the #openweb and citizen of the @indieweb and the @fediverse, working on #activitypub & @IndieWeb for @WordPress
loosely, we want the posts that end up on SocialHub to be relevant/valuable/etc, and we don’t want those posts to only exist on SocialHub
This! Imagine we could get to the point where SH is a display layer on top of a distributed data layer of dev discussions. So deleting stuff from SH didn't delete it from the underlying data layer. Then we could develop a process for pruning SH down to the strong wood. Akin to using git rebase to prune version history down to the key info.
OR we could keep SH as is, and use a federated forum at distillery.activitypub.rocks to create a more curated portal. If anyone disagreed with the curation approach, the underlying data is all still there, so they could fork the effort to demonstrate their approach on top of the same shared data layer.
Does this sound familiar? It should. It's exactly how existing fediverse moderation works. julian:
Mentioning a group actor doesn't work reliably because someone could mention the group actor in passing, and not mean to have the entire conversation imported.
Fair point. This could be addressed by having action-specific Actor addresses (eg @discourse-crosspost@socialhub.ap.rocks). In the longer term there could be a different character to denote actions (eg !crosspost@ @discourse@socialhub.ap.rocks), although that would need pan-fediverse buy-in.
On top of this, I mentioned the option of limiting crossposting permission to fediverse accounts with privileges on the receiving forum (eg forum and category admins/mods only). That could further reduce the likelihood of accidental misuse, as well as intentional flooding.
loosely, we want the posts that end up on SocialHub to be relevant/valuable/etc, and we don’t want those posts to only exist on SocialHub
This! Imagine we could get to the point where SH is a display layer on top of a distributed data layer of dev discussions.
This is the more interesting discussion to me, and where a design-first approach can be very innovative and valuable. This is what I meant above when saying "what is a Forum once it becomes fully federated?". Adding federation support to any app changes the nature, characteristics, and audience of it in ways that should be well-known and anticipated.
This design focus at ecosystem level is almost entirely missing in fediverse evolution, and with its bottom-up processes the demand is often "I have this app feature, so I need that AP extension to support it". No matter how high-quality your own app is, for the ecosystem where your foundational technology evolves, this constitutes a Big Ball of Mud anti-pattern: A software system that lacks a perceivable architecture.
Now the tradeoff of the 3-stage bottom-up standardization process that we need in our decentralized grassroots environment is that we likely should allow this anti-pattern to an extent, as it stimulates bottom-up innovation of the fediverse by freeing devs to experiment with new things. The FEP Process allows for this by being non-normative and completely open to any participant to contribute to. And it has many overlapping mechanisms and good-practices that need to be reconciled later to assure the broad interoperability of the fediverse long-term.
Summarizing you can say that both a bottom-up and a top-down standardization process are needed. They should meet and help realign and reinforce each other, and give direction to the ecosystem as a whole. Bottom up we absorb the technical reality and best-practices, and top-down we craft and chisel an open interoperable fediverse able to support the social experiences that people need.
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Tangential. Social coding commons is a movement of people interested in exploring these more social sides of decentralized social networking environments and focuses on building solutions that serve people's needs: social experiences. For this we explore a methodology called Social experience design (SX) tailored to cocreating Sustainable open social systems (SOSS) with participants withing the commons, in order to deliver and evolve services for the social web. A fediverse that may result from these efforts goes "beyond the app" into app-free computing, towards the vision of a peopleverse. A place where online technology serves our daily lives.
For anyone interested, there is a Social experience design chatroom (social / sociosphere) and a Groundwork labs chatroom (technical / technosphere) to join.
So, with big parties making entry to the Fediverse, things are accelerating significantly. Without going into the particulars we all know from the ways that big corporations conduct business, as well their involvement in standards processes, that thi…
Who, among the people using Fediverse to discuss ActivityPub, is unaware that this discussion is taking place on the Fediverse and as part of a SocialHub discussion? Heads up! This is a federated group.
The technical specifics behind how forum federation works, and how it is accessible in other sites shouldn't be top of mind (or thought about at all) for anybody except those who are maintaining it.
A coalition of nearly 50 record labels, including industry giants Warner and Sony, accuse Internet provider Altice of providing a safe haven for pirates. The companies request summary judgment in their ongoing lawsuit, arguing that Altice's repeat infringer policy is a "farce" and the "antithesis of reasonable." The ISP allegedly allowed piracy to flourish on its Optimum network, thus disqualifying it from safe harbor protection under the DMCA.
These music companies, all members of the RIAA, alleged that the ISP failed to take action against repeat infringers on the “Optimum” network, making it potentially liable for copyright infringement.
“Despite Altice’s stated policies and despite receiving tens of thousands of infringement notices concerning Plaintiffs’ works […] Altice knowingly permitted repeat infringers to continue to use its services to infringe,” the complaint read.
Labels Seek Summary Judgment
Both parties have gathered evidence to support their case and last week the music labels filed a motion for summary judgment. The labels ask the court to rule that Altice is not entitled to a safe harbor defense under the DMCA.
Safe harbor protection is important for ISPs, as it provides them with immunity from monetary damages related to subscribers’ piracy activities carried out through their services.
To enjoy safe harbor protection, U.S. law requires ISPs to “adopt and reasonably implement” a repeat infringer policy that provides for subscriber account terminations “in appropriate circumstances.” The details of this requirement are not spelled out, but the labels argue that Altice’s interpretation falls severely short.
