I think there already was case like this with either Google or Meta somewhere around Europe few years back. Or it might’ve been actual search results instead of extracts. The decision was overriden shortly as their web traffic dropped drastically. They’ll 100% do this and don’t think twice.

Generally, heating and cooling are the main energy consumption for domestic purposes. next up is the car, and then electrical consumption. (from what i remember).

I suppose it depends on where you live. Our house consumes something over 20 000kWh per year as our heating is also electric (and rest of the consumption is pretty neglible compared to heating) and we also have a fireplace which consumes around 15m³ of firewood, depending on how cold winter happens to be. Electric grid here has a ton of renewables and nuclear, so co2 footprint should be on the smaller side compared to global average.

Also, as google and microsoft (among others) shoehorns AI “answers” to everything that adds up, but private use seems to be quite insignificant anyways.

https://cybernews.com/security/billions-credentials-exposed-infostealers-data-leak/

Several collections of login credentials reveal one of the largest data breaches in history, totaling a humongous 16 billion exposed login credentials. The data most likely originates from various infostealers.

Because its still bullshit.

Obviously. But I have no context on how much my actions create co2 in the first place. I assume driving a car generates a majority of it, or maybe heating the house, but I still don’t have any clue how many kilograms that might be. But what I do know is how many kilowatts my house consumes electricity and at least roughly how much our appliances use, so if you want to try and blame me for consuming precious resources by generating text or watching a video at least give me an measurement I can easily comprehend.

Is it just me or is that stupid way to measure consuming computing power? The CPUs themselves doing computations do not produce any pollutants (unless you calculate how much of that is created during manufacturing ang logistics, which I doubt). It’s the (without question stupidly large) energy consumption which might, but big players are at least greenwashing their actions by using renewable energy more and more.

Why not create comparison like “generating 1000 words of your fanfiction consumes as much energy as you do all day” or something more easily to compare.

centralised, generic, algorithm-driven social media

Which is always within your fingers. I spent my fair time in IRC and early web-era forums and whatever we had at the time but it was on a full blown desktop computer with CRT displays. It was tied to a location and when you were even on another room that thing didn’t follow you, much less when you left home.

From Wikipedia:

The 22nd General Conference on Weights and Measures[27] declared in 2003, “The symbol for the decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line.” It further reaffirmed,[27]

Numbers may be divided in groups of three in order to facilitate reading; neither dots nor commas are ever inserted in the spaces between groups

That is, “1 000 000 000” is preferred over “1,000,000,000” or “1.000.000.000”. This use has therefore been recommended by technical organizations, such as the United States’s National Institute of Standards and Technology.[28]

While I’m pretty sure you’re correct on majority of cases, there’s still some stuff, like non-steam games, which just won’t work no matter what you do. So, on paper these things work but your mileage may vary.

Stubbilla ei ehkä ole ihan samanlaisia vapauksia huudella ameriikan idiootin touhuista kuin meillä täällä anonyymisti niin pitää vähän pehmennellä sanomisiaan ettei oranssi mies pahoita kovin paljon mieltään. Ja tuon arvopohjankin voi määritellä rusinat-pullasta -menetelmällä, Donaldilta jos kysyy että onko hyvinvointivaltio hyvä juttu niin sehän vastaa että tottakai on ja Amerikka on best ever so beautiful ja sitärataa.

It fits 188 KiB on a sheet of letter sized paper

Maybe I won’t use that to back up my photo library as few rough web searches suggests that the pile of paper would be something around 500 meters tall. Pretty neat technology and I suppose if you really need something stored you can etch that to stainless steel plate or something similar, but data density isn’t the best around.

It’s the same in any country with buildings over 100 years old.

In here 100+ year old houses are pretty common but practically all of them still have at least somewhat up to date electrics with that 3-phase input. It’s been around for decades after all. My house is built originally 1928 and my mothers house is from 1909 and both of them have 3x25A main breakers with those 380V 16A CEE sockets around.

