Also later in time when one is making a choice for a kind of product one doesn’t usually buy, one might have forgotten their dislike for a brand due to their excessive use of advertising and yet their subconscious is still giving them a feeling of familiarity when they see that brand’s name on a product which makes it more likely that they’ll chose it over other options that don’t feel as familiar.

Most advertising nowadays is meant to affect subconscious impulses which will do their thing with no cognitive effort, whilst the position the OP holds (and which I myself try to) is conscious and requires cognitive effort to maintain.

Yeah, even cheap microcontrollers nowadays with support for clock functionality have an ultra low power mode were the only thing running is the clock crystal and the clock functionality which uses so little power that it can run for years from such a button battery.

The thing could do the same as my stupidly cheap alarm clock that has some batteries as power backup and just keep on counting time without displaying whilst mains power is down so that when mains power comes back up it still has the right time.

The extra $1 for the hardware needed for it is hardly going to matter next to the overal cost of anything but a stupidly cheap microwave.

I have a stupidly cheap microwave which I bought a few years ago (because I moved homes and the last one, a rental, included a microwave) and it has no clock.

In fact, it doesn’t even have the simplest of displays - the entire user interface is one analog rotary control for power and another for microwaving time - the latter rotating back by itself at a fixed speed - plus a bell that dings when the second control reaches the zero position.

If I want to know how long till a microwaving operation is finished I just look at the position of the second rotary control.

Sometimes simpler is better.

The definition of “crime” is pretty much controlled by a small number of people and it ain’t a crime if there’s no law against it.

Always remember that the mass murder of Jews and Roma in NAZI Germany wasn’t a crime because it was all legal. Similarly, Slavery wasn’t a crime in most of the World, and even today in many countries, such as the US some forms of it (for example using prisioners as forced labour) aren’t a crime.

We’ve been indoctrinated into in everyday speech conflate Legality with Morality (as its very useful for those who control lawmaking for the riff-raff to unthinkingly shun those deemed law-breakers and side with law-enforcers), so IMHO it’s a good idea to, once in a while, remind oneself that Laws are made by Humans, not Gods, and the reasons for Humans to make Laws as they are, are messy and the results themselves are often bad and easy to selectivelly interpret and abuse, something especially bad in ages like the one we live in when widespread political corruption is pretty much standard.

A common trope of this kind of “Press” in the UK was (no idea if still is, as I left Britain some years ago) the “many generations of the same family living on benefits (i.e social security)”, which was part to greater far-right picture they very purposefully painted of poor people as leeches.

Somebody actual went and researched it and found out that in the whole of Britain - home to over 40 million people - there was a grand total of 3 families with 3 generations living on benefits, 4 if you count the massive stippend the Royal family gets from the British state as “benefits”, though they’re filthy rich and don’t actually need it.

A common schitck of the far-right propaganda to selects a handful of people who are assholes and happen to be part of a social group said far-right wishes to slander and point them out as if they’re representative of whole group. They do this for everybody, not just immigrants and it’s not just them doing it: for example, notice how news coverage of demonstrations from some News organisations tends to focus of the handful of people destroying things rather than on the majority who are behaving peacefully, something incredibly common in pretty much the whole of the UK press, even the supposedly serious one.

It’s hilarious that China now stands for International Rule Of Law and the US stands for Piracy and Genocide.

This government has arresting people for demonstrating against that government’s active support of the mass murdering of children in Gaza, so morally speaking, putting bananas ahead of people (even poor Brits who might actually need those free bananas) is nothing in comparison.

Sometimes I suspect that making sure people suffer is their whole point.

Want to make tons of lines of code from pretty normal code?

Just unroll your fixed size for loops (i.e. convert them into multiple copies of their contents, one after the other as many times as that loop would loop).

You can actually automate it and in fact some compilers will do that when generating assembly for some microprocessor architectures (if the loops aren’t crazy big) because it increases performance in those (because the JMP instruction at the end of the loop is quite expensive).

I’m in Europe too and my experience with TOR is not quite the same.

