InfinityByTen

Complaining about the bureaucracy is sure everyone's favourite trauma bonding exercise, but I never hear about the solution to it. It's in the political agenda, but the solution is almost always, let's form a committee to decide the agenda of the report about it that would be 1500 pages long and be done in 72 weeks from the day of conclusion of committee's proposal. I feel the issue is the mentality towards problem solving.

Taxes are fine till Herr Merz isn't busy proposing a rug-pull on half of the things you learnt were supported here. Many of our "expat" friends faced this first hand when they lost their Kindergeld unplanned. There was a sudden hue and cry about dependents' insurance being scrapped, not sure of what's latest on it. And the English speaking, tech and finance working expats are not in poorer regions.

I don't know all Germans and maybe it is my circle, but in general I felt if I didn't mirror their hobbies, opinions, and preferences, I wasn't going to have a chance to be on the same table as them or have a heart to heart conversation with them. It's almost like it's too inefficient use of their social time and I'm pretty sure I ain't alone.

It's interesting how quickly any discussion about immigrant/expat life in Germany becomes about language. That has to account for something.

After my tenure of 11 years in the country, my impression is that there is a deeper sense of "us" v/s "them"; the language is the most PC way to express it.

If you're in the category of "us" you don't complain about the taxes or things being closed on Sundays, because you're supposed to "understand" that there's a welfare state (which has been a myth for a while now and cracks are showing up since covid). If you're in the "us", you don't claim bureaucracy is treacherous, because the language should have equipped you to fight it. You might be in the "us", if you believe with every bit of your being that rules and regulations is the best way to ensure everyone behaves properly and everything works efficiently.

If you dare challenge (m)any of these and you don't speak German good enough, it's the language. If you speak the language, then you're not "integrated". Maybe that's immigration everywhere, but I feel in Germany, there is a rather narrow band you get to be in "acceptably".

Oh, I *love* those kind of people who take the time to _simplify_ and draw meaningful insights from their first draft. They take the time to ensure that they are not just putting out thoughts for the heck of it. They have gone through a learning journey and they are letting you step on it. They might even make the effort to actually articulate their intuition: "it seemed like a good idea to toy with this, because such and such usually have some connection".

Maybe this is the mathematician's lament rejigged. And I have held it for probably 20 years of my life. I try to do things differently when I write, but I have to say there are enough people who find it sub-standard. It's too imprecise or ambiguous or not clear enough for their taste. They aren't wrong. But I'm not done learning and I start building my thoughts as I go along.

I shared my thoughts in the context of someone saying that one should be able to share your line of thinking when asked to. Whether "when one asked to" applies to keystroke by keystroke blockhained versioning isn't my point of discussion.

I get it, that the overall discussion is about DeltaDB. I'd say interesting concept to toy with. I'd pay more attention to "micro commits" as the idea more than the keylogger.

One of my professors in undergrad said: the most dangerous mathematicians are the ones that begin the proof with "Consider a case ...". He said that these mathematicians are the ones who don't share anything about how they got the case and they end up projecting this sort of "magician aura". I don't know how accurate that assessment it, but I think it captures something that never sat well with me.

In my life, I've never liked people who deliberately polish up their articulation to the level that it obfuscates how they arrived at that understanding (whether it's academics or engineers). They might not do it for attention and they might not be doing it knowingly. IMO, they are taking away the opportunity of learning from the people they are talking to. For me the conversation is one sided. I'm there to listen, but rarely can I ask questions, give feedback or grow from where they have possibly reached.

I'm still baffled how crypto is still around.

How long would it be that people realise that they are playing "passing the parcel" with a ticking explosive?

I like this article already because it took me to the goals of Rust for 2026. We use the language in our team, but we haven't needed to go very deep to do the stuff we need. Yet, I really enjoy witnessing the development of a language from ground up with so much community feedback.

I somehow miss noticing that in C++ and I have no idea how it is working in other domains.

My only gripe is that a lot of it is feeling a bit kick-starter-y, with each of the goals needing specific funding. Is that the best model we've found so far?

I'm not sure I have a way to fact-check this, but the link claims

That is significantly more than many batteries on the market today can achieve (often around 500–800 cycles).

I've never understood how their Brave Credits were supposed to work, but I liked the idea that someone wanted to try out a different model to ads how we know them for about a century.

Ads made magazines, newspaper, news, radio, tv and now internet terrible to be with and I'm honestly curious what can be done to improve the situation.

I'll be honest that it was *long ago* that I made that attempt. Plus with the new AI denoise, it seemed even harder to move away from it.

But, if there's a battle-tested, mature UI, I'm up for giving it a shot. I have done no video editing, so no clue how my experience with DaVinci Resolve is going to go. I might give Darktable another go while I'm at it. Just tend to have a bad gut feeling about it.

Some people love tinkering. I do that as my job, so I don't often have the urge to do it when I just want to get shit done.

I'm so eager to try this out today after work. I heard a lot of things about Darktable, but then it didn't really feel like the alternative to Lightroom I'd hope for.

I'm in a similar camp where I'm stucking to windows for that one software: lightroom classic (or CC as they call it). I'm happy to pay for a legitimate replacement that lets me go Linux native on a laptop. I'm fine even paying for the Adobe Cancellation tax from the money I save not buying Windows.

