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gman83

2,453 karma · joined February 19, 2016

meet.hn/city/ch-Geneva

Socials:

- gman83.at.hn

Interests:

Books, Cycling, Freelancing, Mobile Development, Networking, Web Development

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submissionscomments
gman83··on We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything
Cloudflare also doesn't have any hard budget caps.
gman83··on EmDash 1.0: the stable CMS with a secure plugin registry
I have had a bunch of my WordPress sites hacked in the last couple of months, I'm in the process of migrating most of my sites to EmDash. I think the WordPress security model just doesn't work any longer in the AI age.
gman83··on The Google Play app review process now regularly takes longer than a week
This isn't my experience. My updates usually get accepted within hours. Apple takes days usually.
gman83··on Shopify moves back to Native from React Native
I'm building an app that targets Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, Linux. There's no way I'm going to be maintaining 5 different codebases, even with LLMs.
gman83··on Mistral raises €3B
Power is the easy part; the hard part is where the check comes from.

One single frontier computing cluster costs some €30-40B initially and becomes virtually worth zero every four years. That’s the equivalent of France’s full-year VC market for all industries combined times three. A single Member State, already indebted far beyond sustainable limits, cannot subsidize expensive, long-term 40bn€ hardware risks from its national budget more than 33 times without both falling foul of state aid rules and blowing up the debt crisis even more seriously than it already is.

The three factors you mention, missing VCs, political reluctance, and brain drain, are by-products of exactly these fragmented fiscal structures. European capital is not missing; it is frozen at 33T€ (roughly) in risk-averse national bank deposits and Member State pension regulations instead of in one unified Capital Markets Union to pay for high risks related to enormous tech bets. Similarly, leading researchers are not looking to work on a better salary but for liquid equity, which is not available at the high valuations seen in the NASDAQ through deeply integrated public markets.

With insufficient scale for an entire continent in finance, even the best AI valley in a single country will hit the wall much faster than a US hyper-scaler investing greater amounts in CAPEX in one single quarter than every member state treasury.

gman83··on Mistral raises €3B
No, Europe doesn't have the capital markets required to build the required data centers. Underwriting gigawatt data centers and frontier models demands a fully realized European Capital Markets Union, a single energy regulator with cross-border grid integration, and shared fiscal borrowing power.
gman83··on The Education of a Doomer
Social safety nets have come about because labor movements were able to use their leverage over capital to extract concessions. When the labor movements have no more leverage, capital won't give it to them out of the goodness of their hearts.
gman83··on Private German rocket makes history, reaches orbit from European soil
Its not that Europeans havent read Mearsheimer. its that for the best part of three hundred years the whole of Europe has been trying that same realist script until there was nothing left but total ruin across the entire continent. Europeans who created the EU knew about balance of power geopolitics so well, they created this slow bureaucratic mess specifically to stop Germany and France sliding back into the same old lethal habit. While clumsy positioning between the US and China is a headache in the present moment for Europe, compared to a tedious Union Europeans prefer reawakenings of 1914 in their backyard. Well at least so far.
gman83··on You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
You're right that the EU has much stricter baseline consumer protections than Switzerland, but none of the examples you gave are actually part of the GDPR. Insurance pricing rules come from EU equal treatment directives, the 14-day online return window is the EU Consumer Rights Directive, and the USB-C mandate is the Common Charger Directive (which Switzerland actually adopted into law in 2024 anyway).

The GDPR is strictly about data privacy, and it deserves defense on its real merits: it made data collection illegal by default without an explicit legal basis, banned deceptive tracking patterns, and introduced turnover-based fines large enough that tech companies actually had to re-engineer their systems around privacy by design. EU consumer protection directives are great, but it's worth crediting the right ones.

gman83··on You Know GDPR Is Good Based on Who Hates It
I mean this isn't some hidden agenda. The Heritage Foundation has an active plan to dismantle the EU from within.
gman83··on The Benchmarkpocalypse
I've gone in loops where it'll tell me twenty times in a row that it's definitely found the root cause of a bug, when in fact it definitely did not.
gman83··on Flutter 3.47
No framework prevents bad engineering. If a tool is rigid enough to make messy code impossible, it becomes too limited to build anything non-trivial.

