tribaal

As a Swiss I'm a little surprised about your points:

1. We have a wide, per-canton range of solutions for everything even up to school system or tax software. Almost nothing is the same everywhere in the country (not even mentality...)

2. I am quite surprised about the "chage adverse" comment as well, except maybe in rural/conservative villages, people are on the contrary quite forward looking. Our economy is regularly listed as the most competitive in the world. How can competitive economy exist if nothing ever changes? Where does your impression come from?

3. My wife works in the Swiss government and uses a linux desktop at home...

It's mostly the same in any general purpose programming language though, parts of the language features are meant (or became seens as) tools to be used in very narrow cases, which people less familiar with the language tend to "overuse".

Eg. goto/jump, bare "except" statements in python, etc... In Rust, unsafe has its uses and is a first class language feature, but it certainly isn't idiomatic to use it to mimic access patterns from other languages (unless absolutely necessary).

Almost the latter - I can almost live without pulling anything from the grid. The huge caveat being that my system is way oversized for a normal house, since my building is multi-use (including commercial tenants who obviously only need power during the day). I am definitely injecting more during the summer though, of course.

I have a 40kWp system and a 20kWh battery.

Wind is not that developed in Switzerland because it's not actually that great of a situation... We have a lot of steep mountains which make building wind farms a real challenge, and the flat plains in between have "meh" levels of wind. And a very strong NIMBY mentality. We do have some projects but those are more exception than rule.

The really awesome wind spots are more the coastal or offshore farms, which... well... we can't have (no access to the sea does that to you).

Solar is really really booming right now however, many houses take themselves off grid completely. Mine is a net producer for example.

Mostly all of our potential for pumped hydro is already developed, and there is not a lot left to do for non-pumped hydro.

We can't grow hydro at the required scale, and the usual problem with solar and wind (that we should develop nonetheless, don't get me wrong) apply: we can't produce enough power with those all year (winter nights need power too for heat pumps etc...)

The SVP is not considered "moderate". They are a far-right party. The fact that they are wide spread and gather a lot of votes does not make them "moderate".

Source: am Swiss

It's mostly similar to France. My house is in a valley (so reasonable snow) and some good solar irradiation year round.

The roof being at a steep angle also means snow doesn't tend to accumulate much.

Exactly - I own a Tesla and an id.buzz and it’s just insulting how bad the user experience is on the buzz.

I don’t need buttons for the rear view mirrors or lights, I need them to do the right thing for me instead. VW not saving the position of the rear view mirrors on my profile is stupid. Having a hardware button for the seat position “profile” is stupid. Having walk away lock locking and unlocking the bus in a loop in you stay within range with the fob is stupid. Having a fob is stupid.

Those are the software issues you need to fix VW, if you ever want my business again.

Edit: and since people seem to care about AC buttons: the id.buzz has AC buttons! But they are right under the infotainment screen… and capacitive :) the Tesla’s screen is much easier to manipulate.

Another data point: my entire system in Switzerland cost me 1.3CHF/Watt including a 20kWh battery and 5000 CHF of scaffolding costs (needed because of our local OSHA equivalent laws when installing panels on a tilted roof).

It has become ridiculously cheap indeed.

Maybe you should visit Geneva then, or most of the "Arc Lemanique".

It's way more diverse than Zurich. Well, if you mean "diverse" as "more brown people" as your comment seems to imply.

SteamOS is really a desktop linux. You can switch to "desktop mode" to see the "normal desktop" and you get a KDE where you can run whatever you want.

It's "just" immutable Arch that defaults to Steam's console mode interface.

Exactly - it's done in public, and not centrally. Any citizen can go and check how it's done in their own Geminde.

As a Swiss citizen I strongly disagree. Most people capable of reading and basic maths (addition!) can understand the counting of our paper ballots. My kids understand how this works since they are like 5.

Any citizen can go and check how votes are counted in their Geminde. Any citizen can check what is reported in the federal tally. I did several times. It's not rocket science.

