From what I’ve seen in Startups both during the 90s and more recently, the spirit in them changed from “solve a cool problem” in the 90s to “find a way to make lots of money for founders” after the Net Crash and more often than not the chosen way to make money was sell the company to investors rather than actually selling anything to customers, so the tech just needed to look like “the next big money maker” in order to get said investor money and “tech” messaging became dominated by investor hype.

The almost pure-grifer incentives and spirit I saw become dominant in Startups from the 00s now seems to pervade the whole Tech industry.

From what I read, the point of Law in the countries were EULAs have already been deemed not enforceable by courts (such as Germany) is that one can’t hold something one has sold to a customer hostage to the customer accepting a NEW contract after the sale (the sale itself is considered an implicit contract with certain rights, such as the right to freely use what was sold) before they can use it, so even if people click “I Accept” on such a thing it’s does not form a legally binding contract.

It’s part of a family of attitudes which include “I don’t care about Politics”, as if pretty much everything involving humans living in society wasn’t in some way or other shaped by politics.

Don’t lots of countries have very strict rules about were medical information can be sent to and how it must be managed (I believe in the US it’s called the HIPA)?

Those things aren’t legally valid for consumer electronics or software in many countries (possibly most of the World) because they’re considered an attempt at forcing a change in the terms of the sale after the sale.

They would be totally valid if they’re presented to the buyer for confirming acceptance during the purchase BEFORE they pay which, “curiously”, they never are.

Samsung is the second Electronics maker I’ve started boycotted, after Sony.

Sony was all the way back since the Rootkit scandal, Samsung was about a decade ago when a small tablet I bough from them have filled with unremovable applications and after a few updates became pretty much unusable because it’s didn’t have enough memory (clearly planned obscolecence).

Patting myself on back (and a little gloating) aside, Samsung has been clearly abusive towards their customers for a while (it was maybe the second electronics make to enshittify, after Sony) and this is not at all surprising.

I know for sure Intel server CPUs (for example, Xeons) don’t have integrated graphics and somebody else mentioned that many Ryzen CPUs don’t either.

That said, I’m not sure if they need integrated graphics to have hardware decoding for certain video codecs (though it makes sense that those things come together). Personally when I was looking into buying a mini-PC to transform into a media server for my living room, I made sure to check in the CPU specs if it had both integrated graphics (as it’s connected to my TV) and hardware decoding for the most recent codecs (I ended up going for a mini-PC with an N100 processor, since it has all that plus its power consumption is pretty low with a TDP of 6W so I can leave it always on as it also doubles as homeserver).

I actually have a Mini-PC with an N100 CPU and no dedicated GPU as media server and it uses very little CPU (less than 20%) whilst playing 1080p video even with a torrent server over a wireguard VPN running on the background.

You don’t really need much CPU or GPU for playing or streaming videos from compress video files as long as you have hardware decoding on either processing unit (just make sure it implements all the way up to the AV1 coded).

You only need lots of CPU or GPU power if the codec you’re decoding from or encoding to is not implemented in hardware since in that case it will use software decoding or encoding so it’s down to raw CPU or GPU power.

In fact if all you want is a media server that solution I have is probably one of the best ones, mainly because it uses very little power (tops at 25W, usually much less) and runs silent, which is why I can have it in my living room using it as a media player connected to my TV, and with a wireless remote people can’t really tell it’s a PC since it just looks and works like a store bought media player rather than one I put together myself.

However that option means buying new stuff, and I can see the value in using old hardware if you have it around, plus the old hardware will still likely be more powerful so you can also use it for more demanding stuff or just more stuff at the same time, which is why I didn’t suggest it and instead just suggested some tweaks to make that old hardware consume less and make less noise.

underclock and undervolt

If I’m not mistake only hobbyist level motherboards let you control the voltages and if one knows enough to get one of those they probably don’t need the advice I gave.

