Don’t worry, with all these data centers going up, they’ll have enough hardware power to track the rest of us, too, not just the women.

I never really had any issues with mine. I did have it die after about two years when it just stopped charging and/or turning on, never was quite sure where the issue was. But I bought it refurbished and on a steep discount, so I felt I got my money’s worth out of it at least and that that was just an inherent risk of cheap refurbished tech. My only real complaint was that it managed the battery really poorly when I tried to put Linux on it, but it ended up being useful to keep one Windows machine around for the occasional one off use, so even that worked out for me in the long run. As someone who’d prefer to run Linux on everything I can, I have to admit I had like zero problems with it until it died.

But if I had to use one with Windows 11 on it, I’d rather learn to live on my smartphone.

I used one in school a couple years ago, and I can’t deny it was pretty great for it. I like to handwrite my notes, and any math-heavy assignments are way easier to just handwrite, so I used it so all my notes and homework and textbooks could be saved digitally and automatically get backed up to cloud storage. I still use it occasionally as a super light and portable laptop occasionally, but I use a desktop far more often these days.

GOG is strictly anti-DRM, so you’ll never get Denuvo-enable games there. You miiiiiight get them after Denuvo gets pulled out since that often happens after… 6 months? A year or two? But the sort of publisher that wants Denuvo included is probably the same kind to refuse a totally DRM-free release.

I would think there’d be some very minor bleeds at a minimum. Like the fan churns the air, and that definitely turns a lot of its energy into heat, but someone of that energy is spent on actual movement, not simply heating air particles. But without more precise figures for that, “well over 90%”, or whatever my exact wording was, is true and precise enough to make my point. I could have looked up a more precise figure, but it wouldn’t have significantly impacted the very rough math that was only intended to approximate the truth well enough to illustrate the point.

Yeah, a much smaller heat source will produce a much smaller heat bubble. 100 MW is an amount of power that’s difficult to comprehend. A home in the US consumes an average of ~11 MW in an entire year. Every single hour that a 100 MW data center operates, it consumes enough power for a little over 9 homes to run ALL YEAR. Every single day, enough power for almost 225 homes to run for a YEAR. The heat output of a data center is orders of magnitude higher than a parking lot.

I said over 90% because I couldn’t remember the correct figure. I wanted to be as accurate as I could be with full confidence. If you think something I said was inaccurate, feel free to correct me, but so far, it looks like I was right but could have been more precise if I’d wanted to spend even more time fact checking.

No, it’ll all happen inside the data center. The problem with that is computers hate all that heat, so they pipe it all away and dump it outside to the best of their ability. The data center may not be 6 miles wide, but then the wind starts blowing the heat around. Hell, even on a perfectly still day, heat would radiate out. They’re making enough heat to keep every single home in a city of 500,000+ people comfortable in winter, so it’s either that or the data center turns into the world’s largest oven.

My understanding is that some tiny portion, like 1-2%, is actually used in a meaningful way to do calculations to do what you want, but that could incorrect. Or it may be that that tiny portion still inevitably turns to heat, just indirectly somehow. I’m not sure, though, you could be right.

Large data centers can consume over 100 MW of power. Almost ALL the energy a computer consumes is turned into heat, like well over 90%. A home AC unit pulls a little under 1 kW, and I think heating is about the same so that’s equivalent to heating over 100,000 homes, except those homes will eventually get warm and stop running the heat. The data center churns all day, every day. Given that, it may be equivalent to all the heat put out in more like 250,000 homes. Data centers produce an ABSURD amount of heat.

Edit: and keep in mind, that’s HOMES, not people. Average people per household in the US is 2.5, so that’s heating for over 600,000 people.

Yeah, some of us really don’t want our home PCs directly contributing to the surveillance state, and we sure as hell don’t appreciate pre-compliance to the demands of increasingly fascistic states.

That’s better, at least. GrapheneOS users should be fine at least since there are extensive restrictions on Play. Other Android ROMs may have issues, though. Maybe not if they use MicroG.

