Notices by Nemo_bis 🌈 (nemobis@mamot.fr)

Are retaliatory #EU #tariffs on digital services possible? Do you just have to call them by another name?

Reading up on GATS.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Agreement_on_Trade_in_Services

«Estimates for ad valorem tariff equivalents of services trade restrictions for cross-border trade [...] ranging as high as 2000% when trade flows are relatively inelastic, as opposed to between 20% and 300% in most other sectors.»

https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/reports/2017/04/services-trade-costs_3781532c/dc607ce6-en.pdf

"GATS the way"

https://esil-sedi.eu/esil-reflection-gats-the-way-i-like-it-wto-law-review-of-eu-legality-and-fundamental-rights/

Looks like tariffs on services are possible and are being considered, together with a bunch of other options.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-tariffs-counter-strike-big-tech-us-banks-donald-trump/

Big Tech oligopolies are largely parasitical. If you slapped a 100 % tariff on them, replacing them would be painful but possibly not all that inflationary. (Compared to, say, rebuilding a car manufacturing supply chain from scratch.) A 30 % price increase for Office365 was apparently enough to make millions to switch to LibreOffice! Try 300 % and see.

@lxo Fair enough. I treat captchas like an addictive drug: I follow #HarmReduction principles.

@lxo Truly privacy-respecting #micropayments could open many possibilities, yes. The #digitalEuro plans are interesting too, in this regard.
https://mamot.fr/@nemobis/111951626495391352

@lxo Captchas are always waste (compared to the user's task at hand). The question is whether this kind of captcha is more wasteful than the unfortunately more common ones. (The hypothetical benefits produced for datasets of proprietary captcha-makers are not verifiable and would only accrue to shareholders; they need not be counted.)

@lxo It's not like currency, precisely because it can't be accumulated. Timeless accumulation is the problem with currency; without it, a number of problems vanish.

Anyway, we've still not established that any significant waste exists. That's not a philosophical question but something that a power meter can determine.

@lxo "playing the video is supposed to be useful to the user, whereas the proof of work [...]"

I don't really see the qualitative difference here. When I play the video or audio there are parts of the decoding that are redundant for me, for example the video may be too high resolution or contain a padding intro/outro I'm not interested in or audio frequencies I can't here.

"there has to be a better way"

Maybe. I don't run an Invidious instance so I don't know. On wikis, QueryCaptcha works.

@lxo It is sad, but we have had captchas forever. The skills to solve captchas are unevenly distributed. A PoW captcha only asks you to spend some electricity, which is a commodity more evenly distributed (among those who already have a browser and are using it for compute-intensive purposes like video). I have not measured how much additional electricity is consumed by visiting this sort of captcha, but I expect it is negligible compare to the playing of the video.

@lxo Yes it's unfortunate, but I mostly use it to share links. Does mpv/yt-dlp <URL> work for you?

Is there a way to make mCaptcha work with LibreJS?

@fijxu Thank you so much for using a proof-of-work #captcha https://nadeko.net/announcements/invidious-and-the-bot-problem/ instead of centralised proprietary mass #surveillance aka Google/CloudFlare!

You're a hero.

#Invidious #Anubis

@Amgine How long do the USA last without Canadian oil?
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=62664
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(United_States)

@jonny Let's solve the problem of the centralised expensive database by moving it to an even more expensive database!

#FediMeta

Always a good sign when I'm laying down 20 m ethernet cables at home in order to mirror more stuff from the internet. (Not.)

@edsu Here you go.

The real reason is that impulse buying this little cutie of a #Libreboot 9020 SFF forces me to find some use for it.

@edsu *Maybe* it qualifies as old hardware reuse because the product line was being retired and it could have gone to trash, but not sure. I just had to finally buy something from @libreleah after recommending their services to all my friends for years. :P

@tml The uber-mythical night train to Lecce! Nice that it runs once again (it used to be an Espresso). Here's the soundtrack appropriate for the trip: Giovanna Marini, "I treni per Reggio Calabria" (different side, same story).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeVmCIkrz2Y

@douginamug Oh no, new rabbit hole. :) You say "lend" but I see no mention of a legal structure here, how does it work? I guess I'll ask them. Thanks for sharing!

@hexa Is "fair to a fault" an euphemism for "engages in extreme bothsideism for sport"?

@edsu Putin called it last month! "Sanctions fuel tech jump" https://tass.com/economy/1885325

@davidgerard "It was the worst trading day in five years": I wish, but they reduced losses by closing time (S&P closed at minus 100 points vs. 200 earlier in the day).

If we talk about biggest point losses, both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had worse days on 2024-07-24, 2024-12-18; also several days of 2022 for S&P 500.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_in_the_S%26P_500_Index#Largest_closing_point_changes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_daily_changes_in_the_Nasdaq_Composite#Largest_point_changes