dirkt

The logic was "if we depend on each other, Russia isn't going to pull crazy stuff". Which works with rational people (and after Gorbachev and the German reunion, the perception was that Russia is rational), but not with Putin.

And you may have noticed that Russia is not cutting off delivery of Russian gas to Germany. Which they would if the damage was unilateral.

Also, electrical heating is one of most wasteful and damaging ways to do heating, and Germany has been moving away from electrical heating for this reason for decades now.

Nuclear power plants can't be used for residential heating, residential cooking, chemistry, and industrial processes like making glass for solar panels.

At least not without changing the infrastructure for that completely. Which is not going to happen overnight. And even then it can't replace chemistry.

So, no, Germany couldn't have. No matter how many Internet armchair commenters repeat this.

Knowing that something is a scam is very much not the same as wanting to get onboard with the scam.

> the only way you can write merge sort is if you memorize it

Nah. You only have to remember the central idea (if you have two sorted "runs", you can merge them into a single sorted run). You draw a quick diagram to explain the idea, you go ahead and write code that does it.

Then you apply recursion, and write down the overall algorithm (subdivide into runs until you can use some other method to sort it, then merge recursively).

Bonus points if you can explain the circumstances when this is useful (when you want to sort data that is a lot larger than your main memory, but you can write it on disk or tape). Which is kind of obsolete today, unless you are again dealing with BIG data (everything old is new again...)

Here [1] are statistics on usage of natural gas in Germany.

Roughly 1/3 is used for heating, 1/3 is used by the industry. None of those can be replaced by electricity in the short run, nuclear or otherwise. Probably only part of that could even replaced by electricity in the long run. Only 14% is used for power generation, but this part is for the "we need more power right now for current demand, and not more power in 10 hours after we've started the nuclear plant".

> Replacing 12% of the electricity supply with something other than Russian gas, along with the other measures being taken, is enough to eliminate 100% of Russian gas imports.

Completely wrong, sorry...

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/37985/umfrage...

But I have never seen it to mark negation of a condition, that's usually done with a slash (as in ≠ ≮ ≯ ≰ ≱ ≴ ≵ ⊄ ⊅ ⊈ ⊉ ⊊ ⊋ ∉ ∌ ∄ ∦, you get the idea).

So for "not a right angle" I'd have expected a "right angle" symbol with a slash through it.

Tageschau (extremely reliable source) says

> Da die Gazprom Germania GmbH jedoch kritische Infrastruktur betreibe, müsse jeder Erwerb durch einen Nicht-EU-Investor vom Ministerium genehmigt werden. Unklar sei, wer wirtschaftlich und rechtlich hinter den beiden genannten Unternehmen stehe. Zudem habe der Erwerber "die Liquidierung der Gazprom Germania angeordnet, was, so lange der Erwerb nicht genehmigt ist, nicht rechtmäßig ist".

(Use Google Translate etc.)

So the sale had to be ratified by the ministry, which didn't happen. Gazprom ran afoul of the law, the government stepped in and took over temporarily.

But of course this is the internet, the more radical nonsense you spread, and the more emotional outrage your project, the more clicks you get...

[1] https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/gazprom-ger...

Except that you can't use nuclear for heating - not unless you exchange all gas heaters with electric heaters. Which we are trying to get rid off, as they are the most inefficient form of heating.

> I am turning 35 years soon and I feel like I haven't achieved much, both personally and professionally.

It's called "midlife crisis". Everyone goes through it.

> I feel like I've seen most things before, and it's all just different iterations of the same.

Yes. I am over 50, I have been programming since I was 10 or so, and I have seen even more iterations than you :-)

You only get excited about these things if you see them for the first or second time.

On the other hand, if you understand the principles that makes things work, instead of just knowing every single detail, that gives you some good guidelines to cut through the crap and do some slick, efficient things.

> But not anymore now. I feel like my time for everything is running out.

Nah. The fun is just starting for you.

Paying them more would also help...

Where I live (which may be different from the previous poster), the health system has not been overwhelmed yet. So guess that counts as success?

We didn't have to rig tents to use as hospitals, burn dead bodies on the street, or to pay exorbitant sums for oxygen on the black market, as it has happened in other countries.

And if you ask me, yes, that's worth billions, and a bit of self-discipline.

"Overloaded semicolon with in-built assignment of the value of the first statement".