‘A Safe Haven for Pirates’
Last week’s filing by the labels is heavily redacted, which makes it difficult to report on in detail. However, it is clear that the music companies see Altice’s repeat infringer policy as highly ineffective, or even counterproductive.
“First and foremost, the design and implementation of Altice’s policy are the antithesis of reasonable, making a farce of the DMCA’s repeat infringer termination policy requirement,” the labels write.
The details explaining how and why Altice’s implementation of the repeat infringer policy was lacking are largely blacked out, as shown below.
The implementation of this policy wasn’t reasonable either, the labels argue. They allege that subscriber accounts were not terminated resulting in a permanent loss of internet access, but were suspended and eventually reactivated.
That doesn’t square with the idea of a reasonably implemented repeat infringer policy, the labels argue. Instead, they counter that Altice offered a safe haven for pirates.
“The result of Altice’s actions, both by design and effect, was to provide its users with a safe haven to infringe,” the labels write.
“Ultimately, [a]n ISP cannot claim the protections of the DMCA safe harbor provisions merely by terminating customers as a symbolic gesture before indiscriminately reactivating them within a short timeframe.”
Reactivations & Commercial Subscribers?
The motion insists that these arguments are sufficient to rule that Altice is ineligible for safe harbor protection. If the court disagrees, the labels mention specific circumstances for which this would certainly be the case.
The two categories are redacted in the motion, but, based on the arguments and citations, we can speculate that commercial subscribers and reactivated subscribers are likely candidates.
The motion notes that commercial subscribers represented roughly 7.5-8% of the Altice subscriber base between 2020 and 2023. For these subscribers, which include third-party businesses, Altice purportedly had no repeat infringer policy.
In a similar vein, the unredacted context suggests that Altice should not be entitled to rely on a safe harbor defense for customers who continued to infringe after their accounts were terminated and then reactivated.
Clarity from the Supreme Court?
In addition to this motion for summary judgment, the labels also moved for summary judgment on their ownership of the works in suit. This appears to be a response to a completely sealed motion filed by Altice which concerned the number of statutory damages awards the labels are eligible for.
Without further details, it is nearly impossible to accurately report on these filings, but we expect that the eventual court order will fill in many of the blanks.
Looking more broadly, there’s also a forthcoming Supreme Court matter that will have repercussions for this case. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court granted Cox’s appeal in a similar subscriber liability case, which is expected to provide more clarity on ISPs’ legal obligations regarding repeat infringer policies.
—
A copy of the music labels’ heavily redacted motion for summary judgment on Altice’s safe harbor defense, filed at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, is available here (pdf).
Shortly after the motion was filed, several replies also appeared in the docket, but these are all sealed and inaccessible.
The U.S. Supreme Court announced today that it will take up a landmark piracy liability lawsuit between Cox Communications and several record labels. The Court granted Cox's petition for a writ of certiorari.
TEHRAN, Jul. 15 (MNA) – Iran has awarded a contract to a Chinese company to electrify its east-west railway amid plans to increase freight transit from China to other countries via the Iranian railway.
Sono trascorsi quasi quarant'anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione "Hangin' Around the Observatory" targata 1974, in mezzo ci sono vent'uno dischi, alcuni memorabili come Bring the Family del 1987 e il successivo Slow Turning del 1988, altri ottimi come Perfectly Good Guitar, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster e The open Road, alcuni sufficienti, tra gli ultimi Same Old Man del 2008... Leggi e ascolta...
Sono trascorsi quasi quarant'anni dalla sua prima pubblicazione “Hangin' Around the Observatory” targata 1974, in mezzo ci sono vent'uno dischi, alcuni memorabili come Bring the Family del 1987 e il successivo Slow Turning del 1988, altri ottimi come Perfectly Good Guitar, Crossing Muddy Waters, Master of Disaster e The open Road, alcuni sufficienti, tra gli ultimi Same Old Man del 2008. Ora, dopo la sua ultima prova Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns dell'anno scorso, disco che non ho avuto il piacere di ascoltare, ritorna con questo Mystic Pinball ed è ancora buona musica... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/11…
This month, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang promoted AI in both Washington, D.C. and Beijing — emphasizing the benefits that AI will bring to business and society worldwide. In the U.S. capital, Huang met with President Trump and U.S.
At NATO prompting, the Trump Administration has now dismissed the Russian terms of June 2 and the new July 10 Lavrov proposals as perfunctorily as the Biden Administration dismissed the proposed treaties for the US and NATO, which Lavrov’s ministry submitted on December 17, 2021.
Those were the final terms before Russian strategy was compelled to pre-emptive and preventive war, but on Putin’s orders, that was a “special military operation” short of war.
Moscow sources now say that on the evidence of Trump’s latest statements, he will not negotiate on any terms Russia has already submitted or will submit. He can only understand terms of capitulation he dictates himself. But even those ceasefire and peacemaking agreements Trump claims the credit for negotiating himself are garbled in his recitation of them. In addition to the Pakistan-India, Israel-Iran, Congo-Rwanda and Serbia-Kosovo agreements he has mentioned before, he told Rutte he is now claiming credit for two new ones he hasn’t mentioned earlier – for which there is no evidence at all.
Russian sources believe that Trump's incapacity is well understood by his own officials to be as useful to them for continuing their war against Russia as it was for their predecessors to have under the President Joseph Biden who was incapacitated by Lewy Body dementia associated with his late-stage Parkinson's Disease
do you know of a source somewhere that confirms that biden actually has parkinsons?
also: it's funny that there's no room for doubt about this on trump. lol
I love how the world is burning and the people needing to bury their heads in distractions are filing a petition that their distractions need to be protected and remain high quality.
