I’m sure buying them is generally easier, this being the United States Of America.

It’s really down to fitting the machine to one’s Requirements, present and forecasted ones.

So my home server is just a N100 Mini PC because it’s just a TV Media Box on my living room that doubles as home NAS and Torrent server with a dedicated VPN connection, for which an N100 with not especially large or fast memory and a decent-sized SSD, is more than powerful enough since the CPU heavy stuff - video decoding - is done in dedicated silicon inside the N100 so doesn’t really run on the CPU cores, whilst the other functionality is mainly bottlenecked by network speeds and my network is just Gigabit Ethernet.

If I expected heavier CPU loads I would have gone with a different CPU (plus associated elements such as motherboard and memory) whilst if I wanted to run the heavier AI stuff (such as image generation) it would’ve been a Desktop PC with a dedicated Graphics Card with lots of video memory.

As it is, my games PC doubles as Image generation machine and also works fine if I want play with VMs or Databases since that’s running Linux and is a lot more powerful in almost every way (curiously, not disk speed since it’s a bit old with upgraded parts, so it’s still using SATA and does not support M.2 disks on PCIe) than that Mini PC.

A machine on my living room is supposed to be quiet (so, no loud fans, hence low power consumption), so I was hardly going to over-dimension that living room TV Box / Server just to once in a while I could play with heavy stuff in it, given that I already have a different and much more powerful Linux machine at home that I can use for that, hence why I partitioned my needs this way and can have an always ON server that just tops at 20W (though generally it uses less than half that power).

PS: Also keep in mind that merely running a database isn’t by itself any kind of heavy load (even for heavy stuff like Oracle, much less mySQL or PostgresSQL), it’s what uses it that dictates the load, so even running a DB there is not an issue unless I’m doing tons of massive non-indexed queries against it (or huge dataset indexed ones, since non-indexed ones on huge datasets end up disk bound unless you have insane amounts of memory) or a similar pattern of usage.

Even better: traveling at light speed means that from their point of view it takes zero time to get there.

Sadly, for a few years now I’ve had TDP as one of the main criteria when buying parts for my machines, so there really isn’t enough waste heat from my machines to even just keep a room warm in Winter by playing heavy 3D games (the worst machine tops at around 180W with 3D and CPU heavy games - so basically the same heating as a really bright incandescent light bulb - whilst my home server uses about 20W at 100%)

On the other hand what I save in power consumption on my machines can be used on a dedicated heating solution that’s ON only when I need it rather than the whole year.

The expression “back to baseline” comes from Science and Engineering and literally means that something has gone back to the previous average flat level (for example: “the power line noise level spiked when your turned the machine on but is now back to baseline”)

Edit: not average, but actually specifically the original flat level below which things would not fall. Sorry, it’s kinda hard to explain in words but very easy to point out in a graph or a scope were it’s just this flat line to which things always return.

That expression makes sense if you’re talking about the rate of growth itself (i.e. the Lemmy rate of growth spiked at the time of the Reddit changes and eventually went back to baseline, since Lemmy is not growing any faster now than before the Reddit changes) but it doesn’t make sense if you’re talking about user numbers since the number of Lemmy users grew a lot with the Reddit changes and never went back to the average before them, not even close.

Your original post is not clear on which of those things you’re talking about when you wrote “back to baseline” and your subsequent posts are mainly talking about user numbers, giving the idea that that’s what your “back to baseline” is refering to, in which case you’re using that expression incorrectly.

I’ve lived in The Netherlands and they’re “complicated” if you’re used to, for example, English-style of politeness or even Mediterranean-style exuberance.

They tend to be very direct, objective-oriented and seemingly cold/closed towards strangers (they open up more with friends and family), so for example if you’re in a work environment and one person’s trying to do things in broken Dutch is hindering the actual accomplishment of the work objectives (for example, in a work meeting), that will probably be pointed out to them, though I’ve never seen it done so rudelly.

They also tend to be pretty proud of their English-language speaking abilities and when you’re just learning Dutch and try to speak to them in it, often switch to English when they spot (from the accent) that somebody comes from an English-speaking country (so for me, who am Portuguese, they didn’t tend to do it and I could just silently ignore it when they did because they couldn’t be sure I actually knew English, but I had friends and colleagues over there from Britain, US and Australia who constantly got that and for whom it was a lot harder to learn the local language), though I don’t think that applies in your example.

It bet that happenned in a professional environment or some kind of professional situation.

That said, that specific telling off would be considered rude even in Dutch terms: if a person’s attempts at using Dutch are hindering doing the work, one is supposed to tell them that as the reason to switch to English (say, “other people are waiting behind you in the queue” or “we don’t have time to do this meeting in Dutch”, though one will probably not get a “I’m sorry but” or “I’m afraid that” or other such decorations to soften the blow which you would get in most other countries. In that quote of yours the other person making it about themselves “I’m not your Dutch teacher” and just bossing the other person “we will”(!), would be considered rude even by Dutch standards IMHO.

Personally (and note that I lived over 8 years in the Netherlands and do speak the language), had somebody told me off like that my reaction would probably be to not give a shit and carry on speaking Dutch since that person made it about themselves and I’m just as entitled to do it the way I see fit as they are to do it their way and I very much suspect (can’t be totally sure) this reaction comes from that part of me that are the elements of the Dutch mindset I’ve taken in from having lived there so long (certainly the whole “I’m just as entitled to my preferences as you to yours” feels very Dutch).

During the period when I was starting to learn Dutch on various occasions the other person switched to English (probably because my Dutch was really bad or I was having trouble following them) and I just kept on speaking Dutch, and I think I was once or twice told off for trying to say something complex with my really broken Dutch whilst buying something and I was holding the queue, but they simply pointed out I was holding the queue.

It’s funny that I’ve never had bad experiences with the French and most of my visits to France were to Paris.

Then again I do speak French and try and take advantage of being over there to exercise my language knowledge in it as much as I can.

In my experience people almost everywhere (well, not in English-speaking countries, probably because English is the present day lingua franca so it’s kinda expected that you can speak it) generally appreciate you trying to speak their language even if you’re pretty bad at it and just trying to learn the local “good day”, " goodbye" and “thank you” will get you a lot of goodwill.

What I find delicious is that he is implicitly stating that being on any Meta platform is not virtuous.

At some point in my career I worked in Investment Banking making custom software directly for people like Traders (so in the are of IT in that industry that’s called the Front Office)

Traders have almost no free time, hence no time for social niceties, plus they’re “the business” which is the reason for Front Office IT to exist and for whom it works, so eventually you just have to figure out their point of view and that the only way you can do the part of your work that requires interacting with them (to figure out what they need or letting them know what’s now available for them to use) is to use straightforward objective-oriented talks like that.

It was actually quite a learning experience for me as a techie to learn how to interact with time constrained people who aren’t going to change to suit you, in a way that best does what’s needed for both.