Jakob

Less than Singapore for sure. Less than European cities, I’m not so sure. I don’t have the numbers but if you do an image search of Jakarta (probably one of the worst vegetation-wise and boasting a population of a quarter of Germany) it still has trees in every picture and many more than let’s say Frankfurt or Madrid. The latter has many photos without a single tree.

79% of all German trees are sick. Monocultures and beetles play a role but the problem is much bigger than that: https://www.bmleh.de/DE/themen/wald/wald-in-deutschland/wald...

Yes, Singapore is great for that. But to be fair with the other cities, it’s very hard _not_ to have abundant vegetation in tropical rainforest climate. Everything grows rapidly and stops at nothing in its way.

In other climates, like European ones, this becomes much more complex. Germany struggles even to keep its forests alive with long stretches of missing rain, higher temperatures, and new pests. Single trees in cities constantly die. Spain is in large parts a desert etc.

I really hope we find a solution/adapted plants to keep cities from heating up so much.

I would see that as an absolute win. Socialization is the main point I send my kids to school.

Socialization leads to discourse which leads to learning.

I really like Mimestream, which is a native client for Gmail.

Very fast and supports all the usual native macOS keyboard navigation, e.g. shift or command to amend selection in a list.

Maybe not in your corner of the internet, but businesses used server side includes (SSI) for that, not iframes.

You add “include” tags to your HTML file and your web server like nginx or varnish would replace it with the fragment at runtime.

  <!--#include virtual="../footer.html" -->

Very cheap, stable, and very big changes across the whole website could be done instantly since cache invalidation is trivial (the web server knows all modified dates of all fragments).

Also, no additional CDN or caching needed. Later, with CDNs there was even a variant where these fragments were hosted at the edge (ESI).

We have been authoring HTML by hand for decades with ease. Text editors are very good at it, and many have commands to auto-wrap, auto-close etc. Reading and writing is simple.

For a long time this was a common concept: that more central authorities should only come in where more local cannot effectively do it (subsidiarity). This was of course pretty universal until recently. The oldest counter-example I can think of is the French Revolution that started to centralise.

The church works like DNS in that regard. (Without the caching. ;)

While it was always decentralised, the standardisation of the documents was with the Council of Trent ~1550 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Council_of_Trent

My partner and I are from two different European countries that speak different languages.

When we wanted to marry in the country of my partner, both our (catholic) churches needed to sync. They did so in their common language: Latin.

That was a fun surprise.

Speed is a quality in itself. We are so bugged down by slow stuff that we often ignore that and don’t actively search for another.

But every now and then a well-optimised tool/page comes along with instant feedback and is a real pleasure to use.

I think some people are more affected by that than others.

Obligatory https://m.xkcd.com/1205

And recently even dropping the negation itself while keeping the meaning: “je sais pas”

I never thought about that. Interesting. This negation related cycle is apparently called Jespersen’s cycle and happens in many languages. The English equivalent

I say not -> I “do” not say -> I don’t say. -> ?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_cycle

Yes. There are lots around; whenever the original word becomes too short for the importance people want to give it.

Tuna fish, chai tea, Enter the room -> enter “into” the room, French: hui (today) -> aujourd’hui (day of today)

Keyword: pleonasm

Yes, this is unfortunately still the way and was very common back when iOS Safari did not allow embedded video.

For a fast start of the video, reverse the implementation: instead of downgrading from Websockets to polling when connection fails, you should upgrade from polling to Websockets when the network allows.

Socket.io was one of the first libraries that did that switching and had it wrong first, too. Learned the enterprise network behaviour and they switched the implementation.

Contemporary historic preservation sees itself as the guardian of historical substance. The content of a monument is bound to the preservation of the inherited material.

Georg Dehio’s principle of "conserving, not restoring" is often invoked as a synonym for this self-conception. Old and new need to be clearly separated.

It is a counter-movement to the 18th century historicism which ”destroyed” a lot of old monuments beyond repair.

Personally, I think we went too far on the conservation angle (at least in Germany, not sure about other countries), and should restore a bit more again with the knowledge we have. But much more intelligent people have debated that for centuries, so I guess their answer would be the same like https://askastaffengineer.com/.

iCloud surprisingly works without issues for me. You can switch on “keep downloaded” for the folder in question.

