Youden

I asked Claude for some context and while I'm hesitant to simply parrot its claims, they seem reasonable:

This passed late at night with an 11 to 10 vote (the entire assembly is 577 people). Odd amendments like this apparently pass somewhat frequently in similar ways.

Even though it passed, it's likely to be killed by the more right-wing parties when it gets to the senate.

So for a download of the newest Call of Duty, you'd need to pay 6.33 EUR? Not for the purchase but the download? What is up with France?

I've been self-hosting my email for years. Something that wasn't obvious to me in the beginning is that you can separate sending and receiving: host the receiving yourself and use a service for sending (e.g. Mailchimp, Sendgrid etc.). That can address many concerns.

I did that in the beginning but later set up my own relay hosted at Hetzner. I could do it on my receiving server (a PC in my house) but I don't have a static IP and IP reputation is a big deal in email deliverability.

I do very occasionally get sent to spam but it's fairly rare and I'm not sure my free Gmail account was any better.

Does anyone know if the voices are AI-generated? I was a little surprised; I don't think I would have questioned it if I heard them in a real game or video but since this seems to basically be a joke, I'm doubtful real voice actors were used.

Interesting but for photography at least, there's a massive hole: RAW support. What they've implemented is very limited and basic, nothing like parity with Lightroom or Photoshop. Just try loading a RAW photo into Lightroom/Photoshop and put the window next to Lightcraft/Photocraft - the results are completely different and not in a good way. Lightcraft's image looks like an amateur attempt at RAW processing from first principles, without any of the most basic colour profiles and adjustments that Lightroom applies. Photocraft doesn't even offer RAW processing, it just dumps the raster straight in.

I'd treat this as completely new, far from complete software heavily inspired by the Adobe Suite, rather than a "port".

But maybe folks who use workflows that don't involve RAW photos have better luck.

I'm well aware of the Phoebus Cartel. It's not as straightforward as often reported. Have a look at Technology Connections: https://youtu.be/zb7Bs98KmnY

Dubai isn't a country. It's a city in the United Arab Emirates.

The Dubai bulb isn't some trick Big Lightbulb doesn't want you to know about, it's an engineering tradeoff: lower current on more filaments gives you higher efficiency and lower temperature but at higher cost and with substantially lower light quality (CRI).

You'll find that after EU energy labeling, there are products available to European consumers that well exceed the specifications of the "Dubai" bulbs. Look for EU energy class A. They often come with a 5-year warranty and rated lifespan of 50000 hours. The "Dubai" bulbs were rated for 25000 hours. You'll also find though that they're substantially more expensive and usually don't have a CRI above 90.

Regarding planned obsolescence, in many cases I can believe that a product will fail earlier than it would if designed for longevity. Rather than planned obsolescence, I believe this is simply a result of being cheap, a consequence of the race to the bottom. If you're buying cheap Chinese fixtures for $10, or cheap Chinese bulbs for $2, you're not going to get a high-quality, long-lasting product.

If you want products that last a long time, buy them and use them properly. If you want bright lights, make sure they're adequately cooled. Consider buying lower-voltage fixtures and bulbs so that you can have a separate power supply and don't put the full ~230V to ~3V conversion in a tiny space.

When an LED bulb dies, it's typically not the LED, it's the electronics driving it. This is worsened substantially by heat. If you have recessed downlights or something, that's close to worst-case for an LED bulb.

Lights with non-replaceable bulbs can actually be far better, because they can be designed for their environment. Recessed downlights with built-in LEDs for example can thermally couple the LEDs directly to the metal housing, so the heat can be dissipated into the surrounding air, instead of into the recess.

$5/hr = $3600/mo.

Unless you only need the AI available some of the time, $5/hr is pretty expensive. That's an RTX Pro twice a year.

If you're using it for discrete sessions of coding or something, that might make sense for you but if you're using it for an always-on assistant, that pricing kinda sucks.

I had it do the opposite: reverse engineer the protocol for the Eufymake E1 UV printer so that I can connect my own software to it.

It did a pretty good job.

I think maybe your view is too narrow? It's not that people don't want to make a machine, it's that now they don't have to.

When I started hobby CNC a few years ago, the only compact or desktop CNC machines were flimsy Chinese things made entirely of extrusion, expensive machines made for education/prototyping environments and the Carbide3D Nomad (which I ended up buying).

I ended up building a machine from scratch because the original Nomad was too flimsy to really cut metals, even Aluminium.