Cambridge scientists have spotted gut bacteria that greedily soak up PFAS “forever chemicals,” then ferry them safely out of the body in animal tests, removing up to three-quarters of the toxins within minutes.
The voices of women who have died at the hands of a partner or former partner are being ignored and the government is failing to heed warnings from their deaths, a damning report from the domestic abuse commissioner reveals today.
An examination into how the government learns lessons from the deaths of domestic abuse victims has found that half of the national recommendations made in domestic homicide reviews (DHRs) are not put into action, with only a quarter fully implemented.
The domestic abuse commissioner, Nicole Jacobs, told the Guardian that a study of DHRs – carried out whenever anyone over 16 is murdered in a domestic setting – revealed a “deeply concerning” lack of oversight at the top of government.
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People chilling at home, going to a festival, etc. Then getting attacked, burned alive, kidnapped, raped, bombed, etc.
Totally ignoring the cyclical nature of the violence. As if it's helpfull to pretend that isn't the case. To me it seems more so that ignoring the larger cycles, people not venturing beyond their ideological bubble, is why they reoccur.
Too vague to agree on this. All conflicts are more complicated than this, even where there's a clearcut culprit. I've seen it misused too many times.
Just by seeing iii's comments one can see the confusion. Where he thought the one holding the missile is what the author thinks is clearly the one chilling and vibing, I thought of another conflict entirely that this doesn't apply to, but seen the argument used at least three times.
I hereby end my post stating that the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa and France's New Caledonia should give back its land to its indigenous people. Thank you.
light blue guy then proceeds to attack the dark blue guy and media starts saying that dark blue guy has a right to defend itself and light blue guy is a terrorist.
Il National Hurricane Center (NHC) ha acceso i riflettori su una nuova area di bassa pressione situata attualmente al largo della costa atlantica della Florida, identificata con il nome "Invest
I don't know of any cases of imperialism recently, though I see what appear to be conflicts incorrectly framed as such.
For example, many say this about the Israeli/Arab conflict. However, this conflict is thousands of years old. The Israelis solidly lost a war to keep their land in the BC era, then after WWII, leaders decided to undo the loss, again by force. Predictably, the Arabs, having lived there for thousands of years now (since they were Babylonians!) were not happy. It is not simple.
The Israeli return may have been orchestrated by the imperial powers, but I would argue this is not imperialism or even a bad thing. Consider the colonial invasion of the Americas. That was clearly imperialism because my ancestors had never lived there, and had no claim to the land. We just wanted it. At best, we thought we could make better use of it than the natives. That was not the case with Israel, whose ancestors largely were the natives.
Of course, persecuting Palestinians is wrong. Imagine if thousands of years from now, the American Indians, supported by the international community, forced Americans to adopt their customs and religion or leave. That would not be right either, even though maybe they should have their land back!
We need to share in these cases, and are unfortunately bad at sharing.
Except Russia also did and is doing settler colonialism, inasmuch they have been moving Ukrainians out and Russians into Ukraine for the past century at least, as they did with other Soviet republics, as they are doing to neighbouring states, with the aim of eroding their national identity.
Just like they are doing now. The only marginal difference is that there are not enough Ukrainians to alter electoral balances, and Russia would be able to dissolve the population of Ukraine via forced relocations instead of just killing them all. Both are genocide by the way.
That they are not merely trying to make Ukraine Russian-aligned.
They are trying to move 5 million Russians into Ukrainian territory, and have confiscated tens of thousands of homes after making their owners war refugees and are giving them to Russians.
They have kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children, and they are not just educating them to be Ukrainians accepting Russian rule, but they want to completely Russify them as a further attempt of erasing the Ukrainian nation.
Settler colonialism is not about race, it's about the goal of eliminating one society by forcibly establishing another and pushing the original one out. What you are talking about is called ethnic cleansing. Settler colonialism attacks the idea of Palestine and Ukraine, ethnic cleansing is killing people systematically because they are Palestinian or Ukrainian.
Israel does their settlement one way, because they are racially and religiously motivated, Russians do their settlement another way because they are imperialistically and national chauvinistically motivated.
Yes, they are not exactly alike, but the actions and end goals don't differ as much as the motivations.
Have you ever noticed America being very white and not very native American?
How about Australia?
Apartheid South Africa?
Russians do their settlement another way because they are imperialistically and national chauvinistically motivated.
There's Russian colonization of Crimea but the goal of Russia is to annex Ukraine and forcibly assimilate its population. Not to wipe out or expell all Ukrainians.
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They are attempting to do the same thing, to erase the national identity of the people living there and conquer the place.
Even the settlement thing matches, the Soviets used to move Russians into all the republics to erase national boundaries and make them all uniformly Russian.
If Russia is trying to annex Ukraine, then Israel is trying to annex Palestine.
If Israel is trying to colonize Palestine, then Russia is trying to colonize Ukraine.
Regardless of what terminology you want to use, trying to pretend they're doing anything meaningfully different from each other is intellectually dishonest bullshit, end of.
Israel wants it so that there are no more people who call themselves Palestinians in Gaza. Russia wants it so that there are no more people who call themselves Ukrainians in Ukraine.
Yep, that's why Hitler is regarded as the ultimate evil, the settler colonialism.
