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k_g_b_

66 karma · joined June 29, 2022

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k_g_b_··on Tesla to wind down Cybertruck production
The real heroes are still the boots on the ground climate/green/anti-nuclear movements of multiple decades that enabled the parties to be voted into power, that set up the subsidies which gave entrepreneurs an actual market, initial funding, public research to use and planning security.

As you said, subsidies played a huge role. Look at the timeline when Germany and then Spain set up their subsidies and the following ramp up in PV production.

Sure, it was an idea at the right time, but the right time needed decades of political groundwork.

While the entrepreneurs deserve some credit, they generally got cash. The movements got massive backlash by conservatives and some got terrorism charges for protesting non-violently.

k_g_b_··on Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-electricity-per-cap...

The only other even slightly comparable country is Spain and they don't start until 2006/7.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Renewable_Energy_Source... where the laws that kick-started that. Under a SPD-Greens government - it wouldn't have happened with the conservatives or (market) liberals, that's clear.

k_g_b_··on Germany Records Historic 12B KWh Solar Feed-In in July 2026
This. Plus the fact that it would have been politically absolutely infeasible to get anyone except the Greens to agree on a coal before nuclear phase out at any point until at least 2018. SPD, CDU especially were and are very close to to the coal industry (voters, company boards, etc.).

In addition, without the Greens-pushed and initiated renewables subsidies, there would have been basically no big market worldwide for solar manufacturing to even be built out the way it was and all solar tech and industrialization would likely not be as good as it is now.

k_g_b_··on German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications
I don't know that because it is utterly untrue, as is easily verified by looking up plenty of available data in the German electricity mix - it's replaced by the growth in renewables, fossil fuels have continuously shrunk https://strom-report.com/electricity-mix-germany/.

If you don't want to out yourself as a hardcore ideologue you should argue with data instead of political talking points.

Congratulations on picking up far right "children's book author" talking points! I'd say that is more of a worthwhile economic activity than whatever Merz has done in his life. If you can't recognize the self-serving ideology of Germany's "conservatives", I do have some perpetual micro-nuclear reactors to sell you.

k_g_b_··on German battery maker Varta files insolvency applications
Germany's use of gas has basically nothing to do with nuclear energy. It's used for gas peakers (which are for now and were needed, whether some % of electricity is provided by nuclear plants or not), heating (which has/had nothing to do with nuclear plants) and heavy industry like steel (which wouldn't be able to replace their gas usage any easier with nuclear than with renewables).

The current government is full of hardcore ideological incompetents captured by fossil fuel interests that wouldn't recognize a free market if it threw € bills in their face. Merz in particular can "admit" whatever he wants, it was an uninformed talking point to get a few points on media as a response to a small time-limited news wave on nuclear - nothing else to it. He's easily triggered.

The previous government extended the runtime of the shutdown-ready plants because of the energy crisis. Shutting off the last few hasn't had any significant impact on industrial energy prices https://www.smard.de/page/en/topic-article/5892/216044/indus...

k_g_b_··on Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained
Conservative politicians and leaders as they label themselves and practically act in today's political landscape are fundamentally on the authoritarian and anti-civil liberties side - there is no distraction. The right is only worse in the extent of authoritarianism and destruction of human rights they're willing to go to and the speed at which they want to achieve it.

If a conservative wants to preserve some status quo, basically all policy they use (and have available as a tool) in a permanently changing and developing world (socially, technologically) is that of restrictions, especially on civil rights, and of authoritarian mechanisms like police power. For weird reasons, conservatives never* want to preserve status quo civil rights like workers rights, freedom of information rights and similar that are anti-authoritatian.

k_g_b_··on Tenda firmware (multiple versions) contains hidden authentication backdoor
They'll have a lot of work to do, if they want to catch up with the amount and rate of "hidden authentication backdoors" all those companies (and also Cisco) have. E.g. https://www.thestack.technology/cisco-hard-coding-passwords-...
k_g_b_··on I stopped using NixOS and went back to Arch Linux
Compared to other Linux distribution's package tooling Arch's is pretty nice and painless, I think.

Agreed with namcap/chroot - I think there should be even more mandatory checks on pushing stuff to AUR. But even so - regarding your last point: you absolutely need to check all PKGBUILDs from AUR or potentially get malware.

https://bertptrs.nl/2026/01/30/how-to-review-an-aur-package.... is a nice recent article by one of the maintainers that follows up on last year's AUR malware.

