I'd wager the most efficient way would be to sell your electronics and donate the proceeds to a local charity that does this at scale and knows its way around local needs and regulations.
When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to still be happening to a small degree. It's a nice sentiment and I'm sure it makes people feel like they're making a difference, but economically it makes no sense. The cost of processing and shipping second-hand items is probably not much lower than just giving people money to buy locally, and supporting local businesses while you're at it.
Sort of unrelated, but the funny thing was these donations were often distributed by American missionaries who were using them as a pretext to hand out bibles (or rather just the New Testament). In Moldova, which by some metrics is the most Christian country on the planet after the Vatican. And the bibles were usually in English, a language almost none of us spoke.
Not to say that's necessarily the case for Uganda, but if the OP blog is any indication, they could have bought several second hand laptops for what it cost to ship one.
The lowest price for a working second hand laptop in Uganda is about half a million ugandan shillings, which is about USD130. That gets you a 10 year old second hand model with minimum specs. If you want anything decent, expect to pay at least double. The difficulty of importing and the import taxes are at least part of the reason. In hindsight, sending the money would have saved a lot of trouble, but it would not have gotten him a better laptop than the one he received.
But otherwise you are right. Not only is it not economical, a lot of stuff that is sent to Africa is junk, and that's exactly the reason why Uganda generally does not allow importing of second hand products. On the other hand, i believe second hand imports are the only way to make laptops available at that price range. I don't know how that works though. Maybe they make exceptions for importers that they verify are not importing junk?
Thank you for the answer - I think one the biggest trap is to bring more problem than solution. I am afraid that a some laptops or smartphone that I gave a second life will have almost no value on the second hand market.
I will keep offering them locally on market place or charity shops
Thank you for you insight - Probably best is to act locally and or use charity association to be more efficient for other countries.
It is sad sometime some people use charity or assiociation to push things that makes the work of the good one even more difficult
The article is about AI companies using the Internet Archive to source training data, not about people using it to avoid paywalls. AI companies don't care that the data is one week old.
If you read a book and then retell it to your friend pretending you came up with it, it is plagiarism. If you write down the book almost word-for-word [0] and send it to your friend, it is stealing.
Solar panels may not be everyone's cup of tea, but they're fine, you get used to them. I think windmills look cool as shit. But then I think cybertrucks are one of the ugliest things created by man, so I guess the point is we each have our own taste.
What energy installation improves the landscape? Do oil wells look nicer? If I had a choice of minimal impact on the beauty of the landscape, I'd choose solar and wind.
Great that you like your car, windmills and solar panels are also functional and fucking cool, so I don't know why you've bought up them being ugly. You're happy to drive an ugly car, but draw the line at looking at ugly roofs?
You're mixing up arguments. I don't know or care if solar makes financial sense for you, it does for many people. I was only addressing the fact that you seem inconsistent on whether something deserves to exist based on whether you think it looks nice. You have the right to drive a huge car that many people find unappealing, but windmills are useless because you don't like looking at them, despite them producing a third of the UK's energy?
I'm not fixated on the cybertruck, you bought it up unprompted. Though I do find it uglier than most cars, I think all of those enormous American "trucks" are an eyesore, and I hope to never see one in person.
I said I use solar, just think the panels are ugly on a roof. That's subjective also, it's not the reason I don't have them, cost is.
Windmills are useless because of the amount of maintenance, the resources/carbon used to make them, lack of recyclability (huge blade graveyards), and most importantly, it's not a base load. Them being ugly is just the cherry on top.
They are useless when you could just use nuclear.
Yeah you keep wanting to bring it back up though, it wasn't unprompted, the GP mentioned EV and range. I was giving a duality example of owning both vehicle types. You focused on the CT for some odd reason. As did another person.
By that logic water can never be wasted, it all stays on Earth and eventually comes down somewhere.
Of course water use above replenishment rates is bad, it doesn't magically rain down in the same spot and all the underground water tables get full again. They deplete, meaning existing consumers have to dig deeper or just go without water. Even ancient peoples knew that if you take too much water from a well, it will dry out.
