I’d like to share your optimism, but what you suggest leaving us to “deal with” isn’t “AI” (which has been present in web search for decades as increasingly clever summarization techniques…) but LLMs, a very specific and especially inscrutable class of AI which has been designed for “sounding convincing”, without care for correctness or truthfulness. Effectively, more humans’ time will be wasted reading invented or counterfeit stories (with no easy way to tell); first-hand information will be harder to source and acknowledge by being increasingly diluted into the AI-generated noise.

I also haven’t seen any practical advantage to using LLM prompts vs. traditional search engines in the general case: you end up typing more, for the sake of “babysitting” the LLM, and get more to read as a result (which is, again, aggravated by the fact that you are now given a single source/one-sided view on the matter, without citation, reference nor reproducible step to this conclusion).

Last but not least, LLMs are an environmental disaster in the making, the computational cost is enormous (in new hardware and electricity), and we are at a point where all companies partaking in this new gold rush are selling us a solution in need of a problem, every one of them having to justify the expenditure (so far, none is making a profit out of it, which is the first step towards offsetting the incurred pollution).

You can always give a shot at using a third party client (possibly acting as bridge for other/better protocols, like e.g. slidge.im>xmpp or the buggy matrix equivalent), but you need to keep in mind that they will all require you to authenticate (and remain authenticated) using a smartphone, and that usage of 3rd party clients is forbidden from WA’s terms and conditions (which may lead to your account being blocked/deleted).

Russia supplied 77 per cent of China’s purchases

Not exactly a surprise, then. And good luck for the Russian’s arm industry bouncing back, considering its performance on the battlefield and its interleaving with western tech that it hasn’t managed to decouple itself from since 2014. China’s only taking a reasonable stance there.

and how much of this troubled history is linked to Java Applets/native browsers extensions, and how much of it is relevant today?

Yep but:

• it’s one runtime, so patching a CVE patches it for all programs (vs patching each and every program individually)

• graalvm is taking care of enabling java to run on java

Or rather a Dunning Kruger issue: seniors having spent a significant time architecturing and debugging complex applications tend to be big proponents for things like rust.

Why? What’s wrong with safe, managed and fast languages?

I agree with the sentiment and everything, but the whole gaming console industry has gone to crap after they started putting hard drives/storage in them with the goal of needing you to be online and not owning anything anymore. They are all equally despicable for that. Which makes emulation even more essential, just for preserving those games into the future when the online front will inexorably shut down.

Report, as disinformation/propaganda/not news, hoping mods are not looking the other way

The important figure isn’t the total, but the fraction of GDP that goes into real estate, which is disproportionate in the case of China, for the reasons I mentioned, and more (another major one being the land leased by local governments to serve as their de facto revenue stream)

Not like “many other countries” but expectedly much worse: real estate has been de facto where most Chinese have been concentrating their wealth as “investment” in the absence of better local alternatives and the inability to invest abroad.

According to https://www.notebookcheck.net/ , a framework 13 with a Ryzen 7840U will run out of battery 22% faster than the macbook but will outperform the macbook by 85% on some benchmarks. I wouldn’t pick the mac.

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What’s the deal with you, exactly? Are you denying the many substantiated academic reports of environmental damage caused by rare-earth extraction and refining as part of some anti-China conspiracy? Just so I know if it’s worthy of my time to engage at all.

care to elaborate? The rest of the world definitely has higher environmental standards (and, more importantly, enforcement of them) than China. And that is a significant driver of the cost. You should read about the history of the PV industry in Germany before throwing insults.

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That’s seriously overlooking decades of Linux being optimized for embedded/mobile/cloud/desktop… computing and billions having been invested in engineering efforts by companies like Google, AMD, Nvidia, MediaTek, Intel, Facebook, Microsoft, Red Hat, … for which every bit squeezed out of the hardware means millions in operating costs saved. Sure there are niches where Linux isn’t the best fit for the job, but with such widespread usage and support, you are almost guaranteed to be reaching peak performance for whatever device it’s running on, with the category of devices HarmonyOS is targeting being amongst the one having the most eyeballs.

I don’t believe anything, I want numbers and hard evidence, and then you’ll see me cheering.

It’s part of the reason why I think decentralized services could be the future. Lemmy or Mastodon can have a lot of small servers with reasonable costs spread across many admins, instead of one centralized service that costs a significant amount to run.

Ohh, absolutely, or rather, it is the past. I mean, internet was built that way, as a resilient federation of networks and protocols. Lemmy could be seen as us just rediscovering emails after the tech giants almost succeeded in killing it. We should approach all the services we use by asking ourselves basic sustainability questions:

• is that thing opensource?

• self hostable?

• does it federate/interoperate with equivalent services?

• can I pull my data out of it/relocate to another provider on a whim?

• if not, is this a trustworthy and ethical business?

• is it profitable?

• are there open financial records available showing where/for what the money is going?

• is it at risk of being acquired?

• is it subject to foreign/unlawful interference

Etc Etc

That, or what you get when you let an unhealthy breed of MBAs and bean counters run an engineering company for their and friend’s short term profit.

At that point, just create heat from the excess energy, store it, and push it through district heating