Escapado

I usually eat 3 meals a day or two meals and a snack and I brush my teeth about 20-30 minutes after that so I guess it mostly due to my wish to get my mouth feel fresh and prevent staining if I had something like kimchi. 2 minutes twice per day is probably sufficient most of the time but the amount of abrasion and gum damage will probably also heavily depend on the hardness of the brush, the specific toothpaste and and the of course how vigorously you brush. I asked my dentist about this last year and he said it's fine and my gum health and enamel seem to confirm that.

Super exciting stuff and it got me thinking: could we genetically engineer bacteria to get rid of morning breath? I would like to think (and so does my dentist) I have very good oral hygiene* and I get regular checkups where everything is fine but when I wake up the taste in my mouth and my breath are really unpleasant. The last time I had to be on antibiotics for a longer time I noticed it was severely lessened but came back just as strong after.

* My routine includes brushing my teeth 3x per day for 3 minutes with an ultrasonic toothbrush, I use an interdental brush at night, I use a tongue scraper in the morning and at night and I do an occasional chx mouthwash and semi-regular salt water rinses.

Just out of curiousity I let Wolfram Alpha divide the total land area by the global population and got roughly 0.0191sqkm per person. That’s about a 130m distance if people were positioned on a grid. Then I found that roughly 57% of people live in cities. Treating the size of those as a negligible term that leaves us with roughly 210m. Then I found that 57% of land is considered uninhabitable which cancels out the city factor, so we are back to roughly 130m. I think this is a neat number as it really puts being kilometers or even tens or hundreds of kilometres away from others into perspective. The human density distribution on earth is really all over the place.

I’ve never not been a developer in a „scrum“ team. And each org butchers the framework in one way or another. Dedicated scrum master? Meh, let the PO do it. Let’s estimate stories based on the time it takes to complete them and eventually measure our velocity based on days worked on a ticket (and pat each other on the back when a sprint without holidays finished). Let’s plan the next 12 months like this based on loose terms and draw some deadlines in the sand - which we will absolutely insist on later but worry not it’s still scrum because you guys do the scrum related meetings. Let’s have a status report during dailies because instead of fostering collaboration middle management would like to know whether they can update their weekly progress PowerPoint mid sprint. Let’s document every minute on every ticket, meeting or 2 paragraph chat message to help someone from QA because transparency. Let’s have a disjoint backend, frontend and testing subteam on the same scrum team and discourage cross functionality because of efficiency but still have them all sit in the same refinements twiddling thumbs. Let’s strip the PO of every ounce of decision power so they become an imperfect messenger of non-agile middle and upper management. Let’s have plannings and refinements together. Let’s do a mid-sprint planning for all the production bugs which we will not estimate. Let’s have 5 backlogs - product, bugs, technical debt, experimental and misc - and let’s ignore the technical debt one. Let’s not listen to developer feedback and rather tell them which tools to use for the job. Let‘s never document anything technical even if it is super obscure but incredibly important because we should rather work on features that increase revenue in the short term. Let‘s never pair - that’s twice the time booked on one ticket and we can’t have that. Let’s have a pre and post refinement. Let’s write todos at the end of a retrospective which nobody will ever be assigned to or complete.

This reminds me of FizzBuzz Enterprise Edition and I have come across software that was pretty much written like this more than once.

To be fair: finding the right level of abstraction in a sea of uncertainty can be a tricky problem - but sometimes this also just happens for very different reasons than out of necessity (ivory tower architecture commitees, external companies selling the most expensive solution, ego fueled idiocy or just plain old ignorance).

And even though the points raised are mostly valid I think there is a lot of nuance to this. If you write control software for medical devices this is simply not true. Same goes if you handle incredibly sensitive data or critical infrastructure or assistance systems for air travel and you can probably come up with a a bunch more cases where bugs are not ok. And also I think this sentence

> Where high quality is nice to have, but is not the be-all-and-end-all.

while being mostly true in all other cases I don't think it does it justice what mediocrity actually means for everyone involved. I have seen very varying levels of quality requirements/enforcement, testing, delivery speed and eventual bugs at different costs at different companies. And I in general found that higher quality software and less bugs were associated with much happier and more productive developers. And I would make the argument that less happy developers => more turnover => more second order costs. So while it might not make or break the company it certainly has a negative impact on profits downstream. And for customers too. Vendor lock in is a great thing for a company to profit from but if you really make a shitty product it opens up a lot of venues for competitors to eventually canibalize your market or from users to jump ship the next time they can. Take MS Teams for example. Lots of lock in but trust me the second better competitors are on the table I vigorously fight to switch. It's a slow burn but a burn nonetheless.

