MudMan

I hate modern reporting.

So, ok, here we go, fact checking dot lemmy dot com.

Tihs one seems to come from Google’s 2025 environmental report, which the article mentions but does not link despite being publicly available. The message Google would like you to take here is that while their power consumption has increased significantly their emissions have not (key chart below).

I guess that’s what you get for trying to spin these things. You get spun right back.

Anyway, Google would also like you to know that:

“However, it’s important to note that our growing electricity needs aren’t solely driven by AI. The accelerating growth of Google Cloud, continued investments in Search, the expanding reach of YouTube, and more, have also contributed to this overall growth.”

This tracks. While power consumption seems to be speeding up a bit, it’s been climbing for a while pretty consistently. I don’t know of Google’s implication that less CO2-heavy power generation is enough to not have to care about it, but I also don’t really see a way to reverse this trend. Data centers are data centers, and whether they’re crunching AI numbers or running every spreadsheet in the world, a bunch of big companies are committed to continuing to own a disproportionate chunk of the computing power of the entire planet so they can sell it to you by the minute.

Sure, but that’s a problem with the language selector setting, as I said above, not with the country list.

Well, yeah, but so are plenty of other gross things and you don’t see me out there raiding coastal villages just because we’ve spent longer taking things from each other by force than enforcing some peaceful, democratic social contract.

To be clear, I’m not disagreeing, we have tribalism baked into us. It just happens to suck and we should strive to break past our built-in biases.

OK, so the difference is a nationalist is a supremacist and a patriot is not.

So I’m back to my original statement, then. Patriotism sucks. Call it what you want, but allegiance to specifically a nation, nation-state or whatever construct you’re assigning special status is bad and I actively oppose it.

I’m not arguing in bad faith, I’m disagreeing. But you made it seem like we don’t actually disagree and like you had a distinction that made patriotism not match the thing I’m saying is bad, so I want to understand if that’s the case. It doesn’t seem to be the case. You think patriotism is not a problem and think my negative characterization is of nationalism instead.

Let me be clear, it is not.

The patriotism you’re talking about? The lovey-dovey “improve your country and learn from others” patriotism? It sucks. That’s what I’m saying here.

I’m also saying it’s just whitewashed nationalism and that your distinction between supremacist nationalism and patriotic nationalism is superficial at best an non-existent at worst. Sure, not all nationalists or patriots are equally toxic, but that doesn’t mean the concept of patriotism is salvageable into something positive.

You owe no allegiance to your nation, beyond what ties you culturally to the groups of people that live within it. Just like you don’t owe allegiance to your hometown beyond the same concerns. Or, you know, to the planet.

You wanting to improve any one of those scales of human organization isn’t any better or worse than the other, and the mere fact of implying any special relevance to one of them is a brand of nationalism I just don’t find justified. It’s a bit like religion. It can be well-intentioned and genuine, but in the long view of history it is undeniably an irrational, toxic force at the core of many atrocities. I will respect it and your right to participate in it, because the alternative is worse, but I won’t take part in it and I don’t think it’s a good thing.

Things, yeah. National symbology, not as much.

I’ll say that I agree with you, though. Americans do way creepier stuff. The first time I attended a US sporting event it felt exactly like being trapped in some ritual for a religion I don’t understand. They may as well have been ripping off some poor guy’s still beating heart before lowering him into lava and watching it spontaneously burst into flame, for all I cared. I genuinely didn’t know what to do with myself for the entire duration of the thing.

I’ve never been to school there, either. I imagine watching a bunch of children recite their daily indoctrinations must be creepy AF. I’m not sure if it actually happens, though. It’s never in American movies.

Yeeeah, I don’t know, it’s an interesting UX question. For language selection, sure. For country? There are plenty of reasons why you may need to select a country name and not be clear on the native spelling of its name. Plus how do you end up in a country selector list in a language you don’t understand?

I’ll say that flagging the language selector for international users is even harder than the list itself. If you don’t have an icon for it in particular. You can make the name cycle, but depending on where it’s at it can be distracting or impractical. Accidentally changing the language to Hungarian (which may as well be an alien language, for how unrecognizeable its roots are if you don’t speak it) was one of the few times I ended up having to delete a config file just to be able to use a piece of software again because I just could not find the lanuage selector after that.

