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There wasn't actually a minimum wage back then. That was introduced in 2015 in Germany.

Hate's not the right word. A lot of clubs have a community around them -- they have their regulars; people go there to see their friends. If there are too many tourists, there's less space for regulars. There are always some tourists, and that's fine, but a lot of those communities that I mentioned a second ago have been choked out by a club eventually being so popular with tourists that the regulars don't bother going anymore. The lines are too long, it's full too early, prices go up, etc. A lot of the well known clubs started off as underground spots that eventually were overrun. God, the last time I went to Renate, it was credit card only, didn't know a single person there who wasn't working there, even though we had guest list there was a 30 minute line at the coat check. That's what we don't like. ;-)

Also, often tourists aren't accustomed to Berlin's marathon club opening times (some clubs don't close on weekends) and end up too trashed and are annoying. So, yeah, tourists have a harder time at the doors.

Honestly, I've only been to Tresor once. It's kind of a misnomer since it's named after a very famous, very important long-closed club in a different part of Berlin with a totally different vibe. The current incarnation ... it's probably fine. Like, there are a handful of clubs in Berlin that actually feel a lot like the clubs Berliners do go to, but are mostly there for tourists. You can spot them because ... you can spot them. ;-) (Good rule of thumb in Berlin: if you can easily find the entrance, it's for tourists. Most of the more scene-y clubs don't have a sign.)

I was trying to make a comparison to the €100 rooms from 20 years ago. That would be a single room in a 4-6 person shared flat. Those are still €500-ish. (In places just outside the ring like Treptow, Britz, Wedding, Lichtenberg.) In my shared two person flat back then I paid €300 (bills included). That room now would be way over €500.

Tourism definitely wasn't a major drag on the techno scene. There's always been the tourist clubs and the clubs that were more underground. Berliners usually don't go to Berlin's best known clubs. (Who the hell goes to Watergate or Tresor? Old joke was that Tresor was the biggest club in Dresden.)

I think the biggest drag is actually rent prices. When I got to Berlin 20 years ago you could get a room in a shared flat for €100. That same room now would be €500. Same for music spaces: it was easy to rent unused warehouse space in the inner city 20 year ago. There are a lot of interesting things that happen to a city when rent is ridiculously low as it was in Berlin for a long time (there were more apartments than people).

There's still a lot going on in Berlin, but the character has very much changed. 20 years ago it was rare for clubs to be legal. Most of Berlin's well known clubs now started off as illegal clubs back then. But there were hundreds of other spaces that didn't survive and transition to being legal spaces. There's still some of that, but much, much less. Also back then just randomly setting up a sound system in a park in the summer was much more tolerated. "Open Airs" in Berlin were just kind of what you did in the summer.

Honestly, while I generally did not partake in such, the pandemic was the first time that I realized that came back some. Partying was illegal and the parties were moderately guarded secrets. I hadn't seen that much buzz around illegal parties in more than a decade.

Addendum: As a weird note, I don't even get the grandparent's comment about Potsdam? For the non-Berlin folks, it's a city just outside of Berlin's borders, but an hour away on the train from the more alternative bits of the city. It's neither known for its music scene, nor honestly as a place that rich people want to move. I know a couple of people that have moved there because of usual suburb reasons: they wanted a bigger place, and it's cheaper there. The other cities listed there are also weird. I've been out in all of them but Lyon and, yeah, there's some stuff, but to say the "scene" is moving there is really off. Three of the cities listed there are in the Balkans, but the best city for techno in the Balkans is undoubtedly Belgrade.

Those are both options, but there is a third. There are international payroll companies that handle local taxes and compliance. They're not cheap (a couple hundred per employee per month, plus usually a base fee of $1-2k/month), but for a company that's potentially doing such for multiple people, not just the post author, and more than few employees, it might be in reach.

It's just a relatively hard sell if they haven't had the need for such in the past. I'd think getting a job at a local company would perhaps be more sensible, and was the route that I went before I got permanent residence in Germany (at which point I started my own company). I'm not certain on such, but I doubt the digital nomad offer a path to permanent residence, which if one wants to be long-term in the EU, eventually is a very nice thing to have sorted.

Ditto. Price doubled while the service declined. Amazon used to offer a credit card in Germany that offered more cashback with Prime, and they pulled that too. I mostly only care about the fast shipping, and that doesn't seem to be much different than non-prime shipping anymore. For the few times I actually need it, I can pay for fast shipping explicitly and still come out under €90. Things have been so bad with the direction of Prime that I've actually wondered if they're trying to kill it off.

