I definitely don't think so. You're seeing companies who have a lot of publicity on the internet. There are tons of very successful SMBs who have no real idea of what to do with AI, and they're not jumping on it at all. They're at risk.
This. It's a fascinating project, it is hard to believe how can an FLOSS project be so high quality. In my book it's on the level of Postgres (although it's a smaller project, probably).
Their frontend is amazing, their apps are not as performant, and the backend is (IMHO) the worst of them all.
No hate here, I'm really grateful for what they've achieved so far, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement (e.g: proper R/W query split, native S3 integration, faster endpoints, ...). I already mentioned it in their channel (they're a really welcoming community!) and I'm working on an alternative drop-in replacement backend (written in Go) [1] that will hopefully bring all the needed improvements.
TL;DR: It's definitely good, especially for an open-source project, and the team is very dedicated - but it's definitely not Postgres-good
Why the focus on S3 for a self-hosted app? Anyway kudos for the effort, I'm not experiencing performance issues in my locally self-hosted Immich installation but more performant software is always welcome.
I have and love my self-hosted immich install. If self-hosted could also use S3 storage, that allows me to use Garage (https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage) , which also lets me play games with growable/redundant storage on a pile of second-hand hard drives. IIRC it can only use a mounted block device at the moment, (unless there is a nfs-exposed s3 translator ....)
A lot of existing tooling supports the s3 protocol, so it would simplify the storage picture (no pun intended).
S3-compatible storage. In my case, Backblaze B2. The idea is to make the backend compatible with rclone, so that one can pick whatever storage they want (including B2 / S3 and others)
I backup my immich photos in B2 with rclone but I prefer having it as a separate process (also, the backup is append-only). I don't need "hyperscale", and storing directly on S3/B2/remotely breaks a bit the 3-2-1 rule I want to follow.
On B2 (and S3 storage in general) you can set a retention policy for what happens after you delete an object (e.g: object lock with persistance for at least 30 days). Of course this is not a substitute for a backup - but it's better than discovering that you deleted your whole 1TB library when it's too late
Looking at the world around me, so much of it is driven by open source. In fact, I can't name a single piece of electronics around me that isn't using it.
OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones.
OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities.
I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover.
I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”
> I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.
If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.
For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.
But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.
What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.
the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like that.
everyone will roll over if all large public companies roll over (and they will)
IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).
Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.
MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.
Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.
> If your goal is saving energy/money, you don’t want a system capable of going from cool to toasty in 20 minutes.
Depends. As explained in a sibling comments, I have some rooms that have combined UFH and radiators, and if the desired temp is more than 1 celsius away from the current temp, then both are driven, otherwise it's just the UFH.
So long as you can get the boiler return water temps low enough, you can operate the boiler in its high efficiency range.
Most dual-temp setups are set for the highest temp and mixed-down to provide the lower temp for under-floor. That’s cheapest in terms of equipment and install but cannot be as efficient as a system that mixes down when both loads call but also lowers flow temp (thereby lowering return temp) when no high-temp rads are calling.
It does match physics if you consider other factors. Apart from the heat pump scenario, this statement can also be true when you have condensing boilers (and okay-ish insulation)
The reasoning: when you heat up the house, then your boiler needs to produce constant high-temperature water. When you keep the house at the same temperature, then the boiler produces much lower temp water and it is more efficient.
Insulation also matters because if your house has outer insulation then it means that heat transfer from the house to the environment is mostly blocked, but cross-room heat transfer is likely not (through the walls). Therefore it is better to heat the whole house than heating just a couple of rooms because if you do the latter then you'll end up heating the whole house anyway but you're using less surface area (meaning you need higher flow temperatures, meaning less efficiency).
> The reasoning: when you heat up the house, then your boiler needs to produce constant high-temperature water. When you keep the house at the same temperature, then the boiler produces much lower temp water and it is more efficient.
How does your boiler produce heat for your water in your scenario?
> Therefore it is better to heat the whole house than heating just a couple of rooms because if you do the latter then you'll end up heating the whole house anyway but you're using less surface area (meaning you need higher flow temperatures, meaning less efficiency).
