And do you also believe what Merkel said that "it's purely a commercial venture"?

Who chairs those "privately owned large utilities"?

What are the links between those people and "the establishment" that includes people like Merkel (earlier Shroeder - his work for Gazprom was also purely commercial venture of a private citizen, right?).

That establishment deciding its a great opportunity for Germany to be the Russian gas station of rest of Europe forced to use that gas as the only "green transition" hydrocarbon.

And not only was it a great commercial venture (that had in its profitability calculation getting rid of nuclear - including blocking countries like Poland from building it, squeezing out other countries that own pipelines again such as Poland/Ukraine/Hungary and so on and forced "transition" to gas for the EU - let's not kid ourselves, renewables will never be more than 50% of base load unless battery tech gets cheaper, so that "transition fuel" would last for 50+ years.

It also contained a humanitarian element of giving Putin huge amount of money therefore making sure the dictator will absolutely not use it to build armies to invade his neighbours (despite doing that already at the time in Georgia for example), but he will get used to that money so much he will spend it all and will not want to stop it coming therefore granting eternal peace in Europe.

Anyone who thought the public will swallow this must have been high... But the Germans did.

"nothing to see here" - right?

I for one am glad hopefully the German public realises what kind of state Russia is now, and what "doing business" with them leads to (it corrupts your own country) , but how long that knowledge remains, and why it took a full scale war in Europe to acquire it I don't know.

Although OpenAI and google models are much more responsive to it. With Anthropic if you treat Opus too harshly it might start pushing back if the insults are not justified.

So I'm not surprised they had good results with chatgpt.

Don't get me wrong. I try to remove plastics in all areas of my life as well (because of microplastics), but can't they coat the surface in some biodegradable polymer like PHA/PBS?

Or if this is too expensive coat it with some beeswax at the very least...

On the subject of cost. Multicloud doesn't have to be expensive, but it requires foresight during the initial design not to lock yourself up in proprietary tech.

Things such as AWS cognito, lambda elastic beanstalk, SQS can make it completely uneconomical to do multicloud.

But let's say you run roughly equivalent services (load balances, DNS, vms, containers for example under GKE, s3 compatible object storage, etc) it doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg.

But then you want to use the same stack across providers and all the proprietary technologies (even hidden from you with things like terraform) are suddenly loosing their luster.

Last two times they tried to push other censorship/tracking laws (claiming as always "we have to, EU is making us") there were mass protests in every city and town.

In my own town of 5k people there were several hundred (500 people at least, probably more). And the previous govt backed down.

This topic seems to be coming back everytime certain countries (Denmark etc) hold the rotating EU presidency. Our current PM is certainly in the same EU clique that wants to push this so much, but it's an extremely unpopular position and he is already leading a weak minority coalition govt. It wouldn't take much to topple him, so he will not do anything like that (unless he is convicted people are distracted with some crisis, but that is where normal people come in. To keep watching what is being smuggled in).

I wonder why do voters in those countries that propose these laws tend to allow this to happen again and again.

People do care about such things.

I hope the same is true in other EU countries.

While AI tools have been provided pretty quickly (over a year ago, I initially used gemini cli, then copilot once it added anthropic models) the management is absolutely clueless about it.

The top wants agents. Every team is asked few times a week "what autonomous agents will you build next" and answers the current AI lacks agency required not to mess up critical long running tasks and generate even more work are falling on deaf ears.

(also ideas such as, why don't we setup a wiki page were teams can post their repetitive tasks and we can use AI to script them, are considered "not fast enough" - just build it... but we are the automation team, we automated everything we do years ago :-)

Middle managers on the other hand suddenly started giving juniors senior's work and asking seniors "tell them (juniors) how to prompt it".

Seriously? How about I prompt it myself instead? Oh, but it makes a shit load of architectural errors and boobie traps the junior will fail to find... So now instead of a cursory glance I have to spend an hour reviewing a small PR from them.

And any questions about "why are you creating a new X for this instead of extending the existing one?" are met with blank panicked stares...

The essence of this BS is contained in my description of the recent "Copilot Review" incident.

We sometimes merge the same Github workflow files (10 line files) to dozens of repos, we have to obtain approvals for the PRs from a bunch of teams working in different timezones, but the merge has to be done everywhere at once and it has to be coordinated with other work.

As we were on a day of such task some "helpful hand" enabled Copilot PR reviews for the whole org.

Copilot helpfully opened 7 or 8 discussions on each PR giving us such precious advice as "your concurrency group uses the commit sha as a differentiating factor, this will allow multiple runs to proceed concurrently" to which one is tempted to answer "no shit sherlock".

We suddenly had almost 200 conversations to "resolve" an hour before the merge and a bunch of approvers didn't give their approvals because "there is a discussion".

Thankfully we had copilot that wrote us a script in 5 minutes to resolve the problem caused by itself...

Maybe our next overnight agent can go over all our open PRs and close Copilot Review conversations with appropriate messages?

I don't doubt people that are, exist, but I highly doubt it's a high percentage and certainly very far from "everyone else".

It was pre-internet obviously so obtaining software was very difficult. For years when I was learning assembler I was using a so called "monitor cartridge" that did simple assembly/disassembly, but it didn't support labels and such. I could read about software like "Meta Assembler" that let you use labels and variables and think "wow, I could do so much stuff with that..."

My first PC was sometime in late 90s. A Celeron 233MHz with Windows 95. I wasn't a huge fan of Windows back then. I remember when one of the pc magazines I got had RedHat Linux install CDs. I liked it from the start. The fact my software only modem and Lexmark printer didn't work got me into kernel programming :-)

Fun to think of it now, but I prefer 2026 a 100x :-)

Central EU here. We order a bunch of switches. A "starter pack" of sorts. We try them and then choose the favourite.

Physical shops rarely stock keyboards with removable switches.

For someone who is able to design an end to end system by themselves these tools offer a big time saving, but they come with dangers too.

Yesterday I had a mid dev in my team proudly present a Web tool he "wrote" in python (to be run on local host) that runs kubectl in the background and presents things like versions of images running in various namespaces etc. It looked very slick, I can already imagine the product managers asking for it to be put on the network.

So what's the problem? For one, no threading whatsoever, no auth, all queries run in a single thread and on and on. A maintenance nightmare waiting to happen. That is a risk of a person that knows something, but not enough building tools by themselves.

If you wanted to run same workloads on Aws it would cost you few hundred euro a month.

I see a silver lining to all this. At least maybe the silly "throw more horizontal scaling at it" will stop being a default response to all performance problems and people that are able to squeeze more processing out of the same hardware will be sought after again.

Their size and the effect on the market they have

>×If 5 companies want to buy a quadrilion ram chips to build datacenters, why is this manipulation moreso than a million companies each wanting to buy 100 ram chips?

Because they are 5 companies, especially when it can be shown they work in unison (formed a cartel)

To be honest for anything more serious than a personal Minecraft server hetzner has been beaten by ovh for ages (on bandwidth - you get all you can eat data limited by speed from ovh - for example 500mbit, instead of 20tb from hetzner).

For this reason hetzner is always a "backup DC" in my eyes and never the primary.

Also I heard they are extremely sensitive regarding abuse allegations so don't even think of hosting something someone may not like seeing...

They get a lot of hype, but there are many competitors worth looking at.

They may have not noticed an improvement, but it doesn't mean there isn't any.

Would organising an armed resistance be more effective? The state dissappears people. Have them organise and dissappear the leaders of the revolutionary guard or at the very least help another state (like Israel) to target them.

Non violence works only in democracies and other systems where the rulers care about what people think.