codingbot3000

You're quite right. The German city of Munich tried to switch their administration to Linux with their own LiMux Ubuntu flair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux). Unfortunately some of the (generally grumpy Bavarian) employees did not like it, and Microsoft's lobbying finally got the city council to dump it.

Have you heard about the Arch Vegan already? The memes kind of write themselves...

Impressive feat doing this in 10 days. These kind of travel blogs always get my upvote ;)

My theory is that the increased turnaround times are due to the fact that people are too stupid to board a plane properly. And Airline staff is doing less about it than, say, 10 years ago, probably being afraid of social media shitstorms or whatever.

I'm a frequent flyer, and the sheer carelessness of how people waste the time of everyone behind them in the boarding queue still surprises me. As if in the moment they reach their aisle they immediately forget they, too, were waiting...

I do not remember things to be so bad 20 years ago, and even 10 years ago. Some airline staff was quite active in herding the cattle back then, but also the cattle maybe was not as ignorant as today.

But maybe I am just becoming an old, grumpy man, and nothing has really changed. Who knows.

The idea is to interfere in the free market of buying software companies in order to maintain the free market of software.

Adobe buying Figma at that time looked likely to reduce competition in the "creative" software market.

I am always wondering why the US scores so well on these "ease of doing business" rankings??? Even taking into account that this was a risky business idea, relying on subsidies etc., both property and interconnection to me seem like areas where the legislation could be clear and predictable. Adding in the ever-present risk of litigation in the US, I wonder if my stock portfolio is maybe a bit too reliant on this market.

I never get why people will drop plastic garbage somewhere in nature or just at the roadside. I always associate it with the Alaska Highway in Snow Crash, don't know why :-D

That is a very good reason for trade barriers, much better than the trade deficit. And the barriers could be introduced in a far less disruptive manner, that allows companies to plan long-term. So I guess whoever stresses the US trade deficit, does not really care about national security, otherwise they would say so directly.

Exactly, and as a consequence of the automatic load shedding, the fission reactors shut down for safety reasons, and had to be cooled using their Diesel generators, which wasn't nice to watch: https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250428/10625069/nucleare...

Which unfortunately meant they were unable to support the "reboot" of the network. That was started in the evening to avoid working hours (we were lucky and hat our electricity back at 18:30, while some people had to wait quite a bit longer). The reboot used mostly hydro, gas, and as much electricity as possible from France and Marocco. (well summed up in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iberian_Peninsula_blackou...)

I wonder whether there could be a safe mode during load shedding that would not require a complete reactor shutdown. If that were the case, nuclear could have a stabilizing effect same as gas or hydro.

I am quite eager to learn about what really went wrong. We enjoy really cheap consumer prices for electricity (we use it to heat and cool, like in the US), thanks to solar and wind. I hope investing in batteries and network reliability will be enough to mitigate the problems.

As you say - in software a US monopoly is usually a ticket to export success. Not so much in other markets. There is a reason the US telcos haven't found much success abroad as opposed to European or Arabian telcos, but prefer to milk off their less competitive home market.

Really good point. As a EU citizen, I hope the commission had at least the balls to put a retaliatory DST on the table in private. But I doubt it.

Adam Smith already pointed out that a trade deficit is not really interesting, so I do not understand the American obsession about it ;)

Also, the often-mentioned US-EU trade deficit is not that big if you count in services. Which I think should be done in the 21st century. Large parts of the US economy are focused on digital high-value services, and they are "exported" worldwide.

See answer above - the EU is less "debt-fueled".

But I also think that EU producers are more competitive. The US has a strong tendency towards local monopolies which are bad for export competitiveness.

Good point about the flammability, wasn't aware of that.

The safety mechanisms are part of why nuclear is so ridiculously expensive. I think every major power needs nuclear infrastructure for their nuclear weapons, but I don't think it is economically viable anymore as a power source, whatever the propaganda says. Maybe for the US, China, and Russia who have enough empty wastelands to dump the nuclear waste at low cost. Finland and Sweden their granite. Everyone else has to do sth. expensive.

