At some point, though, you have to come to terms with the power usage.
One or two modern machines could do everything a dozen shitty old ones do (even if you have to emulates some of them as VMs), and with a lot less power usage than running a dozen shitty old computers.
Ideally, you’d also first talk to the developers in charge of the project to see if your changes would be wanted in the first place.
(Or you’d start by reviewing existing bug reports and feature requests and addressing one of those.)
What I mean is, it’s generally better to not just throw code at them and hope they’ll like it. If you check first to see if they want it, you can save yourself from wasting effort on writing code that they’ll decline.
I got run over by an idiot in an SUV while riding my motorcycle.
Are we even sure that CEO was ever a real person? I think the whole thing is a made up story and that guy never even existed at all!
A big, juicy lawsuit is the reason I own my house outright and don’t have rent/mortgage payments. Which in turn means I can get by on the very little money I make on my hobbies.
So … yeah. Lawsuit for the win?
Well, the big issue with that is that all the projects you want to donate to will also have to be on that same platform. If any of them aren’t, you’ll still have to deal with those ones individually.
You got a special interest?
Make long, overly detailed youtube videos about it.
Chances are, you’ll find an audience.
If you donate even just $5 to my submarine balloon program, you can be part of the solution to this harrowing issue. Be the change you want to see in the world.
the question of whether evolutionary pressure on the timescale of human generations can keep up with our technological advancement
As long as people exist who could/would refuse it, and as long as there are enough of them to form a viable breeding population, evolution will bring the species through it.
Waiting for random beneficial mutations usually takes a long, long time. But if the beneficial mutations are already in a population, the population can adapt extremely quickly. If all the individuals without that mutation died off quickly (or at least didn’t produce offspring) then that mutation would be in basically 100% of the population within one generation. A rather smaller generation than the previous ones, sure, but they would have less competition and more room to grow. (Though, thanks to recessive genetics, you’re likely to still see individuals popping up without that beneficial mutation occasionally for a long time to come. But those throwbacks will become more and more rare as time goes on.)
That’s a vast oversimplification, though. Because it’s very unlikely that the ability to resist the temptation of ‘wireheading’ comes down to the presence or absence of a single particular gene.
Since mouse studies have already been done, it would be interesting to do it with a large, long-running experiment on an entire breeding population of mice, to see if there are any mice that are capable of surviving and reproducing under those conditions (and if so, do they show any evidence of evolving to become more resistant?)
AI “assistants” stealing slightly more data than usual… Who would have thought?
Yeah … about that…
As long as X11 still works and does what I want it to, I’ll keep using it.
(And hopefully, by the time I’m dragged to a new system, kicking and screaming the whole way, Wayland will be fully mature and complete and it will be a painless transition.)