On that note, is this supported on Linux?

When I see someone just throwing a lot of numbers and graphs at me, I see that there are in to win an argument, and not propose an idea.

Of late, I've come across a lot of ideas from Rory Sutherland and my conclusion from listening to his ideas is that there are some people, who're obsessed with numbers, because to them it's a way to find certainty and win arguments. He calls them "Finance People" (him being a Marketing one). Here's an example

"Finance people don’t really want to make the company money over time. They just thrive on certainty and predictability. They try to make the world resemble their fantasy of perfect certainty, perfect quantification, perfect measurement.

Here’s the problem. A cost is really quantifiable and really visible. And if you cut a cost, it delivers predictable gains almost instantaneously."

Choosing to spend three weeks on a feature that serves 2% of users is a €60,000 decision.

I'd really want to hire the Oracle of a PM/ Analyst that can give me that 2% accurately even 75% of the time, and promise nothing non-linear can come from an exercise.

You don't know something is slow until you encounter a use case where the speed becomes noticeable. Then you see the slowness across the board. If you can notice that a command hasn't completed and you are able to fully process a thought about it, it's slow(er than your mind, ergo slow!).

Usually, a perceptive user/technical mind is able to tweak their usage of the tools around their limitations, but if you can find a tool that doesn't have those limitations, it feels far more superior.

The only place where ripgrep hasn't seeped into my workflow for example, is after the pipe and that's just out of (bad?) habit. So much so, sometimes I'll do this foolishly rg "<term>" | grep <second filter>; then proceed to do a metaphoric facepalm on my mind. Let's see if jg can make me go jg <term> | jq <transformation> :)

I was personally hoping the The JV would be spared Honda's strategy shift, but apparently not.

Spot on! I hate being sucked into an "accountability sink", where delay/bad treatment/ tangential answers are ok (somehow acceptable) and justified because it's not personal, "it's just the process".

I was considering trains for a Berlin-Frankfurt trip, and after looking at the performance of the preferred train, I'm not sure I want to still go that way: 25% cancellations :/

You surely haven't read the whole of it. There's more!

Sinderella She has to leave the ball by midnight — but her last train was cancelled. Now she roams the platform in glass slippers, waiting for a replacement bus.

This is an underrated observation. The companies built surveillance as a competitive advantage. The "system" rewards bolstering this advantage.

So, now it's mis-anthropic?

I was actually wondering why haven't the computational geometry and shape optimization people found these structures so far. I would expect us to at least know these shapes or category of shapes.

Getting it via origami is art and a testimony to wonders of intuition and observational learning, but getting the shapes could be done by other methods.

Well, claude at least was successful in getting me to pay. It became utterly annoying that I would hit the limit just with a couple of follow ups to my long running discussion and made me wait for a few hours.

So it worked, but I didn't happily pay. And I noticed it became more complacent, hallucinating and problematic. I might consider trying out ChatGPTs newer models again. Coding and technical projects didn't feel like its stronghold. Maybe things have changed.

I find the atrophy and zoning out or context switching problematic, because it takes a few seconds/ minutes in "thinking" and then BAM! I have 500 lines of all sorts of buggy and problematic code to review and get a sycophantic, not-enough-mature entity to correct.

At some point, I find myself needing to disconnect out of overwhelm and frustration. Faster responses isn't necessarily better. I want more observability in the development process so that I can be a party to it. I really have felt that I need to orchestrate multiple agents working in tandem, playing sort of a bad-cop, good-cop and a maybe a third trying to moderate that discussion and get a fourth to effectively incorporate a human in the mix. But that's too much to integrate in my day job.

It seems it's not easy to find a non-search-first, with an app drawer that allows for horizontal card/page scrolling launcher that would get out of my way ASAP.

The only widget I have is for the calendar. Pinning most used apps on the front page is an appreciated add on, but I think I could live without that too. I'll just pin 8 on them on home screen.

Thank you for this! I was really happy with one launcher that I configured probably 8-9 years ago and then moving to the new phone meant everything just worked (^tm ?) with normal phone porting. Reading the headline made me freak out for 2 min. I really really do not like UI muscle memory being changed for something like my phone.

Not strictly today. But I discovered that there exists a special class of algorithms that are designed with the use case of streaming data to your program. I just used one to get a uniformly distributed sample from a 10Gb log file.

I knew this was something coding interviews delved into: "if it doesn't fit in memory", but until like yesterday I never went down the rabbit hole. I have to say it was a nifty trick.

Solidworks and a lot of CAD software is just a GIANT amalgamation of the original software and the work of all of the tiny companies they keep acquiring (basically whosoever built a plugin/competitor for their stuff).

It's most likely so poorly set up that I finch considering working in that domain now.

Source: I've had friends who've worked there. Background: we studied computational engineering, but I got a non-domain software job. Sometimes I feel I learnt more being away from that sort of work.

At least postman is :P

Words of wisdom. Hear hear!

I concur. I did mention there was a rush and foolhardiness. That's my mid 30s excitement. Let me revel a bit :P

I do want to be able to take control; with photos and Google not giving me a folder view to manage them was the last straw that pushed me deep into the self hosted world. I just want to de-google as much as reasonable.