The final point sums it up, though: the AUR was built without the security mechanisms - technical and social - we want and need today.

k_g_b_··on Show HN: Skir – like Protocol Buffer but better
*Made by the proto2 implementor, Kenton Varda

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=kentonv

k_g_b_··on Zig Libc
Ah, so you are signalling misogyny and judging people as less just by their choice of hair-do with that term, got it.
k_g_b_··on Zig Libc
So you're basing it all on your willful interpretation of "don't enforce federal immigration law" instead of going with any other interpretation that would not enrage you so? That seems unhealthy. How about the following very likely interpretation: "abolish the government agency ICE through democratic process (including protesting and voting)" followed with one of "move immigration law enforcement to another agency and better qualified agents with different, more humane rules" or "also reform immigration law to be more humane than allowing the executive arbitrary deportation of people in a legal process of gaining legal visa/citizenship/etc" or any of the other less ridiculous takes than your interpretation or Stasi comparison.
k_g_b_··on Zig Libc
The world demonstrates in many instances, that you do not have to have empathy with people suffering from oppression, rape, murder, etc in order to "succeed" in terms of wealth and power.

Meaning: if you can't accept that someone publishing words/code/etc on the web at the same time also offers their own strong opinions (that you directly claim to be hate) about their own such issues, there's plenty of "communities" in which this kind of unempathetic approach to other people and their lives is celebrated and normalized.

If you barely know what ICE is, how can you claim his opinions to be "hate"? How can you claim that Andrew may hate you without thinking you identify with what you understand about ICE?

What ICE does is unmistakenly fascistic and authoritarian, far beyond the powers they have been granted by law and democratic processes. It's utterly disgusting to try and compare protesting and fighting against that with "abolish people with tattoos". ICE is an institution, a government agency among a dozen+ law enforcement agencies in the US. You compare advocating for abolishing it through democratic process (what Andrew expressed) with calling for the murder of many millions of people with a private hobby.

And while Andrew may have some responsibility towards the community he founded; if he has the responsibility to include different political opinions, he most certainly has the responsibility to exclude fascism. Fascism is the destruction of different opinions, it is not a political opinion that can stand among others and be compared on the same basis: that of human rights at the minimum.

Ask yourself and reflect: why does this very simple and inoffensive call by Andrew make you scared, especially if you don't know what ICE is and does? Could you have been influenced into this feeling? It is certainly not a rational reaction to a few characters of text viewed on a screen.

k_g_b_··on Actors: A Model of Concurrent Computation [pdf] (1985)
Structured concurrency is also a Kotlin thing https://kotlinlang.org/docs/coroutines-basics.html#coroutine... and a Python thing https://vorpus.org/blog/notes-on-structured-concurrency-or-g... and before that it was a C thing https://sustrik.github.io/250bpm/blog:71/
k_g_b_··on Swift is a more convenient Rust (2023)
In the long run https://github.com/google/crubit will very likely solve this for Rust even if it's a bit specific to Google's use cases right now as per readme.
k_g_b_··on ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid
Germany in its constitutional law has protections against that data being used for any other purpose or government agencies. Does that help if a new antisemitic party would take over? Not likely for long, but hopefully long enough for other constitutional protections (like banning the party), anti-fascists or people working there themselves to intervene. On the other hand folks like the CCC or other data protection NGOs have been trying to teach politicians data minimalism for a while, but in this particular case religious conservatives don't want the state to get out of collecting church tax and the churches don't want the state to get out of it. In particular, Jewish communities could request the state not to collect taxes, tell their members to not enter that data into the tax forms and collected tithes/donations/similar on their own.
k_g_b_··on All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]
Please read again and don't put your own ideological spin on my words, please. I fully blame governments and politicians for all failures. I did not write that it's "actually" or otherwise privatized, in fact I wrote "you're right that it's not privatized".

The root cause is still privatization attempts and politicians that don't like well run public infrastructure and sabotage it through underfunding and bad requirements/structure. These are the same people that always claim that infrastructure will work perfectly well when just sold off to the private sector for maximum profit extraction. The working long term strategy is to get these out of position of power - however as is common, people like to vote against their own interests for ideological and emotional reasons.

No need to abandon reality, austerity and idiotic state underfunding of basic infrastructure (not just rail) have been the norm in Germany for decades. This isn't some crackpot conspiracy, but well accepted reality.

k_g_b_··on All my Deutschlandtickets gone: Fraud at an industrial scale [video]
DB is only in its current state (company organization, leadership failures, organizational failures, underfunding for decades, etc) because of previous governments' failed attempts at privatization decades ago. Full actual privatization would not likely have yielded any better results - especially regarding the actual infrastructure itself. (There's enough examples worldwide)

It's also been used for cushy post-politics jobs and lots of other incompetent meddling - such as requiring and extracting profits, etc.

