I too ran a large VDI, server, and scientific computing cluster based on Linux - libvirt in my case. I saved a bunch of money over VMware. When I quit to go to a higher paying job, they had to rip and replace everything with vSphere because they couldn't find anyone willing to work for .edu money with the skills to manage that despite the massive cost savings.
I had asked for vSphere to avoid this problem, and they balked at the licensing costs even in the good ol' days.
Windows does care about file extensions but is mildly embarrassed about it, hence the "show" default that has existed from Win 8 (?) onwards.
Linux and co generally work with magic bytes which is just another way of doing file formats. Is it better to signify your file format with a .ext or otherwise?
I find myself turning on file extensions if I have to use Windows and on Linux, I don't care and it just works.
I think the UIs for Linux are better. I think that MS are hung up on trying to suggest their stuff so it gets in the way a bit. On Linux, you just get the best option based on what is installed.
I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
When antivirus weren’t widespread, having a person click on a virus was just so easy: create a program with the icon of an image file. God forbid people learn that .exe means executable program. Learning new stuff is scary!
> I have gone and ticked the “stop hiding file extensions” since they were introduced in ~98 (or was it Windows 95?)
I think Windows 95, although even selecting that option still hides some file name extensions (such as ".lnk"). However, I have found that it is possible to use the registry editor to force all file name extensions to be displayed.
But even on system where they aren't needed they're useful IMO, for me as a user. Magic bytes mean you have to seek into each file, and if you care about file types, it means anything that lists files has to do that.
I personally am of the opinion that both make sense and should exist. Extensions are for a first pass filtering/displaying, while magic bytes should be the source of truth, which is extra important when parsing a file anyway. Linux's binfmt_misc[0] even supports matching on either.
Personally, I'm not against file extensions, and I like to see and use them, however when something (i.e. magic bytes of a file) is used a lot system-wide, the underlying mechanisms optimize towards the use case as a natural tendency.
The interesting, or more accurately neat thing about EXT family of filesystems is, the file header is always one pointer away from your inode structure for that file.
With NVMe disks or SSDs in general, this is a very cheap operation, even when done en-masse. Even when we were using HDDs, anti-fragmentation features of EXT3/4 kept that one seek pretty cheap.
As a test, I fed my whole documents folder (~3500 files) into "file" tool to see what it does (via "file -f $filelist"). It finished in ~1,5 seconds. I redirected the output to /dev/null to eliminate the overhead incurred by printing things over SSH, though.
While everything is fast for small n, the consideration of small for this operation goes a long way, AFAICS.
A cheap operation is still infinitely more costly than no operation at all though. And not everything is on a local SSD, even just with a NAS, not to mention FTP, I really wouldn't want there to be no file extensions.
How would webdev look like? At first the HTML goes into "document", the style into "style", and before you know it, you're re-inventing extensions as prefixes or suffixes anyway, and I prefer users.sqlite to users_db. I honestly don't even see a problem to solve, so even the "cheapest" solution seems needlessly costly to me.
I don't see file extensions as a problem to be solved, either. My point is, it's nice that Linux (esp. Desktop Environment) ecosystem embraced magic byte parsing as a solution where having no extension creates problems.
I'm just happy to have the option around, I don't want to deprecate or against file extensions.
If you're interested, I can run some benchmarks on NFS and FTP as well, however.
I (we) run Qwen3.8-27B-FP8 on a DGX Spark box - that's roughly £4000 of hardware.
I did benchmark it in various ways and it runs quite well but it is a quantised jobbie and 1.5k t/s is also rather faster than anything I can possibly hope to achieve.
To run that model at those sorts of speeds is going to need some serious investment and you are going to have to pay for it.
The problem is most providers hit tok/sec limits really fast. 1m/min is the default and the only place I can get 10m+ is from first party providers without a lot of upfront cash.
Thank you, always nice to see real world performance figures.
We run a pretty large rig, 10 GPUs right now (this goes up and down with various experiments, getting this many GPUs to play nice at x16 GEN4 with any motherboard is a challenge), 240G VRAM in total. 256G RAM and a TR PRO. For small models the comms overhead is larger than the gains so there I have to reduce the number of active GPUs. On this machine I'm getting between 150 and 200 tg/s with FP8, but it took a lot of time and tweaking to get to that, and not all of the improvements held up when combined with other improvements. I've been playing with this stuff for a while now and it is interesting how fast the frontier is moving and how much you can now do on your own hardware. For larger models the communications overhead is low enough that we can run them on bigger groups of GPUs, and using hacked drivers to give us p2p capabilities on some of our GPUs also boosts performance considerably once you start to hit communications limits. Typically we get 50G/second in p2p mode (full duplex, half that one way).
