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.

That’s probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn’t be feasible.

An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don’t, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged

Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.

You’d be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm (“stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren’t infringing”). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they’d contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won’t get back even if you win - there isn’t really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith

Something like

!“A line with exactly 0 or 1 characters, or a line with a sequence of 1 or 3 or more characters, repeated at least twice”!<

Syntactically valid Perl

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

Language specifiers include country level variants - de-DE, de-AT, de-CH

Yup, this - batteries are consumables. They have a service life of ~2-5 years depending on load. If the manual doesn’t tell you how to replace them then it’s basically ewaste already

Depends on what you need:

• As cheap as possible, but actually want a VM: OCI free tier will be way bigger than you will probably need
• Happy paying money but still want to learn about Linux things: I’ve had good experiences with Scaleway
• I just want something I can set up and not think about: don’t use a VPS. Architect your site as a pure-static site, stick it in an S3 bucket. You’ll probably be within the free tier unless you do absolutely bonkers traffic, and once it’s running you can leave it alone for literal years without worrying about patches or upgrades

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)

I’d love to live in a place with workable public transport, but where I live it would add an hour to my commute each way; effectively an extra 10 hours a week at work

~2kg/month, currently spending ~$60NZD/kg - anywhere between 1 and 4 espressos a day for me depending on if I’m going into the office or not, and my wife drinks a jug of cold brew every ~week

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?