Because Germany failed to establish its own platform to do digital payments, everybody doing some kind of collaboration is stuck using Paypal. Paypal has never been good and never will be good. For instance after sending money to the class fund, the "Fertig" button here does not work.

China schooling the West in real SCALE. That list of uninvestable assets that we have here in Europe may be uncomfortably long. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Now that I have a road bike and winter is coming, my Cube cyclocross bike doesn’t have to pretend it’s something it’s not anymore. I put back on the Schwalbe X-One tires that it came with and am looking forward to eat a lot of dirt with it.

Glad to see improvements like this can be made without fuss and drama. The ASF is obviously better and long overdue. www.phoronix.com/news/New-Apa...

Somebo should investigate the predator situation going on inside Meta. There's now a pattern of them sexually targeting children. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Anybody have experiences with apps ordering directly from China and cutting out Amazon as a middleman? Is there something competitive when it comes to shipping customs yet? Quality wise it seems like it would be entirely the same.

We are deeply stuck here in this outdated and small thinking: ‘the only realistic policy, therefore, is not some twee Western European vision of “sustainability”, it is radical and transformative. Cities will be bigger, energy needs will be bigger, production will be bigger’

Gleam is truly a dream of a programming language. I’m looking forward to launch my project and do more with it. mtlynch.io/notes/gleam-...

Compared to the way I had to learn about B-trees (poorly photocopied sheets bound into a reader), this interactive page is a dream. planetscale.com/blog/btrees-...

Postgres is *the* database engine (together with sqlite) and knowledge about its internals is becoming more than a nice to have. drew.silcock.dev/blog/how-pos...

Turns out it doesn’t matter much that Django has been better on most fronts all this time, but it has including on this one.

Litestar is an interesting addition to the list of Python microframeworks with a lot going for it. www.b-list.org/weblog/2025/...

Working with Claude is a lot easier if you can keep its changes under close supervision. The interfaces that VSCode derived editors give you to do this are poor and most git based workflows are also not great for this. I've written about my jj based workflow. alper.nl/dingen/2025/...

We’re seeing increasingly more posts about jj coming out and I can’t repeat enough that it is totally worth switching away from git. maddie.wtf/posts/2025-0...

Every time I have to cross-compile something (usually in Rust to run on the cloud somewhere) it’s always rather confusing to figure out the correct target triples. Weird that something that’s this fundamental is documented this poorly. mcyoung.xyz/2025/04/14/t...

Maybe they can keep doing this and become the official show of the regime and its exalted leader? It's no like these people are susceptible to any form of irony. www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GXN...

That’s definitely a phrase worth remembering: "Slow is smooth, smooth is fast." Chasing “more” and “faster” is often not much more than a distraction from the things you should be doing. raitner.de/en/2022/09/s...

Klein has perfected a type of bullshit that liberals can’t help but fall for.

When I’m waiting for the kids to be done with sports, I go to a local library, pop open my laptop and often have a Stanley full of great coffee with me. This is already better than any coworking space. We should have more and better libraries providing study/work space for anybody who needs it.

I don’t think enough Germans know about this happening in the Netherlands. There could be support for a merger among the bases of SPD and Grüne. (The politician themselves of course hate the idea.)

Specialty coffee doesn’t seem like it’d be affected by LAP very much if at all. But somewhere like Bergmannstraße has 15 cafes serving undrinkable swill and I would be more than happy to see all of those go out of business.

Of course it’s not possible to go swimming on one of the last Fridays afternoons with nice weather. I guess we were too used to Iceland’s opening times for swimming pools.

A moderator on the German national broadcaster repeats far right lies they read on “X” and in doing so legitimises them. This isn’t an exception. The ÖRR does not house any significant quantities of journalism or even media literacy. Reform is impossible and we’re better off without it.

“The press was hysterical.” I guess the more things change the more they stay the same. This episode by the way is a great explainer of the Dreyfus affair if—like me—you’ve never been explained the details of what went down. pca.st/episode/2455...

The write-up how Bun can be so fast is a good exploration in all the things that computers are good at now. Machines and our networks have gotten much faster and much more parallel which influences what an optimal approach to building software is now. alper.nl/dingen/2025/...

