What’s the point of spending a day compressing something that I only need to watch once?
If I pop into the public library and start a ripping process using Handbrake, the library will close for the day before the job is complete for a single title. I could check-out the media, but there are trade-offs:
Indeed, I really meant tools that have some cloud interaction but give us asynchronous autonomy from the cloud.
Of course there are also scenarios that normally use the could but can be made fully offline. E.g. Argos Translate. If you use a web-based translator like Google Translate or Yandex Translate, you are not only exposed to the dependency of having a WAN when you need to translate, but you give up privacy. Argos Translate empowers you to translate text without cloud dependency while also getting sensible level of privacy. Or in the case of Google Maps vs. OSMand, you have the privacy of not sharing your location and also the robustness of not being dependant on a functioning uplink.
Both scenarios (fully offline apps and periodic syncing of msgs) are about power and control. If all your content is sitting on someone else’s server, you are disempowered because they can boot you at any moment, alter your content, or they can pull the plug on their server spontaneously without warning (this has happened to me many times). They can limit your searching capability too. A natural artifact of offline consumption is that you have your own copy of the data.
if it aint broke dont fix it
It’s broke from where I’m sitting. Many times Mastodon and Lemmy servers went offline out of the pure blue and all my msgs were mostly gone, apart from what got cached on other hosts which is tedious and non-trivial to track down. It’s technically broken security in the form of data loss/loss of availability.
I have nothing for these use cases, off the top of my head:
You just wrote your response using an app that’s dysfunctional offline. You had to be online.
Perhaps before your time, Usenet was the way to do forums. Gnus (an emacs mode) was good for this. Gnus would fetch everything to my specification and store a local copy. It served as an offline newsreader. I could search my local archive of messages and the search was not constrained to a specific tool (e.g. grep would work, but gnus was better). I could configure it to grab all headers for new msgs in a particular newsgroup, or full payloads. Then when disconnected it was possible to read posts. I never tested replies because I had other complexities in play (mixmaster), but it was likely possible to compose a reply and sync/upload it later when online. The UX was similar to how mailing lists work.
None of that is possible with Lemmy. It’s theoretically possible given the API, but the tools don’t exist for that.
Offline workflows were designed to accommodate WAN access interruptions, but an unforeseen benefit was control. Having your own copy naturally gives you a bit of control and censorship resilience.
(update) Makes no sense that I have to be online to read something I previously wrote. I sometimes post some useful bit of information but there are only so many notes I can keep organised. Then I later need to recall (e.g. what was that legal statute that I cited for situation X?) If I wrote it into a Lemmy post, I have to be online to find it again. The search tool might be too limited to search the way I need to.. and that assumes the host I wrote it on is even still online.
Did you ever find an answer on this?
Lately I’ve seen lots of external PCI-E slots that attach to a USB 3 cable, and they’re quite cheap. Theoretically you could add an external graphics card that way, but I have not tried it. Someone told me the heat that would bring to my USB 3 expresscard would risk damage. I think these external PCI-E slots are intended to be attached to a desktop so a cryptocurrency miner can use the GPU.
Worth noting that some countries adjust to the reduced demand for postal service by reducing the number of delivery days. Belgium did this, where they only deliver standard class letters a couple times per week. Priority class gets better treatment.
In the US, Trump is trying to fuck with USPS. He wants to privatize it. Funny thing is, it’s the (Trump supporting) rural areas that would be fucked over the most by privatization. Since he prioritizes his voters above ethical people, he’s struggling with cognitive dissonance.
Well it’s still the same problem. I mean, it’s likely piracy to copy the public lib’s disc to begin with, even if just for a moment. From there, if I want to share it w/others I still need to be able to exit the library with the data before they close. So it’d still be a matter of transcoding as a distinctly separate step.