On the last point on Apple Notes: iCloud has the “keep downloaded” option now on iOS and macOS for folders and files.

This makes every app that saves into iCloud files behave like Notes, i.e. work offline with automatic online sync.

Most countries have mandatory tax withholding by the employer, but not all (e.g. Singapore, Indonesia). In that case you would pay the taxes yourself.

What I haven’t heard yet, is not being allowed to sell on the settlement date. That puts you in a serious risk:

Worst case, the stocks fall to zero, but you paid taxes from your private money. This is net-negative.

To avoid that risk, either the employer needs to withhold the taxes or needs to allow you to sell the tax amount on the first day.

It’s actually not harder thanks to HLS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_Live_Streaming

Live streaming with HLS is equal to distributing static files and can be very low latency.

If you need to go below 3s of latency, yes it becomes harder, but everything else is thankfully solved.

The bigger issue with live streaming are the peaks: 0 views in one second and millions in the next. Even with static content delivery that leads to all kinds of issues.

Not taking away from your point, just for comparison:

A British Airways first class LHR-JFK roundtrip is $10K today for an 8h flight. Supersonic would be 3h.

Socrates says that profound knowledge is gained through interaction. He compares the written word to a painting, meaning it can be analysed but it doesn’t respond to questions and is therefore not a substitute for dialog.

This mirrors the critique to phones: used primarily to passively watch “paintings” instead of interacting. The viewer’s knowledge and critical thinking is improving only seemingly at best.

I haven’t been to UK airports, but often I find one of the more prominent bottleneck to be central checks per terminal instead of distributed checks at each gate like they happen at more efficient airports. The latter is a major improvement: You can directly go to the gate and bag checks happen there.

Try out Singapore and fly for example to Phuket. It’s a very lean process with optimised waiting times (read: nearly none) and walking distances on both sides.

It can be done, most airports are just amazingly inefficient. No idea why that is.

  git config --global diff.noprefix true

As middle ground for small scripts I like implementations like the one from 1Password: The environment variables contain the path to the secret:

export DB_PASSWORD="op://app-prod/db/password"

Calling the script with `op run scriptname` replaces the secret path with the actual secret after authentication during runtime.

This way you can commit the file but people still can use their own passwords locally without saving them in plaintext.

TIL that signal speed in copper and in fiber is roughly similar, around 2/3 c. Thanks!

I prefer wired too, because of the much reduced latency and better sound quality both in and out.

Especially important with calls around the world, where electron/light speed already adds 150 ms.

I would hope that my call partner acted similarly but unfortunately they nearly never do.

Maybe some future directed microphone and speaker setup in rooms will finally lead to the same comfort without the wire.

I wish all API doc generators test the doc code examples like this https://rust-lang.github.io/mdBook/cli/test.html

Even if the code example works today, it might not in the future and tests prevent people getting stuck on outdated docs like we often see.

This shows the keyboard shortcut configuration: https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Keyboard-shortcuts#ac...

The setting is called "Relax blocking mode" and will enable JavaScript (but keep all ad blockers) if JavaScript is disabled by default.

In summary, for Firefox it’s under

  about:addons > gear icon > Manage Extension Shortcuts

  chrome://extensions/shortcuts

I do that, too. cmd-J as shortcut to enable JavaScript without needing to reload. In my experience once I hardcode which websites I need JavaScript on, browsing becomes painless. And much faster obviously.

As a counter point, I think Singapore is a good example of well-educated, appreciated and well-paid teachers in public and private schools. Even starting at kindergarten. Education is on a different importance level there both for the government and its citizens.

I was surprised to see the relatively high salary in Luxemburg, Germany and Switzerland, too: https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/education-at-a-glan...

Yes that is unfortunate. Safari had the option to toggle JavaScript via Shortcut until recently, but it was removed. The only browser I know which can easily toggle JavaScript now is Brave.

But uBlock Origin has that functionality, too, and I guess most people who would care about JavaScript have that already enabled anyways.

The web is so much nicer without JavaScript but easily activating it (via cmd-J) once it seems necessary without reloading.