Eh… why would including English help?

Ideally you keep each language in their own language so it can be recognized by native speakers. Flags help. Adding English to the native name… does not.

And of course if you’re selecting a country, not a language, then it makes sense for the country list to be in the language you have selected. Why would you not know the names of countries in the language you chose for the interface? As somebody points out below, those are not language names in the screenshot.

OK, so it’s just nationalism, then.

I have a real problem trying to wrap my head around where you’re drawing that line. Is the problem that “patriots” honestly believe they’re making things better? Because it seems to me that the difference that leaves between a nationalist and a patriot is whether you agree with them.

From the side of the victors it’s easy to see slightly morally flawed patriots where, had things gone the other way, people would see nationalist zealots.

I’m also surprised at you bringing up left and right divides. There are plenty of violent nationalists across the spectrum. I mean, it’s definitely true that traditional leftists were internationalists (hell, left-wing movements organized in “internationals” and that’s also the name of their anthem). So historically yeah, right wingers are more patriotic/nationalistic, but there’s no shortage of left wing nationalists, either.

I don’t know, man, I struggle to share your very US-centric view, but also to see how anywhere in there is a distinction between those two terms. If patriots are just nationalists you like then you start to sound a lot like one.

The etymology of the term is certainly much older than the nation-state, but also entirely disconnected from modern meanings (or ironic/facetious, which I do appreciate). There is just no original, clean, virtuous instance of “patriot” dislodged from the nationalist undertones. It simply has never existed.

The mistake you’re making is assuming that US revolutionaries weren’t nationalists or were praiseworthy or fundamentally different than British colonists. We’re going to disagree on that one. I mean, never mind that they didn’t invent the term or that their whitewashing of it was self-serving. Even if your timeline of events was true, I despise their patriotism as much as anybody else’s. US revolutionaries weren’t some ideal version of a patriot, they were nationalist independentists who happened to borrow some French revolutionary ideas about the liberal democratic state-nation organization slightly earlier than their previous administration did (and perhaps due to the first draft nature of the thing, slightly worse, too).

I won’t judge them by modern standards, but I also absolutely, entirely refuse to sacralize them or idealize them. They were what they were, and they are absolutely not the thing that’s going to give patriotism a good name.

Well, then what fatherland is the patriot beholden to?

Cause that’s what the word means.

I get it, particularly in countries where the nation state has overlapped more or less perfectly for a long time it’s hard to shed the emotional attachment, but there’s no need for it.

See, the reason I go from small to international is precisely that the nation state takes care of itself. The world has agreed that it’s the natural resting place of sovereignty and every other scale of governance or administration os derived from it. I don’t like that much. I don’t resent it, but I also don’t give it immediate precedence over any other scale of government.

A patriot may care for whatever arbitrary definition the XVIIIth century put on their identity and be well meaning enough about it. I’m not a patriot. The historical borders of what some consider a nation today have no particular relevance, beyond the fact that they happen to drive some level of administration. If anything, it’s the level where the most people decide to infringe on each other’s business just because they feel they have a right to ownership over that national identity. I have no particular interest in whitewashing any of that into some supposedly healthy version of patriotism that has very rarely existed in any way.

That’d be great if it didn’t disagree with all available evidence. For all of history patriots have been either cannon fodder or abusive tyrants. On a long enough trajectory, almost inevitably nationalists and eventually imperialists.

One could argue that, much like some flavors of political utopia, internationalism has the advantage of never having been implemented in any practical sense, so they have less of a challenge proving their positive impact, but I’ll take it anyway.

Regardless, I find that “making their country better” should be a distant second to “making the world better”, and perhaps a close third behind “making the crap you have on hand and the lives of those immediately around you better”.

Look, I am not a globalist anarchist. I believe in well structured, effective democratic governments. Maybe I was the right age to look at the EU and think that those don’t have to be held to the absurd liberal idea of the nation-state,and that wherever a collective of humans have a common interest there should be governance structured to work with other layers of organization to improve things and enforce rights within that sphere. There is nothing magical about the nation-state layer of government that makes it more spiritually attuned to identity or the needs of the people. It’s all administrative stuff as far as I’m concerned.