Just model the other rooms as very weird wall to the outside.
We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it. It's a multi-floor semi-detached house and I wanted the best comfort and the most economical heating possible.
In particular: stable and individually adjustable temperatures for bedrooms and living rooms; underfloor heating in some rooms (bedrooms), radiator-based heating in some others (living room), and combined UFH+radiators in some others (where UFH might not be enough during extreme colds).
I thought I can just pay someone some money and they'll set up the controls for me. It must be a simple exercise, right?
I could not have been more wrong. After spending a few hours of understanding the setups that "experts" have recommended, I figured out edge cases where they would be either wasteful or uncomfortable (meaning: unnecessary and inavoidable temperature overshoots or undershoots, etc.). I had many-many rounds with Honeywell, Tado, Siemens, etc. and every single one of them had _major_ issues.
The renovation got a bit stuck because of this, but the plumbing was ready so I wanted to see whether the pluming and pumps are working, at least. So I connected the pumps and valves to "smart plugs", i.e. Zigbee-controlled plugs, so that I can see that they turn on. They did, which got me thinking...
Right now I have $20 Zigbee temp sensors sprinkled across the house, $30 smart plugs and relays driving valves, pumps and the boiler, and Home Assistant is controlling the whole thing. Everything works perfectly and I could implement some features that simply no system would have done out of the box, for example in rooms where there's combined UFH and radiators I can drive both heating systems when the target temperature is far from the desired (so that the room heats up quickly) but as the room temp is getting closer to the target, the radiators are turned off so that UFH dominates heating (more comfortable and more energy efficient than radiators). In rooms with radiators, temp is +- 0.4 C within target, in rooms with UFH, it's +-0.1C within target.
Yeah, the automated/remote controlled heating system world, and also the ringbell world is basically a giant scam, since they are updates on world that also scammed you in the past. I cried when I shelled out so much money for my Tado device, but even a dumb bTicino device costed in the hundred of euros realm, and it's just a sensor + a small LCD display and a designed-in-hell menu system to program it. And the same happens in Ip-based ringbells. A Doorbird will cost you hundreds of euros for what is basically a webcam plus some nice metal casing and a shitty software, but it competes with analog systems with optic cables etc that cost basically the same or more.
Off the shelf systems aren't only optimised solely for efficiency. They're made to be simple enough that an installer with half a day's training can do a few multiplications and additions to set the parameters that'll give you a tolerable percentage of optimal in the situations that equipment is specified for -- while still being understandable by the next guy. This nearly always means things are a bit oversized and inefficient to account for the things that the simple models are missing.
Almost everything in engineering is like this, not just heating. It's pretty rare that something is fully optimised.
> We've moved to an new apartment (house) and we had to do a full renovation. It doesn't have modern insulation and I calculated that for the time being the ROI on insulation isn't worth it.
You calculated wrong, guaranteed. Most likely, you wildly underestimated fuel/electricity costs.
> After spending a few hours of understanding the setups that "experts" have recommended, I figured out edge cases where they would be either wasteful or uncomfortable (meaning: unnecessary and inavoidable temperature overshoots or undershoots, etc.).
Instead of thinking "the entire HVAC/heat industry are idiots who can't do any of this right", maybe you should take a look in the mirror and consider that your assumptions and/or criteria are wrong.
For example: under/over shoots in a modern HVAC or heating system will not cause any "waste" or discomfort. 1-2 degree F in overshoot does not mean the space will lose appreciably more heat than if it had perfectly regulated at the setpoint. You also don't want a system that responds instantly. Let's say you open the door to receive a package, and you're signing paperwork, etc. You close the door. The air in the room is substantially cooler.
Should the heat turn on?
I bet it does in your home...but the correct answer is no, because the air will warm up rapidly from all the objects that were at the temperature of the room. Thousand-plus square feet worth of surface area...