But in the last few years companies like Makera came along and sell desktop CNC machines that can cut metal for under $6k USD and there's even a toolchanger.

For just a little more, there's a Kickstarter for a 5-axis machine with mist cooling, ATC a wireless probe and it can cut steel and titanium.

And for those that want a DIY project, there seem to be plenty of folks doing CNC conversions of second-hand manual mills.

Where are the CPUs fabbed? They make a big deal about "sovereign" but is the CPU actually made in Japan, or do they rely on TSMC?

Also odd how big an emphasis they put on AI inference when they don't build the GPU?

NEAR AI does a lot of things right but with this kind of thing, it only takes one mistake to completely break security.

If you look at [0] (the code they run in the CVM), there are a couple of things that worry me:

- They ship logs out of the CVM and worse, they send them to third parties (DataDog). Even if we could verify every bit of code running in the TEE, it's not enough to know the code doesn't maliciously ship prompts to a third party, we also need to audit what each binary logs.

- SGLang, the core inference engine, isn't reproducibly built. We have no way to verify that the thing they call "SGLang" is what they claim it is.

Really, it's the log shipping processes that worry me the most. Ideally, NEAR would minimise how much auditing needs to be done by having the minimal open-source proxy be the only thing with network access, making it much easier to audit potential exfiltration routes.

[0]: https://github.com/nearai/cvm-compose-files/blob/main/prod/G...

Chutes, Near AI, Phala and Tinfoil all offer various privacy assurances around inference. Some of the bigger providers also offer "zero data retention".

The problem I have with these is that the guarantees aren't strong enough (Phala, Near) or the models are old (Tinfoil). Chutes is mostly pretty good (cryptographic security all the way to the GPU) but I'm not sure it's possible to cryptographically verify the precise source code they run on the mode.

I wonder, rather than re-encoding when starting on a B- or P- frame, could you preserve the entire GOP losslessly but make the earlier content "disappear" on playback by shifting PTS, or bundling several frames into a single frame's payload? Maybe it causes too many problems with players.

Not a German but Duden disagrees with you [0]: "etwas in der Absicht, es zu verbessern, schlechter machen".

[0]: https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/verschlimmbessern

I've been thinking about buying a system to run LLMs locally but the price for one that'll run Qwen3.8-27B well is quite offputting to say the least.

What I've been looking at instead is inference providers that use TEE and E2EE to provide cryptographic guarantees that my prompts and responses are only visible to me and the GPU itself.

Despite their docs and assurances of what their guarantees mean, I'm having trouble getting to a point where I'm actually comfortable trusting them with secrets though. Phala for example seems to be E2EE only to the gateway and will then forward prompts to (potentially third party) providers.

Has anyone been down this path and found a provider they feel safe with?

I think that's reasonable. The goal of the benchmark is to determine how the model performs on real-world tasks. If real-world tasks trigger Anthropic's classifiers, that's a failure on Anthropic's part.

I feel that choosing tasks that don't trip the classifier would also be a form of bias towards Anthropic.

In case it's not clear, the coding tasks are really benign things; there's nothing security-, health- or biology- related in there. The classifier being tripped is definitely unreasonable.

A YouTuber, Joel Creates, recently developed a filter that can be assembled from furnace filters, 3D printed parts, O-rings and PC fans: https://youtu.be/GpA7-EJpKWU

Files can be purchased by backing the Kickstarter but they won't be sent until November: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/joelcreates/oddcube-air...

I think this could be substantially cheaper than a build based on a PC case.

> Banking apps (e.g. Revolut) block GrapheneOS actively and many other apps too.

You've misunderstood something here. Revolut doesn't "block GrapheneOS actively". I'm running Revolut and most of my banking apps on GrapheneOS right now.

In my experience, there are two major categories of incompatibility:

- High levels of Google Play Integrity checks: app only works on releases of Android that have been allowlisted by Google. The only app that does this for me so far is McDonalds.

- Commercial root detection APIs: some of GrapheneOS' security features like "Secure App Spawning" trip root detection heuristics. This is the kind of incompatibility I usually run into for banking apps. You can disable individual features on a per-app basis these days to get around this.

A 9950x3d has about double the multi-core performance though: https://browser.geekbench.com/v7/cpu/compare/53883?baseline=...

I don't know how you define "properly" but the study did account for this, among many other factors:

"[...] We also investigated whether obesity, diabetes, and a healthy diet, all evaluated in 2 categories (no/yes), modified the association between LNCS consumption and cognitive decline by adding a 3-way interaction among the consumption of LNCS, the timescale, and each modifier on model 2."

