The Cyber Show's Andy and Helen Confronting 'Upgrades'
In 2020 we began publishing many videos, helped in part by the second COVID-19 lock-downs. They gave us more free time and generally time to explore new things, including IPFS.
Around 2022 I changed the machine meant to record videos and a year later "vonick" needed to have its storage device replaced (it died sort of suddenly, but it had already given warning signs and there were recent backups). After installing a newer version of Debian on that same laptop I noticed that encoding videos on it took 3-5 times longer. I could never figure out why... except the assumption that some acceleration (for codecs) was no longer available or was differently available. This meant that 'upgrading' Debian made everything a lot slower. Newer was not better.
Andy recently wrote about how "upgrades" made life harder for him, wasting many days in vain. As it turns out, that sort of moaning isn't the end of that. First it was audio, now it's video as well:
Andy and Helen seem to have just released "Guardians of the grid", dealing with energy consumption from another angle:
Grid frequency is sensitive to less that 2 percent deviations that can take down part or whole of the grid. But even batteries, which are a "shock-absorber" (capacitors in the system), are also software controlled and network connected. That's a disaster unless all the components are separated.
It comes down to greedy economics of "efficiency" because nobody wants to pay people to administrate sites or to pay close attention to systems and be in charge of them. That easy-living comes at a price.
Don't let "efficiency" be reduced to such a buzzword. For example, LLMs are the opposite of "efficiency"; the best "efficiency" is rejection of slop, even locally-available slop.
That sums up the latest from Andy and Helen. █
