grumpy-de-sre

I'm not sure if democracy has the tools to adequately deal with this tbh, at-least in the short-to-medium term.

I really hope we can find a way to make voters actually believe an abundant future is possible, and that it'll benefit them and their families.

It's the biggest difference I see in societies like China, there's this pervasive optimism about technology, progress and abundance (~700 million people have first hand experience). No idea if they can keep up the growth but we sure won't.

Particularly the Australian border security industrial complex.

Ostensibly a great idea to protect Australian agri-business (don't kind yourself it's not about the environment). But in practice hasn't been particularly effective in achieving its stated goals [1][2][3].

Extremely effective at bullying autistic kids interested in chemistry though. There's a lot of stories.

1. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-02-26/white-spot-prawn-dise...

2. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/sep/...

3. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-03/black-market-tobacco-...

I think the biggest challenge in Berlin/Germany is that very little of the capital that has been poured into the startup sector has made it's way back to the the engineers.

Part of this is due to severe restrictions on employee share schemes (changed recently), low employee turnover (3-6 month notice periods), enforceable non-competes, and heavy tax burdens on income. As a result you see a surprisingly low amount of engineer led/founded companies.

Germany has genuinely innovative companies though, but they don't look anything like SV, eg. Trumpf, Zeiss, etc.

It's private/public partnership with an established "makerspace" called Motion.Lab. Historically their cheapest memberships have been 250 EUR per month. Unless something changes this initiative is an incubator/business park.

It's interesting that the state is contributing, but it looks like the intention there is to encourage industrial startups to the city. That's probably a great thing to do but I think calling it a makerspace is stretching the definition a bit.

All over mainland china as well, works great for small vehicles like mopeds etc (because the battery is light enough to be swapped by an individual person without tools). Probably helps reduce fire risk as well (because people aren't charging themselves indoors).

Do wonder if it could be unintentionally being alloyed into recycled aluminium etc. Though I'm not sure if that's more likely than upstream routes.

Good old scientific mystery.

Improper disposal of used batteries (eg. burning them) is another potential exposure route.

It's true that I can't find any reporting on Baidu Xinwen. I can definitely understand why, as there's a real risk of causing potentially unjustified panic (scientific reporting and literacy isn't great globally). More research is needed before action.

Fascinating that it's not a complete information blackout, but just disseminated on a need to know basis. It's kind of an interesting social contract really.

Half the authors on that paper are employed by the Chinese academy of sciences. Doesn't look like brushing it under the rug to me.

More than likely it'll turn out to be something that can be easily and relatively inexpensively mitigated.

Man, that's fascinating, full study here [1].

I wonder how the Lithium is entering the food chain? Given they've tested drinking water, food, and air.

Dust from processing? occupational exposure? unscrupulous recycling operations? but Lithium isn't a heavy metal so exposure would have to be ongoing.

Definitely need to test some additional cities and try and understand what's going on here. While concerning these blood levels are at 3% of the doses typically studied in psychiatric conditions. There's some potential public health benefits to low level lithium exposure actually [2] but at the same time you don't want to be unintentionally exposing pregnant folks.

1. https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.4c12959

2. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.2020.128

I'd argue Aus should really seek a policy of neutrality, and strong Asian trade. Remaining neutral requires strong diversification and the EU is a great independent technology supplier to keep on board.

Sorry to be a killjoy, I see these sentiments everywhere across the EU sovereign cloud space. The dream of distributed "cloud providers" made up of individual companies products, all cooperating and communicating together in some utopian way. That's the stuff that Gaia-X was huffing.

Make no mistake, this will absolutely be curb stomped by vertical integration.

But I get the sentiment, we need to figure out a way of collaborating on this. Perhaps airbus is a good example.

Suffice to say as an EU based engineer in the infrastructure space, I'm rather optimistic for my future employment opportunities.

Did you know alibaba cloud has a GDPR compliant datacenter in frankfurt [1].

1. https://www.alibabacloud.com/en/press-room/alibaba-cloud-lau...

Without protection, a EU hyperscaler will never emerge. It's not that any hypothetical future EU hyperscaler would be an inherently less competitive. It's just plain old first mover advantage. Cloud computing is a VERY sticky good, and once folks got on AWS/Azure no matter how good your product is there's no way larger customers are going to migrate off to some "risky" startup (thus keeping scale small).

Source: I worked on a sovereign cloud PaaS in Germany. Admittedly the project was a disaster, hiring talent in the infrastructure space here is really tough. Probably mostly due to a lack of opportunities to acquire experience domestically and noncompetitive wages limiting migration of those with experience.