Also it’s hard to end up with a non-working or unstable configuration with underclocking, whilst it’s pretty easy to do so with undervoltage.

That said, for those who know what they’re doing, your suggestion definitely delivers lowers temperatures than underclocking alone though at the risk of a less stable system (which can be ameliorated with proper stress testing).

For anybody not doing generative AI with it and not running massive loads on it, if you’re going to use an old gaming PC as a home server, at least replace the graphics card with a cheap one with no fans or use the integrated graphics on your CPU (something I believe pretty much all consumer CPUs of the last two decades have) and underclock the CPU if you don’t need full processing power since even small reductions in clock speed can significantly reduce the maximum temperature.

Oh, yeah, the Goldbug-Prepper ideation of Gold as a way to preserve one’s wealth when society collapses is ridiculous: when things get that bad what matters are the basics like food and water, which for anything more than a few months means growing your own food as you’ll deplete whatever stores you have sooner or later. Then beyond that come all the things needed to (re)build a society and it’s going to be a bartering society, not a “tokens of value” one. Wealth held in some abstract token of “value” only becomes useful much later and it might not even be precious metals.

As I see it, Gold is just a decent insurance for a certain range of systemic risks - think of it as a basket of currencies but simpler and with lower correlation to main currencies. It will insulate you from things like a run of the Dollar (a possible thing when the USD stops being a Reserve currency) or governments continuous devaluating their currency as a way to make up for economic mismanagement (like in India), not from societal collapse.

Check it with a 1y or 5y window.

Both Silver and Gold climbed massively in the last 3 years (though they’ve been steadily climbing since around 2020) and hit a huge peak early this year and then came back down. Now they’re both sitting at roughly were they were at the start of the year.

IMHO PMs are not really great speculative investments since they’re not all that volatile (though early this year volatility was unusually high) and they’re more mid and long term wealth holding mechanism in the face of Economic problems that hit major currencies making the value of those currencies (and hence all assets denominated in them) go down. It helps that actual physical metals (especially for Gold) are not managed by Governments or Central Banks - you cannot create new Gold beyond the roughly 2% mined per year hence there is no such thing as Gold interest rates so states can’t just make more of it or tweak its long-term returns - hence it cannot be mismanaged, unlike government issued currencies.

In a long-term perspective it’s not as much that you make money from PMs as it is that everybody else around you is getting poorer because their incomes, savings and assets are in a currency which is losing purchasing power, whilst you managed to retain the purchasing power of your savings.

From my own experience in the 2008 Crash, expect PMs to first go down as Markets plummet and traders are forced to sell in more stable and liquid assets (such as Gold) to cover margin calls in other areas, and then turn and start climbing fast as the crash hits the broader economy and hence the value of the main currencies (this time around, especially the USD) starts falling meaning that PM prices in those currencies go up.

Also keep in mind that Silver is very exposed to the status of the broader Economy since it’s mainly used as an industrial metal, so if the Economy slows down, fewer products containing it are made hence demand for it goes down - Gold tends to be more insulated from the broader Economy than Silver.

That is a good point.

It really depends if he’s trying to control the narrative (in which case he will want to control the bots) or to just keep people engaged with his products (in which case he doesn’t care).

Security services don’t base their personnel or their user-facing machines in commercial data-centers.

It’s as likely the C&C for Russian Government Propaganda ops is in Yandex data centers as it is that NSA personnel are working from Amazon data centers.

Well, you see, a lot of people have been convinced that Denialism or at best Non-Mainstreamism (a word I just made up) is the same as Skepticism and think they’re the latter when they’re mainly one or both of the former, not understanding that you have to actually think hard to be a Skeptic (as it’s mostly about logically and analytically testing what you are told before accepting it or rejecting it, and it’s definitely not just rejecting everything), not just engage in the low-cognitive near-brainless activities of criticizing everything and/or choose a side whose words one unthinkingly trusts that somehow is supposedly non-mainstream (hence “it’s not the same” as most people when they choose a side whose words they unthinkingly trust).

