atoav

Ahh I just created a blog post about my Ikea Helmer modification: https://atoav.com/2026/08/30/ikea-helmer-mod/

Turning the thing into something a little bit more mobile.

Situations change, asking the same question a few years later is good, not bad. Especially since getting into the EU isn't BAM you're in, but a lengthy process with many exits along the route. I am convinced if a country doesn't want to be in the EU there are many off ramps to not actually be in the EU. And be it some last minute re-negotiation of fishery regulations.

I am not so sure. I have seen similar things in the wild. Admittedly nothing thst BSD, but still clearly identifiable as generated.

As someone from the Austrian alps: Of course as the climate is warming the glaciers are collapsing. At this point thst has been observable with my own eyes during my relatively short lifespan.

That of course means the old wisdom in which places to settle is safe no longer holds. However placed like Austria or Switzerland have top notch tech and public serviced, meaning glaciers are condtantly surveiled and such risks have a much bigger chance of getting noticed here than in the relatively poor Nepalese mountain region. But that doesn't mean black swan events are always preventable.

It really hits the most kind and humble people in Nepal as I know from the stories my grandparents (both avid alpinists) told me about being there.

Huh, I am sorry my comment seemed to pushed wrong buttons, no need to get all angry here. It appears you projected some emotion or intention into my comment that simply wasn't there. I did not minimize your struggles with my comment.

Granted, out experience level may differ since I read my first book on CSS in ca 2004 as a teenager and have worked with this ever since, so I may have a biased opinion, but come on. That is really no need to become bitter. "See how your pretty website behaves"? Really? Please keep that kind of emotional pettiness out of this website.

I stand by my statement if you have understood CSS it is not hard nowadays to create simple responsive designs. I come from times where you had to center elements in five different ways for all the common browsers out there and true responsiveness was either impossible or required javascript polyfills and weird nesting of (unsemantic) HTML. This is why my sentence about semantic HTML was relevant. Today it is possible to write semantically clean HTML and style it as you need for 99% of the cases. That was not the case in the past for certain designs. Today we do not usually need to create a hundred HTML elements that carry no information and have only relevance for the design. And even if you would need it there are at least ways noe to keep the info relevant for people who have a need for clean semantic HTML, like people with screen readers. Nonetheless, the separation between the roles of HTML and CSS has gotten so much better over the past two decades.

Keep in mind, this discussion tree started out with the discussion whether it is hard to limit text to a width of 60ch. It is not. This can become hard depending on the complexity of your website and the content that mixes with that text (e.g. if you need to break out images that are wider than the text on occasion). But that was not the discussion here. If you have a raw HTML document and you simply need to limit the width of the text body, to a maximum that is dead simple. Any web-browser on any device is capable of displaying a simple HTML page with their browser default template in a way that the user sees the content.

I argued most 90s style layout patterns (e.g. header, navigation on the left, body in the center, footer at the bottom) are not hard to get right, provided you know how to use responsive units and this isn't your first responsive layout. Of course we need to consider how to deal with the width-taking elements on devices that are very narrow (this may require re-arranging or making menus foldable) — that is usually the part that requires the boldest decisions. Other devices like Landscape tablets for example usually don't require a lot of separate work other than adjusting some sizes and ensure the content fits.

If your project is some ultra-flexible thing where the displayed elements are not fixed or predictable, then this can become a hard task, but thst has nothing to so with the CSS and everything with the information it may or may not need to style correctly all at once.

Well, depends. Maybe it can go up to 900mph¹?

¹ drivers are responsible to get the car into a low earth orbit themselves and need to be familiar with the orbital maneuvers needed to accelerate the car to 900mph

main should contain the semantic content of the website, you can still make full width headers and footers and have on the side. Well and <aside> can be just where the name implies, depending on the screen width.

This is really not that hard nowadays. How to do responsive design is no black magic and can be done with only HTML and CSS.

You basically just need to wrap (no pun intended) your head around a few basics. Especially CSS grid templates combined with media queries allow you to rearrange the whole page depending on the screen width in a simple way, especially compared to how we had to do this 20 years ago.

You write your website semantically (or ensure the template produces semantic HTML) and then you write the CSS with realtime preview right there in the browser.

Really? I know people in the hardware space for whom the tariffs have been an unmitigated disaster. They had to go through a lot to not lose their customer base outside the US. I have seen many US-people with businesses swearing about that admin, especially the smaller ones.

Yes, it should be illegal. The default expectation when you buy a device should be that something as simple as a power supply can be replaced.