> I could not have been more wrong. After spending a few hours of understanding the setups that "experts" have recommended, I figured out edge cases where they would be either wasteful or uncomfortable (meaning: unnecessary and inavoidable temperature overshoots or undershoots, etc.). I had many-many rounds with Honeywell, Tado, Siemens, etc. and every single one of them had _major_ issues.
Temperature hysteresis is unavoidable with a conventional thermostat, but you can reduce it with PID controllers. Most commercial building automation systems use PID controllers extensively.
My guess is that the residential options from Honeywell, JCI, Siemens, Trane, Carrier, etc are focused more on one-size-fits-all applications, whereas commercial BAS systems are more or less bespoke designs for a specific building (using commodity sensors and controllers). I work with all five of the aforementioned companies on building automation projects, FWIW.
Sounds like a nightmare for a future buyer to operate.
Some people are unlucky enough to buy homes where a machine engineer designed the boiler setup and the boiler room have enough valves and manometers to like operate the engine of Titanic.
I guess programmers are the new sinners in this area nowadays.
If we ever sell this (which we don't plan to), I know what to install (it'll be quite good, just not this perfect). I have it in a cupboard (a Siemens Connected Home thermostat system), the downside of that is that the combined UFH+radiator rooms will be less comfortable.
(But still more comfortable than 99% of the houses I've been in.)
I haven't mentioned in the parent comment but as a test I've dismantled the HA system and installed the Siemens system and it works well, just not 'perfectly'.
For every John Siegenthaler and Dan Holohan, there are thousands of mechanical engineers and tens of thousands of plumbers who are happier to slap in a $20K 4-hour boiler retrofit. There’s not enough extra money in catering to the 0.1% of homeowners who care about the details.
It’s a service or human engineering problem rather than a mechanical engineering or knowledge problem.
Contractors today put in over-sized equipment, set flow temps higher than needed, undersize emitters for aesthetics and cost, and run pumps at full speed to avoid callbacks for “it’s too cold”. You can’t afford the windshield time to drive over to tweak the system to extract maximum performance, because homeowners don’t want to pay for it and will go with the lower bidder enough times that your premium AI-powered service will struggle.
I’ve tweaked my reset curve 12 times the first winter and 2 more times since then (counted from my spreadsheet).
Realistically, if I gave up on the last 3% tweaking, we could have lived with it after 2 post-install tweaks, but at least one of those had to wait for seriously cold weather snap to fine-tune the low end.
My spouse would happily agree that the house is finally very comfortable and noticeably more than before. She’d also tell friends who asked that there were a few days the first winter where the house wasn’t warm enough and needed an adjustment. People who heard that story might conclude that their neighbor’s guy who never has a callback for “too cold” is a safer bet.
Over time, I think even the best mechanical contractors will start to lean towards avoiding callbacks and do that by running the system 5-10°C hotter than “correct” engineering requires. That’s still better than today, where flow is set to 80°C, pumps to max, and the thermostat cycles 4 times an hour but the house is never too cold.
a bit off-topic: Are you running a single boiler and if so, how are you mixing UFH with radiators given there's a ~20C difference between the recommended temps for the two?
My knowledge is that for UFH you run at temps between 40-50C and radiators run at 60-70*C.
As someone who lived in multiple rich countries in Europe, let me tell you that the German healthcare system is awesome. It has a lot of problems, but it's head and shoulders above many-many other countries. You can actually get care by a qualified doctor, while this is absolutely not self-evident even in rich countries like the United Kingdom, and let's not talk about CEE countries.
I would disagree. German doctors regularly prescribe homeopathic medicine, misdiagnose patients and tell people they just need to drink tea, and also will not supply medicine when it is really needed. This is well researched.
Saying you can not get care by a qualified doctor in the UK is a completely false statement.
There's not much to see here I believe - Tesla's valuation is approximately where it was before the election, and that's generally true for tech stocks (Tesla generally moves with the NASDAQ). It made a big swing in the last month, but the news around this is classic post-hoc narrative.
Edit: I meant the crashing valuation, not this particular news, apologies for the confusion. I do think that government officials promoting stocks is a terrible precedent to set.