Yet they did not help to stabilize the network in Spain, and had to be shut down.

Thanks for your factful reply :)

Regarding the nuclear risk - it is driven by incidents. If the plant had not incidents, there would be no risk.

E.g. the childhood leukemia risk is double inside a 5km radius, and there is no good explanation for this (except the occasional release of radioactive exhaust in case of incidents). (https://www.bfs.de/DE/bfs/wissenschaft-forschung/wirkung-ris..., link is in German, sorry)

Same is true for the nuclear plant workers. Their cancer risk grows linearly with their exposure - which I assume is also an effect of minor incidents, especially if you exclude lung cancer (smoking was quite popular in the 20th century...). See e.g. https://www.aerztezeitung.de/Medizin/Krebsrisiko-im-Kernkraf...

If you like nuclear, ask yourself the following questions:

- Would you want to raise kids living close to a plant? (with higher likelihood of childhood leukemia etc.)

- Would you want to live close to a nuclear waste processing plant such as Le Hague or Sellafield, with all the incidents?

- Would you want to live close to a nuclear waste disposal site?

- Would you want to pay much more for electricity than would be possible using cheaper sources than nuclear, either directly, or hidden through taxes (as in France)?

- Do you want your country to import uranium from countries such as Russia or Niger, and depend on them?

If you can answer all these questions with a clear yes, continue to promote it. If not, please don't!

fyi, the root cause of the Spain blackout (not blackout) is not yet known.

I won't deny that solar and wind make things harder, but linking the recent blackout to renewables without the facts is only done by fossil/nuclear propaganda orgs and their useful idiots.

The Spanish network had much wilder days before and did not break down. First insights point to possible design flaws in the network.

"healthy mix of generation" is quite funny to read, thinking about nuclear and coal which are not too healthy for the people living close to the plants :-D

one question: why? :-D

Well well well. While it is sad for the crypto folks and their families, it also demonstrates them the benefits of government, law, and order. E.g. in France the recently abducted crypto high-rollers were very quickly saved by the police. Unfortunately missing a finger.

Maybe stupid question: What does it mean to add a bluetooth mouse to this setup?

I think this is a game changer, because data privacy is a legitimate concern for many enterprise users.

Btw, you can also run Mistral locally within the Docker model runner on a Mac.

Sad to hear this.

There seems to be, at least in more enlightened companies, a slight momentum away from the current "classic" org structure of having separate Product and Tech departments staff dysfunctional Scrum teams. Going towards smaller delivery teams and managers who cover product as well as people leadership. The Basecamp folks have been doing this for a while, apparently.

This might open another chance for you to use all your skills.

(Of course, you cannot find this in any MBA program afaik, they all seem to teach the CPO/CTO Enterprise Slow-Motion Scrum blueprint, so if the tide will turn, it will take a while...)

I also find the "classic" org structure quite limiting. I've found that experienced "builders" can take on more senior functions such as people management and product management. No matter if their original speciality was dev, UX, or QA. Today I consider the simple-minded hierarchical structures most companies build, as well as their dysfunctional team structures, a colossal waste of talent and energy.

Good luck to you!

Out of curiosity: Why didn't you continue being product manager?

link is broken

As a side note, why does he only get ~21k likes on Truth Social for his post?

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1144521171432...

What is going on there? Why don't they fix the likes for him? :-D

Maybe Germany should have imposed 100% tariff on movies produced in foreign lands :D

Not unexpected.

Whatever content I have seen from NPR looked well-researched, and politically unbiased. It's a pity.

Gilead might be in for empty shelves like Venezuela and Cuba :-D

Sponsored by the fossil fuels industry... Also, Texans are not in a good position to lecture others about power network stability :-D

The official investigation is not over yet, but the head of the Spanish power network has already said that this cannot be related to renewables: https://www.lavanguardia.com/vida/20250430/10632617/beatriz-...