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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Essentially for something to be decentralised and not ephemeral, everyone needs a copy of the data.

    To go into a bit more detail—one of the biggest benefits of decentralised systems is generally redundancy has to be built in otherwise you have a Single Point Of Failure™️, and then you get data loss when it’s gone. Given any sensible decentralised system is designed to avoid this scenario, that data has to be somewhere, and generally the simplest and less expensive (in terms of processing) way to improve on data in one place, is to have it in every place. Any time the data isn’t in one place or every place, you then have an exercise in figuring out where it actually is. This “finding it” processing is going to take time and effort, and if you imagine a standard semi-popular lemmy post, that’s potentially data coming from all sorts of different places, which may or may not be there—this would inevitably make request times ridiculous and basically no one would use it.

    At the end of the day, any kind of processing is energy, cost & time expensive, whereas storage makes that part of the process effectively instant and is much cheaper than increasing processing power in both cost and energy.

    So basically in this use case and many like it: it makes sense if you’re trying to pick what to optimise, you optimise for lower processing and higher storage requirements rather than vice versa.

    The history aspect is more straightforward to understand given the above, if you expect people to care what happened a year ago and want to support that, that data needs to live somewhere













  • Basically in my experience, when it comes to smart lights it’s generally just worth springing the extra for Philips Hue (and using the hub, not just in Bluetooth mode) unless you want to waste your time and money with other brands. Nothing else seems to be remotely as reliable and easy to work with—and I have zero patience for having to perform tech support on my house lighting.

    I’m glad to hear you got your bulbs working though





  • Politics is not just the relationship between two people, it’s the relationship between a person and everyone/everything else in the world.

    Reducto ad absurdum: would you suggest a world where every country is at war with everyone else would foster a better environment for global FOSS collaboration than one where the world was at complete peace?

    I honestly thought the statement you quoted was entirely uncontroversial. “Healthy” and “global” being the key words, I’m not saying it’s a requirement for FOSS to exist in general or anything.




  • Agree on the application side, but when it comes to the test suite, I’m definitely gonna consider letting an AI get that file started and then I’ll run through, make sure the assertions are all what I would expect and refactor anything that needs it.

    I’ve written countless tests in my career and I’m still gonna write countless more, but I’m glad I can at least spend less time on laborious repetition now and more time on the part of the job I actually enjoy which is actually solving problems.