Then again I’m in one the more peripheric bits of Europe and not surrounded by countries were people run TOR nodes, so TOR probably more bottlenecked than in a more central place in Europe.

That said, surfing behind a VPN (which I pay for) plus provides me the level of privacy which I need at the moment.

Isn’t TOR a bit too slow to watch videos in YouTube?

I’ve been getting a “You must sign on to see this content” from YouTube (refusing to play the video if I don’t) for ages when I’m behind a VPN, but if I disconnect the VPN and try again I don’t get it.

Curiously, sometimes it doesn’t happen.

I guess YouTube has a list of IP addresses of VPN exit points and will do that if it detects a connection coming from one of those, but at least for my VPN provider some exit points are not in the list.

Curiously, actual scams also go through “a speculative boom that looked like a scam in the moment”, and then they turn out to actually be an overhyped scam that doesn’t in fact change the World.

Crypto currencies are a good example.

Your “don’t throw the baby out with the bath water” statement makes a lot of sense in the early stages, when we don’t really know yet if what’s being overhyped might or not be just the beginning of something big, hence one shouldn’t just discount a tech because there’s a massive hype train on it. The thing is, this was maybe 1 or 2 years ago for things like LLMs, but by now it’s becoming obvious that it’s a dead end since the speed of improvement and cost relative to improvement ratio have become very bad.

Whilst broader Machine Learning tech is useful, as it was useful already since when it started (back in the 90s Neural Networks were already used to recognized postal codes on mail envelopes for automated sorting), this bubble was never about the broader domain of Machine Learning, it was about a handful of very specific NN architectures with massive numbers of neurons and huge training datasets (generally scrapped from the Internet), and it’s those architectures and associated approaches to try and create a machine intelligence that are turning out to not at all deliver what was promised and as they’ve already reached a point very low incremental returns, seem to be a dead-end in the quest to reach that objective. What they do deliver - an unimaginative text fluff generator - turns out to be mainly useless.

So yeah, if you’re betting on the kind of huge neural networks with huge datasets used in the subsection of ML which has been overhyped in this bubble and the kind of things they require such as lots of GPU power, you’re going to get burned because that specific Tech pathway isn’t going to deliver what was promised, ever.

Does this mean that MLs will stop being useful for things like mail sorting or other forms of image recognition? Of course not, those are completelly different applications of that broad technique which have very little to do with what people now think of as being AI and the bubble around it.

Machine Learning has a bright future, it’s just that what was pushed in this bubble wasn’t Machine Learning in general but rather very specific architectures within it - just like when the “Revolution in Transportation” which turned out to be the Segway and kind crap thus quickly fizzled didn’t destroy the entire concept of transportation, so the blowing up of the LLMs bubble isn’t going to destroy the concept of Machine Learning, but in both cases if you went all in into that specific expression a technology (or the artifacts around it, such as massive amounts GPU power for LLMs), that the broader domain will keep going one isn’t going to be much comfort to you.

In my experience in a small leftwing party were the old-generation decided as a group to pass power over to the newer generation some years ago, the kids by themselves are just manipulated by more recent propaganda instead of old propaganda (for example, the new young leadership, having grown up under Neoliberalism, saw many elements of it as “natural” and hence part of the “structure we have to work within”, rather than seeing those as just political choices like the rest) and end up fucking shit up in new ways (that party has pretty much collapsed to non-existence since) rather than being wiser than the older ones.

Beware of fetishising youth.

As I see it, you need a mix of all kind of people of all ages and all origins influencing politics, rather than just people with a very narrow range of life experiences. Also regular change is important - dishonest people using positions of power for their own ends, entrenched control of power and unchallenged groupthing becoming unquestionable dogma, are all things that get swept away by regular change.

In all fairness, I think it’s a mix of what @loonsun@sh.itjust.works wrote and those people having a much weaker moral compass, rather than them being full-blown sociopaths with no moral compass.

Or to put it in another way, even in people with a moral compass, if its a weak one, tribalism can override and even swith it off, so that even when faced with outreageous displays of what a normal person would feel is Unacceptable Evil they’ll take the side of Evil if their “tribe’s chiefs” are taking that side.