I could agree with you if products that fail with the regulation have to put these shortcomings front and center on every place they are marketed on and not some fine print in some manual.

The idea of regulation is to allow consumers to just buy a thing and have certain expectations met.

If you buy a piece of lettuce you should be able to eat it without owning a fucking biology lab to check it first for example.

Depends on your proficiency. As a former philosophy student I find it one of the more readable books. It still is probably hard to wrap your head around as a layperson not used to this kind of theoretical thinking.

But what it is not: Some authors use word plays, complexity and semantics to make their ideas appear more sophisticated than they are. This is not that.

It is probably better to just thermodynamically ballpark the whole thing. How much energy goes in? Some percentage of that is gonna need to be radiated out either directly as IR radiation or by pushing a heated medium out (water, air). Someone did the math on that in the construction of the data center.

It is completely understandable that it is in the interest of the public to enforce some limits on the resource use, radiation, etc on any building, be it a data center or not. And these limits ideally should take local, state-wide, national and global considerations into account.

Well many of the countries where the war crimes happened are signatories to the ICC, so that isn't gonna be the problem you think it is.

Also: the US acting as a rouge state is not a power move it is a sign of moral decay, corruption and a critical failure to uphold the principles laid out in its own (wonderfully written!) Declaration of Independence.

It is just sad to see how hollowed out these great ideals have become.

As a European I would want my goverent to summon the US embassador and declare them a persona non grata over this. Then as a next step to work on sanction the US on an EU level like the rouge state it is.

I would say depends what you're trying to do?

Is NodeJS the simple, solid and rugged way this has been done for a decade now? If not, then it is an innovation.

Second it depends on what your or your teams experience level is.

Have you ever built a serious thing with it and do you have multiple years of experience running and maintaining it? Yes? Then it is probably the boring choice.

Would you be okay with leaving the final product unmaintained for a few years and it would not be a major problem? That may be a factor as well. E.g. a static HTML website needs next to zero maintenance, while a wordpress blog may fall apart every once in a while.

How maintainable would it be if the person who built it leaves? Could someone else pick up the slack right away? Would they need some time to get up to speed? Would it be literally impossible to get up to speed?

How hard is it to get the build system setup if the devs laptop is crushed under a truck? Is it as simple as cloning the project or does it need ritual sacrifice and dark chants and incantations to even get near running?

The boring thing is one that scores all the easy points on these questions.

Turns out, it is hard to understand a potential future problem if your salary or comfort in the present depends on you not understanding it.

Climate change is pretty much the same.

  A: Let's keep handing out band aids
  
  B: I think it would be far more important to remove the razor blades from the handrails which causes the bleeding   
  
  A: I simply want to stop the bleeding, why can't we keep handing out band aids? People should not suffer
  
  B: I think we can do both as needed 
  
  A: You misunderstood me, that is what I said  
  

Ahh?

Great, you sucessfully showcased the idea that analogies can be bent around till they no longer reflect the scientifically measurable reality.

So again:

It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths athmosphere.

1. Should we create it if there is enough profit in it? Y/N

2. If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?

If your answer is Yes to (1) you are in a suicidal, planet killing cult. If your answer is No, you realize the simple fact there are limits to what can be done in a limited space. But then you have to draw a line and find a mechanism even if you don't like it from an ideological standpoint. And that is what I would be really, honestly be interested in.

Either accept it and perish or mitigate it obviously? What would you propose?

Ah yeah, the myth that a society can't walk and chew gum at the same time. Do you really belive we can't both address the root causes and install AC?

Which other things do you believe a society can't do at the same time? Taxes and waste managment? Breathing and thinking?

No. The societal impact of crypto currencies is net-negative.

I know the original idea. In 2009 I bought coffee using Bitcoin. I had to wait 30 minutes till it went through despite using a fee that back then mirrored what PayPal would take. Then I knew: OK this is not going to be used as a cash replacement.

Then it became clear that it was used as a way to pay for illegal shit on the internet, be it drugs, botnets or services of questionable ethical value. Of course also to speculate, to launder money, to blackmail, to extract ransom, to run ponzi schemes or rug pulls, which became a big driver by people who wanted to get the wealth without having to put in the legwork.

And these are still the main drivers behind crypto currencies today by a wide margin. So yes: Net-negative. Prove me wrong.

I grew up in the 90s and there was a book in climate in my shelf that talked about thousands dying today, nearly three decades back. At some point we should stop pretending this is a new and surprising danger and start treating it as the risk we willingly steered ourselves into.