> tailored to someone with my neurological makeup that causes this dislike of useless exertion

Quite a lot to unpack here. I would argue the advice given is really good and valid for most people and so that's a good thing. I am sorry you feel under-represented and hope you find something valuable for yourself elsewhere.

Additionally I think lots of people find that they have to force themselves to start and finish a workout and only some eventually come to learn to like it. But for many it starts as a chore like preparing food or doing laundry or taking a shower. It costs time and effort and often hurts. And people can go for a while without any of those but it usually has consequences which are usually worse in the long run than the initial invest.

You seem to have a fairly static view of who "you" are. I used to be in the camp of "my body is just a vehicle for my brain" camp and did not understand why I would exercise at all since I was always skinny (but also super weak) and my mind was what I was working with. And then my grandpa told me: "A healthy mind likes to reside in a healthy body" and that took a few years to really sink in. And now I realize that pushing myself through regular workouts and making myself deliberately suffer exhaustion, fatigue and pain makes me more happy, stable and relaxed in general and I even think of myself as a fit athletic person now and made that part of my identity.

And lastly I am kind of curious about a thing: You said that you only want to do it when it's attached to a game. So if you share the notion that exercise is good and you already know that this is how it's easier for you to do it, then why not focus on exercises which are also games. There are so many of them. And for everyone else who does not need or want a game, meditating or doing yoga seems to be another great venue to start.

Lots of negativity here. I don’t share the sentiment. I have ported one project over to the app router months ago when it was still in beta with zero problems and another one is in the works using server actions and drizzle-orm to get end to end type safety. I think it’s a blast. For those complaining about the feature set growing: I think this is just a question of use-case. At my current gig we are using pretty much everything next has to offer for a fairly sophisticated eCommerce site. If your app has thousands of pages (like product pages) with integration into a dozen micro services, auth, large images everywhere, redirects everywhere for seo purposes, middleware for various purposes, i18n and needs SSG for seo and perf reasons then next offers pretty well thought out solutions for all of that.

I can understand the performance argument but most of that is being worked on and the next team has already shipped lots of improvements in the past. But maybe the things I worked on haven’t reached a scale yet where these things become a bottleneck.

About 5 years ago I wrote my master thesis on quantum computing, specifically on the construction of quantum circuits. As these circuits are generally unitary matrices an interesting question is: Given a set of gates that operate on one qbit or two qubits (controlled gates) and a target unitary matrix (e.g. fourier transform or the hamiltonian of a physical system of interest such as an Ising model), can we find an optimal/minimal arrangement of those gates to approximate or exactly match the target matrix.

Back then I modelled the quantum circuit as a set of unitaries (by parametrizing them through their generator), that operate on one or two qubits, set a limit to the amount of steps and the amount of controlled gates and then threw different optimization algorithms at it. I got the best performance using simple dense neural networks. What's cool is that I could generate a training set really quickly since I could just randomly build tensor products of unitary matricies to create billions of unitaries of up to 7 qubits in minimal time and then just see how close I can get given a fixed length for the quantum circuit and a fixed number of control gates.

I really liked this approach and it was fun to work on. However it was ultimately limited as the size of the matrices scales exponentially with the number of qubits.

Just sent out my application. I have a thing I am working on in the education space using LLMs and since I would pay out of pocket for Vercel and OpenAI usage and I have no peers to discuss my work with this is pretty much ideal for me. It's motivating and I think it's a nice move. I was set on Nextjs on Vercel anyway so either way I'll be a customer for it so I don't really care if it's mostly a marketing device as others in this thread presumed. I think if both parties win it's a great thing.

I am also really curious to see the projects which will eventually be selected. It's an interesting time we live in and I would argue that before we know it we will use highly AI augmented or enabled services in the future which will provide value we don't even know of yet. We had maps before we had google maps. And we had coaches before we had cars. And yeah, a lot of the AI stuff we see these days is mostly cool toys and lots of buzz to ride the wave but I am convinced we will see some really impactful stuff come out of it.

This is great. I wonder if the price decrease comes from the competition (on the side of anthropic and from local LLMs). If so, I guess we will have to wait for a general GPT-4 competitor to come along before we see price decreases there aswell. Right now it's quiet expensive. We are incorporating it in a new product in the education space and we have to be fairly conservative in rate limiting things so that the cost won't go out of hand.

I also wonder how much of an impact the new Nvidia HGX systems will have on the medium term infra cost on running these services and whether we will see some benefits from that.

Please no. Make my dog smarter so she can use the toilet or not roll in poop, great. But I don’t want to be attacked by Cthulus spawn at night.