I think this justifies even more strongly your fear that this stuff spreads - a lot more people than just Sociopaths have both weak moral compasses (we live in an age were Society deems Wealth as the measure of the greatness of a person, not moral behaviour) and tribalist thinking is both more prevalent and more subtle.

Certainly that would explain how in some countries like the US there is still a majority (or at least a large minority) of people justifying and even supporting (usually by parroting “Hamas, Hamas, Hamas”) the mass murdering of Palestinian children by Israel.

It’s called being a Sociopath With No Morals.

Lots of those have been crawling out of the woodworks and taking sides entirely based on the politicians from their favored political force taking that side, showing us that they have no Principles and Morals of their own whatsoever or at least that their own inate sense of Good and Evil is so weak that even the mass murder of civilians (including thousands of babies and tens of thousands of children) is less important to them than following the leader of their political tribe.

Any half-way decent human being looks at this and judges it based on the character of the actions that are being commited, and giving that it includes purposefully murdering children (to the point of literally executing them using snipers) its so morally powerful that most people are unable to not have a reaction of revulsion, but Amoral Sociopaths have no emotional reaction to even the murder of children and hence couldn’t care less about that aspect of this situation, hence will just not understand “what’s all the fuss about it” and/or just mindlessly “follow the leader” on it since the part of a normal human being’s character that would be shouting for them to defend the victims and stop the aggressors, does not exist in such people.

If the post was about themselves, saying “I am queer” is fine IMHO (as would’ve been to say “I am straight” or imply it for example by saying “I’m a man” and “I have a wife”) as that’s about that person so sharing what they feel defines them as person is the whole point and restricting mentions of one’s sexual orientation there is at best idiotic.

Had it been on a post about something Canonical or Ubuntu, in my view mentioning one’s sexual orientation would probably not have been appropriate, mainly because it would be raising an irrelevant and (sadly, in the present day) ideologically charged subject, same as it would be inappropriate to mentioning one’s political allegiance in the same context.

All in all I hope the moderator who made that mistaken moderation action has been taught the difference and been alerted to how their own internal biases are leaking into the professional sphere, which they shouldn’t.

I see, with your clarification that does make more sense.

Frankly I would’ve rather have avoided Intel because, well, they’re Intel, but from what I saw when I looked around, the N100 was an x86 designed for that kind of use, had far more computing power than the dissapointing cheap ARM based Android TV boxes I had tried before (I’ve been using TV Boxes for since well before they were common and the last one was so old that it couldn’t handle newer media anymore, so I started looking around and first tried replacing with with a cheap Android TV box) and I could get a Mini-PC for roughly the same price as a good Android TV box for making my own thing fully under my control (i.e. Linux with my chosen media player and services, rather than a closed Android riddled with bloatware), so I went for it and am happy with the result.

As for desktop environment, in practice the thing just runs Kodi all the time as the frontend, hence is perfect for controlling with a remote, like the one I linked in my original post. Any linux style kind of management I do remotelly from another computers, either from the command line via SSH or via web interfaces. In practice whilst I do have a keyboard and mouse connected to it, they’re very rarelly used.

I later found out that using LibreELEC (a whole Linux distro meant specifically for use as a TV box were Kodi is the frontend) would probably have been an optimal choice for a TV box rather than starting from a light ubuntu variant and customizing it myself, plus LibreELEC would’ve worked just as well on an ARM based SBC (something like an Orange Pi 3) which would’ve been cheaper and would’ve used even less power. That said, I had intended from he start to hang more services from that box (for example, I wanted to replace the NAS “solution” I had in place using my router, which only supported SMBv1) so starting from a more generic Linux distro probably made more sense that using a TV Box specific light distro.

The thing is a bit of a Frankenstein monster on the inside but doesn’t at all look like it when used in my living room to play media on the TV.

If the thing is not meant to use as a Desktop, why load it with heavier applications that aren’t delivering anything useful?

No matter how efficient a core is at most tasks, it can’t beat the power savings of not actually running needless code.

