LLMs will never be conscious.

So do they

Here’s the email I got from them:

Dear xxx,

This mail is to inform you about an unfortunate, but necessary price change that we must make.

There have been drastic price increases in various areas in the IT branch recently. That is why, unfortunately, we must also increase the prices of our products.

The costs to operate our infrastructure and to buy new hardware have both increased dramatically. Therefore, our price adjustment will affect both your existing products and new orders.

The underlying causes of the increased costs are, among others, the exploding demand for AI-related computing power and for cloud services. In addition, raw material prices and production costs have also generally risen for manufacturers. The costs for RAM and SSDs especially have risen by a large amount. For example, the cost for DRAM memory has increased up to 500% since September 2025. And according to market researchers like TrendForce, this price trend will continue throughout the year.

We have genuinely tried hard to optimize our costs and to prevent increasing our prices for as long as possible. But we can no longer compensate for the strain that it has placed on our operations. We want to continue to deliver quality products that meet both our standards and your expectations, so we must take this step.

The price changes will take effect on 1 April 2026 for both new orders and existing products. For orders placed before 1 April 2026, but delivered after 1 April 2026, the adjusted prices will apply.

The following existing products, listed under the customer number specified in the subject line, are affected by the price increase as follows.

Product previous price New price as of 1 April 2026 Server Auction € 43.56 € 44.87 all prices incl. 21% vat

We know that price changes are always a challenge for everyone. However, we believe that our products’ prices and conditions still have a competitive price-to-performance ratio.

We have prepared a list of all new prices for you on Hetzner Docs at https://docs.hetzner.com/general/infrastructure-and-availability/price-adjustment. Starting on 1 April 2026, the new prices will also be on our website.

If you do not wish to continue your contract, you can cancel the products within the regular cancellation periods via your administration interface.

We hope that you will be able to understand and accept our decision, and that we are sorry that we have to change our prices.

If you have any questions, we will be happy to help. Please log onto your account and go to “Support” in the menu and create a support request.

Kind regards,

Hetzner Online

1.31 for me!

Past me had a dick

Sorry, couldn’t resist.

Did you prompt it in English, or on Chinese? This is just a next-token-predictor, and it will largely use its English training data for its English output prediction.

This is not surprising. Nor is it indicative of, well, anything.

Captain of the USS Voyager. Nice.

What a clown. In what world do you require an LLM to check for duplicate pictures??

I mean, good on him for realizing that LLMs are dogshit. But still.

If all jobs were lost if rich people disappeared, then jobs aren’t really necessary.

If jobs are necessary self-evidently, they do not require rich people to exist or get done.

I mean… Depends on your threat model. Hetzner is a very reputable German hoster. The only way someone is going to try and read and puzzle together memory dumps is if you’re under investigation for something seriously heinous.

Shutting the VPS down also solves this.

But really, this is a general problem with every “someone else’s computer” solution.

E2EE still nice though, wish Immich had it.

LUKS isn’t cumbersome, you should really enable it on nearly every Linux system.

Anyways, what do you mean “allowed”?

I have a Hetzner root server set up this way btw, have to ssh in to decrypt the zfs pool before boot.

Do note though, this does not protect from an attacker with physical access reading memory.

/s

Sorry, unfortunately can’t help you there. My matrix server is not federated, I remember back then I created an account on matrix.org specifically to read these. But maybe they got deleted in the meantime?

Anyways, I have been really happy with continuwuity, to the point that up until now, I haven’t even looked at tuwunel again. The maintainers of continuwuity seem really nice and engaged, and both from a usage and stability point of view, as well as for the actually surprisingly fast release cycle, I have no complaints. I found and fixed a bug a couple weeks ago, and the dev process was also very friendly and relaxed.

In short: while I don’t know how things are on the tuwunel side, I’m very happy to have gone with continuwuity and have high hopes for the future of the project.

You do have a point. TBH I only now realized that the video was posted from Doctorow’s personal account, and without a link to the “original”, which yeah, kinda weird.

The talk itself is still worth it (had the fortune of sitting in the audience), but probably a good idea to use the media.ccc.de link.

Originally/additionally hosted on media.ccc.de

The show is endlessly quotable

Mallory Archer?

Universal Android Debloater.

It’s a community-rating systems for apps, and you can remove/permanently (even through os updates) disable them through ADB, without actually needing to know anything about ADB because uad comes in a nice GUI package.

I think I removed ~200 apps (most of them invisible, background ads stuff) from my phone. Much better experience.

Campari

FWIW, I’ve been using Music Assistant with my Sonos speakers without issue.

HOWEVER, I’m using MA as part of Home Assistant, and have the speakers configured through HA, not MA. MA just sees the speakers as HA Media Players. That works really well.