News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

martin_a

Re:Pico CSS is no longer maintained on Friday October 30, 2026 @07:01AM (#50302297)
First of all: Thanks for the work! Used Pico CSS quite a lot in personal and small company projects where a simple site was needed. It was a great help to get things looking good without much effort.

To be honest: I haven't really looked at the CSS that agents have written for me. I'm wondering if CSS frameworks still can play a role in that world as guidelines to get more consistent and maintenable code. On the other hand: agent does it, agent has to fix it.

Still not totally sure where all of this is going.

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Wednesday October 28, 2026 @10:38AM (#50274417)
It sure is, especially with casual gaming...

I checked used prices though, and I think the market is not in our favor. rebuy.de has an M2 Max with 32 GB/1 TB configuration in "very good" condition and is asking 2100 Euro for it.

M6 is "just" 600 Euro more...

Re:Apple introduces the new 14‑inch MacBook Pro with M6 on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @03:41PM (#50264666)
As lots of Apple Users are in here: I'm thinking about "sidegrading", my M2 Pro runs fine, but I chose 16 GB/512 GB when I bought it and I think 32 GB/1 TB would be nicer in some cases.

Is it easily possible to sidegrade/upgrade with a Timemachine backup?

Re:The 1.5°C goal of the Paris Agreement is no longer viable on Wednesday October 21, 2026 @06:29AM (#50178602)
Yes, totally correct in all points, but people just don't care about the future. I fear it's easy as that.
> vibe coded Photoshop clones. Yeah, they work [...]

I think what people (sometimes) miss is that building something is one part of the work, but keeping it running, developing and refining it is a whole different story. And I think all those vibe-coded software will not stand the test of time.

Photoshop is 36 years old now and it wouldn't be the most-used, most-established solution for professionals if Adobe didn't do great work over all that time.

Not really rooting for Adobe here, dislike their subscription models just as anybody else, but I think you'll have to recognize that they kept it running and never stopped.

Late to reply, but nevertheless: More and more people I know have additional heaters in their water systems integrated.

So if there's additional power available and they don't want to give it away for free, they turn on those heaters and boost the temperature of the water that is used for showering etc.

For a four person household these things are around 200 to 300 liters, so you can put a few kWh in them that you can save a day or two later.

Re:I guess I'm using WebP now? on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:21AM (#50053627)
What do you think is the impact of delivering JPEGs instead of WebPs on the battery life of an iPhone 18 Pro? Measure it and tell me, I'm curious.

And I don't want to be wasteful, but I'm wondering if we are optimizing the right things, when we are throwing established toolchains overboard to save a few kB while we probably could be saving MB in other places.

Re:I guess I'm using WebP now? on Monday October 12, 2026 @05:13AM (#50053564)
Ok, but do we _need_ WebP after all in this day and age?

Globally seen connections get faster and storage gets cheaper and we have huge amounts of tools for dealing with PNG and JPEG, so what's the deal?

Sure, use images wisely, compress them accordingly, deliver images in the right size, that's all important stuff, but you have to do that with WebP, too.

So after all those years, I don't think WebP is really solving a problem that needed solving or am I missing something?

Yes, because we failed to invest in storage systems for the last... 25 years or so...

If we would have, it would look much different now.

Why not store it in small and large battery systems and use it later?
To provide a counterpoint that is missing in the article: Conservation organizations are somewhat skeptical that these projects might take much longer and be more expensive than planned, due to climate change.

Projects like Garzweiler and Hambach were expected to take 25 to 30 years to fill up, but with droughts like this summer it might take much longer and the water would have to be diverted from already stressed ecosystems like the Rhine.

This whole topic has become much more complicated in the last years...

> conspiracy theories when you claim Katherina Reiche is a fossil fuel puppet

lol, wtf?!

Before becoming a minister she was employed by E.ON (for non-Germans: one of the big four energy companies in Germany) to lobby for their interests.

She is _the_ prototype of a fossil fuel puppet.

That's not true in that simplified form.

It's perfectly fine to take pictures of the Brandenburger Tor for example and post them online. There will likely be people in that picture but as they are not the main aspect of the image, it will be fine.

It's something different if you zoom in on somebody in that scene and he becomes the main point of the image. Then his personal rights overwhelm the right to document public spaces.

Re:Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @06:59PM (#49823805)
Most likely: Corruption in one way or another.
Re:Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @06:53PM (#49823741)
We should be able to call out bullshit if we see it.
> Samsung has made garbage appliances for my entire life.