And as garages commonly double as a work space with 3-phase induction motors on the tools it’s still pretty common to have that 3x16A available as it’s not that much more expensive to pull 5x2.5mm² cable to the garage compared to 3x2.5mm² for single phase 16A outlet.

having three phases allows for simplest induction motors for things like blowers and circular saws

Which is really nice. No capacitors or other electronics needed. My old drill press has 750W 3-phase motor and it just works. Also having the power available gives options like running a 7kW log splitter with circular saw at the end of 20 meter long extension cord.

Though, if I remember correctly, your outlets have resettable breakers?

Here in Finland we don’t have breakers on outlets themselves, they’re all on electrical panel. But we have ‘automatic fuses’ which you can reset, they’re just referred as ‘fuse’ almost always. Also, as our house is older, the 25A main fuses are actual porcelain ones, but new ones obviously have those automated too. Similarily, nearly all of the fault current protectors are on electrical panel instead of individual outlets.

And in here nearly all fuses for lights, sockets and everything are either 10 or 16A with bigger main breakers, normally 3x25A for individual houses.

I watched the video and it seems to make good points, but no matter how many times I see something related to US power circuits it just feels so … antique? I have 3x25A fuses on the house and several 3x16A outlets around so getting 11kW out is just a matter of plugging in a socket.

Obviously it would be a good thing to have controls so that water heater, floor heating or sauna stove aren’t all on together but I think I’ve replaced a single 25A fuse over 10 years we’ve lived on this house and I’m pretty sure that was caused by a small(ish) surge on the grid and not our load.

even Linux has dropped a lot of 32bit support in the last few years

And that’s just because no developer uses those systems anymore actively. If you really want to, you can pick up from where they left and bring the support back. But as 32bit x86 CPUs haven’t been produced in the last 20 years (give or take a few years) there’s just not that many working systems around anymore.

Fire up your trusty LaserJet.

Not yet…

They need to bring back the sporty station wagon/estate.

Or “soccer mom” cars, there’s very little on minivan market today at least here in Finland. My wallet says that I don’t drive fully electric for quite some time but about a year ago we had to get rid of our Toyota Previa (too expensive repairs were needed) and there just isn’t too much to pick from. With 3 kids and a dog we just can’t fit the whole circus in a VW Golf and there’s less and less cheap used cars on that category. Sure, if you throw 30-40k€ to the table then you can get a newer VW Caravelle or MB Viano, but below 5k there just isn’t much to choose from. Currently we have Mitsubishi Grandis but with all 7 seats there’s not much room for luggage.

We used to have E-class Mercedes (S210) and it could easily fit the whole family (with child seats) and have plenty of room in the trunk for the dog and luggage, but if you try to seat 3 nearly adult sized kids on the Grandis the middle row seat alone is really not comfortable for multi-hour trip. And it’s pretty much the same for all the station wagons we’ve had over the years. Sure, we’ve had a lot of them, but I think it’s better for not just my wallet to get old ones and drive them “to the end”.

But even if we use bigger cars none of them has a bonnet you need a ladder to reach. Grandis, Previa, Hyundai Trajet, Renault Espace and Peugeot 807 all had very rounded front end and “normal” height bumpers. That makes services a bit more pain in the rear, but you can easily see what’s going on in front of your vehicle.

I heavily doubt Germany could make that change. It’s pretty analog country still on a lot of things and stuff like card payments aren’t available everywhere. My bet would be Estonia. Here in Finland we’re pretty digital on everything already but a crapload of offices (both public and private) are pretty heavily married to M365 (and microsoft in general) environment and workflows and have been for quite a while so even if I would absolutely like to see the change I don’t see it happening any time soon.

And then there’s the plain scale of things. You can find at least half decent windows helpdesk/admin staff everywhere but (at least in here) similar linux knowledge just isn’t around. Plus then there’s areas where linux just don’t have replacements on windows environment. Basic desktop stuff is easy, but replacing AD forests with GPOs just doesn’t have similarily easy replacement. There’s of course workarounds and you can get similar end results but you’ll need a skilled admin and pretty tightly controlled environment to do that.

They even said that if it proves too difficult, they will return to Microsoft

And, unfortunately, I’m pretty sure they’ll decide it’s too difficult. They’d need capable linux-admins and helpdesk personnel, training for employees and someone to deal with the people who just won’t even try to change. All of that costs money (and time, but that’s the same thing), and quite a lot of it at first and benefits will come slowly over time.