Aren't you conflating framework design with dev discipline? You can write a monolithic disaster in React, native iOS, or Flutter with equal ease. Bad architecture usually happens when devs copy-paste habits from web or imperative paradigms without adapting to a declarative model.

Flutter actually gives you great primitives for clean code. UI components are lightweight config objects, so breaking a huge screen into tiny, modular pieces has virtually zero performance penalty. Its state model naturally separates logic from rendering, making it easy to isolate business logic into testable layers. Plus, the built-in analyzer catches anti-patterns like memory leaks at compile time.

all the tools to enforce separation of concerns are there, imo

gman83··on Flutter 3.47
The premise is a bit off. Flutter was never just width/height: the model is min/max box constraints. The core rule is: constraints go down, sizes come up, parent sets position.

Row and Column are just layout algorithms built on that same model, not separate engines added later. GridView uses the sliver system internally, but still doesn't require anything like CSS Grid's general layout model. The render API is open enough for custom layouts too, so packages like https://pub.dev/packages/boxy build directly on it

gman83··on Flutter 3.47
I treat nesting as a feature: if the nesting starts getting deep, that's the code indicating to extract a child widget. It pushes me toward better composition and smaller, reusable components instead of giant monolithic views.
gman83··on Flutter 3.47
Even with AI, maintaining feature parity between Android, iOS, Windows, Linux, and Mac is extremely complex. Flutter makes it so much easier. If I were doing native, I'd probably have to drop all desktop platforms.
gman83··on Flutter 3.47
We've been hearing that Flutter is going to be killed any day now for almost a decade. And yet here we are, it's a stable platform that's quietly chugging along with massive 3rd party buy in. Honestly, Google could abandon it at this point and it would have enough momentum to keep going just fine. Where is Compose Multiplatform? Does anyone actually use that, is it even stable yet?
gman83··on Flutter 3.47
Yes, hopefully now that this decoupling is complete, they'll actually start being updated again. The progress was a bit stalled while this process was ongoing.
gman83··on Flutter 3.47
I guess because they have buy-in from within Google? Google Pay, NotebookLM, Family Link, Google One, etc. are made with Flutter.
gman83··on US strikes $1.2B deal to pay German firm to halt offshore wind projects
This is the exact reason it's happening. Offshore wind is cheaper than gas /kWh and would therefore kill Trump's fossil fuel donor's profits. So kill offshore wind and the grid is forced to go to more expensive fossil fuel sources, which increased the grid price and means extra profits go to those companies. All this raises energy prices.
gman83··on Climate.gov was destroyed. Open data saved it
That would be great if the courts were actually neutral arbitrators and not captured political entities.
gman83··on Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
Awesome, will test & let you know if I have any issues
gman83··on Show HN: OpenKnowledge – open source AI-first alternative to Obsidian/Notion
I've been using my opencode go subscription for Obsidian, saving my Claude sub for actual coding. Any reason why it's limited to Codex, Claude, and Cursor?
gman83··on Stop wasting tokens and re explaining your project between sessions
How's it different to https://github.com/angelnicolasc/graymatter ?
gman83··on Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor
China is working on the same type of engine: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/chinese-axial...
gman83··on Can the stockmarket swallow Anthropic, SpaceX and OpenAI?
This seems like straight up fraud? Presumably all to bail out early investors?
gman83··on Italians and Dutch share the same gestural instinct for teaching
Also, she made the gesture twice without saying "mmmmm" while making it. Imo, that sound is part of the gesture.
gman83··on AI Datacenters Were Built for GPUs. What Happens When You Remove the GPUs?
If I had to guess they used this skill https://impeccable.style
gman83··on Project Gutenberg – keeps getting better
I'm working on audiobook app that integrates the Libivox catalog. Only on Windows right now - https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9n1z76ffb3fc?hl=en-US I'll release Android, IOS, Mac & Linux versions soon.
gman83··on Googlebook
I presume since they're going to be actually showing off the details of the Aluminium OS at Google IO, they probably want to keep it surprising, so that should hopefully explain the sparse details. HN is a bubble... this sentiment about Google really isn't widely shared. Personally, I'm pretty happy that Android is coming to desktop, I really feel like Windows and macOS need more competition. Unless Valve does something spectacular with Linux desktop adoption, Android is probably the best bet.
gman83··on Show HN: A modern Music Player Daemon based on Rockbox firmware
What's the advantage of using cpal over something like libmpv?
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