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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: January 20th, 2024

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  • So more or less, since many businesses are only keeping their offices because they have multi-year leases preventing them from simply packing up and going fully remote or downsizing to a smaller office, we can expect occupancy rates to continue falling and slow-burn exacerbating the commercial real estate crisis. And really, the problem here is just that banks are overinvested in commercial real estate, not knowing that a pandemic would alter work patterns in a lasting way. So again, we’re all in for a fun ride on the roller coaster that is capitalism, literally because of problems caused by real estate speculation.







  • I found the stats re Firefox usage a little surprising/hard to believe so I double-checked them. Indeed, most rankings show Firefox use hovering at around 2.5%. The open web is sort of already dead, I think. It’s honestly not that uncommon now that I come across websites that don’t work in Firefox and there are zero hints or info that you need to use Chrome. It’s like the world has already forgotten that the web isn’t just an app you access through Chrome.

    Google’s been working on this more or less since they launched Chrome, so it’s not surprising, but wow, that fucking sucks.


  • Right to repair also has an environmental angle. Consider which one uses more resources and likely produces more pollution:

    • The RAM in your laptop dies, you take it to a repair shop, they swap out the dead RAM. Dead RAM goes in the bin, laptop has years of life left in it
    • The RAM in your Macbook dies, the RAM is soldered to the board, you throw the whole thing away and buy a new one, and when a single component in the new Macbook dies, lather, rinse, repeat

    Considering how much extra e-waste is generated when people can’t repair things, there’s really no way to buy Apple and call yourself an environmentalist.


  • Yeah, ensuring availability over time requires dedicated infra. That’s basically what it comes down to. Torrents for the most part lack dedicated providers ensuring file availability. Web seeds exist, but the uploader or the tracker needs to have the resources to back their torrents with bandwidth and storage. Other decentralized solutions, like say IPFS, don’t solve the resources problem, because it’s not technical, so although you can pay to have content “pinned” in place on IPFS, or you can pin it yourself, that “pinning” requires a server, running off electricity, using someone else’s uplink to serve the content, all of which costs. If you don’t have your own server, and don’t pay someone else to pin it for you, it could easily fall off IPFS.

    Syncthing could honestly help, I’ve thought about this a fair amount, although you’d still have the resources issues. Availability of content over syncthing or something like it would likely still be tied to popularity (how long are uploaders going to keep their syncthing folders full of specific content? how long will downloaders? In order for it to really work people would have to get in the habit of building out NAS’s and putting their libraries on syncthing forever, basically). It still has some of the same basic issues with torrent, but the dynamicness is cool for sure.