My homemade TV Box isn’t running a lightweight desktop because I had to “limit myself”, it’s running one because I’m not losing anything by not having that which I don’t use and if that even just saves a few Watts a week, it still means I’m better off, which is satisfying as I like to design my systems to be efficient.

For fancy Linux Desktop things I have an actual Desktop PC with Linux - the homemade TV Box on my living room is only supposed to let me watch stuff on TV whilst I sit on my sofa.

Further, there are more than one form of efficiency - stuff like the N100 (and even more, the ARM stuff) are designed for power consumption efficiency, whilst desktop CPUs are designed for ops-per-cycle efficiency, which are not at all the same thing: being capable of doing more operations per cycle doesn’t mean something will consume less power in doing so (in fact, generally in Engineering if you optimize in one axis you lose in another) it just means it can reach the end of the task in fewer cycles.

For a device that during peak use still runs at around 10% CPU usage, having the ability to do things a little faster doesn’t really add any value.

Even the series 4000 Zen2 being more optimized for power consumption is only in the context of desktop computers, a whole different world from what the N100 (and even more things like ARM7) were designed to operate in, which is why the former has a TDP of 140W and the latter of 15W (and the ARMs are around 6W). Sure the TDP is a maximum and hence not a precise metric for a specific use case such as using something as a TV Box, but it’s a pretty good indication of how much a core was optimized for power consumption, and 15W vs 140W is a pretty massive distance to expect that any error in using TDP to estimate how the power consumption of those two in everyday use as a TV Box compares would mean that the CPU with 140W TDP consumes less than the one with 15W.

PS: All that said, if the use case was “selfhosting” rather than “TV Box (with a handful of lightweight services on the side)”, you suggestion makes more sense, IMHO.

Also, in my experience of trying Android boxes first and ending up with a Mini-PC with Linux, the Android boxes which are cheaper than basic Mini-PCs like the one with an N100 that I have, are underpowered, and the one’s which aren’t underpowered cost about the same as the Mini-PC.

Further, you can install all manner of services running on the background on the Linux machine: mine works as TV Box with Kodi as the frontend that’s displayed on my TV, but it’s also working as my home NAS and runs a bittorrent server with a web interface on top of an always on VPN, all of which uses very little of its computing power. I manage the “linuxy” stuff remotely via web-interfaces and SSH whilst in the living room were it is I actually have a remote for it and use it just like a regular TV Box.

This in addition to as you pointed out the Android stuff being locked down and often bloated.

I really would advise people against an Android TV box, but if one really wants the lower consumption of those (they do consume half as much power as my Mini-PC, with TDPs around 8W or less to the Mini-PC’s 15W) best get an SBC and a box for it, and then install Libreelec on it or a full linux distro (often the manufacturers have a Linux distro for those and there’s always Armbian),

I use one of these which I got from AliExpress along with one of these, though of course it will work fine with mouse and keyboard.

(Please note that I haven’t tested it specifically with a bluetooth keyboard and mouse).

I installed Lubuntu on it because it’s a lighter distro (it will work fine with the full desktop Linux distros, but why waste computing power on fancy window managers for something that’s just a TV Box that’s always showing Kodi) and have it always turned on (the TDP of this is pretty low) with Kodi as interface and its runs perfectly.

It’s sitting on my living room under the TV.

It’s probably a little overpowered, but that means its fan almost never turns on (it’s pretty quiet when it does, but silence is better), so I’m also running a bittorrent server on it with an always on VPN, plus it’s my NAS. There’s room for more if I wanted.

I don’t really understand people advising the more powerful Mini-PCs: they’re way overpowered for the job hence needlessly expensive plus the TDP of their processors is way more than the N100 in this one hence it both consumes more and is a lot less quiet because the fan has to be bigger and running a lot more often to cool that hotter processor down.

PS: Also the downside of using old PCs for this as some recommend is their higher power consumption, even for notebooks, plus they generally don’t really look like a nice TV-Box to have in your living room, which this one does. If you’re going to run it all the time, a low TDP mini-pc will probably quickly pay itself over using an old desktop, longer if versus an old notebook.