In the results section: "[...] obesity and diet did not modify the association between LNCS consumption and cognitive decline [...]"

You don't need peak power all the time. The point of trains is that they're extremely efficient; most of the time they're essentially coasting, they only need a lot of power when accelerating or ascending.

If you want hard numbers, SBB used 1685GWh for passenger trains in 2025 [0].

The bigger problem with this idea is solar in Switzerland. It's fantastic during the summer but close to nonexistent during the winter [1]. Trains need to run year-round, so you'd need to overbuild solar monstrously to power SBB during the winter, or you'd need to solve seasonal electricity storage, which isn't easy. Pumped hydro is great but Switzerland has already built about as many artificial alpine lakes as the population is likely to tolerate.

[0]: https://reporting.sbb.ch/en/sustainability?=&years=5,6,7,1&s...

[1]: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion

Init7 (the ISP in question) is pretty fantastic for peering. They're good to start with but there have been times I've just written them an email and said "hey, I know you and ASABCD have a presence at BLAH-IX, could you peer directly" and it ends up working.

I can download from Usenet at consistently around 10Gbps and I've determined the limiting factor is the combination of client/server behavior and TCP windows. With some customization I've saturated the 25Gbps pipe.

Online games (e.g. League of Legends, Path of Exile) typically have a ping of around 8ms.

25Gbps is available but not common. Most average people will buy 10Gbps P2MP from Swisscom, Sunrise, Salt etc., the really big companies with marketing all over the cities. Then they'll use WiFi with the default modem and not reach anything like 25Gbps.

25Gbps requires pretty unusual hardware to use (see [0] for example) and you need to pay a couple hundred francs for installation so even among the geeks and nerds, it's not common.

I have it myself but recommend to friends and colleagues to use Init7 but 10Gbps instead.

[0]: https://michael.stapelberg.ch/posts/2021-07-10-linux-25gbit-...

Not quite. There are some homes where P2MP was installed before the court order that are still P2MP. These still have fiber but only 10Gbps shared, not 25Gbps dedicated.

Also, the only ISP that offers 25Gbps is Init7 and they need to have their equipment at the other end of the fiber to offer 25Gbps. I don't think they quite have 100% coverage yet.

It's not always possible, or at least trivial. For example how do you enforce "prefer to reuse existing code over making a copy"? Is there a static analysis tool that will detect two pieces of code that do the same thing?

No, my point is that the price is inaccurate because it reflects peak/best conditions output and in Switzerland that isn't accurate. To generate the nominal output in winter, you need 6x as many panels as you would need in another climate.

Is that price for Switzerland? What time of year is that power available?

Here's how much each energy source contributes to Switzerland's grid: https://energiedashboard.admin.ch/strom/produktion

Right now, solar and other renewables produce enough energy to meet about two thirds of our demand. Solar alone produced around 55GWh of the needed 169GWh yesterday.

Look at new year's day though: consumption was 192GWh (14% higher than yesterday) and yet solar only produced 11.4GWh and that was an unusually good day for winter.

You can't talk about the price of solar, even solar with storage, without talking about the climate it's in. Assuming your prices are for summer or a mild climate like California, you need to multiply those by around 6x to get a system that can replace nuclear for a baseline load in Switzerland.

That brings the price to $180-$510/MWh.

FWIW: I live in Switzerland and have solar panels and a battery on my house. I sell the obscene amount of excess solar I generate in summer to the grid which covers much of the cost I incur buying from the grid in winter. That power is generated by nuclear.

I think that's distro-specific. Some set it up with more secure defaults (unix socket with permissions), others less (TCP socket).

> [...] a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident [...]

This is surely the first time I'm seeing "on accident" from a journalist. I get that it's used in casual speech but it's never been normal in formal contexts where "proper" use of language is considered important.

To back up my words with evidence, take a look at [0]. If you look at some of the examples from the late 90s [1] you'll see that most of the uses of "on accident" that did exist weren't even used in the "accidentally" sense but in contexts like "on accident compensation" or "on accident rates" - to introduce a topic. To eliminate that, we can do something like [2] and see that this modern construction basically didn't exist until 2010.

If you play with the corpus, you can see that it's not really used in English English, only American English.

[0]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=on+accident%2C...

[1]: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22on%20accident%22&tbm=bks&...

[2]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=it+accidentall...