It’s not bullshit. I deal with the repair and engineering side of 1/8” phone jacks and they’re fucking stupid ass miniaturized versions of designs from 70 years ago that have to maintain mechanical backwards compatibility with several profiles and conductor arrangements, literally cannot be reliably implemented in a high IP way, cost a bunch, are worse to clean than even usbc and provide a very high leverage thing to torque on your board as well as necessitate additional pcb space for the dac and its power conditioning, shielding and other stuff.

And people who like 1/8” will just buy a dongle anyway.

You need to restructure your priorities.

Or use a ca, vps and dns provider that’s hostile to the west.

It’s not a question of supporting “freedom” and if you insist that it is, I will gladly provide all those services to you for a slight markup (price of freedom!).

Hey, I think ai can be a useful tool and I use both cloud hosted and local models.

The ecological impact is god awful.

Datacenters run on fossil fuel turbines to meet demand when there isn’t enough capacity on the grid or just 24/7 because the residents of the nearby municipality said they don’t want brownouts.

Fundamentally ai datacenters transform expensive to transmit electricity into cheap to transmit data, financializing what was previously a relatively insulated commodity whose pricing and production reflect local demand into a globally traded commodity whose pricing and production reflect global demand.

If you don’t have a background in the history of industry and environment: that’s bad news for the environment (and anyone who relies on stable power rates).

Production of ai computing components requires mining rare earth minerals and phenomenal amounts of power. This is the same process with nearly the same inputs as the production of general purpose computing parts (if you leave off the increased rare earths needed to mitigate electromigration in single digit nanometer processes!) but the increased demand has already brought more fabs up to meet it meaning more use of resources and energy in production before the first kilowatt of inference is run on those chips.

Turbine blades for datacenter generators are also limited by production and are currently years out for delivery. These are components produced by advanced aerospace manufacturing shops which use massive amounts of energy to shape alloys of metals that have to be yanked out of the ground and smelted into some esoteric type of steel or aluminum first.

So even without the water concerns datacenters have tremendous impact on the environment.

But the water concerns are legitimate. Swamp chillers divert flowing water into the air where it is blown anywhere but where it would have flowed. Which is fine if you aren’t downstream of one I guess.

All this is to say: if you don’t care about the impacts you can rationalize that however you like, but they exist.

There isn’t a comparable service.

If you don’t need what mullvad is selling then there are others out there but the landscape is hard to navigate if you don’t understand what you’re there for and how to choose what you give out.