I had a brief interaction with a real estate agent a few months back and he told me they really have trouble selling houses now at those interest rates. The run on housing apparently has dialed back significantly. He also mentioned that he thinks in around 5 and 10 years time the market might be flooded with houses people bought at low interest rates because they will not be able to pay their mortgage at these new interest rates and those are typical timeframes for interest rate guarantees. Maybe someone with more insight can share their perspective.

I also wonder if people who are in a position to sell our build houses will try (and maybe even succeed?) to sit this out or whether we will see a downward trend in prices again.

German reporting in. According to Weatherspark [1] starting November to March around 70% of the days are cloudy and it's cold so you would barely expose 15% of your body to the remaining sun. In feburary, around midday, on a cloudy day you don't make enough vitamin d. And even on a cloudless day it takes more than 4 hours around midday to get the daily recommended dose. [2]. Being a dog owner I spend a lot of time outside, also during midday and 3/4 of the year I go for a run around midday every other day. Last year in january I was diagnosed with severe vitamin D deficiency at around 6ng/ml. Took a few months to get that back to normal using supplements.

[1] https://weatherspark.com/y/68301/Average-Weather-in-Hamburg-... [2] https://fastrt.nilu.no/VitD_quartMEDandMED_v2.html

Really hyped about this! I can't wait to try it out and watching the CI build as we speak. I am curious however about a few points. From their examples in the blog post it's not clear what kind of payloads can be transfered when using server actions. Do they need to be serializable in a specific way? Can I transfer dates? Can they return something (in case I want to validate a form on the server and return an error or a success code)? How does it figure out that the db import will not be bundled into the client? Because it is only used in the function with the "use server" directive? And finally: Can I call "use server" functions in a client component too? In case I want some extra state in there?

Maybe there is someone here who knows more!

To be a little more precise about the pricing:

O2 Unlimited:

- 32,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 3mbit with unlimited data

- 42,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 15mbit with unlimited data

- 62,99€/month for 4G/5G up to 500mbit with with unlimited data

Vodafone:

- 79,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimted data

Telekom:

- 84,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data

1und1:

- 49,99€/month with 4G/5G capped at 10mbit with unlimited data

- 69,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data

I won't dispute that there is corruption and that there are still Nazis and right wing forces around - especially if you look in certain german states.

But if I am completely honest lots of government agencies and the people working there are entirely complacent with the state of bureaucracy because they don't feel like they can or need to change this sorry state of affairs. I had to wait more than two months to get an appointment to be able to formally leave the christian church to avoid paying church tax. When I went there the woman took my ID, started typing all my credentials into some interface of some government software for 10 minutes and then I could go. I don't even remember saying or hearing anything but "Hello", "ID Please" and "Bye".

Why can I not do that online with my ID? Why did she have to type in all my information and not get that from some other government body? Why is she even typing it at all of it's all on the ID and that could be scanned as they are entirely standardized. What did I wait for two months for?

When I talk to people who work for the government they tell me it's just the process and they simply don't question it. Sometimes some complain but there is little or nothing to be gained. And I think herein lies a bigger part of the problem. The structure does not reward or incentivise improvement.

And so I would argue the problem is not one of being publicly or privately owned but about the structures that provide incentive to offer good service. And if there is none - regardless of the ownership model - then most likely it will fall flat. When you have privately owned monopolies you see a similar effect - they don't need to improve affairs, they just need to stay in power.

And also the inner city transport - at least in hamburg. Which is a great datapoint I think. Because this was true for all three months if I recall correctly and it means that there is absolutely a lot of public demand for inexpensive/free ways to travel. I work in an area with a lot of publicly subsidised housing which hosts mostly families that are less well off and I sometimes get to talk to these people and what I hear time and time again is how they had trouble paying for public transport and so they put off doctors appointments, can't have their child join a soccer team because they would need a monthly ticket to get to the field or have to compromise on other parts of their life that are completely non-negociable for many others. So there are many higher order effects where making public transport financially accessible to everyone could have positive benefits for financially underpriviledged people. Also higher public transport usage might lead to less cars and hence less polution, less road damage that needs repair and less crashes and accidents so there might also be other positive effects downstream. I would be interested in a full economic breakdown of this, although that might be hard or infeasible to do. Yet I would not be suprised if it turned out quite positive for most.

I am confused. In my book vendor lock-in would refer to a situation where a user or customer would be unable to switch vendors or only with prohibitivly large cost and often under the notion that they were unknowingly lead into that situation.