GrapheneOS is built on AOSP, which is where the change is being made. Graphene and other custom ROMs will need to maintain a fork that cuts out the feature if they want to avoid. Google is also starting to close off Android to make that more difficult, so it’ll become a genuine project to maintain the fork well.

Pretty sure it’s a change to AOSP, the basis for every single Android ROM in existence.

I’m not talking about people who had a “cure” but about those who shared their experiences openly while being censored and dismissed. People who are not part of a campaign.

You’re assuming you can tell when a stranger on the internet is part of a campaign or mistakenly parroting something from a campaign. The internet is heavily astroturfed, especially social media. Several hugely popular pieces of misinformation have been traced back to just a handful of accounts that look like and pose as regular people but, upon thorough inspection, are very clearly lying either for money or for propaganda. Those accounts lied, not got it wrong, lied, and millions of people parroted it. Many of them lied a bit themselves and framed it as something that totally happened to someone they directly know.

You assume a lot, and the way you associate everything with anti-vaxxers only shows how much governments have turned this into a political issue.

…Motherfucker, it’s not a politics issue, it’s a science issue. Antivaxxers have REPEATEDLY shown they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. At best, they’re scared of what they don’t understand and make mistakes. At worst, they’re grifting at the expense of people’s health. Many just want to feel smart, like they’re in on a secret the rest of society can’t recognize, and they’re willing to endanger people’s health and wellbeing to get that feeling. In no case are they overall correct, even if they manage to occasionally brush against truth as they flounder. You wanted examples of why regular people might go on the internet and lie about the vaccines, and antivaxxers are a great example because everything that comes out of their mouths on that topic is either half baked or, relevant to the question at hand, an outright lie. Some of them will just make up random shit on the fly to defend their incorrect beliefs. Shit, some people are just pathological liars, and some portion of them will be antivax or whatever.

If I say someone close to me had side effects after the vaccine, suddenly I’m assumed to also drink bleach and take dewormers.

I don’t think anyone with sense and information doubts that people experienced side effects. When I got my COVID vaccines, we had to wait a little while on site in case we had an allergic reaction or any other sort of adverse reaction. What most of the doubters don’t believe is the people suggesting it’s way more dangerous than anyone thought because the vast majority of the evidence is someone claiming that their cousin’s uncle’s dog’s vet’s new girlfriend he just met totally suffered life altering consequences. The vast majority is bullshit, whether the person saying it knows it or not, and the remainder is such a small portion, it most likely doesn’t make a significant difference from reported results and risks.

At this point, you’re basically unable to think critically or discuss the negative. Being part of a herd also comes with some dangerous aspects.

No, I can do that. The problem is that critical thinking leads me to the realization that there’s never any fucking evidence, at all, ever. Some schmuck that may or may not be AI with a username I’ve never seen before can write some words on social media about a thing that totally definitely happened to someone, but that’s it, that’s all it is. There’s never unadulterated pictures or video. No medical records from the hospital visit such a severe reaction surely must have required. No articles from a respected journalist known to thoroughly vet sources. No medical or scientific studies that hold up to thorough scrutiny. Do some people have severe negative reactions? Yeah, the manufacturers literally warn us of them. Is it the huge threat that some people made it out to be? Almost certainly not according to the available legitimate evidence.

Cue the classic Arthur meme, “do you really think someone would do that? Just go on the internet and tell lies?”

How about for money? How many grifters pushed their own protective supplements? You think pharma maybe would pay some astroturfers to push the ivermectin that didn’t do dick for anyone that didn’t have worms already because it’s fucking dewormer? How many antivaxxers made up bullshit about it just like they do every other vaccine? How many wealthy people down played everything and helped push lies so their workers would get the fuck back in the office/factory? How many people just said some stupid shit and doubled down to protect their ego when called out?

Like here’s the real issue. You’ve put no real thought at all into why someone might lie about it, as evidenced by the fact that you can only conceive of it being state actors while I came up with all those people incentivized to lie off the top of my head. And then, after putting no real effort into reflection or anything, you look around at all the people who can come up with reasons you’re wrong and claim it feels like a cult.

Probably more to do with the fact that there is, at most, a tiny grain of truth at the core, but it’s wrapped in a mountain of bullshit.