renaudg (u/renaudg) - Readit News

renaudg commented on Last Year on My Mac: Look Back in Disbelief eclecticlight.co/2025/12/... · Posted by u/vitosartori

renaudg · 2 months ago

Liquid Glass appears to be the culmination of the Alan Dye era at Apple, where UI terms like "radio buttons" were derided as "programmer talk".

https://daringfireball.net/2025/12/bad_dye_job

Thankfully he has now left. Things could hopefully pick up again usability-wise within 2-3 years.

renaudg commented on 996 lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/9/4... · Posted by u/genericlemon24

qcnguy · 6 months ago

People who work more get more done. Yes, there are limits. It's not obvious 45 hours a week is that limit.

Observe that the two places in the world with cutting edge AI startups are America and China. Europe has none. Maybe Mistral if you're generous, or DeepMind if you ignore that they got bought by Google, which IMO is OK because a lot of US startups have no plausible future outside of being bought and nobody claims that makes them not an AI startup.

But US and China lead. Americans work way more hours than Europeans do, mostly through taking fewer holidays rather than working Saturdays. And the Chinese have caught up to the cutting edge of AI very fast, despite facing trade sanctions, Great Firewalls and other obstacles. It is reasonable to infer that they did this by working really, really hard.

I was once told by a US executive that the rule of thumb is people in America (vs "Americans") work ~20% more than people in Europe. Skill level is the same, but Europeans both get more vacation time, have more national holidays, and are harder to fire for low performance. It adds up to a big difference, especially compounded over time. If 996 adds another 20% for China over America, then the Chinese will take the lead. They might burn out a lot of devs along the way (in fact they will), but maybe not as many as you think - after all America has not suffered mass burnout from having 15 days of vacation a year instead of 25 - and success will continue to accrue.

This is a painful truth. I myself work part time and get European vacations. It is pleasant. Yet I know it cannot last. Europe has become a vassal continent, in which Trump dictates terms and the EU accepts them without negotiation, because of the decisions its society has made; one of the biggest being to take life easy.

renaudg · 6 months ago

15 in the top 20 most productive countries per hour worked are European. The US is in 12th place. China is 99th.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_labour_pr...

Diminishing returns is a thing.

renaudg commented on The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden goto80.com/the-demoscene-... · Posted by u/robin_reala

xandrius · a year ago

I honestly often hear about the "demo scene" being talked about but I've never even once seen anything in the real world. I might see a youtube video or two but I would have 0 clue on:

1) What is it for?

2) Where does it happen?

3) What's the goal? (not in a snarky way but in what do the sceners pursue?)

4) How does one get to know about the demo scene? How does one "join"?

I'm impressed by how something that seem so hidden, but also talked about, but also hard to catch still exists.

I guess I'm just a noob out of the loop but I'm curious :)

EDIT: Or maybe I am so out of the loop not to know it's mainly a thing of the past?

renaudg · a year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene

https://www.demoscene.info/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRkZcTg1JWU

renaudg commented on New Mac Mini with M4 apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/victorbjorklund

chipdart · a year ago

> Yes, the M4 is faster (...)

I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro and they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros. Being RAM-starved might have something to do with it though.

> but there's loads of mini PCs with decent CPUs, 32GB RAM and a 1TB of SSD storage for under $600.

I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind. For example, most NUCs from the likes of minisforum and Beelink ship with a single SSD but support multiple SSDs, with their cases also having room for SATA drives. They even go as far as selling barebones versions of their NUCs, where customers can then pick and choose which RAM and SSDs to add.

renaudg · a year ago

> I know a couple of iOS developers who recently switched to a M4 MacBook pro

The M4 Macbook Pro will be released next week, what did you mean instead ?

> they swear that in some frequent workloads it feels sluggish and slower than the old Intel MacBook pros

I don't think I've seen a single other piece of user feedback online that corroborates this.

> I also add that, unlike Apple hardware, these miniPCs are built with extensibility in mind

Mac Mini gets its extensibility through Thunderbolt.

renaudg commented on New Mac Mini with M4 apple.com/newsroom/2024/1... · Posted by u/victorbjorklund

chipdart · a year ago

> From my experience, TCO on most apple products ends up being roughly the same when you factor in resale value.

This reads like the epitome of Apple's reality distortion field. I mean, you're trying to convince yourself that a product is not overpriced when compared to equivalent products and subjecting customers to price gauging by asserting that you might be able to sell it later. That's quite the logical leap.

renaudg · a year ago

No that's an accurate TCO calculation. It's interesting that on this topic, the inventor of the PC also seems to be caught in that supposed "Apple reality distortion field" and can't confirm the "price gouging" that you're trying to convince yourself Apple practices.

https://www.cio.com/article/236396/ibm-says-macs-save-up-to-...

renaudg commented on Fukushima Reactor: TEPCO robot aims to extract nuclear fuel spectrum.ieee.org/fukushi... · Posted by u/rbanffy

natmaka · a year ago

> It's not clear that this is a specifically nuclear issue

An evacuation triggered by a nuclear major accident seems specific to nuclear to me, in the sense: if, instead of this nuclear plant, some field occupied by wind turbines or solar panels were build, there would be no need to evacuate.

