amadeuspagel

All statistics of this type are based on substracting debt. If a headline like "Elon Musk is -100 times as wealthy as Jérôme Kerviel"[1] would strike you as absurd, these headlines are no less so.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/11/meet-th...

> To be sure, North America dominates with 85% of Costco’s 910 warehouses all stocking hysterically-oversized tubs of mayo and peanut butter.

Big families are more common in the US. While average fertility isn't that much higher in the US compared to europe, the US has a lot of subcultures where it's much higher. Maybe that's part of Costco's success. These tubs aren't oversized if you have four kids.

Can you name a "zine" or whatever people had in the 90s that experienced a drop in subscribers after it sold out?

> That, by the way, I think we’ll be able to fix in the next 18 months with AI. The plugin security only works on Cloudflare.

Hear, hear. I expect the same from app stores, but I haven't seen anyone announce it.

Genuinely thought this would be an April Fools joke. But this is the kind of tech media we deserve for using paywall bypassers and ad blockers.

I can't tell you how much it pisses me off when on I click on an article on an english-speaking forum and see a german translation, despite having my browser configured to tell websites that I speak both german and english[1].

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

This is also a good reminder that Paul Krugman opposed the Iraq War from the start. The Iraq War is still the most important part of populist narratives about elite untrustworthiness, but populists never ask about exceptions, and if we judge people and institutions by their stand on the Iraq war today, it has to go both ways.

Ever heard of WebRTC?

Thankfully this seems to be an April's Fools joke.

If I see "paid vacation" as an argument for why life in europe is better one more time, when an american doing the same job could take half the year off and still have more money left over, I'm gonna have an aneurysm.

> Basic skills — especially reading, writing, and numeracy — must be firmly established first, physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose.

Reading and writing, maybe, but numeracy? With a computer, you can get instant feedback, immidiately see whether you did the math correctly or not. With a textbook, you have to wait for your teacher.

Are you asking about my sensitivity to pain here or disagreeing that this is easier with a touchscreen?

The reason you want a touchscreen on a laptop isn't so that you can use it for "an extended period of time" but rather so that you can use it to do the few things that are painful with a touchpad, like drag and drop.

If you're aware how much knowing to touch type improves your experience of using a desktop, you should also learn to glide type on your phone.

Beautiful. Another approach to visualizing the discovery of elements would be a "time travel" feature, where you see a timeline with just years below the table and can click on a year to see how the table looked that year.

When I was a kid my dad always told me to dream something beautiful when tucking me in. I didn't get this then, I can't control what I dream about. But it's more general life advice: spend your time so that you have beautiful dreams. When I travel I often sleep better in a hostel bunk bed then I sleep at home, because I was out all day, had real experiences, have something to dream about.

- Windows like Snap Assist where you tile one browser tab to one half of the screen and then it shows a preview of all other tabs and you pick one to tile to the other half of the screen.

> Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling “a little isolated”. He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to “chill”, but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself.

This is almost too on-the-nose. I was already thinking about how we've become chill about drugs only to have moral panics about AI and social media, but I didn't expect to see a story about a drug user having a psychosis and blaming it on ChatGPT. And no, the fact that he was using cannabis for years "with no ill effects" doesn't mean that it didn't make him vulnerable.

> A logistic regression model gave an OR of 3.90 (95% CI 2.84 to 5.34) for the risk of schizophrenia and other psychosis-related outcomes among the heaviest cannabis users compared to the nonusers. Current evidence shows that high levels of cannabis use increase the risk of psychotic outcomes and confirms a dose-response relationship between the level of use and the risk for psychosis.[1]

Emphasis mine. I'm sure in many of the cases this study is based on, people had been using cannabis for years, while some other factor, a person, a hobby, an interest, an app, a website had only been part of their life for months. That doesn't mean the other factor was the real problem.

[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4988731/

> But this isn't obvious, necessarily. In the Genealogy of Morals, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche condemns the "slave morality" that underpins values like humility—this way of thinking undermines individuals' recognition of their power, their sense of independence, he says. Human civilizations—and individuals—don't necessarily have to organize themselves around gratitude and interdependence.

Maybe this equation of gratitude with humility is why people have an issue with gratitude, even if they've never heard of Nietzsche and would balk at the Slave/Master morality distinction and why it's so much easier to express gratitude to the dead.

It's interesting to see how people look for powerful interests to explain simple and correct supreme court decisions.

> Okay, so let’s consider a different chart. We start by gathering the 15,000 most downloaded Python packages on PyPI in December 2025.2 Then we split the packages into cohorts based on their birth-year, and for each cohort we plot their median release frequency over time.3 This seems like a reasonable proxy measure of the production of real, actively-used software.

No. Many projects explicitly release on a fixed schedule. Even if you don't, you're going to get into a rhythm.

There's a deeper problem with using PyPi to measure the success of vibecoding: Libraries are more difficult to program then apps. Maybe vibecoding is a good way to create apps that solve some specific problem, but not to create generally useful libraries.

Shockingly fast. Have you considered supporting other countries, maybe all of europe?

I'm sure your statistics are airtight, but I think the context of your last question is a bit misleading:

> In Germany, learning a trade pays you. In America, it costs you. What does the average US student graduate owing — before interest?

In the german apprenticeship system, you're paid to work, starting with a low salary, because you're learning on the job. You're also going to school at the same time (one or two days per week), but you aren't paid for that.

Cool idea. I've been looking for a notes widget for the KDE panel, so I don't forget what I was doing when I open a different program. Maybe even showing the content of the clipboard would be enough.

Useful idea, though I think it would be better as a map not a globe, so that you can see all countries you can travel to at once.

This is really an infinite canvas window manager, but only for terminal windows.

I looked for a general infinite canvas window manager and discovered InfiniteGlass[1]. I wasn't able to install it though, even on Ubuntu Mate 18.04, which the installation instructions are supposed to be tested for.

I've switched to KDE recently, using its default terminal, and I feel like I can't miss things like opening the file browser from the terminal or vice versa anymore, so now what I really want is an infinite canvas desktop environment.

[1]: https://redhog.github.io/InfiniteGlass/

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload.

Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrated with unsupported hardware is not a good pitch.

> I should mention that my perspective might be a little different from most people’s because I don’t listen to pop songs. I prefer music of the 500-year tradition that encompasses (in roughly chronological order) composers such as Tallis, Byrd, Dowland, Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Lully, Blow, Corelli, Purcell, Vivaldi, Rameau, Handel, Bach, Scarlatti, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini, Schubert, Berlioz, Mendelssohn (Fanny and Felix), Schumann (Robert and Clara), Chopin, Liszt, Wagner, Verdi, Brahms, Puccini, Mahler, Debussy, Strauss, Beach, Schoenberg, Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Berg, Price, Copland, Shostakovich, Carter, Boulez, Gubaidulina, Pärt, Reich, Glass, Eastman, León, Adams, Saariaho, J. L. Adams, Wolfe, Higdon, Adès, Thorvaldsdottir, Mazzoli, Shaw, Fisher, and many others.

There are apps specifically dedicated to classical music and there are many youtube channels for classical music, with sheet music[1], with visualizations[2], with videos of concerts.

Spotify and it's drop-in competitors were never good for classical music. This article is just another rant on this issue, by someone to whom classical music is so important, a pillar of western civilization, but not important enough to look for other ways to listen.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/@AshishXiangyiKumar

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/@smalin

Is there a way to invest in an index fund minus certain companies?

I think this does something for the correctness of LLMs by making it easier to check their output.