570
‘The tyranny of apps’: those without smartphones are unfairly penalised, say campaigners
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
570 points (98.5% liked)
Technology
63082 readers
4029 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't mind the whole online menu thing. It's probably an environmental net positive, but it's bs if they don't have ANY physical copies for those who can't or don't want to for whatever reason.
If they wanted me to install something, though, that'd be a 100% instant nope.
I mean I simply refuse to as QR code phishing is a thing
You might enjoy SecScannerQR then. It makes it easier to vet QR codes by giving an option to search for the URL instead of going there directly.
https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.t_dankworth.secscanqr/
Ooh. Now do iOS.
Ew
An online menu requires power to be used (on people's phones and the server). Is that really a minor contribution in comparison to printing paper and maybe laminating it?
Considering your average printer is a piece of shit that needs to be replaced quite often, yes, using a website is probably more energy efficient.
That and those servers are going to be running anyway. Powering a simple restaurant website is a grain of sand on the beach of internet usage.
Yeah, exactly. If you're worried about the power draw to host a few hundred KB PDF file, you probably shouldn't be using Lemmy, because scrolling through your feed probably uses 100x that in energy costs.
You have to remember that the shared hosting or aws, or wherever is going to be cheapest to host a simple website is also going to be very power efficient. Wasting power is just throwing away free money, and if there's one thing corporations don't do, it's throw away free money.
Most companies will be using laser printers, some of which may outlive me. Toner is cheap and lasts an age.
Inkjet printers are cheap for a reason. They’re a scam.
This person has never seen the power bill for running a high-availability server with several failovers once in their lives.
In fairness neither have I - though I suspect it's not as insignificant as others have claimed.
It's not insignificant at all. Servers are beefy and take more power than a standard PC... a lot more. Further, failover servers mean you have to have exact copies of the same server up and available, which means you're doubling, tripling, quadrupling power demands. Finally, you also have to have Uninterruptible Power Supplies, those take an amount of power as well.
It's a huge power draw. I know because I have a bunch of low-power devices runnig 24/7 as microservices and it still increase my power bill and use by a lot. I regularly get letters from the power company about how I'm using like 3x the power of the average person in my type of unit.
I'm also using a lot of self hosted things but have never received any of those.
Where do you reside generally where they're sending them because it ain't a thing here in the UK?
US, west coast.
It's not meant to make a person feel attacked as much as gently nudging them to use less power.
Pretty sure its even automated.
I don't think I'd feel "attacked" but more impressed that I came to light if they sent me them very much like a naughty "copyright warning" and would send it back with a brick in it.
Cheers!
I had not considered that an uninterruptible power supply would be consuming power after charging. I suppose no electronics are 100% efficient at what they do.
I've been playing with a Proxmox server on an ITX system for local services and rare game hosting for friends. I'd love something low power I could have on all the time.