> Had an area been evacuated due to earthquakes making the ground unstable

No human being can control nor counter this sort of event. We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

renaudg · a year ago

> We can decide to build wind/solar instead of nuclear reactors.

That's what Germany did, but such intermittent renewables can't power an industry-heavy country by themselves for obvious reasons (e.g. the sun tends to set at night)

No matter how much renewables capacity you want to install, you always need a controllable and reliable source for the baseload : that will be either coal, gas, hydro or nuclear. Only two of those are low carbon btw.

So let's see :

- Germany doesn't have the geography for hydro (unlike say, Norway).

- They don't want nuclear because politics.

- They became partly reliant on Russian gas, an extraordinary geopolitical own goal (and hilariously, sold by a Greenpeace-affiliated energy company as "green gas")

- The only other solution left is coal, lots of coal. That's what Germany has been doing despite political promises to phase it out.

The two main end results of this policy are :

- Germany has some of the worst CO2 emissions per kWh produced of large European countries. As I write this, it's emitting 23 times more than France (the poster child for nuclear) per kWh. Source : https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

- An estimated 22.900 premature deaths every year across the EU from coal-fired power plants. Germany's plants cause an estimated 2490 premature deaths per year in neighbouring countries alone. Source : https://caneurope.org/report-europe-s-dark-cloud-coal-burnin...

Imagine if France had a nuclear incident causing 2490 deaths in neighbouring countries, every year ?

Nuclear is like air travel : spectacular when it fails, but much safer than all other modes of transportation.

renaudg commented on Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/atlasunshrugged

mytailorisrich · 2 years ago

> Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.

> Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded

Two interesting things here: They are uncontroversial because people are so used to them and, yes, the UK is much more privacy minded than, e.g., France in that regards.

In France everyone is used to carry their ID card with them (ID cards include the person's address and finger print is taken when ID card is used to anyone older than 13). Police have the right to ask for proof of ID without cause, and failure give them the right to detain the person until ID can be assertained (which means being driven to the police station). The history od ID cards in France is indeed one of state surveillance and control, and, tellingly ID cards became mandatory under the Vichy government in 1940 and although they have no longer been so in law since 1955, they de facto still are in daily life.

In the UK people are free to go about their lives with no ID and the police have no right to stop and ask someone to identify themselves (or any other questions) without cause. There is a big resistance against creating ID cards.

I read other comments that in the UK driving licences are de facto ID cards but I think this misses the point above. Of course they are situations in daily life when one needs to prove their ID (banks, etc). But the point is protection against the state/authorities and against being forced to identify yourself for no imperative reason.

renaudg · 2 years ago

I'm French and live in the UK, so feel qualified to compare. A few examples off the top of my head :

The UK census and most NHS health records include ethnicity and religion data. In France it's forbidden by law for any entity to collect this information.

Any idiot in the UK (including direct marketing firms) can purchase the electoral register which has a wealth of personal data. You can opt out of one version, but not from the one that political parties, election officials or private credit agencies (!) have full unfettered access to.

Credit agencies, by the way, don't exist at all in France.

I think this qualifies the UK as "not especially more privacy minded", for at least some definitions of privacy.

renaudg commented on Uganda's surveillance state is built on national ID cards bloomberg.com/news/featur... · Posted by u/atlasunshrugged

renaudg · 2 years ago

The problem may have more to do with Uganda and having a surveillance state than it has to do with National ID cards.

Most European countries have them and they are as uncontroversial as passports.

Countries without national ID cards are not especially more privacy minded : for the purpose of identity verification they just use alternative documents & processes that are less straightforward and at least as intrusive (e.g. driving licenses, utility bills and credit checks in the US and UK).

IMO it's much more honest to recognize that there's a legitimate need to be able to prove one's identity in a functioning society, and to build a dedicated system for that, instead of tying your existence as a citizen to your ability / willingness to drive a large piece of metal around.

renaudg commented on Managing my motivation as a solo dev mbuffett.com/posts/mainta... · Posted by u/marcusbuffett

ravenstine · 2 years ago

While I'm not exactly sure what "solo dev" means for the author in terms of intent, I believe that the need to manage motivation is usually a sign that what one is doing is at least somewhat off-course from the ideal of the individual. In simpler terms, if you are struggling to be motivated for something, you can certainly try to change yourself, but it can be at least as reasonable to change that something.

