Yes, I was shocked too. But in 1949 apparently 8.6% of the country was forested; in 2022 it was 24%.

In 2005 they launched the “Greening China” initiative to plant 13 Trillion (yes Trillion with a T) trees in 10 years. They didn’t succeed but in 2021 the People’s Daily claimed 78.1bn trees planted in 40 years Link.

However - China is known for inflating statistics to suit the communist party’s own ends, and the People’s Daily is part of the country’s propaganda system. It’s probably far less than 78bn, and that figure doesn’t count replants and commerically logged trees. But it seems that whatever the figure there really has been a concerted long term reforestation effort in China.

Bizarre comment in my view - I think anyone would regard war as an issue with morality.

Trump posting that bizarre AI image of him as Jesus, referring to himself during Easter as being king like and like Jesus, and then attacking the Pope is just ridiculous.

I’m not religious but I was raised Catholic and I know that the pontiff is regarded as the supreme voice of the Catholic Church (the concept of “papal supremacy”). So for Trump to attack the Pope and JD Vance to double down is basically an attack on Catholics. And for the republicans and Trump, Christian voters are a significant part of their voter base.

Attacking the Pope may ironically play well in some other parts of his Christian base. However even outside the catholic part of his base, Trump portraying himself as a god or Jesus like character will be repugnant and very difficult to role back from.

Trump is looking very weak and irrational over Iran, then posting bizarre imagery as him as a god and attacking the Pope. I thing it’s pretty clear he is off his rocker, potentially even showing signs of advanced dementia because this is way above even his background level of crazy over the past 15 years. And Vance is looking increasingly like an idiot - defending the indefensible, doing bad jobs over things like the Iran negotiations, and going to Hungary to interfere in an election campaign.

I don’t know if Trump will make it to the end of his presidency. But regardless Vance may have hoped he was in the best position for the 2028 presidential election as Trump’s deputy. Instead I think he’s stuck trying to be loyal to Trump while Trump sets everything on fire - his base, the USA and even the American Empire.

Yeah it makes no sense; he literally posted something as bad as this:

Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP"

We don’t need a fake variant of it.

Just keep the cookies on the counter top?

They will never learn because they make Windows for Microsoft not for users. They do whatever suits them and they think will maximises profitability and their share price. They have to keep “growing” so they have to find new ways to make money.

As for the article; what shill bullshit is this?

It probably makes sense for a lot of users to have their default browser of choice open automatically at login, as most people spend the majority of their time in a web browser. Windows already automatically preloads Edge in the background by default to increase its startup performance, so it’s not a huge leap to automatically display the app itself if Windows knows you’re going to open it anyway.

No, it does not make sense to do this. Apps can be set to auto launch if users want them to. This only makes sense from the perspective of Microsoft trying to push Edge onto user so it can grow it’s market share and harvest even more data.

Yeah, could also have two Pi-Hole instances. One is network wide and block ads for everyone, and the other is the DNS the kids PCs use, set with a white list of approved sites only. You can set Pi-hole to block everything (set * as the a RegEx filter) and then add domains to the white list to be allowed through.

Groups is probably more efficient but two instances could be offer more options/nuance on how you run things.

Comics are just like soap operas - when you run for so long you have to try every permutation of every story. Including “time travel to kill mom, pose as social worker and raise barry as his own son”. Probably twice.

It does make sense for Signal as this is a free app that does not make money from advertising. It makes money from donations.

So every single message, every single user, is a cost without any ongoing revenue to pay for it. You’re right about the long run but you’d need the cash up front to build out that infrastructure in the short term.

AWS is cheap in the sense that instead of an initial outlay for hardware, you largely only pay for actual use and can scale up and down easily as a result. The cost per user is probably going to be higher than if you were to completely self host long term, but that does then mean finding many millions to build and maintain data centres all around the world. Not attractive for an organisation living hand to mouth.

However what does not make sense is being so reliant on AWS. Using other providers to add more resilience to the network would make sense.

Unfortunately this comes back to the real issue - AWS is an example of a big tech company trying to dominate a market with cheap services now for a potential benefits of a long term monopoly and raised prices in the future. They have 30% market share and already an outage by Amazon is highly disruptive. Even at 30% we’re at the point of end users feeling locked in.

I use Jellyfin as a home media server - in my set up I have it running on my desktop PC, and I use it to stream a media library to my tv.

A home media server basically just means its meant to be deployed at a small scale rather than as a platform for 1000s of people to use.

Your scenario is exactly what Jellyfin and Plex can do. If you have 5 users then you just need a host device running the server that is powerful enough to run 5 video streams at the same time. The server can transcode (where the server takes on the heavy lifting needing a more powerful CPU) or direct play (where all the server does is send the bits of the file and the end user’s device such as a phone or smart tv does the hard work of making a quality play, so a lower power server device can work).

If this is contained within your home, your home wifi or network should be fine to do this, even up to 4k if your network is good enough quality. If the 5 people are outside your home then your internet bandwidth - particularly your upload bandwidth - and your and their internet quality will be important determinant of quality of experience. It will also need more configuring but it is doable.

This doesn’t need to be expensive. A raspberry pi with storage attached would be able to run Jellyfin or Plex, and would offer a decent experience over a home network if you direct play (I.e. just serve up the files for the end users device to play). You might need something more powerful for 5 simultaneous direct play streams but it would still be in the realms of low powered cheap ARM devices.

If you want to use transcoding and hardware acceleration you’d need better hardware for 5 people to stream simultaneously. For example an intel or amd cpu, and ideally even something with a discrete graphics card. That doesn’t mean a full desktop PC - it could be an old PC or a minipc.

However most end user devices such as TVs, PCs, Phones and tablets are perfectly capable of direct playing 1080p video themselves without the server transcoding. Transcoding has lots of uses - you can change the audio or video format on the fly, or enable streaming of 4k video from a powerful device to a less powerful device - but its not essential.

Direct play is fine for most uses. The only limitation is the files on the server need to be in a format that can be played on the users device. So you may need to stick to mainstream codecs and containers; things like mp4 files and h.264/avc. You could get issues with users not being able to playback files if you have say mkv files and h. 265/hevc or vp9. Then you’d either need to install the codecs in the users device (which may not be possible in a smart tv for example) or use transcoding (so the server converts the format on the fly to something the users device can use but then needing a more powerful server)

I prefer Jellyfin as its free and open source. It has free apps for the end user for many devices including smart tvs, streaming sticks, phones, tablets and PCs. Its slightly less user friendly than plex to set up but not much. And the big benefit is your users are only exposed to what you have in your library.

Plex is slightly more user friendly but commerical. You have to pay for a licence to get the best features and even then it pushes advertising and tries to get your users to buy commercial content. Jellyfin does not do that at all.

Finally if your plan is to self host in the cloud, again this is doable but then you stray into needing to pay for a powerful enough remote computer/server, the bandwidth for all content to be served up (in addition to your existing home internet) and the potential risk of issues with privacy and even copyright infringement issues around the content you are serving. A self hosted device in your home is much more secure and private. A cloud hosted solution can be secure but youre always at risk of the host company snooping your data or having to enforce copyright laws.

Edit: the other thing to consider ia an FTP server. If you just want to share the files, its very simple to set up. What Jellyfin and Plex offer is convenience by having a nice library to organise things, and serving up the media. But direct play from a media server is not far off just downloading the file from an ftp server to your home device and playing it. But you can also download files from a Jellyfin server so I’d say its worth going the extra step and to use a dedicated media server over ftp.

This was a satirical poster; the phrasing is deliberate and it was posted on the underground as a protest against the conservatives.