When I moved into my first own flat, family, friends and colleagues pressured me to buy good appliances. They will last longer they said.

Buy Miele for a washing machine, nothing else, they said. I didn't had the money for that, so I bought a washing machine for 250 Euro. It has been going for 11 years, moved two times and doesn't show any signs of going out.

Another friend told me he only buys Samsung fridges. Best machines, one shouldn't buy anything else. I bought a fridge for 200 Euro because I liked the retro look and its red color. Also going strong for 10 years and moving two times. He has got the third Samsung fridge in 10 years now.

Yeah, that's anecdotal but I haven't really found the part where buying something more expensive really helped with expanding its lifespan, rather the contrary where "high tech" broke earlier or more often.

Re:CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3 on Thursday September 17, 2026 @01:47PM (#49744167)
CYBER CYBER! <3
Re:CCC invites all model citizens to 40C3 on Thursday September 17, 2026 @01:46PM (#49744148)
I tried it last year at every slot and had no chance at all.

Lots of tickets could be found on "Kleinanzeigen" after that and I think the club was quick to get them deleted and try to contain Scalping as much as possible.

With the newer, bigger location, I hope chances are better for a solo person. Hackerspaces have a reserved package I think, but I'm not really affiliated with those in my area, so that's not really an option for me.

For now I got a hotel reservation, that's just as important... :-D

Re:Why is Google still serving dodgy ads? on Sunday September 13, 2026 @02:42PM (#49687257)
> so they would rather have people report them

I have reported so many of those dodgy, scammy, sexualized ads on YouTube, that YouTube/Google has removed the option to report advertisements from my account.

They don't care as long as they're getting paid and there's no immediate liability for them.

You don't. You file a claim with the airline for any losses, take them to civil court or whatever is needed to get your money back.

The airline itself should insure against such events, or rather what follows from them.

I still don't see how this is supposed to work for text content that I copy and paste somewhere else. And with models getting better and better to "human language", wouldn't the false positives also rise as "real text" is flagged to be AI generated?
Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Monday August 24, 2026 @04:03PM (#49425132)
Newly established laws are always like a pendulum.

It swings to one side, overreaching and overcomplicating things, and then back to the other side where restrictions are loosened or removed.

Anybody remembers the EU platform for dispute resolution? It's gone after 10 years because nobody used it.

PPWR in 10 years will probably be something like: Sign up for a recycling system in your country and pay for the packaging you've brought into the market. Also have icons on the packaging so people know how to recycle them. (Except in France, they'll surely require some crazy stuff as always.)

I think that's exactly the case you would insure yourself against as an airline, so when shit hits the fan, you will not collapse.
Re:Fastmail offers EU data region on Saturday August 08, 2026 @04:57PM (#49225842)
> AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle

What? Those are US companies, they will have to give out your data under the Cloud Act. Only Schwarz and SAP are free from that by being German companies.

If you look at Volvo or smart, we are probably already on that route.

Had great hopes for the ID.Polo but from what I've seen it's just another vehicle that gets really expensive for not that much of a car...

More often that not I think this is a cheap excuse. When you look at struggling companies (take the car industry for example), I think the issue is more about missing innovation and building things that people don't want or can't afford anymore in Germany.
Re:Pebble Mega Update – July 2026 on Friday July 17, 2026 @06:27PM (#48952883)
Just looked at mine and wondered whether I should 3D print a cover for the contacts from TPU. Thanks for the idea!

edit: Done. :-D Better safe than sorry.

Re:Amazon Without the Knockoffs on Tuesday July 07, 2026 @04:19PM (#48823143)
Thank you for your work! Just installed the plugin, hope it will ease the pain of finding things on Amazon. :-D

edit: lol. tried searching for USB C flex cables. WHOLE search result page is gone. Love it! :-D

Re:Microsoft Needs Windows Lite on Monday June 29, 2026 @12:53PM (#48721705)
Do these versions get regular updates or are they expected to run on air-gapped machines so nobody really has to take care of them?
Re:Volkswagen started blocking GrapheneOS users on Thursday June 18, 2026 @05:22PM (#48591815)
No problem!

Former colleague had an EQB and I nearly hit another car on the Autobahn because cruise control was not breaking when I got closer. That was really unexpected as that was a standard feature in my Hyundai...

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