In a way it’s funny how human stupidity and the far too common lack of self-awareness and introspection have been weaponized in not just one but actually several ways to the point that even people who think themselves as “rebellious” are being led by the nose just like most of the rest.

It doesn’t actually make sense for Russia to be running their Digital Propaganda agents from Russian IP addresses unless they’re trying to make it easy for the likes of Meta and Twitter to just block them.

I mean, all you have to do is ponder for a few seconds on - “what would I do if I was a propagandist from an adversary nation trying to covertly influence citizens in other nations?”. The immediate, obvious thing is “I wouldn’t makes it stupidly obvious for the counter-intel people on the other side who owns them by hosting the fucking bots in my own country”.

It makes sense for them to have Command & Control in Russia, but not the actual bots.

Weak attempt at obfuscation. Nobody thinks “critical thinkers” are russian trolls; quite the opposite.

Oh, some (very few, IMHO) people will definitely call others “Russian Troll” or equivalent if they point out that Russian interference has far less power than the very much local ultra-rich, politicians and News-media owners when it comes to the current state of most Western nations and that it’s more likely that loudly raging about “foreign interference” is a political propaganda tool of mainstream politicians - a scapegoat for the consequences of the pillaging of the West by ultra-wealthy Westerns (paralleling how “immigrants” are similarly used as scapegoats by other mainstream politicians - they’re both very much “blame foreigners”) that said politicians very much supported and still support.

Also, don’t get me started on how the interference of other nations is much larger and more open - for example both main parties in the US and UK openly have groups amongst their “parliamentarians” who are “Friends of Israel”.

Russia almost certainly interfered or tried to, because it makes sense for them to do so and it’s very much how they’ve always operated, it’s just that it stretches belief to blame them for most of what’s going on, especially in light of the explosion in inequality, crash in social mobility, collapse in job security (mostly in Europe, the US was always so) and so on in the last couple of decades of Neoliberal political dominance that are for more likely to explain growing discontent and the News-media owned by billionaires very openly pushing far-right ideations 24/7.

In bigger countries foreigners generally don’t have the kind of influence that locals do, especially the wealthy and well-connected ones.

As I see it, there are definitely multiple manipulation machines in operation out there nowadays and multiple muppets whose brains are only big enough for simple explanations and who have have fallen for the slop some of them feed and will gladly spout their simplemindedness here.

That said a person who writes “The Russian government might not even need bot farms at this stage, because the West keeps undermining their own credibility” (amongst other such “jewels”) like the previous poster did clearly doesn’t fall into the “critical thinker” category.

I’m think just Tech here, or maybe more specifically digital technology - the period till 2000 was mainly driven by techies, after than it was mainly driven by grifters, generally with backgrounds like Finance or Marketing, not Technology.

Many people seem to still have the idea that Techies lead Tech Startups, but that hasn’t been true for at least 2 decades.

Tech Bros have been trying to repeat the Net Boom almost immediately after that bubble burst - I think it didn’t take more than a couple of years after that Crash for the “Web 2.0” to start being paraded around like some kind of new gold rush that everybody should jump into and, as clearly visible in the list of hype techs you wrote, they just kept doubling down on the hype and the fraud ever since.

I actually was in Tech in the 90s and during the Crash, and then came back to that industry and into startups almost 2 decades later, and my feeling is that the point when the entire sector turned into nothing more than a giant grift was either a bit after the crash or, at best, just when the boom before it was peaking - I remember very clearly that in the 90s startups mostly started with somebody having a cool idea for tech, whilst in the 00s and onwards they mostly started with somebody having a business idea which was generally about setting oneself up as an intermediary in a kind of business transaction already done for decades, using the Internet and/or Smartphones to come up with a new twist for it and some way of becoming an aggregator/middle-man between both sides of the transaction.