Gaia-X is a total dumpster fire though, perfect example of what's wrong with the EU. All the money was spent paying bureaucrats, consults, and standards committee folks to architecture astronaut and design by committee sovereign cloud "standards" bullshit bingo. None of the money went to the engineers.

We should really copy the Chinese approach here, straight out clone a subset of the best/most popular parts of AWS/Azure/GCP. I'm open to contracting opportunities in this space BTW (email in profile).

Classic stuff that impacts all of us (feel free to add/remove to the list),

AI (bringing intelligence to the real world), green tech (solar/evs/power electronics etc), defense, aerospace (sat constellations etc), industrial automation, smart agriculture, government etc.

Agreed, it's bizarre what's happening there. Perhaps a bellweather that something deeper than interest rates (which have been dropping) is going on.

I'd say the good times have just moved around a bit, there's always demand for smart/experienced STEM folk. What's happened is that the adtech and blitzscaling business models have taken a beating (a specialty of the bay area). But there's other sectors, and other markets that are still growing just fine.

A lesson to be adaptable, and always be learning/hungry.

Sure beats sitting around discussing, complaining, and half assedly developing a replacement standard and getting nowhere. Perfect being the enemy of good and all that.

https://xkcd.com/927/

I believe a lot of this is where China's current deflationary pressure is coming from. China has driven the cost to produce energy and goods right down to the floor through tremendous scale and efficiency. There doesn't seem to be any sign prices have reached the bottom yet. A lot of parallels to "The Great Deflation" [1] of the late 1800s.

Quoting Wikipedia,

"The prices of most basic commodities and mass-produced goods fell almost continuously; however, nominal wages remained steady, resulting in a pronounced and prolonged rise in real wages, disposable income and savings – essentially giving birth to the middle class. Goods produced by craftsmen, as opposed to in factories, did not decrease in price"

China's system really prioritizes worker and middle class prosperity. Over here in the west we're too busy sliding into a rent seeking oligarchy that we haven't noticed yet.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Deflation

Great example of forgotten cultural wisdom, absolutely would have reduced dust mite pressure.

Desloratadine is considered to have a low anticholinergic burden, and of course not crossing the BBB readily should reduce risks further.

But it is one of the more anticholinergic second gen antihistamines, make of that what you will, still miles behind something like Benadryl. Fexofenadine is apparently a less anticholinergic alternative.

There's an interesting "subcategory" of sleep apnea under the moniker of UARS. I'm pretty confident that a big chunk of folks in that community actually have allergenic rhinitis (or structural issues).

I actually had a home sleep study done before I figured out it was allergies. Came back negative for OSA but my RIP [1] band data showed a lot of paradoxical breathing and flow limitation indicating significant respiratory effort. So more or less struggling to breathe all night long.

The poor sleep quality really destroys your quality of life.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respiratory_inductance_plethys...

Only Anticholinergic drugs appear to be associated dementia (but as noted the evidence is very weak).

Older first generation antihistamines such as Diphenhydramine (Benadryl), Doxylamine (Nyquil) have substantial Anticholinergic activity.

A lot of the second generation antihistamines have no significant Anticholinergic activity, eg. Azelastine.

Benadryl and Nyquil are terrible drugs. Why they haven't been phased out is beyond me. At least Azelastine is now OTC in the USA.

Pretty much my conclusion as-well.

I guess they just don't want folks giving themselves burns during sleep.

AliExpress as always is tempting [1], but you'd have to be incredibly careful about regulating temperature [2] and adding safety interlocks that'd make falling asleep with it active, or forgetting to turn it off impossible.

1. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007963462500.html

2. Don't blame me when your house burns down, I warned you.

I find the steroids even more effective but they seem to exacerbate my anxiety after a few days though. Still haven't figured that out.

With regular use antihistamines quite quickly lose their drowsiness effects. But it's definitely a nice side effect for sleeping challenged folks. Azelastine is a second generation antihistamine so not particularly drowsiness inducing.

One of the interesting Azelastine quirks, is it's apparently somewhat antiviral [1].

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38140540

There's sweet FA sun for six months out of the year here in central europe so not a viable option.

Yeh I've thought about whether it'd be possible/safe to use something like an "overclocked" electric blanket to sterilize the mattress daily.

They also need humidity (~50% RH), hence why I got the dehumidifer, which has definitely knocked them back.

Get a mattress encasement, it's like a HEPA filter bag for the mattress (cuts off the mites food supply and preventing allergens becoming airborne).

Skips the whole trying to clean porous foam problem.

Indoor air quality these days is particularly awful.

Was reading that house dust is actually a major source of microplastics aswell.