From a cost perspective running locally is not interesting, but it allows us to do experiments that model providers would likely balk at, gives us censorship free access and allows us to work with data that we would not want to share with model providers (or can't share due to NDAs).
I will look into running ninfer, I was aware of them but had not yet gotten around to using it.
Mate ... How many people are engineers, technicians, mildly interested, not fussed or call the internet "Facebook"?
IPv4 without NAT was fucked at the design stage. To be fair: Who knew?
I was asked by my employer a while back to investigate this new www thing that has hit the internet (in around 1994 or 5, it took a while to notice) and I said it was a bit crap and no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC and telnetting madly via a VAX and a X.25 PAD and what I now know was close to magic!
No one had any idea how things would turn out back then.
I'm actually quite impressed how long IPv4 has managed to work and without NAT (which I do mildly despise, given 30 years messing with this stuff), it would be stuffed.
> no better than WAIS and GOPHER. I was using telnet on a Windows 3.1 PC
I had a corporate internship in the late 1990s and they blocked external web access.
They did, however, allow external Telnet access. This meant that whenever I had free time and/or was waiting for new projects, I would telnet back to my college server and use lynx to go read my favorite websites.
That’s the point. There are 27 member states that each have their own regulations that need to be complied with.
The article has more details than your comment implies, such as the fact that some states like Spain have ongoing recurring fees too.
Dealing with changing regulations and fees that are different across 27 states on top of all of the other EU regulations is normal for a big company with a lot of staff and lawyers, but if you’re a small company trying to ship any product you have to start maintaining a list of individual states where you think you can break even and decide if it’s worth doing all of the work to try to sell there.
If you’ve never had to deal with regulatory compliance or shipped physical products this all probably does sound like whining to you, but that’s only because you don’t know how hard it is to comply with regulations for 1 EU state, let alone 27 of them multiplied by all relevant regulations.
the article really doesn't have enough details. the different regulations per country are the least of the problem. the real whammy is having to have a representative in each country, which will cost money every year in every country, not just in some. see my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49485957
But how is it different? Because I live in one of those 27 member states, and I'm pretty sure that we had our own regulations before, that they were different from the other 26 states, and that any companies doing business here had to comply with them. Or is it that they were not complying with regulations before and now they will have to?
Before: you make a thing, you stick it in box and mail it to someone in another EU country. Fees paid: postage.
After: for every one of the 27 EU countries you plan to ship to, you must pay hundreds or thousands of euros in registration fees as a packaging producer.
Somehow, regulation believers who think they are sticking it to the big man think this is a reasonable system, and not a complete killer of small time entrepreneurship for those not fortunate enough to have millions in capital.
Do you, is that what the law is? I've seen enough propaganda flying around to not just take this on faith. What happens whenever two countries differ on any other regulation and one company sells outside its home country?
I could find these all day but let me just remind you that for literally _DECADES_ before this regulation there were no such restrictions to cross EU online shopping. Now the small players have closed entirely, and the more fortunate can only afford to serve the largest countries such as Germany, Belgium, Netherlands. It's insane.
And to add insult to the injury, substandard alternatives to all of these products are still readily available on Temu. They are fucking laughing at us in China!
There are several sites out there trying to help explain PPWR and they all say the same thing: the one that brings the package to an EU state market must do EPR registration in that EU state.
If you sell directly to consumers from a web shop, that is you.
You are free to pretend you know better than SME's all over the union, their chambers of commerce, actual CUSTOMERS dealing with this, but evidently business has already ground to a halt anyway.
This is exactly what I mean by regulation believers. Here you have all the evidence you need that the harm is done, yet you believe it's still about some philosophical debate whether the regulation even works that way.
No, the evidence is that some people are overly paranoid and the rest would like to clear up the wording to bypass the paranoia. The same thing happened with GDPR.
Well, yes and no. They tried making exemptions for micro-businesses, but they are not exempt from the law completely. The administration costs can be bigger than your estimated profit for a certain country.
Briefly, for each EU country you sell into you must:
• Register with the government package registry in each country.
• Sign contracts with a "Producer Responsibility Organization" in the country to fund local recycling.
• Track the exact weight of all the packaging materials sent to that country.
• Submit reports and pay recycling fees.
• If you are based outside the EU, you have to appoint a local representative for these matters in the country. If you are based in the EU you are also supposed to do that, but the European Commission has recommended that members states suspend penalties for EU companies that do not do this.