The Anschluss and the annexation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia were both justified under the guise of protecting and uniting ethnic Germans in the regions, Hitler even said he'd totally, for realsies stop after that. But I wouldn't expect .ml'ers to care about anything that happened before the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact broke down.
A few weeks after the Wehrmacht’s March 1939 occupation of all Czechoslovakia, and despite increasing doubts about Western intentions, Stalin again approached the Franco-British powers.
On 16 April 1939, he submitted a formal proposition: a three-power military pact with the obvious goal of deterring Nazi aggression.
Stalin’s diplomatic proposal mirrored the agreement in place prior to the First World War, in which Britain, France and Russia were bound together in an alliance directed against the German and Austro-Hungarian empires.
Had Stalin’s approach been accepted, it can only have changed the course of history – as such a union would have ensured, right from the beginning in the event of a conflict, that Hitler faced a nightmare war on two fronts.
This final Soviet offer of alliance with the West was snubbed, however, with the British in particular treating Moscow with disregard. Strong anti-Bolshevik feelings were widespread amongst the conservatives in the British government, and with Chamberlain himself.
Buddy, I'm not going to defend the actions of Western powers during the build up to World War II. I agree with you that an antifascist alliance should have been formed and could have stopped Hitler much sooner and with much less death.
I do find it interesting that the article you provided makes no mention of Soviet annexation (Imperialism? Colonization? Liberation? Let me know which hyperspecific term for invading another country I should use) of the pre-Brest-Litovsk territory they lost.
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.
What’s hilarious to me is that OP has a deliberate “this is only about one situation” and then defends how the other obvious situation isn’t that.
From a .ml user.
Curious.
Now I’m no supporter of genocide by anyone, and definitely not a Zionist, but it’s strange how when talking about Israel (by this user) there is nothing else, in fact you’ll be argued down by them if you see this comic as talking about anything but what they think.
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.
First of, of course I would. What would make you think I wouldn't? I'm upset with how many civilians are dying now. And I'm upset with genocides elsewhere.
Second. How does that stop this meme from applying to Russia/Ukraine?
There have been a few minor issues in the past. For example, when moving from FreeBSD 13.x to 14.X, it was necessary to run a command on each jail:
bastille cmd JAILNAME sed -i '' '/pam_opie*/d' /etc/pam.d/*
But, in general, stability has been excellent.
Version 1.0 introduces many new features, but there are also some breaking changes. I’ll be testing it in the coming days, starting with more standard systems (at BSD Cafe, I also use fibs, which might complicate things).
Another fantastic announcement from the team is the creation of a pre-configured ISO. This includes FreeBSD 14.3, BastilleBSD, and Rocinante already configured, some hardening options, zsh as the default shell, and everything set up for pkgbase. I’ve just installed it and am running some tests, but I believe it can be considered an excellent way to get a system up and running immediately for working with jails.
In short, a huge thanks to the BastilleBSD team and… vive les BSD!
Introducing BastilleBSD: A Modern, Secure-by-Default FreeBSD Distribution with Built-in Automation and Privacy
We're excited to announce BastilleBSD, a new FreeBSD-based distribution designed for modern system administrators, privacy-conscious users, and DevOps professionals. BastilleBSD is built to be secure-by-default, automated from first boot, and ready for serious work—right out of the box.
This is more than just FreeBSD with pre-installed packages. BastilleBSD is a curated, hardened FreeBSD experience with a modern toolset and sane defaults, tailored for both servers and power users.
What's Included: Bastille – Container automation for FreeBSD, pre-installed and auto-configured.
Rocinante – Host configuration management using Bastillefile-style templates.
Modern shells and tools – Zsh (default), with bash, fish, vim-tiny, git-tiny, htop, and more.
Pre-configured automation – On first boot, BastilleBSD automatically:
Runs 'bastille setup', configuring the host networking, ZFS storage, and a secure firewall
Bootstraps the host release and applies latest patches
Privacy & Security by Default: Hardened sysctl values inspired by HardenedBSD
Secure SSH defaults (no DSA/ECDSA, modern ciphers, stricter MACs/KEX)
Firewall (pf) enabled out of the box
doas configured for the wheel group – no sudo required
DNS-over-HTTPS with blocky, preconfigured to forward encrypted DNS to privacy-friendly Quad9
openntpd – lightweight and privacy-respecting time sync, already set up
smartd – pre-installed and ready to monitor drive health
Plus: Uses pkg-base by default — no freebsd-update needed
Custom boot graphics and branding
Clean ZFS defaults, periodic snapshots optional
BastilleBSD is fully compatible with FreeBSD and will track upstream point releases (e.g., BastilleBSD-14.3-RELEASE). This is a distribution for people who want FreeBSD to just work with modern tools, privacy-first defaults, and zero guesswork.
Get it, test it, break it! We're eager to hear your feedback and ideas for future improvements.
We're excited to announce BastilleBSD, a new FreeBSD-based distribution designed for modern system administrators, privacy-conscious users, and DevOps professionals. BastilleBSD is built to be secure-by-default, automated from first boot, and ready for serious work—right out of the box.
This is more than just FreeBSD with pre-installed packages. BastilleBSD is a curated, hardened FreeBSD experience with a modern toolset and sane defaults, tailored for both servers and power users.
What's Included: Bastille – Container automation for FreeBSD, pre-installed and auto-configured.
Rocinante – Host configuration management using Bastillefile-style templates.