I learned this about myself a few years ago when I quit my job to build a compact piece of wearable hardware that measures metabolism through breath in real time. Even though I was burning through my savings, I spent close to a year working on this thing day in and day out. I had so many different "responsibilities" on my project and so many things to learn that motivation was never an issue, and I did finish a working device in the end. This is coming from someone who has dealt with motivational issues many times. That also wasn't the first time I quit my job to work on a project, though previous projects often ended early when I lost the motivation. At first, I thought this was a sign of a problem with myself, but in retrospect I think it's good that I lost motivation. Those ideas weren't that great and I wasn't as engaged in them, and it's likely I just would have wasted more time and money on them had I not acknowledged the writing on the wall.

In fairness, this outlook is easy to have when you aren't doing something for income. To some extent, we do have to manage motivation for day jobs. I can't honestly say that I'd be coding enterprise applications if I wasn't getting paid handsomely to do that. Even though I am paid, part of motivation is having a mission that's important to you, and it's easy to lose sight of your mission if you've been paid a regular salary for quite some time.

The author's "leave tasks unfinished" strategy plays into this principle at a very small level, but I think recognizing a greater ambition and keeping it in your consciousness can be important as well. A lot of people find the motivation to work harder and longer when they have kids, for instance. Since I don't have kids, I've found that regularly coming back to investing and retirement planning has been a good motivator for my day job because I get enjoyment out of making my money work for me; I loosely visualize what I want my life to be like in 20 years from now and strategize how to get there based on my current trajectory. I don't think about it most days, but revisiting this every few weeks reminds me why my day job is important. For others, perhaps owning a house and converting the garage to an art studio would be a goal to motivate one through their day job.

In short, I think motivation is more a form of measure than a virtue in and of itself. It can tell you whether you've lost sight of ambition or if what you're doing just isn't that great. "Hacks" will only get you so far.

That said, a "hack" that works for me is to just keep reminding myself to "keep up the pace." Even if I barely accomplish anything in a day, as long as I accomplish a minuscule thing on a daily basis, my frequency of accomplishment stays roughly the same. Going too long not really getting anything done is when motivating yourself to jump back in the game gets very difficult.

renaudg · 2 years ago

> I believe that the need to manage motivation is usually a sign that what one is doing is at least somewhat off-course from the ideal of the individual.

You're lucky not to have ADHD like the author then.

People with ADHD absolutely can (and will) procrastinate endlessly if they don't proactively use tricks to manage their motivation, even with interesting and pleasant tasks that they are also fully aware are critical to reaching their most cherished goals.

ADHD feels like a broken transmission gear between the planning/rational part of the brain (prefrontal cortex) that desperately wants the work to happen, and the "pre-actuator" part that actually gets to schedule your actions for the next 3 seconds.

Too often that part decides that, in spite of all the pleas from the rational brain, the best thing to do in this moment is to keep the finger infinitely scrolling down on X or to click on "just one more" HN link. That keeps the dopamine hits coming, which feels good and predictable, whereas stopping brings short-term discomfort and uncertainty.

The rational brain sees the clock showing 3am and the finger that keeps scrolling and scrolling. It screams and shouts in protest and powerlessly laments the self-sabotage and broken promises. But all this negative self-talk is annoying. What better way to silence this party-pooper than a juicy unread X thread or fascinating HN story ? So the pre-actuator votes for that, hits the snooze button on the rational brain one more time, which soon comes back screaming and shouting again, and so on and so on until exhaustion ensues and you finally give in and crash into bed (or start doing whatever you were supposed to work on). ADHD is a real curse.

renaudg commented on When do we stop finding new music? statsignificant.com/p/whe... · Posted by u/commons-tragedy

npteljes · 2 years ago

The return of the 80s is, or rather was, just a current trend. Next up will be the 90s/00s, which can already be seen in make up and fashion, and I'm sure media will follow soon as well.

Wrt/ Hollywood: I think they are not the monopoly they used to be, because the powers are shifting by streaming, and short video services. Similar to how AAA games are more stagnant than the indie gaming scene.

"Music" is too broad to "get worse". There are trends in music that can be considered bad, such as the lessening dynamic range of the recordings - the Loudness War[0]. But there is more music than ever, computerized or not, so if you find that some source of music is bad, you just need to look elsewhere. Music production is easier than ever, so even very niche sounds are kept alive, like the lofi sound of post-punk decades ago[1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

[1] https://desmonddoom.bandcamp.com/album/doom-and-bloom

renaudg · 2 years ago

The return of the 90s is not next up, it's right now.

For the past 2 years, mainstream chart-toppers like David Guetta or Calvin Harris have been (respectively) covering 90s eurodance songs or making new ones in the same style.