2,421 karma · joined October 26, 2011
> trained it on infrastructure in Germany
Made me chuckle. About the second worst place in Europe to train a model if you really care about environmental constraints and energy requirements.
https://app.electricitymaps.com/
Good initiative on the sovereignty front though.
Apparently this bad habit impacts DVORAK users too : https://brennan.io/2021/03/03/textboxes/
My favourite demo in the list : https://floooh.github.io/tiny8bit/cpc.html?file=cpc/phx.dsk&...
It doesn't have the same business model as the rest of Meta (which by the way, is to get advertisers products in front of users eyeballs, optimized by their personal data. Not to hand said personal data over to advertisers or anybody else, which would be a bit dumb as it's Meta's crown jewels)
Two of their 3 datacenters are located in Germany, which has some of the worst carbon emissions in Europe due to their stubborn refusal of nuclear and reliance on coal/gas. As I write this, we're talking 20x higher carbon intensity compared to France or the Nordics (https://app.electricitymaps.com/).
Besides carbon, coal-related air pollution is responsible for dozens of thousands of early deaths per year in Europe, and Germany has 6 of the top 10 worst offending plants. Until they fix that (not anytime soon), it's not a country that should be hosting foreign workloads on top of their national needs.
Hetzner seem to have a DC in Finland, which can only be better. Not sure if prices are competitive.
Scaleway and OVH are good alternatives if you want to host in Western Europe.
2. Do you realize the consequences of casually overprovisioning solar capacity when it uses orders of magnitude more land than nuclear per kWh produced ? Source : https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-per-energy-source
https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job
Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr...
Diminishing returns is a thing.
The M4 Macbook Pro will be released next week, what did you mean instead ?
> they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros
I don't think I've seen a single other piece of user feedback online that corroborates this.
> I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind
Mac Mini gets its extensibility through Thunderbolt.
https://www.cio.com/article/236396/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-...
That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)
No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.
So let's see :
- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).
- They don't want nuclear because politics.
- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")
- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.
The two main end results of this policy are :
- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map
- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...
Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?
Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.
The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.
Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.
Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.
I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.
Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.
Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded : for the purpose of identity verification they just use alternative documents & processes that are less straightforward and at least as intrusive (e.g. driving licenses, utility bills and credit checks in the US and UK).
IMO it's much more honest to recognize that there's a legitimate need to be able to prove one's identity in a functioning society, and to build a dedicated system for that, instead of tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around.
You're lucky not to have ADHD like the author then.
People with ADHD absolutely can (and will) procrastinate endlessly if they don't proactively use tricks to manage their motivation, even with interesting and pleasant tasks that they are also fully aware are critical to reaching their most cherished goals.
ADHD feels like a broken transmission gear between the planning/rational part of the brain (prefrontal cortex) that desperately wants the work to happen, and the "pre-actuator" part that actually gets to schedule your actions for the next 3 seconds.
Too often that part decides that, in spite of all the pleas from the rational brain, the best thing to do in this moment is to keep the finger infinitely scrolling down on X or to click on "just one more" HN link. That keeps the dopamine hits coming, which feels good and predictable, whereas stopping brings short-term discomfort and uncertainty.
The rational brain sees the clock showing 3am and the finger that keeps scrolling and scrolling. It screams and shouts in protest and powerlessly laments the self-sabotage and broken promises. But all this negative self-talk is annoying. What better way to silence this party-pooper than a juicy unread X thread or fascinating HN story ? So the pre-actuator votes for that, hits the snooze button on the rational brain one more time, which soon comes back screaming and shouting again, and so on and so on until exhaustion ensues and you finally give in and crash into bed (or start doing whatever you were supposed to work on). ADHD is a real curse.
For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.
For 99% of users, it's as good as open source.
I worked at Facebook in 2010-2011 and I must say that the gap between what was really going on inside, and the hysterical, least possibly charitable interpretation and scrutinizing of every single product decision by the press, public, and politicians was insane. By far the worst I'd ever seen.
As an engineer, I actually learnt to appreciate the job of a PR team during that time (I previously assumed they were professional hypocrites paid who put a positive spin on indefensible corporate decisions), and was impressed at how professional they managed to remain as they had to counter some truly insane shit with facts, and still nobody believed them because Facebook is the devil and obviously lying.
Of course there were obviously some large fuck-ups at Facebook over the past decade (some of which even originated from good intentions, like the Cambridge Analytica fiasco : "people accuse us of being anticompetitive as we sit on a treasure trove of data, let's be more open and create a platform !")
In my view, these were more the product of Zuck's failure to rein in bad ideas from some executives due to his inexperience, rather than any indication of strategic malevolence and cynicism on his part.
In other words, he's not perfect but I've always seen him as the rather decent guy that more people can see now, like in this interview. If there's one area where he has changed a lot, it's probably in his ability to show it.
How is Onavo worse ?
TV ratings used to be collected from panelists using a wearable device that literally had an always-on microphone recording you 24/7 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_People_Meter
How is the situation of Onavo/Meta panelists worse ?
Erm.. welcome to psychiatry ?
There is nothing bizarre (or unique to ADHD) about picking from a list of precise, agreed-upon criteria to form a mental health diagnosis. It's how the entire field works, and it's actually a huge step forward from the times when each therapist made up their own definitions.
In the absence of definite imaging or genetic markers for most illnesses, building consensus on criteria and thresholds in a reference manual (the DSM) is the next best possible way to end up with objective, useful and standardized definitions.
Not having a blood test for an illness doesn't mean it isn't real.
> It's important to be aware that each percentage point is hundreds of millions of dollars.
You don't need to resort to conspiracy theories once you understand the above.
FPGAs aren't magically more accurate. That is only up to the programmer and what effort they put in.
The main difference is efficiency and parallelism : it's much easier to reliably produce cycle-accurate parallel outputs in real time with an FPGA, compared to software running on a multi-tasking OS with many layers of abstraction and no deterministic real-time guarantees.
But, as a single-core processor can fake multitasking, by slicing time between processes (preemptive multitasking), software emulation can mimic parallelism if the host is beefy enough compared to the old school system it's emulating. The larger the performance / clock speed gap between the host and target, the more indistinguishable from a truly parallel FPGA an emulator can be.
Software emulation also has practical advantages for developers : while FPGAs force you to painstakingly implement every bit of functionality at the logic gate level, with software you can start off with a much higher level model of the target system that's much easier to implement, and mix & match that with more precise low level simulation where it matters. The time this frees up (+ the availability of various libraries) allows the developer to spend more time researching the original system and adding modern quality of life features that just wouldn't be possible otherwise.
Great article on the topic : https://archive.is/fWosI
It means "strait".
Masking.