That happens when you google idioms in other languages ... you have no clue about the actual usage. And they are usually not one-to-one.

German "das ist mir Wurst" is also a lot weaker than "zero fucks given", at least use something stronger like "das interessiert keinen Arsch" (no asshole cares). Also "zero fucks given" in the sense of "irresponsible, he just does it and doesn't care who gets hurt" doesn't really have an equivalent idiom. Maybe "als druff" (just go full power straight ahead) or something.

What are the options to use Postgres pub/sub with Java? Because the usual Java libraries don't seem to support the pub/sub functionality well, you have to actively poll when you want to subscribe.

> running a brew update and it completely borking the database

I also ran into this, but to me it more looks like in issue with how Homebrew does Postgres. Also, keeping different versions of Postgres around with Homebrew is a bit of a PITA.

> Your boss was sold on agile on the premise that it lets him keep continuous, precise tabs on you and the entire team, to ensure that y'all are hitting the OKRs for this quarter and so that when something goes wrong, the guilty party and what they did can be identified; or when the schedule slips, the laggard can be identified.

Which is exactly what agile NOT is, according to the core values...

You may like Project Oberon [1] designed by Niklaus Wirth [2] then. His guiding principle was to make a powerful but simple system that could be understood from top to bottom by a single person, from the RISC hardware to the OS to the compiler used to compile and run the OS.

It's quite a bit above the Apple ][ in terms of power.

[1] http://www.projectoberon.com

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

CargoLifter tried (though for cargo, not people):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CargoLifter

The German wikipedia article has a lot of more details (use Google Translate etc.)

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter_AG

And they planned to use helium:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargolifter_CL160

> It’s not called a Zeppelin unless it comes from the Zeppelin region of Germany, otherwise it’s just a sparkling airship.

Now I really want to know where the "Zeppelin region" is located in Germany...

While I agree, and while I do that myself, the social pressure to use Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram is immense. And it's worse for kids.

I have to constantly explain to people why I don't use those, and they still keep trying to convince me that I should.

> Even when the only possible "consumer goods" was a rock

Lots of other "consumer goods" made of more perishable materials just do not have survived...

Germany already has much more complicated options [1] [2] for communal elections (but if you are confused by them, you don't need to use them).

The reasoning is that voters would know the communal candidates a lot better, so having more choice there would be an informed decision.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumulative_voting

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panachage

> hate that I see in the internet towards agile

The reason is that enterprise implementations of "agile" are often the opposite of agile: waterfall with no frequent releases nor customer feedback, but lip service to agile practices and middle management ceremonies.

If you go through the agile manifesto and compare, these implementations violates all the points listed.

> My ideal is a language that tells you that expression is bad and to actually clarify what you mean.

And there are existing language that do that.

This. And in particular if there are multiple ways to do it, and you had to choose a particular way for a reason.

Comments should explain the decision process (if one was necessary) that lead to this variant. Because if there's no comment explaining it, the next developer looking at it will say "oh, but it's much simpler if I just do it that way", and will run into trouble because he didn't realize the pitfalls.

Your work sounds awesome.

(And you probably mean O(n) and not O(1), otherwise O(log(n)) isn't really an improvement).

But I'd say the expectation that professionals who have to pronounce Chinese names pretty frequently, like those who do announcements at an airport, or newscasters, could spend the time to familiarize themselves with it IS reasonable.

> I'm still not great at starting words with "ng" despite years of trying

The trick that worked for me is that I know how to end on "ng", and that I can hold that sound. So I froze my mouth in that position, and used that position at the start of the word. After doing that a few times, it became easy.

> The fundamental problem with Agile

This is not what the article is about. If you look at the Agile Manifesto, it says e.g.

- Individuals and interactions over processes and tools - Responding to change over following a plan

What you get in quite a few big companies following "Agile" with the air quotes is the opposite:

- Processes and tools over individuals and interactions - Following (and making) a plan over responding to change

Because that's what makes middle management happy.

So this perversion of "Agile", which is actually the opposite of Agile, is the FUNDAMENTAL problem.

You may enjoy the PoC || GTFO ("Proof of Concept or Get The Fuck Out", google) "newsletter", which is a pdf and zip in a single file, sometimes with a some other file types merged in, too (e.g. truecrypt), and which also contains back issues in the current issue, russian-doll-style.