Modern shells and tools – Zsh (default), with bash, fish, vim-tiny, git-tiny, htop, and more.
Pre-configured automation – On first boot, BastilleBSD automatically:
Runs 'bastille setup', configuring the host networking, ZFS storage, and a secure firewall
Bootstraps the host release and applies latest patches
Privacy & Security by Default: Hardened sysctl values inspired by HardenedBSD
Secure SSH defaults (no DSA/ECDSA, modern ciphers, stricter MACs/KEX)
Firewall (pf) enabled out of the box
doas configured for the wheel group – no sudo required
DNS-over-HTTPS with blocky, preconfigured to forward encrypted DNS to privacy-friendly Quad9
openntpd – lightweight and privacy-respecting time sync, already set up
smartd – pre-installed and ready to monitor drive health
Plus: Uses pkg-base by default — no freebsd-update needed
Custom boot graphics and branding
Clean ZFS defaults, periodic snapshots optional
BastilleBSD is fully compatible with FreeBSD and will track upstream point releases (e.g., BastilleBSD-14.3-RELEASE). This is a distribution for people who want FreeBSD to just work with modern tools, privacy-first defaults, and zero guesswork.
Get it, test it, break it! We're eager to hear your feedback and ideas for future improvements.
I see others comment that they dislike DoH too, but nobody offers viable alternatives. How else do you recommend encrypting DNS queries other than DoT? (DoH and DoT being similar implementations. I have reasons for selecting DoH over DoT, but open to hearing alternate solutions if you have any).
in general, I prefer to treat dns as dns, not as a https request. But it's my personal preference and I see use cases for that. I'd personally install unbound locally and ask the root servers, but this won't be encrypted
Interessant für mich: - Trotz großem Zuwachs bei Kindererziehung und -betreuung gibt‘s weiterhin viel Bedarf/ eine größere Lücke. - IT brummt - Logistik läuft gut - Altenpflege legt zu und sucht weiterhin - Handwerk kackt ab, da entsteht eine große Lücke - Bauen bleibt weiterhin teuer und wird immer teurer, weil kaum Handwerker - Es gibt scheinbar eine Reihenfolgw Helfer > Fachkraft > Spezialist > Experte. Noch nie davon gehört
Meine Tipps je nach Alter: - Handwerkausbildung und BWL dazu und den dicken Reibach mit eigenem Betrieb machen - Viele Youtube DIY Videos schauen und selbst reparieren lernen
Bis 2028 könnten einer Studie zufolge rund 770.000 Stellen nicht mit ausreichend qualifizierten Fachkräften besetzt werden. In welchen Branchen und Berufen droht die größte Lücke?
Ich bin Anfang 40, habe vom Schreibtischjob schon lange die Nase voll und würde gerne von der Softwarentwicklung ins Handwerk wechseln.
Habe mich schon mehrmals in Richtung Elektriker umgeschaut - das würde ich wirklich gerne machen auch gerne in Richtung Automatisierungstechnik. Weniger Gehalt ist auch kein Problem, ich gehe einfach kaputt den ganzen Tag am PC. Leider gibt es anscheinend keinen Weg die Elektriker Ausbildung zu verkürzen oder irgendwie anders den Quereinstieg zu schaffen.
Bei der Berufsberatung wird man ausserdem ausgelacht wenn man aus der Softwareentwicklung / IT raus will…
Multiple federal law enforcement officials who spoke to Rolling Stone on the condition of anonymity say that Jeffrey Epstein hired private investigators to follow, intimidate, and surveil FBI special agents investigating allegations that he paid underage women for sex. The FBI declined Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
These new allegations about the pressure exerted on the FBI come after internal divisions in Donald Trump’s administration exploded into public view last week over its handling of files and information pertaining to the disgraced financier and accused sex trafficker.
Reports across several media outlets describe a tense meeting between deputy FBI director Dan Bongino, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and other officials. According to reports, that meeting ended with Bongino storming out. Bongino is now reportedly considering resigning from his post at the FBI.
Tech giant Nvidia has gained approval from the U.S. government to sell its advanced H20 GPU chips to China, its CEO Jensen Huang told Chinese media outlets on Tuesday.
i wish that where was more coverage of whether or not and how much the chinese monopoly on rare earth minerals enabled the us to change their moratorium on their export to china.
Mondays are always tough, I think that’s true for everyone. But one thing that makes me happy it’s Monday is the consistent arrival of the “Valuable News” from Slawomir Wojciech Wojtczak – or simply Vermaden – [url=https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@vermaden]@ver
Mondays are always tough, I think that’s true for everyone. But one thing that makes me happy it’s Monday is the consistent arrival of the “Valuable News” from Slawomir Wojciech Wojtczak – or simply Vermaden – @vermaden – as we know him. His newsletter covers the world of *BSD and Unix, technology in general, and offers a look at articles (both old and new) about the world and life in general.
Vermaden has been publishing his weekly newsletter for many years, and it’s a go-to resource for many. I can only thank him, on my behalf and, I imagine, on behalf of the entire community.
Here’s the link to this week’s edition, 14 July 2025.
The Valuable News weekly series is dedicated to provide summary about news, articles and other interesting stuff mostly but not always related to the UNIX/BSD/Linux systems. Whenever I stumble upon…
For the first half of 2025, the IIP rose by 9.2% compared to the same period last year, marking the highest growth rate since 2020, the office reported.