Custom widgets aren’t particularly hard to do in iced, but I wish some of those common cases would be committed back / made available.

Except the above virtualised lists, another case I hit was layered images (sprites for example). Not very hard to write my own, sure, but it’d be nice to have that out of the box as in eg. egui

Not contesting your claim, but would you mind sharing what major hardware vendor you mean?

I love iced and wrote a decent amount of code using it, but in my mind the biggest sponsor is system76 - and as awesome as they are they aren’t a major vendor yet :)

Except using the cold output from the heat pump to serve as ac (which of arguably neat) it’s a normal heat pump

Ah it does ac on top, neat. Thanks!

I have an all in one heat pump right now in my house (in Europe). Not made by Samsung.

Why is this news? Is it because it can heat water to 85 degrees Celsius? Is it because it’s Samsung?

This is extremely valuable insight for me, a non-Indian manager.

Thanks a lot!

Probably an unpopular opinion, but it’s been a couple of jobs that I write “just python” to generate k8s manifests, and it works really, really well.

There’s packages. You can write functions. You can write tests trivially (the output is basically a giant map that you just write out as yaml)…

I’m applying this to other areas too with great success, for example our snowflake IaC is “just python” that generates SQL. It’s great.

This is bullshit, Emmentaler has holes here as well.

Source: am Swiss, live in Emmental

Oh really? Wow! I'll switch over tonight and give it a shot. Thanks!

I was very skeptical of the claim that gaming on linux is good now, but fully switched over last weekend.

All of the games I play on a regular basis just worked out of the box with no fiddling at all (nVidia graphics card, X11, pop_OS - but I'm pretty sure any modern distribution would work just as well). Fresh OS install (nvidia drivers just worked), install the steam flatpack, click "download", click "play". That's it.

This includes "modern" games such as Borderlands 4 and e.g. Helldivers 2.

Huawei is very present at EuroRust and seem to look for a lot of people to hire.

I guess it makes sense, I was curious why they would want people to work on e.g. Servo since Firefox is already available on Android... now I know :) Their team there made a pretty good impression for the record, they were knowledgeable and pitched their projects quite well (several of them quite interesting).

The EPA seems to disagree with your numbers: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

Battery manufacturing emissions are dwarfed by lifetime emissions of a gasoline powered car, according to the EPA. They do about double the emissions for manufacturing, but that's not all that much.

https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/electric-vehicle-myths

This doesn't take away the main point of your comment of course, you're right that keeping a vehicle longer is the most impactful decision.

Well, they do give you a lump sum every 3 years to buy whatever laptop you want with.

Personally, I was fine with this: I had a laptop I was already doing open source work with, no reason for me to change (I did open source work with my same laptop, as usual, and got paid for it).

Of all the things I could criticize my ex employer about, this isn't one of them frankly. Could they give a lump sum at hiring? Yeah maybe. Could the frequency be increased? Sure...

They made up for that kind of stuff by a lot by flying you around the world a few times a year for a week or more, in my book.

The argument I saw brought up when I was working at Canonical (before the weird hiring process thing, n.b.) made some sense:

They explicitly wanted you to buy a laptop in your country using what's available to you so as to artificially widen the laptops with good ubuntu support: the reasoning was that you being a Canonical employee means you're more likely to help get the bugs fixed.

In practice however I don't think the diversity of laptops in the company was that great, we ended up with the same bunch of thinkpads and dells you'd expect from any random group of nerds (with a few exotics thrown in perhaps, but not many).

One requirement was to use Ubuntu on your laptop. I think they relaxed that over the years, even if working on not-ubuntu would definitely get you looks and comments at get togethers.

Well, my corporate network seems to be blocking websockets to your domain...

So it's definitely not a neptyne problem (it works great on my personal laptop).

Cool product! Thanks for the good work there.

I'd like to try - it's quite a cool idea. But the interface seems broken.

Is that the HN hug of death, or my corporate netowrk playing up?