So first of all, _you_ can use whatever ORM or database solution you like in general so _you_ specifically choose which technology you want to invest in. If you want to hand craft your kubernetes cluster for your database nodes and put them on GCP or Azure, then go for it. You want redis? Go for it. If you want to use supabase, firebase, planetscale or whatever, use that. If you want to choose a KV store that's built into your runtime then that's great. Believe it or not but people use lowdb in production and their database is literally a json file. I would argue whichever you choose, switching from one hosting provider, database solution, managed or unmanaged platform to another will always incur cost and how high that is will depend on your depth of integration and familiarity with it. I am most likely going to use this feature and I am happy it exists. Also let's not ignore that there is a large breadth of different needs that developers have. Would I build a massive modular corporate CRM system with BI features with it? Probably not. Am I going to build my next D&D game tool, habit tracker or Tinder for sneaker trading for it? Maybe!

I sincerely wonder what specifically you loose from this feature simply existing.

Not only on desktop. I was entirely addicted to shorts and hated that and my little monkey brain would at some point just click on them despite knowing it was entirely stupid. So I did not only block shorts on chrome but also on safari and safari iOS. You can do this by installing AdGuard and setting custom blocking filters so on the youtube website the shorts navigation button disappears and for subscriptions and suggestions I just set it up so it will show a black page. I couldn't get it stop playing audio but at least I am not seeing anything so I became unhooked. This only works in the browser of course so I uninstalled the YouTube app and I can only open YouTube in safari. I _really_ wish YouTube would just natively allow disabling shorts alltogether in their app and on their website.

I don’t have a horse in the race but I’m curious why you think that?

I had this conversation with my girlfriend who is currently teaching herself web development without a formal programming background. She used ChatGPT to help her understand compiler errors or write small code snippets or react components and was terrified that it would write better code than her and seemingly understood things much better than she did.

But here I sit, reflecting on my day-to-day: After the daily standup my PO calls me to ask if there is a chance that our external A/B testing tool can be coerced into tracking some arcane user flow in a slightly different way then the rest. After fiddling around with it for 30 minutes I conclude it can't but I have another idea on how they might get some of the data they want which I promptly put into words forwarding to the relevant people. I then get on to select a ticket from the backlog. Upon reading I notice the ticket is missing some info and the linked figma design is incomplete so I call someone from the design team to get some info and while we are at it we notice that the proposed solution is overly complicated and we settle on changing it - something that did not occur to anyone during refinement. Before I get to start coding the next teams meeting starts, this time to give us a brief of the strategy for the next quarter, and back to back the next refinement meeting starts. Half of the tickets have holes and missing edge cases in them and about 10% of them need to be outright discarded due to fundamental problems with our setup or architecture. We have lenghty discussions about minutiae of the user stories until finally the call comes to a close and I get some time to code. So back to my ticket. I open VSCode and I am greeted by our nextjs project: 850 components, 150 pages and 2200 unit tests and integrations with at least 12 different services in it - encoding the needs and wants of my corporate overlords and the history of it all. I get to identify where in our architecture the wanted feature fits best and think for a while of the exact composition of the components to fit our code style, best practices, testability requirements. I start scaffolding the first component when I see another call plop up. Someone from the testing team is confused why suddenly their locally initiated E2E tests against the dev stage fail. After 5 minutes of perusing logs it turns they didn't pull from main this morning and after doing that all was well. Back to coding. After scaffolding three more components I get to write a little more boilerplate and writing two or three utility functions to juggle around some data I proudly look at my code. Finishing touches and manual testing reveals that all is well. I write a storybook story for two of the components and think about which props should actually be controllable and mock out some of the involved api, write three little unit tests and one integration test to finally push my change to a newly minted feature branch. While the azure build and test pipeline slowly crawls towards completion I open our board, move the ticket to the code-review lane, put a small reminder into our dev teams channel and log my time in the time tracker. One hour of coding effort for ticket #31221. Good! While implementing my feature I noticed that a library we were using is out of date. A cursory search through the changelogs reveals that some of the breaking changes introduced in newer versions would break our app so I go on to write a technical ticket about that and put it in the backlog. Quick note to the PO that I got something for the next refinement and off I go to the next ...call. A bug in prod. Turns out one of our docker pods kicked the bucket. A quick restart and everything is fine again but we get into a lengthy discussion on whether we could finally migrate to some serverless architecture. I look at the clock. One more hour to go. Not really enough time to start a new ticket but looking at the board I find three tickets ready for code-review so that's what I do. One of them is from a less experienced dev so I try to be as thorough as I can and find a few things here and there which I promptly add as suggestions to the pull request. 10 minutes left. I sign off teams, close VSCode and close all tabs except for the time tracking one. I put in the last few entries and I am done for the day.