If you use "fulfilled by Amazon" you still have to do all the above for your packaging. Amazon has to do it just for the outer packaging they ship your stuff in.
Officials have recognized this will be a major burden on many small businesses and are working on revising it to address that in legislation due later this year. Many are pushing for something similar to the way VAT is handled to be implemented for this.
The way VAT works is that you register with just your own country (or a country of your choice if you are not in the EU but sell there). You collect the correct amount of VAR on sales to each EU country, but then just file with and pay the country you are registered with. They tax authorities deal with then reporting to the other countries and paying them their VAT.
The very first thing it means is that a firm has to understand the new law and then determine what changes it requires. And as a firm gets smaller that makes the relative burden higher. Of course this shouldn’t imply you never change anything, but it does mean every incremental new regulation is a ratchet that shifts in favor of large firms. The EU estimates this regulation avoids 23Mt of CO2[0], which is about 0.8% of EU emissions. Not sure that’s the place to focus unless you can make a case that it will have spillover effects into other markets.
0.8% at the size of the EU economy is a huge win. It's slightly smaller than Denmark's fossil fuel emissions. Though, the savings are presumably calculated over several years while Denmark produces it every single year.
I have no skin in this game, but just because they're doing it doesn't mean it's their focus, the EU is big enough to work on multiple 0.8%-size wins all over the place.
Realistically if you're a small company, you just do it, until someone tells you "hey you're supposed to comply with X" and then you say "oh sorry, we didn't realise, we'll do that now", repeat for all X. Programmers think the written law is a description of what actually happens - it's not.
The people effected by this are not programmers sitting around in their underwear talking to Claude all day and peddling virtual wares. It's people making real things with their hands, and they have come to the conclusion they can not take such a risk. Fines in countries like Germany can run up to 200 000 euros, for which you can be personally liable.
No, it's programmers online who are larping making real things. People who actually make real things may be concerned and may push to clarify the law but they're not ceasing. People who actually live in the EU and do business there understand that the interpretation that's going around the angry internet forums is complete nonsense.
What kind of source would you like next? "Just don't follow the law" might be a good advice for the American hypercapitalists of Hacker News, less so for someone in the EU.
It is evident you don't understand how the business landscape or risk management in EU works, you have not done even one bit of research to back up your claims, so why are you even commenting? Maybe if you see such a opportunity in dismissing the rules you ought to start your own.
It's not about the packaging really. It could be as simple as a bubble wrap envelope. The problem is having to register in every country and some of them levy fees that are insane for small artists. The EU was supposed to be a single entity with simple rules but in this case they want to make things as difficult as possible.
The article could be clearer yes but it's really an issue especially for small self employed artists selling by post in the EU. They're basically being killed off if they relied on shipping to other countries.
And the risks of non compliance are high fines. This was meant to punish AliExpress and their sellers for packaging waste but how are they going to fine Happy Goose Ltd in a basement in Shenzhen? They're not. Business in the EU however are going to be easy pickings. So the Chinese will just keep what they're doing and the EU independent artists are screwed with retarded bureaucracy.
For an Amazon it's a joke paying 200€ to register in a single country, but for an artist that may not even have single package to a certain country every year it's insane. And you can't even register when you have an order to send, you have to do it before.
It's deeply evil and totally meant to kill the little guy or girl.
There's some exceptions for small business but they're mainly bureaucratic, the hefty fees still apply.
Are we sure there isn't some single market principle that overrules the presumption that you'd have to register in every country? AFAIK generally you're allowed to operate in one country and sell things to other countries, under some principle of single market / customs union.
Yes for this there isn't, strange enough. I don't know why either. I read that part of the issue is that the EU still considers part of the waste policy a national sovereignty. But I don't know enough about that to verify that.
Absolutely nothing I can read about this regulation, apart from angry internet comments, leads me to the conclusion that someone would have to register in every EU country; additionally, that's not how any other EU regulation works.
For example I don't have to register in every EU country if I make a social media site in one EU country. I only have to register it in my country and that agency may or may not forward the information to others. The law doesn't have to say this - it's implied.
It does help that I have thirty years Linux experience compared to the paltry twenty five or so of VMware (which was RedHat plus stuff back in day)
I also have rather a lot of Hyper V exposure too and I defy you to love its iSCSI and networking, let alone that awful vTPM thingie.
It's Proxmox for me, any day. Even when I've completely knackered it I can always boot a systemrescuecd and mount and chroot the thing back to life.
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