These magic beans will not only grow twice as fast, they’ll also fix the last magic beans that didn’t grow.

Of course he will. Soon the Myanmar Junta is going to be the first and only non-US operator of the domestic policing variants of the F-22 and B-21.

I mean, if there are in fact many “people who contributed” then they should have no trouble forking the project at this point and continuing open source development of it. Their code and everything they contributed to is still open source. Nothing is being held hostage, no one is obligated to use the new proprietary closed-source version and the license they contributed under the terms of implies that it doesn’t bother them that somebody else is using their contributions for their own internal purposes to create a proprietary version of it. That’s explicitly allowed by the kinds of licenses they were using.

If there aren’t many people who contributed then the problem is not the licenses, it’s the fact that we depend way too much on people and companies donating development and maintenance effort to keep these projects afloat. The problem with donations is that they’re not mandatory and if you try to make them mandatory then they’re not a donation anymore. If it’s no longer in the company’s interest or economically justifiable to keep donating effort to the project then they won’t. If the project can’t survive that, then the license isn’t the problem.

So - if it cools the place from, say, 29 degrees outside to 22 degrees inside, that’s the same as warming it from 15 degrees outside to 22 inside?

Oh my, not at all. If it runs for 1 hour continuously in cooling mode that’s going to be electrically largely equivalent to running for 1 hour continuously in heating mode (again, provided it’s not variable speed). Even then the electrical load will vary slightly according to various conditions. The actual temperatures achieved though, depend entirely on the thermodynamics of the system (both inside the pump itself and your whole house and the environment it’s in) which are extremely dynamic and complicated. There are almost no simple, linear relationships you can use to approximate what is actually going on. Even the approximate calculations that HVAC installers do called “Manual J” are hugely idealized and oversimplified. You’ve got things going on like solar heat gain through windows, heat losses through insulation, and heat transfer through gaps in the insulation, air losses through vents and doors and windows and gaps that are specific to your individual home and that you can’t even really measure accurately. It’s a very difficult thing to even attempt to compute or simulate no matter how much we try to develop models that accurately estimate things. On a larger scale, this is why we still struggle to accurately predict the weather.

Only the next bill will tell

That’s a reasonable position. You can make all the estimates you want but at the end of the day the only thing that really matters is what you get billed for and that will tell you the truth about what’s actually happening in your house, environment, climate, and situation. I would be confident that given the same temperature conditions you really won’t see much practical difference in electrical usage between a heat pump in cooling mode and an air conditioner (if anything they tend to be somewhat more efficient just due to better design and higher build quality). But you won’t know the true situation until all the measurements are actually done and posted to your bill, and even then you won’t be able to directly compare them because there are so many other variables that are always changing.

I’ve literally never felt like I needed a file server to be easier and support more protocols, and this seems like it’s trying to do way too much at once. HTTP is beautiful and convenient but as a bespoke javascript-heavy API it’s really not a particularly great way to manage files, FTP sucks and if you still need it for something you need to re-evaluate your life choices, TFTP is useful in extremely niche applications that I wouldn’t want to hook my entire file server up to anyway and certainly don’t want running along side these other options, WebDav is fine but again really only necessary in niche applications which you don’t need or want your entire file system hooked up to (or if you don’t know how to VPN) and this doesn’t seem to support SFTP/SSHFS which is what I would consider a modern standard for a secure file transfer protocol.

Just use Samba and/or ssh, every Linux distribution comes with packages for them. Both are widely used and battle-hardened, and between the two they are compatible with almost everything. You don’t really need all that other stuff.

In some ways it’s the inverse of the UNIX Philosophy: instead of doing one thing perfectly, this program is doing everything [9001] could think of, and doing it “good enough”.

As a believer in the UNIX philosophy (armed with an understanding of why it is fundamentally useful) it horrifies me that either developers or users think this is a good thing.

It’s exactly the same as an air conditioner, and no: it uses the same amount as when it’s heating. The compressor is either running, or it’s not, plus or minus a little bit depending on how hard it’s actually working to compress the gases at the temperatures and pressures involved. Unless you have a variable speed or dual stage compressor, in which case the power usage may be somewhat proportional to the amount of cooling or heated actually needed since it will slow down for smaller amounts of heating or cooling. Otherwise, the main difference in power usage and power efficiency is how long it runs to achieve the desired temperature.

Oh yes, lets give the billionaires access to nukes, that sounds safe, I’m sure we can trust them.

run any game at max settings, 4K, future proofed (at least for a while)

You do understand how excessive that is right? They’re called “max settings” for a reason. Like “any game max settings 4k” on its own is already like asking for a Formula 1 car, asking for it to be future proofed on top of that is like asking for not just any Formula 1 car but one that can dominate the next 5 seasons.

That said, if you truly do believe your daughter needs this and can’t live without max settings 4k on every game imaginable into the foreseeable future, then your friend did a good job trying to meet your requirements.

… but is it truly necessary? Only you know the answer.

Guh, someday I am going to have to learn that bracket-based syntax (lisp?) that keeps popping up on particularly interesting projects but I can never be bothered to learn.

And RIP Malcolm-Jamal Warner too. Been a rough week that we’ve lost three loved entertainers.

Joke’s on them, I’ve already been working on that for decades. *pats ublock* This baby can bankrupt so many websites and I always hoped it could collapse the ad model completely.

In all seriousness, it’s becoming increasingly clear that we’re eventually going to have to build a new, free internet out of the wreckage of this one once the corporations are done with it. Technically it’s already there, nascent but ever so slowly growing and taking root, hiding in plain sight. Like the so-called dark web of tor, it already exists in parallel to the existing structures of the internet. Call it the deep web, the indie web, nostalgia web, unsearchable web, I’ve heard countless terms and most of them aren’t terribly accurate, but the web doesn’t need ads and google search to exist, it never did. It just needs humans, which despite the best efforts of big tech many of us still are, communicating directly with one another and documenting our billions of lifetimes of diverse collective experiences and knowledge.

We are the wealth of information in the internet. Corporations don’t own it. We are it.

I can accept that the inverse exists. I can’t accept that they’re running things. Not just running some things either, apparently pretty much ALL things.

I don’t think I will ever forgive humanity for this lack of humanity. Words are insufficient to express my the depth of my feelings. Words are the problem. Words are all these atrocities ever get. Soft empty words for hard genocidal things. There is no action, never action. There are only words, and death, and more words, and more death. I hate it.

Part of the transition from a democratic government to an oppressive regime requires filling the military and police with only your supporters and thugs. This is all part of the plan.

makes it difficult to develop new browsers, giving one company a near-monopoly.

Totally an accident by the way! They weren’t trying to become a monopoly, promise!

I think I missed the part where they said this will all come at no cost to consumers… I’m sure it’s just an oversight.

I look forward to dying at your side.

Don’t worry. Once we are no longer useful to them, something the billionaires are actively working on, and once they have successfully insulated themselves from the resulting conflict, they will start to kill us all off and they will say they are doing it to “save the planet”. They still care about the planet. Just not with all of us poor people still on it. It deserves to be returned to nature. Except for the billionaires and their friends, of course.

It’s literally rotting people’s brains. Like people are having actual mental deficiencies and psychotic breakdowns depending on how heavily they depend on this technology. I used to think it was merely digital pollution. I’m now starting to think it’s actually worse than that, much worse.

That sounds annoying. The old FF7 is also buggy, but mostly in funny and delightful ways.