Author neglects to go into ISISK being typical CIA shit, and that problems have worsened in Pakistan the more "vital intelligence sharing" with the USA occurs. Pakistan's defense minister was more frank and directly attribured cooperation with western intelligence apparatus as being a factor in the terror attacks that spurred the recent confrontation with India
VOV.VN - Ho Chi Minh City has set a goal of developing more than 199,000 social housing units between 2021 and 2030, according to the municipal Department of Construction.
Sorry if this is not the high brow discussion this com is for.
I travel a lot between different countries in the Middle East which have restrictive laws, and I live in one that is slowly becoming more competent technologically. I have to stay for an extended time in different places, so I’ve been connecting through always-on VPN out of the same place and it’s been working fine for now. But Digital ID laws are quickly going to close things off from me.
My risks that I’m trying to avoid are as follows: Locally, I want to make sure my IPs aren’t connected to public accounts. I don’t say anything online that can put me in jail for the most part, but I don’t trust that this will always be the case. I also would appreciate being a bit separated from the local internet. Elsewhere, I also don’t want my traffic to be monitored or my accounts to be tied back to my personal identity. For example, I don’t want to land in Dubai and to have my Steam account permanently affected by having “Spec Ops the Line” (banned game there) in my account (silly thing to worry about, but this is one tiny example out of many small issues that pile up). Plus, a lot of the internet is not accessible from these places, and I don’t like that, regardless of whether or not I want to peruse inaccessible internet stuff from there.
This has come with some serious downsides (online services are more expensive in Europe, where I have historically exited from), but it was/is worth the cost for me. Ironic that many VPN users seem to be trying to connect in the opposite direction than me (out of rich countries rather than in).
I’ve just been permanently using a single reputable VPN and single exit city for all of my traffic for the past while. Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible and I will probably have to exit out of somewhere new like Switzerland. I don’t know if those servers might be more trouble due to increased abuse for example.
Just want to know how others are dealing with this. Is just stomaching the wave of verifications after logging into all my emails from a new country the only price to pay? Is the world going to shit and should I rethink “just” using a VPN? Is it VPS time now that more and more things are being blocked from VPN access? Do I give up on the internet a decade ahead of schedule and chop wood in the woods until Israel’s AI mistakes my shack for a children’s hospital and drops heavy munitions on me?
I’m really hesitant to start using two sets of devices, some for insecure local traffic and some for encrypted traffic. I don’t think carrying like four laptops through airport security would keep eyes off of me.
Digital ID laws in the UK and EU will make this increasingly infeasible
Sorry I might have missed something... Is this Tony Blair's little hobby horse for the past 30 years or is a more substantial plan in the works?
TBH I am getting discouraged on the VPN thing. I have been using it 100% of the time for years. I used to get ads corresponding to the exit location. But now I occasionally get ads corresponding to my actual location (down to the neighborhood).
But of course I do all sorts of online business where my address is provided, and when I do that I can easily be fingerprinted I assume. So somehow, it's gotten linked up in the back end.
As of right now, Nexus Mods and Reddit are enforcing these new laws. I don’t use either site very often (the latter not since the API exodus). My understanding is that it’s mandatory for platforms of a certain size in the UK after the 25th of July.
The UK is kind of a perfect exit node country (everything is in English!)
I use reddit via the Firefox extension LibRedirect which sends you to a mirror instead. Between VPN, ublock and attempting to access dodgy mirrors, sometimes I have to reload a few times but it eventually works.
Disable IPv6 on your router or primary interface, and enable it on your VPN. If anything can discover an Internet IP on your PC, the link can be formed. Worst case, you are not using the VPN for IPv6 at all.
What kind of device are you using? There was recently there was a leak that Meta is using technology to have web browsers talk to the Facebook and Instagram apps on your phone without your permission and link your identity to every website you visit that has any Meta plugins. I'm sure other companies are doing the same or similar like Amazon and Google. I've been using GrapheneOS on my Android Pixel phone which isolates apps. There are other ways to do this as well if your phone is unlockable. And I use IronFox web browser wherever possible to reduce the capabilities of the browser to do things without my knowledge. And use ReThink and a pihole to reduce the cross site communication where possible. I also left all Meta platforms, but still am migrating away from Google, Amazon, and some other platforms. And make sure your advertising ID is disabled at the OS level.
Those are where I've found most of the targeted ads were coming from. Not from the IP address alone.
I agree it's not only the IP because there are other people on it.
I don't have any meta apps or google accounts for years. I buy on amazon very rarely. I have no apps of any of that type installed. 98% of my apps are f-droid and I flashed a rom. I use tracker blocker to sift through all traffic and limit to only what seems required.
I think it's very difficult to control what the phone is doing. Using the tracker blocker app has made me aware of how much data is flying all around at all times.
I should set up a pihole. It's been on my list of 5 or 6 years.
Yeah there's a lot that apps are doing to uniquely identify you. Not just the apps themselves, but the advertising systems and unfortunately, the telemetry systems which were originally meant only for tracking errors and how apps are used so they could be improved. And often you can't block those systems without blocking the app from working, usually by design, but sometimes more because developers don't understand how their customers' data is at risk by using those systems. Often because their told it's not used that way, but actually is, just in a convoluted way so it's technically true. It's quite confusing as someone who used to develop apps myself.
Not sure I follow the problem here. Is it easier in the countries you are in to get blocked for using vpns? I mean if the goal is to access games and stuff i would just use a good vpn , mullvad is the only one i still have good trust in.