If you live next to a road and every other month a car crashed through your living room wall you'd probably fix the root cause after the first time it happened. If you are clever you fixed it even before it occurs. What you would not do is only deal with the damage caused month for month and pretend there is no need to address the root cause.

The reason why many pretend our only option is handing out band aids while the blade keeps spinning, is because it is hard to imagine anything else, if your salary depends on you not addressing the problem.

It feels more and more like watching a bus driver playing chicken against a solid, immovable concrete wall. It is obvious who wins, the only question is into which directions the scrap explodes most, while the driver eyes for the ejector seat. And all the kids pretend driving into the wall is the only reasonable option.

It is possible for humanity to create unsurvivable conditions in our earths atmosphere. Should we do that if there is enough profit in it? If not, where would you draw the line and how would you set/enforce the limits?

Sure. But you have to weigh any application relative to (1) how useful it is and (2) how easy it would be to rely on a carbon-neutral alternative.

And I would argue the usefulness of bitcoin is negative from the viewpoint of a free society.

AI is to a certain degree a different story, but also there it depends what you're doing.

We live in a thin atmospheric skin around the planet, and that skin has a finite volume. If earth was the size of an apple, the atmosphere is thinner than the Apple's skin in proportion.

Pretending we can do whatever we like for infinitly long inside an finite volume is completely unhinged. The financial and political elites, who some frame as the true geniuses point to technological solutions that are always "just around the corner" for the past decades with some of them even eying to leave the planet behind entirely.

All of that while we know how to address the issue.

Yes and: doing things that fight the cause of the warming?

If you can't run one fifth of your nuclear plants, because the water levels are to low or the water temperatures too high in the rivers used to cool them, you may want to reconsider whether that is truly the best choice here¹

In the meantime my fathers solar roof allows him free AC cooling, because as it turns out AC generally needs most energy when the sun shines the most.

I am not arguing nuclear plants do not have benefits, I just argue that solar with storage may be a much better fit for powering ACs.

¹: https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/12/heatwave-and-jellyfish-a...

For as long as I remember I never had a summer this warm and this dry. And I don't even have to rely on memory alone here as this is backed by actual historic measurements all the way back since humans started to record temperatures in my countries.

Locations: Southern Austria and Northern Germany

Well that is how it can feel, but sometimes the reason you die is just because the game design sucks. E.g. the car chases in the Yakuza series are super managable when played with a mouse and a keyboard, but suck when played on a gamepad. That is mainly because of the (unadjustable) sensitivity of the gamepad and badly constructed camera angles.

Sure in the end dealing with the consequences of suboptimal game design is also just a skill issue, but I tend to play game for fun and it giving me an escape hatch for when it is just not fun makes a lot of sense.

Huh? I am a passionate programmer and I always say that code is not the hard part. And what that means is simple. Beginners in the field of programming will say things like: "Do you really understand what all this gibberish looking text means?". It is a bit like asking a sound engineer whether they really understand what all the knobs on their mixing console do.

That is not the hard part, even it may look like that to the layperson. Understanding the knobs of an audio mixer or the syntax of one or many programming languages is not the hard part. The hard part is to know when to turn which knob, by how much and why.

The good way of doing this is to ask the player if the difficulty shall be lowered temporarily just for that level of they keep dying. Then it is transparent and the choice is theirs.

This mixes several different things into one causal puddle.

Yes, keeping the remaining nuclear plants running would have reduced emissions and electricity prices somewhat. A 2024 Energy Policy study estimates the 2022/23 extension lowered German wholesale prices by about €9/MWh. That's a real effect, but nowhere remotely close to "the nuclear phase-out doubled electricity prices." The huge price spike was primarily the European gas crisis. You know, the one for which LNG terminals had been built.

Nor did Germany replace nuclear with coal. Coal generation subsequently fell to levels not seen in decades, while renewables grew substantially, so German emissions fell as well.

Attributing the nuclear exit simply to "the Greens" is rather selective history. The original exit was SPD/Greens, but after reversing it in 2010, Merkel's CDU/FDP government legislated essentially the final phase-out schedule again in 2011. So basically: every party that was at the levers of power.

You could make a perfectly reasonable argument that shutting existing nuclear before coal was bad climate policy in hindsight, because of the gas crisis. But I don't think you need to resort to the rather dubious claim that it doubled electricity prices as a singular cause.

I have seen digital audio gear that solved firmware transfer like that. You basically go to a website on your phone and it flickers the screen and you hold it in front of a photosensitive bit of the device that needs to be updated for 20 seconds and done.

If your firmware is small enough to fit that model, it isn't a bad variant. Beats downloading a file, transferring it to a USB drive, sticking that in,...