The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing.
I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
> To me Hamburg seemed exceptionally road/car heavy. Munich in comparison seems much more sane and European
That's an interesting perspective. I've been living in Hamburg for more than 10 years and visited Munich many times in the past 5 years or so for work, and my observation was always the opposite (and similar to the article's author).
I never felt the need to get a driver's license while living in Hamburg, given the broad coverage of the U-/S-Bahn network. It goes _really_ far. And most of the people I know who have cars usually prefer to commute by train and save the drive for weekends or evening events.
I've entertained the idea of moving to Munich for many, many times, and one of the deterrents for me always was that I found Munich to be too much of a car-oriented city; U-Bahn/Tram coverage seemed limited to a more central area where rents were quite high. Farther away, where most of my friends live, is covered by buses or S-Bahn with long, long journeys. And that's it, it's either a long commute on trains that look a bit old, or having a nice drive.
It does look like rent prices are not as high in that central area as they're used to be, which sounds nice, because living in the nice area with good public transit coverage looks lovely.
6 years ago when I used Hetzner, it was widely known as unreliable, a provider where you could get hosting that delivered good performance for a cheap price. The tradeoff always was that you needed to treat each machine almost as EC2 Spot: it could go down at any time.
You also needed to consider that when this happened, the data inside the machine was mostly lost. Finally, you also needed to plan to graduate out of it as soon as you had enough money to go either to a colocated data center or the "real cloud".
I kept Hetzner as a backup provider in more than one company, mainly to have real machines for take home tests, back when hiring was plentiful. Even so, we often faced problems with the machines going down due to hardware or networking issues, and the need to rebuild them from the ground up. Those mirrored all tales of woe everyone in the department had from years of working with Hetzner, sometimes losing production data because the rules of the game were not followed.
So it seems that 6 years later their scale has increased but the experience remains the same. On the bright side, kudos to Hetzner for teaching waves of engineers about reliability and disaster recovery during all these years.
Thanks for sharing this! I had to do exactly the same thing some 10 years ago to get an Oracle instance up and running again. Oracle insisted on using the /tmp location, despite being installed on a different drive, and the disk was full. As I had access to the Oracle system user, but not to the DBA user to change any configuration, I built a similar shared lib and preloaded it to the script. Worked like a charm! Happy to know that there is something _slightly more streamlined_ to do that now.
Yup, I faced the very same recently crossing back into Germany from Denmark. Suddenly, nothing worked anymore. I dread the time I have to take the train to a different city, as Internet mostly only works when close to the actual stations. It's even worse now that many routes got longer as the trains get diverted due to maintenance work.
Second that. The state of internet in Germany is what always gets me thinking about how things will work when speed is slow, connections are spotty or you get offline. So many problems with Spotify in particular, as even when it detects that it is offline, it still insists to try fetching assets related to content that was already downloaded.
It's very different on location in Europe. Where I live I have realized we are a bit spoiled. I was biking through the (small) forest outside Bonn in Germany. This used to be the capital during the east germany thing. It was impossible to access internet for the GPS game I'm playing (turfgame.com) so I had to turn off GPS and get back to the road to be able to take the zones. This keeps happening the whole time even driving around on smaller roads.
South sweden this almost never happens, here in north Sweden in can happen that you drop down to 2G and can only do SMS but then you really have to go deep into the forests. Up in the mountains you will lose connection completely though. Especially now when they shut down the older networks that has longer reach.
As sibling post said, it just really depends on the location in Europe. Here in Turin (NW Italy), everything is 4G-LTE/5G and they're phasing out 3G completely.
Got it, thanks. Well, if you ever decide to open it up I'd be keen to having a look at it. I have yet to see a good automated scheduler and none of the places I've been so far had an automated solution that worked fine when it comes to holidays, scheduled time off, etc. A lot of manual work was put into scheduling shifts, which I always found very disappointing.
I remember a significant redesign and a lot of features moved to Swarm, which had a different kind of social push. I remember the app losing its usefulness to me and Swarm not being something I wanted to use. Details are hazy, though, it's been a long while.
Not really as far as I know. Providers in Germany have more or less standardized on Fritz!Box from AVM and the router comes with the admin password available. Updates are then fetched from upstream AVM.
But the key point here is device independence - by law, providers need to give you all information required to establish a connection to them. This allows you to run a Linux or BSD box as a router should you wish to. It somehow makes up for the slow broadband speeds you can get.
Are there Linux or BSD boxes with ADSL or DOCSIS physical layers present? I use a separate modem and router, as do most people in the US that are not renting equipment from their ISP.
I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave.
Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again.
archive.is ftw I guess
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