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  > Europe is pouring more than €2 billion into sovereign cloud initiatives designed to reduce exposure to US legal reach.

(not Europe, the EU)

this is just sad. the US clouds did not happen because US poured billions into them. they happened because the financial/whatever situation was such that these businesses could happen.

now the EU, instead of making it easy for companies to innovate, spends billion on trying to catch up to the US. not even catching up. getting to where the US clouds are today.

the "skating to where the puck is going to be, not where it's been" quote comes to mind.

this seems misleading. the article claims:

  12,000 megawatts, equivalent to 12 large nuclear plants, of energy from its battery arrays.

but for how long is this battery array able to produce this amount of power? compared to the nuclear plant, where the answer is years.

watts are power, not energy. for example, a tea kettle might require 2kilowatts. this does not tell you how much does it cost you to use the tea kettle, because it does not tell you how long the tea kettle is consuming 2kilowatts.

sorry but this is not realistic. i looked at the [2] document and it's just a dream.

it's written in the style of "currently EU consumes this much energy, we project this to grow to that much until 2030/2040, we currently produce this much energy from renewables, so we need to multiply the amount of renewables with the correct number".

completely ignores the largest problem with solar/wind, storage. it just says that we should build enough storage. that's easy to say. i don't know of any country on this planet that made it work with purely solar/wind (please just tell me which one does, bonus point for one with a similar climate to europe), so it means we need to literally develop the technology (pls note, we do not even know what that technology will be) and then deploy it... in 6 years. that's completely unreal.

also, they recommend that we let the nuclear power generation go to zero, arguing for example, that nuclear-fuel needs to be imported into europe, but seems to be totally fine with importing in anything else (rare earth minerals etc.)

what about passwords that you have to type on websites? this solution does not protect you against phishing at all, right? (i mean, it does not help you with making sure the password is entered on the correct website)

"you don’t have to worry about phishing" .... TOTP is also vulnerable to phishing, same as SMS.

please note this needs the can-access-everything-you-do permission ( https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/permission-request-mess... ).

so please make sure you understand the tradeoff, the risks involved.

by not having to trust youtube/twitter/instagram to not store what you do on their website, you instead have to trust a random browser extension to not store everything you do in your browser on every website.

(also, please do not use the it-is-open-source-you-can-read-the-source-code argument. no normal user is going to read and understand the whole source code, and repeat it for every update. at the end, you have to decide to trust it, or not)

i love the idea of uBlock Origin Lite. i am willing to trade some efficiency if i don't have to give it the "has access to everything i do in the browser" permissions.

"I don't use it as a daily driver" (from the article)

an article arguing that reproducible builds are a lot of effort, and the benefits are not that big: https://blog.cmpxchg8b.com/2020/07/you-dont-need-reproducibl...

both "switch" and "restore" say in the docs: "THIS COMMAND IS EXPERIMENTAL. THE BEHAVIOR MAY CHANGE."

so maybe wait until that note is removed.

i was also investigating trying Nix instead of homebrew, but please note that things are not as easy in Nix as in homebrew. for example:

- mac-arm-support has just happened in Nix, with comments like "neovim does not work on m1" 2 weeks ago ( https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/95903#issuecomment-8... ). it works just fine in homebrew.

- when installing it on a new mac, you need to use the "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" switch, which does not inspire confidence (and yes, the documentation points out that on mac computers with T2 chip this still creates an encrypted volume or something, the point is, when installing homebrew i do not have to tell it to do something unencrypted)

- sometimes you get the feeling that nix-on-mac is less important than nixos. like, the whole problem with that "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" thing is because nix wants to live in the "/nix" directory, and apple does not like that. you could install nix into an another directory and have no apple-problems, but the rest of the nix-ecosystem standardized on "/nix", so if you do that, you get no binary packages etc. with homebrew, you get a package-manager that is focused on macos, it does things the way that makes it easy to use on macos.

still, the advantages of Nix are very impressive, and i'll keep looking at it, i just wanted to balance out all the overly positive switch-to-git articles a little :-)

(NOTE: all this info is from following nix-related topics for a couple months. i did not install nix on mac yet.)

is the `--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume` switch still necessary when installing? this is just my personal opinion of course, but i think this should be somehow removed (i understand that on a modern mac computer things will still be safe (probably?), but seeing this flag in the install command is just bad for a first-time user)

all the pull-requests mentioned on that webpage are from 2019 and 2020 and all were rejected (well, technically the last one is still open, with a comment pointing to an another place where it was rejected). the "get involved" link points to a page that does not exist.

about the "_value" thing.. maybe using a rename-by-regex transform could help?

you do realize that the same can be done for a bank-account, right?

at the end of the day someone is sitting at a computer and given an id-card from a stranger and clicking the "yes, i verified their id card".

you can make sync IO calls in Rust if i'm not mistaken. be it reading a file or doing a remote HTTP request.

and with this being true, the article's argument does not work, there is no types-mark-io happening there.

the argument applies better to Haskell, where you cannot do any IO without the types saying so.

interestingly, it also applies somewhat to Javascript, where because of backward-compat and history, it's not possible to do sync IO (mostly :) welcome to javascript), so if you do not see an "async" annotation, you can be mostly sure that this is pure cpu-work.

based on the Nix documentation the macOS situation does not look as positive as described by this comment:

- if you have an M1 mac, it does not work (https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/95903)

- if you have an intel mac, when you install it, you have to add the "--darwin-use-unencrypted-nix-store-volume" switch to the installer, otherwise it does not work (https://nixos.org/manual/nix/stable/#sect-macos-installation). i do not want unencrypted things on may computer. (and yes, there is a long section of the documentation about other approaches with other tradeoffs, and if you have a T2 chip then maybe it is ok (but why isn't the installer detecting this automatically?)... the point is, with homebrew there is no such problem)

are you sure Azure has this?

i looked into this a year ago and there was no such thing available (there is https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cost-management-billi... but that is not really a spending limit, it's more like in some cases you get credits from microsoft and when you have spent all the credits they stop things for you). i mean a system where you pay monthly what you consumed, and you can set a limit, and the provider guarantees that you do not have to pay more than the limit.

but maybe i overlooked something, so if you know more about this, please tell.

btw. fly.io has a kind-of spending-limit, you can preload some credit into the account and when that is spent you are relatively safe ( https://community.fly.io/t/can-i-set-a-billing-limit-per-mon... )