I'll write a one-off shell pipeline to inspect something on 10^5 servers - it will be sent to each of those servers and run once or a handful of times, and the results will be transmitted back and that's that. Kind of a map-reduce shell thing, for ops type tasks.

Sometimes those will actually need to process through a bunch of data unexpectedly.

Sometimes those will be run on a loop - once per second, N per minute (etc), and the results will be used to monitor a situation until a bug is fixed or a spike in load is resolved or a proper monitoring program/metric can be deployed.

Sometimes those are to investigate a pegged CPU and the amortized lower runtime across all the tasks on the CPU is noticable.

We run our machines hot and part of the reason we can do that is being in the habit of choosing lower cost (in cycles) tooling whenever we can. If i can spend a little time and effort learning a tool that saves a bunch of cpu in aggregate, its a win. When the whole company does it, we can spend a lot less on hardware than it costs in engineer time to make these decisions.

Another way of putting it is: its a type of frugality (not cheapness, just spending wisely). If you save a dollar once, its nothing. If you have a habit of saving a dollar every time the opportunity arises, it adds up quickly. By having a habit of choosing more performant tools, you're less likely to hit a case where you wish you did use more performant tools, and are practiced at it when the need arises for pure parsimony and it's less painful.

My local makerspace is building a memory lab. It's very cool. In addition to the obvious "let's get that old media that's becoming harder and harder to play and/or is degrading digitized", there's some really cool stuff you can do.

A very useful on is workshops - older folks are often the keepers of the family archive and aren't comfortable using technology at all, so teaching them not just how to use the equipment, but also safe-keep the digital product (backups, etc) is important. Additionally teaching concepts like infinite free reproduction is helpful because many older folks I've talked to stress about how to divvy up the archive among the children/grandchildren/etc, and are delighted at the idea of "everyone gets all of it", and are also delighted at the idea of "make a family archive that includes a more extended group of people and their archive combined".

Other cool things we've explored and/or are planning to explore:

* making collages and memes and digital scrapbooks for the family as a way of telling the family history/story, doubly cool because you don't have to sacrifice the only copy of a picture to do so. People feel liberated to do some really interesting things.

* having digitization be a community process by hosting regular memory-lab nights. Digitizing everything is a daunting task sometimes. There may be a lot of material. There may be a lot of context that one wants to capture with the material (labeling photos, explaining the photo, etc - I've heard some great stories from the old-timers as we digitize their photos). Not all memories are good ones... sometimes someone will get to a photo and it brings up bad memories. One woman was very glad we were there when we got to a section of her photos of her child who had died and we were able to give her a hug and let her cry and talk about it, and help her work through a difficult thing while preserving the memories.

* I've often heard tech people say "sometimes its hard to do skilled volunteer work with my tech skills...", particularly in a way that is also social and community-building. Helping in these sorts of community digitization processes is a nice way to use your skills and also bond with community members.

The US maintains over 150 elementary schools on military bases around the world.

Although it does make sense that the land of school shootings would use the children of it's military as bait.

The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.

Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.

Also, how is that relevant?

Notably 2025 was also the year that Elon started firing people and shutting down things that were in the budget, as well as several shutdowns.

Consumer routers are just Arm chips running linux, a wifi card, and a network card with a switching chip. I have a little Intel Atom box that i use for my network edge running OPNsense, and it is indistinguishable from any consumer router I've tested it against.

Its pretty safe to say that Biden didn't go start a disastrous war because Netanyahu said a nice thing about him. It also seems unlikely that Harris would have started such a war with her 2-state stance.

There's such a thing as degrees of influence. A fool who is strictly against anything Israel suggests is just as manipulable as a narcissistic moron.

And when the government uses that data to round you up? Sure maybe you aren't an immigrant... but are you in the next group they target, or the group after that?

Maybe not, but does that matter when they use an advertising profile to make your life hell before determining you're not in the problem group? Will they even bother to check? They already have been hassling and detaining citizens on similar sloppy suspicions around immigration.

Even if you're a perfect aryan and think you're safe from the current regime... will the next one have the same notion of perfect?

What about food products that can be used to excess? What about cars or AI or vacations? All these products can be harmful when misused.

Those all pass the utilitarian calculation for me, goods greater than harm.

What utility does a box of cookies have? A bar of chocolate? A can of soda? Those things are about pleasure and have serious harmful consequences if overused - just like tobacco, alcohol and drugs.

What about video games? They only have utility in pleasure and the sedentary lifestyle associated with over-playing them is extremely harmful.

Sounds to me like you have some random things you decided you don't like and want to ban ads for them, not that you've done any thinking about utility (other than as a bad attempt at rationalizing your anti-some things campaign).