The president of the United States is now pushing individual stocks with his cabinet because his billionaire buddy is having a bad time, and the response is “nothing to see here, perfectly normal”???
The Trump administration's active and overt effort to prop up the stock suggests to me that they're worried. The president himself made a video advertorial. It's bizarre.
Sad to see Hacker News turn into Reddit, flagging the only informative comment because it does not validate the mob's hatred. This headline is meaningless, and by the way, $TSLA has shot up alongside the US tech sector and is now positive. Will we get updates on the front page every five minutes?
Whether the comment is informative or not it dismisses the news article without even tackling the actual issue which is the commerce secretary recommending the stick for which the presidents closest advisor is the CEO/largest shareholder.
I disagree with the downvotes but it is very close to distracting the actual issue at hand by dismissing the more minor issue which is the stock price movement.
That's certainly a more interesting topic of discussion, but this submission is not about the issue that you and I would rather discuss, it is about short-term movements in the price of a stock that moved in the same direction as the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ.
I’m going to be honest, I try to assume good faith from others on this forum but your comment makes that particularly difficult. By “issue that you and I would rather discuss” are you referring to the Secretary of Commerce’s unprecedented public endorsement to buy a specific stock, of which the President’s primary advisor is the majority shareholder? Because if that’s what you’re suggesting well, that’s pretty wild. Especially considering the second paragraph of the article highlights exactly what the article is about:
“Why it matters: Cabinet secretaries don't typically recommend individual stocks, much less those linked to the president's closest adviser.”
To whoever downvoted this. I used to come to hacker news years ago and see 90% programming related things: Type system abuse, extreme common lisp code, libraries and tools. It was pretty much all tech debate all the time. The worst days would be 70% tech. Today thats a good day.
Nowadays theres a lot more californians being mad at elon, poetic eulogies, paid articles about "how to write good" or how "you should write even if people dont read it."
People will try to say it hasnt changed but it has changed. It is about half as tech related, and about 10 times as reactionary in the same way the rest of the internet has become more dumb.
You can be mad if you want, but everyone can see it, and thats why some people I know in real life are referring to hacker news as orange reddit in a denigrating way. Reading hacker news doesnt confer programming street cred like it did ten years ago. That isnt because im cynical, or want it to be true. It just is true.
I've looked around (Europe), and there's nothing comparable at the price, except maybe Ioniq (but I didn't like the ergonomics, not saying it's objectively bad, just didn't fit me). Kia is way more expensive, Volkswagen is way more expensive at the same trim level, etc.
>I'm more interested in knowing if there are any glimmers of hope left in Hungary.
Absolutely. In my opinion, our lifeline is the EU, as much as Orban is a pain in the ass for them. I believe that as long as Hungary is part of such international organizations, and I'm counting the NATO here as well, Orban can't cross certain borders, or at least not without repercussions, and I believe that he doesn't want any, since his whole shtick is to capitalize on these relations. For example, the same developments would have been (are?) much more scarier in Turkiye, or Belarus.
According to propaganda, Orban is building a family-friendly place. This is proclaimed loudly in the media, and at points where you enter the country (like metal signs saying "Welcome to the family friendly Hungary").
These family values is the usual alt-right dogwhistle, however. Same as how it's used in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_values#Organizations . In reality, the systems that actually support families, healthcare and education, are more strained than ever, due to the gov increasing their responsibility, and underfunding them constantly.
Couples are pushed to marry and have children, by providing discounted loans for them, if they sign contracts that they will bear children. Up to three, the more children they sign up for, the higher the loan will be.
They have amended the hungarian constitution to say explicitly that the mother is a woman, and the father is a man. The particular part now reads: "Hungary protects the institution of marriage as a voluntary union between a man and a woman, and the family as the basis for the survival of the nation. The basis of the family relationship is marriage and the parent-child relationship. The mother is a woman, the father is a man."
"The West" and progressive societal values are actively framed as harmful propaganda that intends to destabilize the country. Values like supporting women and lgbt+, supporting investigative journalism, having a look on migration as anything other than "very harmful".
