Yeah, Germany is different here. I am not 100% sure, but in Germany it is allowed if you are not focusing on any particular individual person. It is difficult to argue in absolute terms, which is why most consider public photos forbidden completely (unless for private/personal, very narrow use). Nowadays, in Germany, it has helped me to consider everything forbidden, unless it is explicitly allowed somewhere.
I agree. But there's still a valid use here for LLMs: If I have 1 Million bits of information and I want to communicate a synthesis of 500 bits to you, LLMs can be a viable helper. It is rarely done that way - I agree, but the way I use LLMs: Drop in all the relevant context information (PDFs, HTML, Markdown, Pictures etc. - up to usually 200-300k tokens), then compile a synthesis/summary prompt (usually 1-2 A4 pages of handwritten text. Then copy the output (1-2 A4 Pages), manually edit and send off (often, including an archive of the full original conversation, so the human on the other side can consult the unfiltered original prompt + inferencing, if wanted).
In other words: If I didn't reduce the 500 pages of text for you, you wouldn't know what I mean or what is relevant, or how to filter it yourself.
Such a law existed in San Francisco since 2022 and it was just cancelled by court order. The problem is: there are so many edge cases for empty apartments that it is impossible to account for. In Berlin, e.g., just imagine all the empty apartments in 10 years because no one wants to rent unrenovated, uninsulated apartments because of energy prices. The landlord cannot pay renovation. Forcing landlords to pay an empty apartment penalty doesn't help here.
If there is no business model and no one wants to pay, what then? We'd have a lot of vacant properties that would need to be renovated by the city. We see this in lots of places in Germany already, where there simply aren't buyers (because of demographics, primarily). Further, if you devalue properties with such a law, then you'd have a credit/dept property - landlords couldn't pay their dept, if property prices devalue by state law. Lastly, no one would build properties anymore under such a law.
.. Cities also rely quite a bit on property and real estate transfer taxes. By reducing property values, cities destroy their own tax base while needing lots of additional money to renovate state-acquired, vacant properties.
I really like ZFS snapshots with offsite pull-mode sync using
Jim Salter's sanoid/syncoid [1]. ZFS is the base for all OS/filesystems on top of it. If you have a good system for organizing ZFS datasets, and separating ephemeral from persistent data (e.g. [2]), then this is 90% of the backup requirements already fullfilled.
I have an old and loud 16-bay server that boots every 7 days or so if no one is home, `syncoid there here`, and shuts off. I'll get pinged by uptimerobot once in a while if it's overdue and I'll get a notification if a pool is unhealthy or reaching capacity (`sanoid --health` I think). Otherwise I forget I even have it set up.
Exactly! My offsite Backup box boots using a Shelly Plug S set on timer; it doesn't need to unlock the enrypted ZFS datasets because I use zfs sync snapshots in raw mode (-R). After the zfs scrupt, the box sends an email to me and shuts down. Next week: Repeat.
I like to use ZFS snapshots of running systems and then create and upload the backup from them via the excellent Borgmatic. (I know you can't depend on snapshots for databases and similar, but it's worked until now™.)
I run Scality S3 (Zenko Cloudserver in the blig) since about 2 years and it is quite capable and frequently updated. Just make sure to point it to the latest Github Registry, not the outdated Docker.com one.
I really liked Paradox (1: On the Brink of Eternity, 2: Beyond Eternity, 3: Eternity). It is foundationally positive and optimistic, yet still "realistic", as far as sci-fi goes. Also not much known on the US-side, as far as I know, which is unusual for good sci-fi.
Data scientist here. I still use pandas. It is a work horse. But today, the progress in data science is much more in integrating sources and outputs. I find Grist (via API) and n8n much more applicable and process oriented than core DS pandas - although all of these components fit together somewhere. Most of the time, there is very little binding glue needed, e.g. a bash script or standard python file. DS is still fun, but it is much more process oriented today!
Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!). No one needs wordpress. There's even Sveltia or DecapCMS now, to give those WYSIWYG-people access to static site editing. Then, remove PHP and all the dependency overhead and attack surface and you have a stripped down nginx that is pretty simple, minimalistic and bulletproof.
The problem is no one ever built one that works for normal people.
Most Wordpress sites are not operated by programmers, they are run by non technical people who just want a wysiwyg editor and a save button. While static site builders ask you to write markdown files, compile the result, upload it to a server, and if you want to collaborate you have to add git to that.
There almost needs to be an admin app which presents a Wordpress admin like ui but has no public exposure, and then it compiles the site to dump on s3 for the production. But as far as I’m aware no one has built this.
>Jamstack is an architectural approach that decouples the web experience layer from data and business logic, improving flexibility, scalability, performance, and maintainability.
>Jamstack removes the need for business logic to dictate the web experience.
>It enables a composable architecture for the web where custom logic and 3rd party services are consumed through APIs.
How far into this front page blurb do you think the average non-dev would get before they realize this is supposed to be a thing they can use in place of WordPress?
If I wasn't making 5 other things right now I'd consider making something like city desk. Every other day there are complaints about bots smashing peoples servers. Perhaps its time for a better static site generator.
> Static sites all the way (hugo, jekyll, mkdocs!). No one needs wordpress.
Maybe. A better question may be about how many people need to have the dynamic part of Wordpress live on the Internet? How many would be served well enough with the CMS aspects of Wordpress on the 'backend', but have it spit out static files for the 'frontend':
I love immich! On board since June 2026. But, here's a brief report on my evening installation project.. setting up Immich: Ingesting a 1.7TB library (160k+ RAW photos) is apparently not a standard task!
- Thumbnails and ML vectors consumed hundreds of gigabytes. I had to move the library folder to a dedicated ZFS HDD (700GB currently).
- ImageMagick uses 20GB RAM per Nikon RAW file (this triggered the Linux OOM-killer)
- Container crashes filled the OS drive with 2GB _per_ core dump.
I added `ulimits: core: 0` to the `docker-compose.yml` to stop core dumps and increased VM RAM to 48GB. I also added the following `.env` tweaks:
This sounds all like Mark Weiser's "Calm Technology" from 20 years ago [1]. I can't await when that future arrives! (I also self-host and have zero subscriptions, except the Proxmox community license - which is, beyond all, a free choice)
I don't believe such future will arrive by itself, but we can build a calm tech stack for ourselves. I successfully pruned much of the noisier stuff from my environment, and cutting down subscriptions left and right.
Unfortunately, some of the subscriptions are really useful, or I like how they present the thing I'm working on, so they stay for the time being.
In theory we will delegate this to agents, but really companies can already do that (plenty of software does upgrade itself in backgroud (some doesn’t because the user may want to peg an older version).
But really that cacophony of upgrades etc isn’t about user control, but just companies reminding you they exist. It’s spam, and like spam fighting, agents will not be able to handle it adequately.
Really, upgrading in the background is not calm technology to me: Windows Upgrades almost daily and my PC slows down, Firefox upgrades in the background and my tabs become unresponsive daily. I prefer the apt-Linux approach, even Ansible, or chocolatey. Anyway, I am not surprised that there are different definitions of what calm means (no offense!).
I believe there are good ways and bad ways to the background updates.
macOS and iOS doing updates when you are not looking is good because they store your app state most of the time.
Some macOS programs' "We have downloaded the update, it'll update silently when you exit" is also nice and kind way of doing it.
Firefox recently remedied its "We updated in the background but broke the runtime" problem for some months now on Linux and macOS, from which I observe.
However nudging, aggressive updates, forcing user to stop or take breaks are not calm technology. I accept that wholeheartedly.
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