Start using onion sites for sensitive stuff. If you use a always on vpn , then you dont have to worry about state actors seeing that you are using tor.
The thing you really should watch it for is your phone. If you can the best is to use a phone without sim card and with GOS on it, preferably with a broken papertrail and no sim card use previously. If you need internet on the go use a sim card in a travel router and connect that via vpn to your devices. But no tech solution would save you from user error of course.
And use a secure email service , I use tuta wich never complaints about my vpn. Other stuff sure but i dont miss those sites. Good ones will lift any blocks if you ask.
VPS is of course an option , but it does have the downside of not being able to blend in with the crowd.
For the legal issues yeah UK is a bad option. But any EU country should be fine even if they in the eyes programme. Germany have decent privacy laws still. Iceland as well. But for me I just use another closer to home. I trust mullvad enough (and they dont know anything about me in form of payments or identification)
And stop using services that blocks you. There are alternatives for a lot.
OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.
Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn't want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.
I suspect we will see more services and technology to be able to deal with this complex cat and mouse game of destinations (websites/services) and origin counties. You can typically get by with a few rules/countries today, but I think that is getting harder.
CDN's may pose a problem if the DNS resolves to a shared IP address, so IPv6 can help, but many VPN's do not support it. For some services we may just have to accept there is no easy way to use them unless tools improve (e.g. the browser/application auto-selecting from multiple interfaces)
Finding a unicorn country where everything works and all traffic is routed is getting increasingly difficult. For example, if a US news site didn’t want to implement GDPR, it geolocates all users outside the US and blocks them, whilst other US services start to require ID/age verification to post content for non-US users so accessing both easily requires switching location.
You've hit the nail on the head, my own post is a bit meandering and this is what I was going for. I hate how many hoops one needs to jump through for basic anonymity online nowadays.
OpenWRT has a package called mwan3 that in tandem with dnsmasq can allow you set the IP addresses associated with a DNS entry to a particular VPN/country.
I think this would be infeasible outside of very narrow use cases, but I don't know. I don't have an advanced networking setup, but the way I see it, if I, say, route service A and B to connection 1 and service C to connection 2, I only have control over individual IP ranges/DNS entries. So if my bank IP is routed to connection 1 and one new security background service their app/site uses goes to connection 2, something can get flagged, and I could face an unpleasant with the bank/law. I've been trying to avoid things like this. (I have a very rudimentary understanding of networking, I'm not super comfortable doing all of this manually).
I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn't able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else. I know split tunneling exists in the basic Mullvad client, and I guess I can just throw my whole network on Connection 1 and route Connection 2 through it (meaning when I split tunnel I find myself on connection 1) but in that scenario I'm doing myself even less favors re: latency and headroom and all that good stuff.
And that's just the computers. I use a phone as well.
I feel as though the most logical way about it would be to compartmentalize connections by application, but I wasn’t able to find an easy way to do this. For example, splitting off a browser window and having that exit from somewhere else
I use multiple gluetun containers with connections to various endpoints, each provides a proxy and I use foxyproxy firefox addon to switch between the proxies manually (as well as setting up rules), works pretty well for me.
As to phone, wireguard to your computer will minimize duplicating effort.
@deffard@lemmy.world mentioned getting a openwrt travel router as the last and kind of most extreme thing on the list. But its the easiest thing to do. Glinet has good ones with a custom (proprietary) openWRT variant on it with a simpler GUI but they are compatible with plain openWRT if you are able to manage it its probably better.
You can do much of that other stuff on the router then connect from other devices and have it follow the rules.
I don't think you need separate laptops, but a separate router may be useful.
If you use Linux, you can have apps isolated to their own lightweight network namespaces (like containers), using different VPNs. Otherwise VMs can serve a similar purpose on Windows and Macs.
Iptables can also be used to block traffic, and force it through proxies (which can be whitelisted by uid/gid) or VPNs.
If you want a more secure VPN setup, I'd even recommend having the VPN(s) running on the router (eg. portable OpenWRT setup) so your laptop never gets offered a public IP / connects directly to network. Put a proxy on it for special (eg. DNS based) routing exceptions, like banking from real IP, reddit via the US, etc.
Wipe before you leave and restore when you arrive. Carry a second, minimal device with limited smartphone features for when you need to contact someone between those times.
While in some place that worries you, audit and change your behavior and the way your software works in order to be more secure and less convenient. Limit computer use.
Figure out what method of storing data remotely works for you and use it, but don’t treat it as a backup.
just_another_person
in reply to chimay • • •atzanteol
in reply to chimay • • •No, it doesn't. You know what would though? My old Pentium 120mhz with 16MiB of RAM.
MyNameIsRichard
in reply to chimay • • •My microwave is more powerful than the machines that sent humans to the moon.
LeFantome
in reply to MyNameIsRichard • • •UnhingedFridge
in reply to chimay • • •LeFantome
in reply to chimay • • •From the video “websites are still websites. Videos are still videos”. The problem of course is that this is not true.
The problem is that technology is still our servant. What are we asking it to do?
First, this video itself. If this same story was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image. It would not be a 1080p or 4K YouTube video. That, in a nutshell is the real problem. The OP, by posting this video, has already chosen a side in that fight. But let’s compare apples to apples.