I am not scared of AI taking my job just yet. Not as long as I have to defend technical choices in front of business people, implement the most outlandish user flows with obscure edge cases, have back and forth discussions with the design team on the difficulty or feasability of their longings, help QA people with their setups, debug devops problems, show off progress, write changelogs, estimate PDs for different stories and epics on different levels of granularity, onboard new developers, off board other developers, dance around in retrospectives, conjure up ideas and solutions for architectural re-orientations and so on. Actually writing some code is only <25% of my job anyway. And I am no staff level engineer or tech lead. Just a frontend engineer with some side knowledge. All the frontend devs on my team are like that. But maybe I am just working on weird projects. Who knows. Maybe one day I'll just orchestrate AI or have to re-orient but for now I am fine.

Uhh I am saving this one! Thanks! I remember the last time I had to set up a few mail templates it was so incredibly painful. Especially the testing of it is so painstakingly slow.

Hmm I listened to about 2 dozens of his podcasts and I feel like the author is really putting a lot of focus on something that I didn’t feel was nearly as emphasised as this post makes it seem. The vast majority of info I think is about behavioural things and processes inside of us and I think him relentlessly reminding us to always check with our health care providers first before taking or stopping to take anything is enough of a preface for me to be alright with him talking about supplements. And while I appreciate the callout of him citing low quality data (albeit I haven’t checked myself who is in the wrong here), I would also like to point to the fact that most of the other interventions he talks about do in fact have lots of proven benefits and are widely recognised as such. Another questions would be the baseline we are comparing him to. I have two friends who have dramatically improved their lives after stumbling upon his podcast and I also took away quite a few practices that had a positive impact on my life. If that is the mean effect I am ok with embracing a few imperfections in the data he cites or the supplements he recommends since a lot of people start with a baseline of shitty self destructive behaviour consuming all sorts of really damaging stuff.

And while it may be true that it is far from AGI, I don’t think calling it a parlor trick does it justice. I used it this morning to set up a new workout routine for myself after having it write a little boilerplate typescript code to bootstrap 70% of a micro service I want to set up. My girlfriend who is studying react got a lot of value out of it by having compile errors explained to her. My mum uses it to practice English. I am going to integrate GPT-4 into a new product where it provides tangible value for non technical users. To be useful it does not need to be sentient or able to iterate on its own architecture.

I’m kind of relieved to know I’m not alone. Got my masters 4 years ago and immediately became a web dev after. I am greatful for the time and I think a lot of the resilience, logical thinking and general problem solving skills transferred well to my current work. Yet some part of me wishes I had stayed and gotten a PhD but I also remember I was overworked and had significantly higher imposter syndrome although my grades indicated that I was doing really well.

To get back on the topic of perturbation theory I remember how the mathematical physicists in our lectures always complained that the systems the professors would use it for were not well suited to use it in the first place but often times the results were kinda nice so they used it anyway. Not that I remember any details but I was so fascinated when I found perturbation theory used again in QFT and it really dawned on my how powerful of a tool it is.

It's a blade runner reference. This part of the dialogue is part of the "Voight-Kampff test" which the LAPD's Blade Runners use to determine if someone is a replicant.

I would consider myself left leaning and still wish to see a lot of progress and change but I disagree with quite a few talking points of what might be considered the current “zeitgeist” of the far left. Would I consider misgendendering a _violent_ hate crime? No. Am I for more inclusion and free choice of gender identity? Yes. Do I think that pure socialism will save humanity? No. Do I think it’s bad we have people on the planet with more money than multiple countries combined? Yes.

I would even argue most progressives are seeing flaws and don’t accept them and push for change but you don’t need to be “radical”(as in further from the status quo) in your views to do that and it doesn’t make you less of a progressive - you are just trying to push to a different spot on the manifold.

I’m intrigued what your answer is? Apart from the complexity of catching vs throwing is the answer that people don’t usually throw stuff at their young children?

I could not agree more. At my current gig we have forms spanning 6 pages, where the state of each sub-form needs to be preserved, pretty much half of the form fields are conditionally loaded across all pages. There is tons of dynamic data displayed and sometimes that needs to be transformed client side, has loading and error states and there is heaps of validation happening, some of it asynchronously and it involves calling other services. Some of the inputs should be also preserved for other parts of the page regardless of whether the user fully completes all forms or not and then there is a whole basket of custom tracking that the marketing team insists needs to happen. You could of course argue that this is bad UX or that the problem starts with the requirements but that’s usually not something engineers a lot of have control over so I am actually quiet grateful that we have a framework that lets me solve this (imho) more sanely than if I were to hack away in vanilla JS.