> Something is clearly better than nothing.

That's not a major component of venture backed startups. For a company that has already been written off as a failure, often the board members that represent the VC would rather not have to stay involved and keep showing up for meetings -- they could be elsewhere; there's an opportunity cost.

They're also common in Germany, particularly on the ground floor of apartments.

Most of what humans talk about isn't science or religion, and to reduce the world to just that is pretty weird to say the least. Most things can't be resolved by appeals to objective truth. It sounds like you're working on a model where that's how one resolves conflicts, but literally most of the history of knowledge, humanity, whatever label you want to put on it -- isn't that. Even science isn't by any means that binary. Disagreements can last centuries. And we're even at a spot in science where a lot of the interesting stuff fumbles around for decades before we can even come up with experiments that could possibly test it; and some of it we won't ever be able to test. (A lot of cosmology isn't testable.)

But the point me and a few others were making is that you don't seem to know much about religion, so it's probably not a good thing to use in analogies. Religion is definitely not a set of neatly divided mutually exclusive beliefs. Almost all of the world's adherents come from two families of religions -- Abrahamic or Vedic -- and within those groups there's a whole lot of similarity and varying levels of theological exclusivity.

I feel like gambling or the stock market may be better examples. If one person takes a long position on a stock and another short, they have mutually exclusive beliefs about it, and one of them will be wrong.

Yeah, probably should have left the religion analogy out. It wasn't essential to the point you were making and was based on a false model of religion.

There's actually a pretty complex matrix in religious disagreement with or without exclusivity. And not all religions are exclusive at all. Islam's views of other Abrahamic religions is complicated, but it is exclusive about non-Abrahamic religions. Christianity sees Judaism as having been correct, but incomplete. Hinduism isn't essentially exclusionary (particularly to other religions which evolved from old Vedic practices), but is often confused with modern Hindu nationalism, which is. And even within single "religions" there are complicated lines where e.g. some Christians consider themselves to be in "communion" with some Christians, but not others.

So, yeah, bad example. It's a terrible thing to have pulled out to try to show clear mutually exclusive groups.

And the 40% of the city that are Desi immigrants also enjoy that improvement? There were very nice things in the city 20 years ago (and all of the cities I listed); they just weren't available to a major chunk of the population. I'm skeptical that that part has changed in Riyadh?

I stayed in the Al Bat'ha district when I was there, where there were virtually no short-term visitors (can't say "tourists" since Saudi Arabia didn't have tourist visas; I was speaking at a conference, but stayed for an extra week). It never felt dangerous, but there was a massive gap between ritzy central Riyadh and the market district. Close to half of the population of Riyad are guest workers with limited rights and low salaries; I can't remember if that seemed to be the reason for the gap. This was also 20 years ago, so I don't have any sense for how it's developed since, but I'd be surprised if it has changed.

Romania is actually the least corrupt Balkan country (if one counts them as Balkan). In my experience, former east-block countries tend to have high corruption, but relatively good infrastructure and relatively low inequality. They're fairly unique in where they sit on the development ladder, because it seems like quashing corruption is the major missing piece to reaching prosperity. (Whereas in many / most poor countries, there's a lack of intellectual capital, and solving education and growing the professional sector is at best a multi-generational project.)

Haven't been, but would have expected such from things I've heard. But corruption and inequality to a large extent vary independently. There's some correlation, but not as much as one might expect. Case in point: the Balkans are very corrupt, but inequality isn't especially high.

Nothing. To be clear, I wasn't talking about actual danger, as much as the felt gradients in rich and poor between the places, often in a small distance. And the gap between, say, the Infosys campus, and bits of Bangalore only a couple kilometers away is huge. Kind of the GINI of a city...

I think the counterintuitive thing about bringing up Brazilian cities here is that central Sao Paolo (where just the central part has about 3x the population of San Francisco) feels richer than San Francisco. And the favelas on the edges, which have a population larger than the whole Bay Area, feel poorer than almost anywhere in the world, with nowhere in the US that can hold a candle to such. And just the favelas of Sao Paolo have a population larger than most US states.

Yeah, was looking to see if this comment existed. Sao Paolo feels like one of the richest cities in the world surrounded by one of the poorest cities in the world. I've been to more than 50 countries and hundreds of big cities, and Sao Paolo feels like it has the craziest gradient between rich and poor. I'm not even sure San Francisco would make the top 10.

(High up would be: Sao Paolo, Rio, Bangalore, Mexico City, Johannesburg, Riyadh, ...)

