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Belgium more closely follows the Swiss model — though with some duplication if you consider whatever Orange/Telenet is doing. And you know, fiber isn’t that well distributed.

Portugal is also not that different from the Swiss model. Fiber penetration is amazing, even in some rural communities like my grandmother‘s.

Could the Swiss secret be small-country-with-good-funding? Could this article be offering only one of the ways in which utilities can become good?


The Trump administration has shown how many US corporations are willing to bend the knee. Perhaps that was the slap in the face we needed in Europe. It’s shown us that “oh, but they’re just a service provider” wasn’t that truthful, and their neutrality should be questioned.

A bigger blocker I see in Belgium is all the corporate and government software written in Java or .NET-with-Angular and that has to be deployed via Azure because… compliance.

Are web apps much less efficient to use?

Yes, slower start, more memory/cpu use, likely worse UI as the transition broke desktop conventions and/or just lost some power features in the process

Eh. I suppose to each their own, but my experience as a user and developer is… that it depends on a lot of factors.

Many web apps open faster than many apps I have installed. Some of these apps have a faster mobile web app version.

And then, of course, there’s Apple’s increasingly bad choices in interaction and interface design. Some web apps are superior because they stick to simpler or more appealing design.

Linear comes to mind, their iOS app post-Liquid Glass is unappealing. Their macOS version is effectively a web app, and a very good one at that. Things is native and wonderful. Apple’s own apps can be both slow and ugly (hi App Store!).


I don’t think a lot of people still go home and use their computer for stuff. Most of my family will either rely on a phone or tablet to get anything done at home.

I doubt they’d care about which OS they’re on. Corporate tightens their laptops beyond belief, so all they’re really running is Teams and Excel. This seems to be the case for a lot of friends I talk to, no one gives a damn about Windows anymore. Heck, my sister-in-law moved to Ubuntu of her own choices, despite having low tech literacy.


In Berlin we’d just go to the local movie rental shop (think Blockbuster). Wednesdays they would rent the latest Blu-Ray titles for 1.50€, 1€ for DVDs. Done and dusted, the service was amazing and we’d talk a bit with the lady there. I really miss that shop.

Now we use the library or buy cheap DVDs second-hand at a shop that employs people that would struggle to be hired. We cancelled our Netflix when it became something like 15€ per month. That’s 3 years of library subscription.


Jokes on them for the wasted resources. If they don’t intend to market, I hope someone will. Where I live cyclists use ANC headphones all the time, and I’m tired of the near misses.

Student cyclists that ignore the rules and wear ANC (or even large headphones) should be fined more often.


You seem to have misunderstood the invention. It’s not about cyclists wearing headphones.

I haven’t. It breaches through ANC, pedestrian or otherwise, which would help with cyclists as well.

Bicycle bells can be used to warn other cyclists

Not if they wear thick or noise-cancelling headphones.

Copilot OS

There’s been some success training models on top of differential privacy.

I imagine that with live requests it would be quite challenging but not impossible, assuming you could somehow sanitize all sorts of private data that people throw at these prompts.


It was a “bad judgement call” this time because people noticed and complained. Next time it will be the right judgement call. Ach.

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