You're right that it's not privatized, but the root causes of current misery still are the privatization attempts and a significant neoliberal/conservative political force that caused decay and blocked progress/improvements.

k_g_b_··on Odin: Moving Towards a New "core:OS"
When you want to distinguish `MyObj??` then you'll have to distinguish the optionality of one piece of code (wherever your `MyObj?` in the list came from) with some other (list find) before "mixing" them. E.g. by first mapping `MyObj?` to `MyObj | NotFoundInMyMap` (or similar polymorphic variant/anonymous sum types) and then putting it in a list. This could be easily optimized away or be a safe no-op cast.

Common sum types allow you to get around this, because they always do this "mapping" intrinsically by their structure/constructors when you use `Either/Maybe/Option` instead of `|`. However, it still doesn't always allow you to distinguish after "mixing" various optionalities - if find for Maps, Lists, etc all return `Option<MyObj>` and you have a bunch of them, you also don't know which of those it came from. This is often what one wants, but if you don't, you will still have to map to another sum type like above. In addition, when you don't care about null/not found, you'll have the dual problem and you will need to flatten nested sum types as the List find would return `Option<Option<MyObj>>` - `flatten`/`flat_map`/similar need to be used regularly and aren't necessary with anonymous sum types that do this implicitly.

Both communicate similar but slightly different intent in the types of an API. Anonymous sum types are great for errors for example to avoid global definitions of all error cases, precisely specify which can happen for a function and accumulate multiple cases without wrapping/mapping/reordering. Sadly, most programming languages do not support both.

k_g_b_··on Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy
All kinds of fees (e.g. for the grid) and taxes, yes. It differs by year and depending on which surcharges were added/removed through laws. E.g. one part was for renewable subsidies and that's been removed in '22.

40% source is here (German, slide 7) https://www.bdew.de/media/documents/BDEW_Strompreisanalyse_0...

Consumer prices are now down to below 0.30 €/kwh again for new contracts (takes a few clicks for anyone) - they were mostly high previously because of Russia's war. This influence on electricity production was removed.

k_g_b_··on Microsoft doubles down on small modular reactors and fusion energy
End consumer prices are utterly unusable to determine success or failure of the Energiewende. They are also utterly useless to compare across nations, as they are made up of very different components - e.g. in Germany only 40% is determined by market factors, in France the price is held artificially low by massive subsidies https://www.lemonde.fr/en/energies/article/2023/04/21/france... and so on.
k_g_b_··on How randomness improves algorithms (2023)
In my experience it's a common mistake of non-native English speakers, of native speakers of Slavic languages in particular. I see it often at work with titles starting with an interrogative word like "how".
k_g_b_··on Geneva makes public transport temporarily free to combat pollution spike
Public transport being massively/too popular is the only way for it to get anywhere near the level of funding it needs. That's not really a failure mode, just a symptom of the real failure. It was extremely easy for governments to ignore it and leave it to rot for decades because it had next to no lobby compared to cars.

The 9€ and Deutschlandticket reinvigorated that lobby - although that's being snuffed out again.

k_g_b_··on U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds
It doesn't, and people slowly realize - e.g. in beer country Germany: https://www.dw.com/en/germany-alcohol-free-beer-sales-double...
k_g_b_··on U.S. alcohol consumption drops to a 90-year low, new poll finds
Sure, let's just ignore all the issues that widespread alcohol abuse bring to societies and call them healthy. Who cares, I'm living a good life with alcohol, so everyone suffering from or seeing the side effects and abstaining is just an antisocial virgin.

What a ridiculous take.

k_g_b_··on Mastercard deflects blame for NSFW games being taken down
That's somewhat outdated and Wikipedia even slightly alludes to it with "Some banks are phasing out girocards". "some" in reality is "nearly all". Girocard is practically dead and I don't see it coming back without state intervention. There's a few holdouts in stores here and there that only accept Girocard and no other cards (my vet for example), but it's on the decline there, too.

"Privacy concerns" won't hold out long against relentless pushes for more deregulation of privacy laws for AI/other tech/"the economy"/etc and removal of data access hurdles for police/security services/etc coming from certain political spectrum - whose voters generally don't have high concern for such fundamental rights issues when at the ballot box.

k_g_b_··on Helsinki records zero traffic deaths for full year
https://www.tomtom.com/traffic-index/ranking/ 30 km/h is equal to 20 min/10km, 50 km/h is 12 min/10km.

