c4mpute

Freedom of movement is a fundamental right in Germany. Your freedom to move the car everywhere, and without qualification is of course limited for the safety of everyone. But driving places is part of your personal freedom, which has to be weighed against somebody else's freedom to protest.

As far as the linked article says, at least some, if not all, of them were already found at similar blockades, some were also already judged guilty and fined:

https://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2023-09/letzt...

> Zehn von ihnen waren laut Münchner Polizei während einer Blockade am Freitag in Gewahrsam genommen worden.

Also, courts seem to perform some checks, there are reported cases where even repeat offenders were let go:

https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/vorbeugender-freiheitse...

> So entschied zum Beispiel das Landgericht Landshut, dass ein rund sechstägiger Präventiv-Freiheitsentzug für Klima-Aktivisten unzulässig sei, die sich 2021 auf Autobahnbrücken rund um die Internationale Automobilausstellung (IAA) in München ein paar Meter abgeseilt hatten, worauf die Polizei den Verkehr stoppte. Kernargument: Eine Wiederholungsgefahr sei nicht hinreichend erkennbar.

And there are several records of perpetrators announcing followup crimes right after having been judged. Some were even committing their next crime within a few hours: https://www.merkur.de/deutschland/kleber-aktivisten-letzte-g...

Asking to be paid fairly is of course possible and sensible. But I'm not sure that it will be successful. Fewer people working will create a huge overhang of qualified experts, at least initially, driving down prices.

Exactly. Self-driving is a far more complex problem. The car has to get it right, right here on the road, little to no margin for error.

The script-writing AI, voice AI, actor-image AI will be used to create a multitude of options, and all but one will be thrown away anyways. Perfection isn't necessary, realtime isn't necessary, and a human correcting things here and there is always still an option. Compute resources are also far less limited, it doesn't have to fit in a "car" form factor and power consumption.

I guess it won't backfire because the AI revolution will come anyways. I rather think that this strike is a last-ditch effort to contain the AI revolution and squeeze out the last bucks before the flow of money dries up.

Similarly for many disputed territories in Antarctica, with the added fun of "the south pole region is special". But of course that is a very marginal topic.

I suggest giving date and time in the form of phase/frequency references to nearby pulsars. That should guarantee stability for a few million years.

On the one hand, yes, in that one example it worked. After quite a while, during which the competition already suffered massively.

On the other hand, triple nope. E.g. the council of German GDPR enforcers declared most of Windows and Microsoft Office unfit for use in public offices and companies. https://www.wbs.legal/it-und-internet-recht/datenschutzrecht... or https://datenschutzbeauftragter-dsgvo.com/dsgvo-teil-2-micro...

But nobody cares, everyone just ignores those kinds of decisions and continues to not get fined because as especially the second link shows, "its complicated". Nobody even knows which agreements with Microsoft are actually valid for which license, software and situation. At the same time, for all the office drones, Microsoft software is just "the standard" and nobody even considers switching. It is just a complete refusal to get compliant by all the public offices, let alone private companies.

I see the difference in that "enshittification" is what the platform owner does. "Glossification" is what the users do. Of course both are closely related.

To elaborate, with an example: ebay has once been a platform to find things non-professional people would sell from their attic on the cheap, as an auction. Then professional sellers came in, first with auctions (either more expensive ones, or by using sockpuppet accounts to drive up the bid). That was glossification. ebay then of course went through enshittification, with fixed-price offers, selling preferred spots, etc. But interestingly, they currently seem to try to revert some of that, because glossification and enshittification affect their bottom line, so now non-commercial sellers get zero fees and their own classifieds' platform

Circles was a great idea. But not really good enough. I'd have liked an "ignore" circle, like banning users on other platforms, just quietly, like the shadowbans some implement on a personal feed level.

Also, Circles was the only good thing about Google+. The rest was average to bad, and the forced integration into all kinds of Google services, the forced realnames, and the lack of third-party integrations killed any kind of goodwill/benefit-of-doubt anyone might have had.