20 years ago, a web page was made up up a few dozen kb of HTML, a dozen kb of CSS, and a few 100 kb of JavaScript. Images were few, low resolution, and low bit depth. The fonts used were probably bitmaps and installed locally. The “computing power” was on the server. It was all sent as clear text. The networks were too slow to send much more. Today, a website sends me megabytes, maybe dozens of megabytes, of JavaScript. And I am probably downloading a bucket of vector fonts too. Not only is the “web application” much, much fancier but now all the “computing power” is expected to be in my browser (on my computer). And all the “assets” like images and video have to be local too. Instead of small 8 bit GIFs, I have huge high-resolution 24 bit AVIF and PNG files. I am rendering SVG and font vector files at high resolutions on my local CPU / GPU. Maybe there is an animated background. To cap things off, everything is encrypted with 2048 bit or 4096 bit keys. It is not that my local computer or my local operating system has become less efficient (like the video implies). It is that the websites have become 100 times more difficult to render. Browse some of those old websites (if you can find them). They are blazing fast and take very little RAM.
And what were videos? YouTube was probably 360p with a video codec designed to be easy to decompress on an underpowered client. Now, YouTube is 4K or at least 1080p and in a codec that is much more computationally intensive to render. It has to be to support storage of these otherwise immense files. A 4K file is literally 40 times the number of pixels in 360p. This is before we consider that the color space probably went from 16 bits to 24 or 32 as well. So, back to 100 times harder like above.
And the premise that “20 years ago” that you were running your web browser and a file manager and a command line all while editing a video on your laptop is nonsense. You had a 1280x800 screen. If you were editing a video, it was probably the only thing you had running. And again, what resolution and color depth were these videos you were making? Were you even editing video? Be honest. How many “content creators” were there then. The multimedia we were editing was probably audio only. The video work we did was more transcoding (maybe cutting out ads) than it was “video editing” like today.
If this same message was being told 20 years ago, it would be a blog post, mostly plain text, maybe one image.
And you know what, my 10 year old computer can still do the modern stuff and it absolutely blazes though the old stuff.
If this were a blog post, I could have a hundred similar tabs open on that 2 GB of RAM he talks about.
So, it is not that computers and software are built wastefully. It is that users expect things they did not expect before. If you are willing to watch 360p YouTube, read mostly text blog posts with the ads tuned off, make simply edited videos in the same 360p resolution, and run a simple Wayland compositor or X11 Window Manager, a totally up-to-date Linux distro will run just as well on your old hardware as you remember. At least, pretty close.
The only really truly wasteful step has been the move to 64 bit instead of 32 bit. We could save at least a third of the RAM used for any modern task if it were 32 bit. But, 32 bit only gives us 4 GB of RAM, which means I could get a 32 bit computer that performs like 6 or 7 GB 64 bit system today. But of course that is not nearly enough. As the YouTube author states, they need 16 GB for the huge videos he is editing. So, 64 bit is not wasted either I guess.
And, of course, on a Windows machine, a third of my RAM and 20% of my CPU is dedicated to running a bunch of crap that ships with my OS to serve the goals of the OS provider, not me the user. But that is an entirely different problem (or, this is his point, I concede this point to him).
An additional message in this video is about “freedom” and “exponential complexity” and “commercial masters”. Of course, there is some truth there. But again, step back.
This video starts with the OP editing a video in KDENLIVE on Linux. What video editing software and OS was he using 20 or 30 years ago as he says. Be honest. We have more freedom and more non-commercial choice than ever before. It is not even remotely arguable.
And complexity. If I install a distro today with say XFCE as a desktop environment, what is the complexity compared to the early 2000s or late 90s? Try to configure your video card and monitor and get back to me. Explain how to configure your WiFi in 1999. If anything, a Linux distro is less complex and daunting now than before.
Leaflet
in reply to LeFantome • • •There’s still plenty of inefficiencies to criticize.
LeFantome
in reply to Leaflet • • •Of course there is lots to criticize. And it does not get worse than electron. But it is pretty easy to run a fairly lean desktop in 2025. And bloated applications are not a new invention.
I guess we can talk about the “rise” of interpreted languages. As long as we ignore that the Lingua Franca of the 8 bit era was BASiC I guess. Or Logo! We also have to ignore hugely popular languages in their era like Perl 5, Lisp, TCL, Scheme, and PHP. How about all those Bash scripts? And Javascript is less interpreted than it used to be as you say. I assume you mean Python but it is over 30 years old and PyPy is a thing. Most newer languages are JIT or fully compiled. Rust, Go, Swift, Carbon, and Zig are all compiled languages. Kotlin, Gleam, and Elixir are JIT. What are all the new interpreted languages? If anything, I would say the trend is towards performance and efficiency.
JavaScript works against his point in a big way. Javascript was released 30 years ago and yet javascript code runs dramatically faster (on the same hardware) in a modern web browser than it will on one from back then. JavaScript engines are VERY heavily optimized and browser devs will move mountains for another percent or two. And WASM is even faster.
You can build Rust applications on Windows 95 and they are faster than C++ was back then. Not everyone has given up on performance.
Modern code can be much more parallel and asynchronous (faster). And there is a strong recent focus on memory safety and efficiency.
Networking and file systems are both much faster and more efficient than they used to be.
And of course modern processors are not just faster but have many more performance focussed instructions (SIMD, AVX, vector extensions, etc). And we have hardware acceleration for media codecs and of course virtualization which speed up applications dramatically. And technologies like hypervisor clusters and containers can lead to significantly better resource utilization in practice.
Anyway, his point is obvious and of course true to an extent. Not nearly to extent he claims though.