So Helsinki city center is at 21km/h travel speeds, metro area at 31km/h. A speed limit of 30 km/h doesn't really affect these travel times much.

I can't find 2023 data to compare, however by other data on the net these are very common average speeds for any city in Europe even those with plenty of 50 km/h speed limits.

If more people take up public transport, bikes or scooters in fear of an average travel speed reduction of 1-2 km/h - that is a total win for everyone involved including drivers.

k_g_b_··on Google to back three new nuclear projects
Correct, it basically never was.

E.g. for Germany - the most high profile nuclear exits: - nuclear and fossile energy producers were the exact same companies - why would they fund activists to campaign against their own assets? - coal mining and plant employees were (around the first exit) part of a significant worker voter population, especially for the social democrats but to a lesser degree for the conservatives, too. The largest state was heavily dependent on the coal industry and SPD/CDU politicians regularly moved to/from leadership positions in coal-dependent energy producers. No party except possibly the Greens would have remotely touched a coal exit and discussions around that only seriously started after the second (conservative reversal reversal) nuclear exit. - gas and nuclear fuel in major quantities came from Russia, from different Russian state companies - why would they cut into each other's business by funding activists? They were happy for Germany to depend on them in any and all ways. - the second nuclear exit was a political play for voter sentiment by conservatives after Fukushima - they didn't even try to explain why nuclear should be kept for all the reasons they reversed the previous exit and still killed of the nascent booming solar/wind industry - they certainly were not renewables activists. Just recently the reverse happened as part of conservatives pre-election promises to rebuild nuclear as a play for voter sentiment due to temporarily high (war-dependent, already normalized) energy prices. It wasn't important enough for them to include in the government coalition plans in any way whatsoever - the main conservative agitator for nuclear has now had to agree that nuclear is economically dead.

The reality is that nuclear in Germany was already dead when the first exit was voted on - nobody had built plants in a long time, nobody had any plans to build them. If not for the exit plans to start a renewables transition, fossil usage would be far higher today and because of the exit reversal and delay in coal exit due to the conservatives it is much higher today than it needed to be and we're much more dependent on Chinese manufacturers, too.

At most activists were somewhat involved in voter sentiment at some points, but it wasn't particularly crucial versus the actual economic and political realities.

k_g_b_··on Ex-Facebook director's new book paints brutal image of Mark Zuckerberg
I'm not sure whether men are truly better on average, or women are just on average more conditioned by our societies not to do so or even if, to do so in a manner that isn't effective.

Unlearning ~2 decades of upbringing, education, expectations, some of that from religion, etc when entering the workforce could be pretty hard and significantly affect any statistics around this.

k_g_b_··on The cost of Go's panic and recover
Any language that implements linear types has values that can't be ignored and need to be passed to some "destructor" (could just be a deconstruction pattern assignment/similar).

Examples: Austral, some of these https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substructural_type_system#Pr... in particular at least ATS, Alms, Granule, LinearML Though most haven't gone beyond research languages yet.

k_g_b_··on The evolution of a structural code editor
You missed all the cursor movements (whether by mouse/keyboard) needed for the plain text editor:

1. Position cursor before the call from wherever it is right now (might be quick because your editor already allows some form of structure in it's movement commands: words, parentheses, visual jumps, etc or you might need 10+ presses of the left arrow) 2. Type "(if flag " 3. Position cursor after the call - maybe just a press of "End"/$/shift-A/... 4. Type ")"

Your two ways of structural editing seems to be an artifact of Lisp - I agree that most programming languages have issues when editing structurally - especially when using an abstract/concrete Syntax tree as the structure as compared to a non-syntactic representation (e.g. expression graphs where only types need to match).

So when this weird difference does not exist, you can always use the second strategy you listed. This already includes necessary cursor movements/selections and is one step shorter than the commands necessary for textual editing.

I think that any editor will always have to deal with partial programs - it's just the holes/errors are in different parts. The right UX can make dealing with that possible, just as auto formatting, syntax highlighting, inline type display, etc help somewhat deal with parts already in existing editing systems.

I think there's plenty of ways to make the UX work - for a programming language and ecosystem designed for it. So I think that structural programming should be a complete environment - programming language, editor with a good editing meta-language mapped to keys/auto complete/etc, language server equivalent, structural version control, build system, code sharing/review (diffs!) and legacy interface to textual tools. There'll be a tipping point where one has enough benefits from the structure in each of these to overcome the unavailability of many existing tools like grep/etc. A single structural editor experiment likely isn't at that tipping point unless the UX is really a significant improvement like github.com/cursorless-dev/cursorless is for many folks.

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