Yeah, well, that depends on who gained independence from whom and whether you think you’re independent now. Also on whether you’d be indepedendent from any guys who’d like to be independent from the now guys if they were to be independent.

See, political independence for a group requires that you align with the idea the group has of itself. I don’t know that I have that overlap with any particular political delineation, so I may need an organization a touch more nuanced than an independent, sovereign nation-state.

Also, gonna need some citation on the lack of creepy vibe, as mentioned above.

Over here the only similar events I can think of are related to joining the military and taking elected office. And there was significant legal arguing about the last one, to the point where opt-outs and strict limitations were added.

We have one of those, and it’d be creepy even if historically it wasn’t debatable that the event itself was for the better.

I don’t know that I agree with this.

Perhaps coming from a place where the notion of “country” and “nation” don’t overlap one to one makes it easier to see. I wouldn’t really be able to tell you what “my nation” even is, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I respect and take pride in culture in all its diversity and complexity, in democracy and in the general sense of human decency. Screw all the so-called nations trying to get me to vouch for them as a political unit, though. Political organization is for buiding roads and hospitals, not for pride.

Not being American I always found the whole thing very creepy. Like, North Korean military parade-creepy.

For the record, we don’t have anything like that where I’m from, but the closest things we do have are also very creepy. Patriotism in general is extremely not cool, honestly.

Cool.

But the pitch wasn’t “everything will be interoperable unless the company doesn’t mean it or wants to make money or we aren’t “morally aligned”, whatever that means”.

I don’t understand how you can be a “walled garden” and still feature interoperability with a set of open source platforms under a pre-established set protocol. This is not an ethical problem or a problem of ideology, those two things are mutually exclusive.

This also sounds a whole lot like it disproves skrlet13’s point on the heterogeneous Fedi where everything fits under different but overlapping bubbles. Seems to me you think Fedi has the one moral and ethical position on this.

Yeah, we’re almost there. If you buy a pre-packaged box with Home Assistant you’re most of the way there. If you look under the hood most commercial NAS options and even some routers are scraping that territory as well.

I think the way it needs to work to go mainstream is you buy some box that you plug in to your router and it just sets up a handful of (what looks to you) like web services you can access from anywhere. No more steps needed.

The biggest blockers right now are that everybody in that space is too worried giving you the appearance of control and customizability to go that hard towards end-user focus… and that for some reason we as a planet are still dragging our feet on easily accessible permanent addresses for average users and still relying on hacks and workarounds.

The tech is there, though. You could be selling home server alternatives to the could leaning into enshittification annoyance with the tech we have today. There’s just nobody trying to do an iServe because everybody is chasing that subscription money instead, and those who aren’t are FOSS nerds that want their home server stuff to look weird and custom and hard.

Yeah, that’s exactly where it comes from. And it fits just fine for people like you, doing it for a living. It’s just a bit obnoxious when us normies dabbling with what is now fairly approachable hobbyist home networking try to cosplay as that. I mean, come on, Brad, you’re not unwinding after work with more server stuff, you just have a Plex and a Pi-hole you mess around with while avoiding having actual face time with your family.

And that’s alright, by the way. I think part of why the nomenclature makes me snarky is that I actually think we’re on the cusp of this stuff being very doable by everybody at scale. People are still running small services in dedicated Raspberry Pis and buying proprietary NASs that can do a bunch of one-button self-hosting. If you gave it a good push you could start marketing self-contained home server boxes as a mainstream product, it’s just that the people doing that are more concerned with selling you a bunch of hard drives and the current batch of midcore users like me are more than happy to go on about their “homelab” and pretend they’re doing a lot more work than they actually are to keep their couple of docker containers running.

I mean, those work fine and are fast. You mean we’ll get those for cheap.

In any case, the image is about physical dimensions, and SD cards are tiny! Considering we’re comparing to a 40 MB mechanical drive, I’m gonna say the comparison is valid and they aren’t even near the bottom of the specs table.

Of course people like it when ALL the specs get better in these things, but that’s because people like simple things more than true things.