I imagine you would see the point in measuring how much water data centres use when one opens near you, and you can't flush your toilet any more.
The blog compares the cost of running Gemma4 31b, which on OpenRouter is offered by small no-name inference providers, not by frontier AI companies. It seems like a fair comparison to me.
LLM generation is bottlenecked by RAM bandwidth and latency. You can get almost linear scaling by evaluating more prompts in parallel, because the GPU has nothing to for the relative eternity it takes to read all of the weights from DRAM for every layer for every token.
On Apple Silicon you can get 4x-8x more tokens per second if you run more queries in parallel (as long as your inference server supports it, and has enough spare RAM for more KV caches).
When inference is done at datacenter scales, when you distribute generation across multiple GPUs and have kernels carefully tuned to specific hardware, the compute vs DRAM bandwidth speed ratio gets absurd like 200:1. That's why everyone gives you batch inference at a steep discount.
Interestingly if you look at the cost of Gemma3 (this is 12 months old, but demonstrates the authors point) on Vertex AI versus Gemini 2.5 pro, the cost per million tokens WAS very similar.
I think that battle is lost. RSS is already terminology the internet is slowly forgetting, being pedantic and insisting some RSS feeds should actually be called Atom feeds will only accelerate that.
They’re feeds. That’s an adequate term and the best one to use. Adding RSS may gain familiarity, but it also loses accuracy. There was no good reason to alter the title.
If I saw a headline saying "YouTube, your feeds are broken", I would think the post is about YouTube's algorithmic feeds. Search for "youtube feed", and you'll see that all the results are about that.
- Devil May Cry 5: released March 2019, Denuvo removed February 2020
- Forspoken: released January 2023, Denuvo removed July 2023
- Final Fantasy XVI: released September 2024, Denuvo removed March 2024
- Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster: released September 2024, Denuvo removed September 2025
These are just a few examples, there are many more. I can't say whether it was removed because the contract ran out or another reason, but, as I said, Denuvo demonstrably is often removed 6–12 months after PC release.
I said Denuvo is "often" removed 6–12 months after release. Often means many times, frequently. I have given you examples that this has happened many times, so I'm satisfied with the wording I used.
You said it "usually" lasts 2–4 years. Usually means most of the time. What I said is not incompatible with what you said, but in any case, you've presented no data or evidence that Denuvo is kept for 2+ years most of the time.
This isn't a good faith argument. You made a claim that has now been shown to be false, and now you're trying to reverse the burden of proof for your claim.
Whatever the pedantic meaning of "often" is in the context of this conversation, one thing is clear, your statement that Denuvo switched to a subscription service is entirely unsubstantiated. If you have evidence to back up your claim then the burden is squarely on you at this point to provide it.
No because here are 4 games from the last 5 years which where removed after ~6 months which means it is often removed before that time.
My rebuttal:
That's 4 games in 5 years from well over 150 denuvo games since 2020. Simple math should tell you that below 3% is not "often".
But somehow that means my claim is false...
It is well known that denuvo DRM is a SaaS subscription software for many years. I'm not gonna entertain your tantrum further for something you can trivially look up and should already know if you where knowledgeable enough to actually discuss the topic.
When I was a kid in Moldova a couple of decades ago, we had a lot of Americans donating their old stuff (electronics, clothes, shoes, even furniture) thinking they're being super helpful. Just had a quick search and it seems to still be happening to a small degree. It's a nice sentiment and I'm sure it makes people feel like they're making a difference, but economically it makes no sense. The cost of processing and shipping second-hand items is probably not much lower than just giving people money to buy locally, and supporting local businesses while you're at it.
Sort of unrelated, but the funny thing was these donations were often distributed by American missionaries who were using them as a pretext to hand out bibles (or rather just the New Testament). In Moldova, which by some metrics is the most Christian country on the planet after the Vatican. And the bibles were usually in English, a language almost none of us spoke.
Not to say that's necessarily the case for Uganda, but if the OP blog is any indication, they could have bought several second hand laptops for what it cost to ship one.
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