I think this is an eternal cycle. Maybe related to what has been called "enshittification", but not the same:

Users will flock to a platform, make it their own. The platform will grow. Then the advertisers, professionals, and hucksters will swoop in, do their thing, and slowly overshadow the old "normal" users. Then old users will leave, leaving a wasteland of ads and glossy shiny.

I'd like to call it "glossification".

People would no longer buy their product if it wouldn't work on Linux. The Bazillions that Nvidia earns buying shovels in the AI gold rush? All dependent on working Linux drivers because most to all of the big AI shops run Linux clusters.

> not because the end of coal and nuclear, but [...] it depended on cheap russian gas.

Those events aren't independent, they are strongly connected. Coal and nuclear have provided baseload power, with gas and renewables filling in the peaks in the demand curve (e.g. solar for the day-peak). Ending coal and nuclear has ended baseload power, so not only do you have to fill the demand curve, you also have a far more variable supply curve. The only elements in that supply curve you can control are pumped-hydro storage and gas plants. Pumped-hydro is available but rare in Germany due to topography and the green movement. Which left gas plants, strongly increasing the reliance on gas imports.

Edit: And Germany is still dependent on the goodwill and market prices of gas suppliers. It is just that the cheaper and easy-to-transport Russian pipelined gas has been replaced by overseas ship-supplied gas.

The end of coal is premature if your only other GW-scale energy source, nuclear, is being phased out at the same time, and you don't even have a replacement planned.

You can try to ignore that and insist on applying emission regulations on import, which is what the EU currently is preparing.

However, the scenario this will lead to is: Industry will still leave high-energy-price areas. If low-energy-price regions can be found within the EU, industry might go there. Otherwise industry will be off to wherever in the world is cheap and happily charge the EU carbon import duties to EU customers. The rest of the world will enjoy low-priced not-carbon-neutral products that the EU will never be able to compete with because of economies of scale.

The only viable ways out of this isn't import duties but import restrictions, i.e. outright preventing goods that are not up to EU CO_2 standards from being imported. That will lead to local CO_2-neutral industries that have to be continuously walled off, because if they are exposed to the rest of the world they will be too small and expensive. The other way is a global agreement on CO_2 standards, such that those kinds of import regulations are unnecessary.

They are falling from the Ukraine-war special-circumstances peak down to the pre-war rising slope. 30ct/kWh is still 50-100% higher than what e.g. France, Poland, or the UK (comparable in size and economy) are paying.

Btw., those aren't even really low. Heavy industry, data centers and other energy-intensive industries are migrating heavily towards 1-digit-cent-per-kWh countries, so <10ct/kWh.

Not to forget ever-rising sky-high energy prices due to a premature end of coal and nuclear, and a distinct lack of energy storage for renewables.

That's why you always do anonymous immediate full disclosure.

Nothing else is ethically viable. Nothing else protects the researcher.

In Germany the short "hecto" stands for "hectoliter", when ordering larger amounts of beer.

Stainless steel is expensive, roughly a factor of 10 compared to plain steel. The reason is that Chromium is expensive. You can use low-chromium not-so-stainless steel if you then coat it with transparent paint containing among other things, PFAS, and save a ton of money on the material.

Edit: the prototypical stainless steel is Cr/Ni 18/10 with 18% chromium and 10% nickel, aka V2A or 1.4301

Any thread model should take firmware into account. There have been examples of unauthenticated remote code execution against Intel ME[0]. This isn't theoretical, this isn't an assumption, this has happened. Those exploits are independent of the OS running, with certain configurations the system doesn't even need to be switched on, just plugged in. With fTPM as an ME module (not all fTPMs are such) this provides an additional huge attack surface.

[0] https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/48429.html

But cost of cooling is passed on to the cloud customer. Different zones/DCs/regions have different hourly cost which is a function of, among other things, the local price of electricity and cooling.