Every major event can be depended on to elicit an entirely insane response. There is no hope for politics or discourse in this environment.

This morning a car cut me when turning right, I slammed into it and they didn’t even notice it, at the moment or when I confronted them shortly after. Nothing serious on me or the bike and no damage to the car either (the thing the driver was most worried about).

The disabled creating custom prosthetics and turning themselves into highly visible and fashionable “neo-people” is at least one positive way that cyberpunk is turning into reality. www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/6...

Before I went on holiday I deleted LinkedIn from my phone along with a bunch of other apps. Now that I’m back, I thought about reinstalling it but asked myself: Why would anybody want to have LinkedIn on their phone? I can’t really think of a reason. 🚮

One of my favourite TikTok genres and something that shows that the road cycling surge is more than a superficial trend, are migrant kids getting into road cycling. Here’s one example:

Kids talking in front of the gym “I am ready. I’m ready to fight anybody.” —“You’ll get stabbed, bro.” “Then I’ll die a martyr and go straight to Jennah.” —“Even then your mother would be really sad.” (Translated and edited)

We have kids in two parallel classes and every year in Germany have to go through a stationary frenzy as is the local custom. One class needs notebook no. 26 and the other needs no. 28. The differences as you can see are crucially important!

The AWS CEO doing not much more than stating the obvious when it comes to AI and software engineering. www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/a...

Germany: We worship at the altar of Datenschutz. Also Germany: Anybody who wants can request your address details for whatever reason. Explanation: vm.tiktok.com/ZNdbJoV4h/

Not the first time Meta created racy bots and it will probably not be the last unless Taylor Swift sues them. I guess they do need to get more talent in to create things that are actually useful. www.reuters.com/business/met...

How much time for an innovative/edgy/creative agency to copy this (poorly) in Berlin? www.wired.com/story/pursui...

Paris has published a climate adaptation plan for a 50C future. In Berlin I guess we’ll just ignore it as long as possible. www.ekopolis.fr/ressources/r...

A good description of how if software engineering was setup for speed of iteration we would have entirely different environments than we have now. Nobody is really opposed to speed, but nobody really wants it either so we end up with bloated development that is the worst of all compromises.

Love to see it: A car speeding in our 30-Zone, driver holding a cell phone in their hands. Just behind them speeding along a Berlin police car.

Congratulations to That Browser Company on what must be a stellar exit for them. No idea what Atlassian can do with this because it is not exactly the place where innovative tings happen. www.cnbc.com/2025/09/04/a...

Attitudes towards part-time employment of men are a good proxy indicator of how sophisticated the economy is and also of gender equality. From my own experience Germany and the Netherlands are markedly different on this front and the statistics prove it with a 2x difference in part-time men.

Both Komoot and Strava have parts of their UI become entirely non-functional after logging 80k or so of cycling on them (kinda the entire point of the app). Who cares about functioning apps anymore anyway?

One moment of lapsed attention and it happened: Google created a passkey for me. There are lots of good reasons to not want to use passkeys and big tech companies should stop shoving this down everybody’s throats.

Quite the sight to do the school run with your kids in the morning and witness the local disabled person be shifted kicking and screaming into a van. #Berlin

Driving in Berlin is so poor that blanket introduction of robotaxis would improve road safety here. Of course the local car makers (and car brains) will never allow this to happen.

Not sure if the Berlin government currently is being pilloried by the press for their handling of the A100 but I haven’t seen anything yet. If this isn’t happening, it proves my point that there are no working journalists in Germany.

Back from Iceland and I have another six days of not doing much of anything ahead of me. I’ll be walking around either in bibs or trainers. Hit me up.

Elim değmeden kızım bugün bu keki yaptı. Ben sekiz yaşındayken boktan başka bir şey yapabilmişimi hatırlamıyorum.

Iceland poses an interesting conundrum: If a bunch of farmers and fisherman living an absurdly inhospitable geology and climate can create a society so high up in the human development ladder, what excuse do many other countries have?

The final swimming pool visit in Reykjavik before our flight back tonight. It’s the fourth Sundlaug we visited on this trip. The weather has been smashing as it was during our entire trip. Everybody here was sitting in the jacuzzi basking in the sun.