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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • The problem with applying that part of game theory here is it makes several assumptions.

    The biggest is that the bigger party are playing for maximisation, rather than just to “win”. That is very much not the game with trump.

    The second is the assumption that there is only 1 game in play at a time. America could cause devastating economic damage, if it went full tantrum. Europe has noticed how vulnerable they are to that sort of action. They need to patch the holes before playing hardball.

    Under these assumptions, taking fairly meaningless hits to buy time makes sense. Pull the wolf’s teeth, before challenging it to bite you.




  • The rule of thumb with servers is

    • Performance
    • Reliability
    • Power usage
    • Noise
    • Size

    The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

    A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

    I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

    Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

    It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.



  • In an ideal world, you have conservatives and revolutionaries. The revolutionaries want to make changes to try and make things even better. The conservatives act to maintain the status quo. When they balance properly then you get steady change, but slow enough to detect and fix cascading problems/failures.

    In this situation, the centralists act as the balance point, being swayed one way or the other to set the path.

    Unfortunately the only place this is actually close to accurate is Sci-Fi novels.






  • It’s anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.

    While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.


  • While Putin was likely acting on their interests, the current situation has gone completely pear shaped on that front. Putin is stuck. If he backs down, he’s dead, if he doesn’t win, he’s dead. He’s currently riding the limbo between those situations, hoping for a 3rd option.

    If he died, the powers behind him would likely take the chance to disengage. The current situation is bad for business, and plans need to be re-thought. It wouldn’t fix things long term, but short term, they would likely back down.