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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Twitter operates servers in the EU. They will have at least Frankfurt server. Probably UK and probably elsewhere.
    It’s geographically closer, so reduces latency and server load (faster to complete a request, faster to discard allocated resources).
    It also gives redundancy. If Frankfurt DC explodes, the system will fall back to the next closest DC (probably London).

    So let’s say that the EU DC stops existing. And requests go over the ocean to the US.
    Twitter still has customers in the EU. They are still making money from EU citizens. Because twitter isn’t free. It costs money to manage, develop and run. Twitter tries to recoup those costs via adverts and subscription services.
    So let’s say that twitter is no longer allowed to extract money from the EU. The EU bans companies advertising on twitter.
    Any companies that have business in the EU (like selling to EU citizens) are no longer allowed to advertise on twitter.
    Paypal, visa etc is no longer allowed to take payments from EU citizens for twitter services.
    Any EU service that has twitter integrations is no longer allowed to charge for twitter features.
    Basically, twitter has no way of getting money from the EU.

    Why would twitter spend money to access the EU population. It’s a cost sink. Dead weight.
    There is no growth. Getting 50 million new EU users means a massive cost increase.
    Plus paying for that extra load on (say) US based servers, and their international backbone links. (Just because you can reach a server on the other side of the world for “free”, doesn’t mean commercial services can pump terabytes of data internationally for free).

    So yeh, the servers could stay located in the US where twitter operations HQ is. Twitter could disband their international headquarters, so they no longer have companies in the EU.
    But they wouldn’t be able to get any money from EU citizens. And if they tried to circumvent the rules, then they can be blocked by DNS and BGP. So the only way to access twitter is by a VPN.
    That didn’t work well in Brazil, and twitter caved in to the demands of the Brazil government.





  • It’s not difficult to define.
    It’s about people’s choices.

    People can choose to own a gun, choose to want to own a gun, choose to own a whole armoury.
    I think owning a gun is stupid. I live in a country that successfully regulates guns.
    Saying “I think gun owners are stupid” isn’t hate speech because they have chosen to own a gun.
    If I said “gun owners should use their guns in themselves” that becomes hate speech because it’s wishing harm on them.

    People choose to be Republicans, trumps choices in life are why he is where he is.
    Hate trump because of what he does, not because he has blonde hair.

    People don’t choose to be gay, or be trans, or be Jewish, or be black, or be short or whatever.
    Which is another way opinions can become hate speech.
    If I said “I think gun owners are stupid” that isn’t hate speech.
    If I said “I think black people are stupid” that becomes hate speech because it is grouping people by something they have no control over.





  • 4 years ago (best number I can find, considering IAs blog pages are down) IA used about 50 petabytes on servers that have 250 terabytes of storage and 2gbps network.
    From this, we can conclude that 1 TB of storage requires 8mbps of network speed.
    Let’s just say that average/all residential broadband has spare bandwidth for 8mbps symmetrical.
    We would need 50,000 volunteers to cover the absolute minimum.
    Probably 100k to 200k to have any sort of reliability, considering it’s all residential networking and commodity hardware.

    In the last 4 years, I imagine IA has increased their storage requirements significantly.
    And all of that would need to be coordinated, so some shards don’t get over-replicated




  • If only that was the government that invested in the R&D and tech to make it happen.
    Gaining funds from taxes (meaningful taxes), and investing that money in making their country better.

    Hopefully this decision is because carbon taxes that will make consumer products representative of the actual cost of the item (not the exploitative cost). >

    No no, let the free market decide.
    Fucking AI threatening to replace basic jobs (when it’s more suited to replace the C-Suite) gobling up energy and money, too-big-to-fail bailouts and loophole tax rules bullshit.

    So yeh, someone needs to spend the money and that should be the government.
    Because they should realise that carbon fuel sources are a death sentence.


  • I agree, and it is possibly the only good thing to come out of AI.
    Like people asking “why do we need to go to the moon?!”.

    Fly-by-wire (ie pilot controls decoupled from physical actuators), so modern air travel.

    Integrated circuits (IE multiple transistors - and other components - in the same silicon package). Basically miniaturisation and reduction in power consumption of computers.

    GPS. The Apollo missions lead to the rocket tech/science for geosynchronous orbits require for GPS.


    This time it is commercial.
    I’d rather the power requirements were covered by non-carbon sources. However it proves the tech for future use.

    For a similar example, I have a strong dislike of Elon Musk. He has ruined the potential of Twitter and Tesla, but SpaceX has had some impressive accomplishments.

    Google are a shitty company. I wish the nuclear power went towards shutting down carbon power.
    But SOMEONE has to take the risk. I wish that someone was a government. But it’s Google. So… Kind of a win?



  • I don’t think smart phones are conventional communications. The are smart. They are still the “tech of tomorrow”.
    Smart phones use conventional communications to do very clever things. But those clever things are range limited and require specialised equipment. They also have absolutely no “hackability” without specialised equipment (easy to get, sure… But still pretty much single purpose)

    AM is literally a couple caps, inductors, resistors (edit: and diode) then an amplifier (a couple transistors and resistors). And the range of lower frequency radio waves is (or can be) phenomenal.
    It’s just that it takes some experience to operate on these frequencies, and their bandwidth is limited.

    Smart phones do away with the experience requirements, and trade higher frequencies & higher data rates for range (and I guess trade digital encoding for simplicity)

    I see parallels to software.
    People are nervous to “side loading apps” on their phone, but have no issues downloading and installing an exe on windows.
    Smart phones give you the “this is how” kind of experience, and abstract away the sheer amount of technology they leverage. Which is amazing, and is what makes them smart!
    But the underlying technology is phenomenal. And I feel it’s a shame that the majority of people don’t have any understanding of “installing an app” or similar (like calling internet access “WiFi”… 2 distinct things!)


  • It’s pretty serendipitous, actually.
    The past month I’ve done a somewhat deep dive into LoRa for a project.
    I ultimately dismissed it due to the data rates, but for simple remote controls or for sensors - things that report a couple bytes - it seems awesome.
    I’m sure you can squeeze higher data rates out of it, but when I evaluated it I decided to go with a hardwired network link (I had to have stability, dropped info wasn’t an option. But the client had a strong preference for wireless)


  • WiFi uses BPSK/QPSK/OFDM/OFDMA modulation.
    LoRa uses CSS modulation.

    This is about hacking WiFi hardware to make WiFi modulated signal intelligible to a receiver expecting CSS modulation, and have the WiFi hardware demodulate a CSS signal.
    Thus making WiFi chips work with LoRa chips.

    LoRa doesn’t care about the carrier frequency.
    So the fact that it’s LoRa at 2.4ghz doesn’t matter. It’s still LoRa.

    I’m sure there will be a use for this at some point.
    Certainly useful for directly interfacing with LoRa devices from a laptop.
    I feel that anyone actually deploying LoRa IoT would be working at a lower level than “throw a laptop at it” kinda thing



  • The issue is with how aggressive Microsoft is about it.

    Trying to download chrome? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
    Changing default browser? “Hey, are you sure you don’t want to try Edge?”.
    Windows update… “We’ve done you a solid, because we know you want to use Edge”.
    I’m sure at one point, it was a warning in the security center that you aren’t using Edge.
    Also Teams (in sure there are others) will open links in Edge, despite what default browser you have set.