This is highly misleading.

fTPM is more secure against _this_ kind of attack, with physical access to the bus wires. However, since fTPM is a Firmware-TPM, it is vulnerable to all kinds of attacks on the system's firmware, even remotely, even via the network, even maybe if the computer is switched off. Remember all those (even unauthenticated, remote) XML-parser exploits in the Intel ME? fTPM is just one more ME module, and of course vulnerable to those exploits.

So overall, I consider fTPM a huge step back, because you might even get access without physical presence. For an fTPM, attack surface is far larger (because all of the ME software), minimum attack complexity may be smaller (because there will one day be a metasploit module for all those software problems, whereas HW hacking is always a certain hurdle), required attacker privileges are less (prolonged unobserved physical presence vs. network). Thus objectively worse in all aspects.

What would be better would be a dTPM that is integrated e.g. into a SoC, such that there are no exposed wires anywhere without decapping the SoC. Some systems such as phones work like that, but this is hard to tell even from the technical specs.

On the contrary, it can be extremely difficult and expensive to do with waste heat from datacenters. Your average cooling equipment, of the energy conserving kind has 2 modes:

First mode, for cold outside weather e.g. in winter is free cooling, where you just use convection or fans to bring in cool outside air, push out warm inside air (there are also variants of this like "tokyo wheel", but those are unsuitable for heat reuse). You could at best use the warm air output (~25°C) to directly heat neighboring buildings, but the air ducts you need for that will be massive. Comfort level in the buildings heated this way will be low due to high air velocity and associated noise. Also, air ducts are a fire hazard and high maintenance to keep dust and vermin out.

The other mode is water cooling (either direct or indirect) where you cool your servers directly by water or the air through water radiators. The warm water is then either cooled down with outside air, outside air plus evaporation (both possible only when it is not too warm outside) or compressive cooling (aka heat pump, the usual big MW-scale machines in the cellar). In those cases, district heating will only be possible if you can reach a sufficient water temperature somehow. E.g. directly cooling your servers uses at most 30°C intake and outputs at most 50°C. District heating usually runs at 70°C, so you would need a running heat pump to make up for the 20K difference. When the servers are indirectly air-cooled, the difference will be even larger. So you will always need those big MW-scale heatpumps running, just to make use of your waste heat, at great expense and for the uncertain benefit of maybe selling your heat to neighbors. This is deadly for mom-and-pop datacenters because of the uncertainty (maybe you can sell your heat, maybe it'll be too expensive) and the huge investment, your cooling equipment will be far larger (more and bigger heatpumps), more expensive, redundant (because in summer you will still need to have equipment to give of heat into the outside air).

All the sufficiently large customers I know of are looking to move abroad, for this reason and the astronomical cost of electricity in Germany.

Planning. https://www.zeit.de/digital/2023-04/bitkom-rechenzentren-abw...

Hetzner runs an intentionally primitive shop. Famously, one of their (historic) cheapest offerings were desktop "servers" on wooden shelves with flying cabling. So anything in the way of UPS, PDUs, monitoring, airflow, etc just isn't there, keeping PUE low.

Even worse, a future requirement will be compulsory use of waste heat. No matter the cost or efficiency, you have to find users for the heat given off by your cooling. Good luck finding people wanting their homes heated in summer...

Dangerous as in: exposure can cause allergies that haven't been there before. Medical treatment with allergens can also cause allergies and therefore shouldn't been done willy-nilly in a prophylactic manner.

Also, suggestions like those usually bring out the quackery in people, with things like "Oh, hayfever? Let's cure it by doing summer holidays on the farm!" and "Oh, peanut allergy? I have a sandwich for you, kid!".

Well, you suggested prophylactic exposure in early childhood (which is usually before any allergy is diagnosed and usually also before it is manifest):

> I suspect that in twenty years it will be standard to start infants on sublingual immunotherapy for all the common allergens (literally putting a tiny, strictly controlled amount of the allergens under the tongue once a day, simple as that) as a prophylactic

Also, even therapeuthic or diagnostic exposure can cause allergies, there is no safe exposure. Just safer and less safe.