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 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'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.
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> :)
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.
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.