Your point isn't completely invalid, but there are two major counterarguments:

- Most land animals do fly. Most insects fly, and most land animals are insects.

- Almost all (90%+) of animals live in the top 200 meters of the ocean. That's not that much different than the portion of the "air" that includes things that live in trees.

In both cases, it's a pretty thin layer of the total volume that contains almost all of the animals. It is more distributed in water, but not as much as your comment implied.

That's not a good analogy. Trusting an LLM right now is more akin to trusting a compulsive liar. (Another approximation would be assuming historical fiction was true.)

Humans usually try not to lie, and there's a particular shape to the sorts of details they tend to forget / confuse. Compulsive liars often don't even notice themselves lying. That's closer to an LLM. I trust the output of an LLM about as much as stuff George Santos says.

There are a lot of data structures where doubling the size of the struct would be a big deal. I've worked on big graphs, where I used similar tricks, because most of the storage of a graph is pointers, and limits of what can be quickly computed are bound by how much of the graph you can get in memory.

Other people had already responded with what I'd have said. There was no need for me to chime in too.

€200k is not a normal developer salary in Berlin. In fact, it's more like 3x a normal salary. It doesn't make sense applying Silicon Valley salaries to other places.

Just to provide some counterpoint to this: I regularly go with my kids in the winter weekends, and aside from the Wellenbad ("wave pool") in Görlitzer Park, which had a plumbing problem once when I went, I've never run across randomly closed pools. We didn't go much last winter since they'd lowered the temperatures because of the war in Ukraine and rationing of gas, but we went a lot the year before and a couple times already this year. They've never been painfully crowded -- in fact, usually the opposite, usually pretty empty. We've gone in Kreuzberg, Neukölln, Lichtenberg and Schöneberg.

Normally I'd have the sense that I was seeing things in my periphery that weren't there. It was almost like having the fear that a deer was running into the road, except the deer was never there. It was distracting enough to be dangerous.

I'm from Texas but went to college in Michigan. I used to sometimes drive it straight through (20 hours, with stops every 6 hours for fuel, food and toilet). The times I'd stop were because I'd start hallucinating, not because I couldn't stay awake. Was always super annoying having to stop since I'd invariably be 1-2 hours from my parents place.

> One joined floor for the shower and rest of the bathroom is a weird non-North American thing that is absolutely wrong and I sure hope isn't catching on here.

I live in Berlin. One of the two bathrooms in my new apartment (designed in 2016, completed in 2019) has that. It was designed for the half-door thing. I did a few experiments with it with a couple shower heads to see where the water ended up going, and decided you'd need a very large space for it to be workable without getting wet everywhere. My bathroom is only 150 cm wide, and allowing 50-60 cm for a space to walk out of the shower didn't leave enough space to keep water in the showering area. I put in a sliding glass door, and all's good.

I think the reason it works sometimes in North America is you more often have redonkulous sized bathrooms where you can have two meters of space behind your showering area.

Since nobody's chimed in here from Germany yet:

Germany's broadly a hold-out. Particularly a lot of restaurants, bars and clubs are still cash-only, and some smaller shops definitely prefer cash. Used cars are, interestingly, almost always cash-only. Person to person transactions (i.e. buying something you pick up in person) are almost always cash. Open air markets (produce, flea markets) are always cash.

Electronic payments are becoming more accepted, but it's wise to almost always have some cash on hand.

Cash retains a certain appeal for privacy reasons, and, let's be honest, for businesses avoiding paying their taxes. I'm actually happy cash remains. I don't like the idea of everything I ever buy being recorded. I also don't mind when e.g. going out that I have to consciously get more cash from the ATM when I've blown through my evening budget.

This is in amusing contrast with my trip to Sweden last year, where I pulled out the equivalent of €100 for emergencies, and had trouble getting rid of it in the week and a half there since most places didn't seem to even take cash.

This feels too dogmatic to be very useful. I'll ofter a softer version that I think everyone can agree to?

- Don't mix rewriting code and adding features in the same commits

- If you're squashing commits on a feature branch, and there are rewrites in there, cherry-pick them to master and rebase

That at least leaves you with the ability to track bugs down to rewrites vs. feature additions.

The advice in the original post feels like it's potentially useful if it's in a large system that sees heavy use with good test coverage. Then it's probably the right impulse. But a lot of code isn't that.

I wonder how much of this is that ADHD is also linked with higher alcohol consumption, which is itself linked with higher dementia.

That's a false dichotomy. This is the old, "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." It's possible to both believe people should have the right to do something annoying, and simultaneously wish they wouldn't.