Internet in NZ used to work a bit like the US does now with one large ISP that is also the network operator and gave exactly zero shits about quality of connections or internationally competitive pricing, except they got greedy and charged their retail arm half what they charged their competitors. Anti-monopoly folks got very pissy about this and managed to get the largest fine permitted by law, forced them to split their wholesale arm off into a separate company, banned them from tendering on the government-funded fibre network (which cost them literally billions of dollars) and then changed the law so that if they did it again there wouldn’t be a cap on the penalty they could impose.

In 20 years we went from ~35th of the 38 OECD countries in internet speed and accessibility to 9th. Markets only work long-term if you actually regulate them

Yeah, pretty much. The way the rest of the world deals with it is by splitting the infrastructure maintenance and retail sides to eliminate the profit incentive to not do maintenance.

You have a company who owns a/the fibre network in an area and is obligated by anti-monopoly rules to sell access to the network at the same rate and terms to anyone who wants it. They have a profit incentive to maintain the network to a reasonable standard because having a functioning network is how they make money. In a lot of places this wholesale provider will be at least part government owned given that the government usually pays a good chunk of the cost to build out large national infrastructure projects like fibre networks.

Separately, you have retail ISPs who buy access to the fibre network (or 4g, satellite, …) and sell it to the public along with value adds like tech support, IP addresses, peering agreement etc.

It’s never work in the US because holding private companies accountable for how they spend public money and maintaining well regulated competitive markets is communism or something.

It’s not the issuance that’s the headache, it’s the installation. There are more things that need valid certs than just webservers

I agree with your analysis of the law, but I do get why people are a bit uncomfortable with this. Elon has been a shit human, rocket launches have impacted wildlife and SpaceX and Tesla have been toxic places to work for a long time, but that’s only become a problem recently because he’s been getting more involved in politics? The whole point of having a regulatory state separate from the rest of the government is so they can set and enforce rules fairly and impartially.

But it’s all the government’s fault for having regulations that stop him doing what he wants - he’d be on Mars by now if it wasn’t for the stupid government stopping him from poisoning a protected nature reserve and crashing rockets into people.

Don’t they understand? It’s really important to get people to mars so there is a place for rich assholes to go when the environment on earth is completely trashed beyond repair

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The only real use case for VPNs is to bypass geo blocking on streaming sites, and the VPN providers know this. They also know that if they lean too hard into that, eventually someone will sue them and their business model will evaporate - so they add the “iT MaKEs yOu mORe SeCurE” nonsense as a fig leaf so they can say with a straight face that they operate a product with legitimate uses

Adding the cue marks for the skip intro takes actual effort to set up correctly

Even assuming 25% of Twitter users are bots (probably a significant over estimate), and even if half of Twitter’s users quit in the next year, it would still be 150x bigger than mastodon

(Mastodon has ~1m MAUs, compared to ~421m for Twitter)

Digging into it a bit more, it seems like I might be better off getting a 12gb 3060 - similar price point, but much newer silicon

8700g

Hah, I’ve pretty recently picked up an Epyc 7452, so not really looking for a new platform right now.

The Arc cards are interesting, will keep those in mind

Thanks for the tips! I’m looking for something multi-purpose for LLM/stable diffusion messing about + transcoder for jellyfin - I’m guessing that there isn’t really a sweet spot for those 3. I don’t really have room or power budget for 2 cards, so I guess a P40 is probably the best bet?

Personally I can’t wait for a few good bankruptcies so I can pick up a couple of high end data centre GPUs for cents on the dollar

Ah yes, WordPress, renowned for it’s robust social engagement tools.

It’s the kind of decision you announce over Zoom so people don’t riot

So politics aside, would you really put any money into a financial system run by someone with a proven track record of driving businesses into bankruptcy?

The thing he seems to have forgotten is that unlike the automotive industry where the regulation is designed to allow companies to fuck up then fix things as long as they have the systems in place to fix the fuck up and to know when they fucked up, the medical device industry is very much designed so that the default stance is “this is dangerous and will kill people” unless you can prove otherwise

If you have a concrete example I’d love to hear it

Keycloak to provide OIDC, although in hindsight I should have gone with Authelia Authentik

Or, alternatively, coms management is important and formally declaring an incident is an important part of outage response - going from “hey Bob something isn’t looking right can you check when you get a sec” to “ok, shits broken, everyone put down what you are working on and help with this. Jim is in charge of coordinating the technical people so we don’t make things worse, and should feed updates to Mike who is going to handle comms to non-technical internal people and to externals” takes management input

Why does patreon even need to be an app? What value does the app bring that the website can’t deliver?