renaudg

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)

Comment · 4 months ago

I am no environmental activist, but Hetzner's carbon footprint is so much worse than the rest that it's hard to ignore. I've always avoided them as a matter of principle.

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.

Comment · 6 months ago

1. Overprovision as much as you want, solar still won't work at night.

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

Comment · 6 months ago

First one I remembered with a proper song was 303 by Acme : https://demozoo.org/productions/62/

Comment · 10 months ago

Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".

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.

Comment · 1 year ago

15 in the top 20 most productive countries per hour worked are European. The US is in 12th place. China is 99th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr...

Diminishing returns is a thing.

Comment · 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

https://www.demoscene.info/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU

Comment · 2 years ago

> I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

No that's an accurate TCO calculation. It's interesting that on this topic, the inventor of the PC also seems to be caught in that supposed "Apple reality distortion field" and can't confirm the "price gouging" that you're trying to convince yourself Apple practices.

https://www.cio.com/article/236396/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-...

Comment · 2 years ago

> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

I'm French and live in the UK, so feel qualified to compare. A few examples off the top of my head :

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.

Comment · 2 years ago

The problem may have more to do with Uganda and having a surveillance state than it has to do with National ID cards.

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.