Abortion laws are strictened. They included things like the mother having to listen to the fetus' heartbeat, before agreeing to the abortion procedure. Frankly, I think this is so evil, that I have a very hard time not to write something that wishes active harm towards these people.
Doctors don't take women seriously, and are often hostile or degrading towards them. This is not a politically directed issue, rather the result of the previous 50-100 years of political climates. For example, a female friend of mine went to a regular checkup, where the PRIVATE, for-profit gynecologist asked her if she has children, and when she said that she doesn't, and that they don't plan to have children with her husband, the doctor recommended that she reconsider, and that he can organize it that she gets pregnant, despite what the husband wants.
Hungary has a significant Roma minority. Many of the Roma people live below the poverty line, and their relation to the Hungarian population, government and law enforcement is a systemic, centuries-old issue. The current government does exactly nothing for them, nor in the short term nor towards their long-term well-being, but uses public figures of their culture to signal their support and association, and buys their votes with cheap gestures right before the elections.
LGBT people, and issues are not just marginalized, but the movement is branded as something that actively destroys society. LGBT families are regarded as unfit to raise children, they can be life partners with some of the marriage benefits, but not in a recognized marriage, and the Pride parade has been floated as something to be outlawed just this year.
These are just from the top of my head, in 30 minutes. Please feel free to ask any follow-up questions or proof, or post clarifications and corrections, I'm sure there are mistakes, and I don't intend to have any, as the well-being of my fellows is dear to my heart. Thanks for reading.
I've always admired Hungary and Hungarians. Very prodigious people. Neumann, Erdős, Teller, Szilard, Grove, Simonyi. Is there a country that breeds more geniuses per capita? How comes Hungary's political situation came to this?
I didn't read them all, but I read enough to think they were lying about it being tweets from 2017. It reads like someone asked ChatGPT to summarize current political news in the US.
History may not repeat, but it absolutely rhymes. If had a nickel for every time I heard about a government proposing to round up and deport thousands of people to a special island just so that their normal Constitution rules wouldn't apply, I'd have two nickels--which isn't a lot, but it's weird it happened twice.
Unfortunately, remote detention camps to "keep the homeland clean" are nothing new, they are tried and tested.
Here in Europe, we have had the UK and Italy actively pursuing rounding up migrants and deporting them to Ruanda/Albania until their claims are processed, and Australia has been doing this for decades now on Nauru and other places.
Possibly the migrants could enter the country using the approved legal process instead of just wandering in?
It isn't reasonable to expect countries to have a generous welfare system, accept all arrivals and exist on the same planet at the billion-odd people who live on a few dollars a day. Something has to give. I vote the welfare system but keep getting overruled; so one of the other two has to go. And we don't have the space tech to pick option 3.
> Possibly the migrants could enter the country using the approved legal process
At least for America, many if not also the majority did just that... And then overstayed the time limit, which is a civil infraction in the same category as a parking ticket.
Republicans have proposed a special "come deport me" registry where not-signing-up is itself a felony, as a roundabout way to retroactively criminalize things.
> Possibly the migrants could enter the country using the approved legal process instead of just wandering in?
For Germany, there is no legal way to enter the country if you're not caught by one of the larger dragnets (evacuation of personnel in Afghanistan, EU-wide assistance for Ukrainians and a few other rare international resettlement efforts). You are not able to apply for asylum outside of Germany, you cannot fly to Germany without a visa (the airline just won't take you as a passenger).
On paper yes you have the right to claim asylum. In practice, you have no way that doesn't make you commit at least one felony along the way.
I know nearly nothing about German law, but I going by what you write if Germany doesn't make it legal to enter the country, then no surprise the people who try anyway run the risk of being deported. I have enormous sympathy for them, but the fact is Germany is famous for having a big welfare system. That means people can't just wander in.
The thing for us to do would be to not make it necessary for people to flee in the first place. Feeding them in Africa is cheaper than feeding them here, the 2015 migration movement was largely caused because of a 100M $ shortfall in UNHCR / UNWFP food supply.
