Tax write offs don’t really work the way people think they do. You reduce your taxable income by the amount you donate but you don’t pay 100% of your taxable income to the government.

So charity is like an inverted tax where you lose 80% of your money instead of the 20% you pay to the government.

Rich people make can make it work sometimes by donating assets that have an inflated value and otherwise don’t translate well to “income”.

Businesses operate very differently because they’re taxed on profits not income. So when you hear about businesses not paying taxes it is because they’ve cooked the books to have less “profit”.

The only one I’ve heard of working really well was 3D printing copyrighted material that is usually way overpriced. Board game pieces, figurines, etc.

Thank you for pointing that out. I’m not familiar with IPFS but I tend to agree there’s no free lunch here. People think you can wave the blockchain wand and free computing appears but there’s always costs built in somewhere.

What would an IPFS solution look like here? That’s a genuine question. I don’t have much experience with IPFS. It seems like it isn’t really used outside of blockchain applications.

They grew there

For sure, I’ll add it to the list. :)

The Lemmy server config indicates that is an optional setting to improve user privacy so requests don’t ever hit the original server from the client. Those cached files are only temporary and will be deleted after some time. So it’s not really full blown duplication.

The default setting is to only generate the thumbnails and store those locally (indefinitely?) but even that can be turned off. I checked and it appears that lemmy.world has the thumbnail generation disabled so all images from other instances just link to the original on that instance.

Are the images duplicated when shared? My understanding is that only a link to the file is replicated across servers and duplication comes from users manually uploading the same file to another server.

My website does not do any deduplication at this time.

Yeah, I wish it could be cheaper but I’m not a corporation. Instead I’m dependent on them to make a simpler product.

The target audience is certainly not developers because they can jump through the hoops to setup their own S3 + CDN or similar.

Somebody actually did make this as a joke years ago haha https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs

Thanks for reading and pointing out that typo! (I fixed it)

Jortage is a really interesting approach. It definitely helps reduce the impact of the file hosting problem but it doesn’t fully address the underlying cost issue. The cost of storing files grows every month indefinitely while donations typically don’t.

I would like to see a file hosting pool come to lemmy though. So I will look into it. :)

The files are uploaded to two separate S3 buckets. One is backed by Wasabi and the other is Backblaze. So if one fails, randomly bans my account, etc then I can switch the primary to the other and setup another mirror afterwards.

Compute is hosted by fly.io and the CDN is bunny.net

This has been said in the thread already but I want to try and boil it down a bit. Your question is about intuition vs evidence. Science used to involve a lot more intuition. Many things that the public believed to be true were just educated guesses with little evidence to back them up.

Over time we realized through research that a large number of these reasonable guesses were completely wrong. So now intuition in science has been largely limited to the hypothesis and the hypothesis is mostly worthless without evidence.

We’ve also seen in the modern day just how fucked up human intuition can be. We largely have intuition to thank for: flat earth, anti vax, snake oil, etc.

If I remember correctly the only massless particles that travel through space are photons. Photons are what make up light so to say they travel at that speed is a little redundant.

Maybe. Anybody who says no is forgetting that we still know very little about the universe. It’s possible that we’ll find a way to transmit data to other time periods.

Electrons have mass. It’s tiny but a very important distinction between them and massless particles like photons.

I too met my wife on Omegle. It was in text chat. We were both around 14 years old at the time. I don’t remember what talked about but we ended up exchanging phone numbers. We texted for years and would sometimes play video games together.

Eventually towards the end of high school I was able to fly out to visit her. I did that a few times and was totally convinced at the point I was in love. So I moved across the country to be with her after graduation.

Married and few years ago and we’re 27 now so it’s been 13 years since we met on there. :)

I don’t understand the point you’re trying to make. It seems like what you’re saying doesn’t follow the conversation logically. I think that’s why the other commenter asked if you’re ok.

Does it? I love answering questions and I answered yours