rerx

There are "city Ikeas" in several places, at least Hamburg, Coventry, and Taipei. It's pretty recent though.

> finish that one thing on Friday before the weekend starts

Sometimes you might fix that one bug that would haunt you over the weekend otherwise, I grant you that. More often than that, feeling that one has to enable oneself to finish stuff at the end of the week leads to fewer plans on Friday nights, too little socializing outside of work, less restful weekends. And those kill productivity and company culture in the medium term.

In the short term I have seen my share of lost productivity because people feel like deploying hardly thought through changes (if only to internal system) on Friday afternoons to get it done that week.

> I've seen companies where this happens, and people have Friday afternoons off because they already did their hours that week.

How is that a bad thing?

Do you have a source for this claim? Otherwise, please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors.

All reported Corona deaths in the German media that I am aware of were linked to pre-existing health conditions.

Please don't spread unsubstantiated rumors. All reported deaths in the German media that I am aware of were linked to pre-existing health conditions.

There are reports from Switzerland that the government considers to block video streaming as the Swisscom infrastructure is overly taxed.

I have only been able to find German language sources (I'd suggest to try DeepL translator or similar) like this one https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/die-kommunikationsnetze-sind-...

I like the app (on Android though) and paid 3 Euros or so once. Their weather and rain "radars" are really useful.

This is very useful to read and search TensorFlow source code. It definitely beats Github for me.

There's usually two types of reverse-vending machines in a German store: One that takes refillable bottles from glass or hard plastics to be brought back to the bottler, which have been part of a deposit system for ages, and another one for disposable plastic bottles, for which a deposit system has been started about 15 years ago. Those disposable bottles are shredded on site and brought to a recycling plant.

The first system makes ecological sense, the second one not so much (but it reduced litter for sure).

But my knowledge of Italian really helps my understanding of French and Spanish, although all are foreign languages to me. False friends are an exception; but apart from knowing some language generally is an aid to learning another language if it is related.

But the English word "journey" has precisely the same roots as today's French "journée": A journey may have been a day's worth of traveling. A "journeyman" was paid day by day.

Aside from the weird sentence periods, I love the look and feel! It's refreshingly uncompromising.

Ah, earlier today the Slack app on my Mac had not updated yet -- there I experience the same issue.

The web client on Firefox works better, though: https://imgur.com/a/X53iIlm

Edit: On Chrome it's broken for me too....

I could not reproduce the example issues from the blog post, but the dual asterices inside the back ticks still fail for me.

The upside is that it's now possible to have bold passages in monospaced text. I missed that before.

I just tried the new web client for the first time: Both issues highlighted in the blog post seem to have been fixed already. As it stands it does not actually feel all that disruptive to me.

It's a bit annoying that there is no way to toggle the WYSIWYG rendering, but for me personally there have been countless times when I was missing some kind of preview while editing. For instance to align stuff in preformatted blocks...

On my S9 they seem to have hit the sweet spot -- there's little to complain about.

Quoted for its WTF-factor:

> Perhaps his new-found peace with Linux is linked to yoga, a practice he said he has taken up after leaving Microsoft in 2014.

Workaround: https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.ft.com/content/03775904-177...

I was thinking of parcel deliveries. Narrowish European inner city streets are regularly blocked by delivery trucks and fundamentally it's unnecessarily many of them because there are so many different companies servicing the same street. Where I live double parking on bicycle lanes is extremely common (the individual delivery people often see no alternatives), which poses massive dangers to cyclists. Also these trucks typically are quite large, worsening all issues, because a full load is meant for a long route.

If there was just a single company responsible for some "last mile" area, smaller vehicles like this electric model [1] would suffice. They would distribute parcels from a depot that is filled by larger long distance trucks that do not need to belong to the same company.

The last point is important: If DHL, FedEx, UPS etc. each have their own final storage buildings and delivery fleet, those depots could not all be situated close enough to the target addresses.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetScooter

There are some restricted zones. German, but if you click on the map, you will get an idea: https://mein-ostseehafen.de/seegebiete/schleswig-holstein/sc...

Regional rail works okayish in Germany. A part of the regions and lines are carried by private business, others by the former monopolist that is still fully owned by the state.

Did I hit a nerve by picking public transport as an example? If it does not work out, regulations are bad. Competing non cooperating infrastructure service providers are a bad idea if they hinder each other.

But surely they would rather have one truck service a shorter route than have two trucks service the same longer route if it leads to the same overall utilization rate.

I feel delivery companies should bid for providing service for the last couple of kilometers, then the winner should get an exclusive contract for some time frame. That's how it's done for other services like regional rail public transport.

This is extremely surprising to me, but they really seem to have been granted the patent: https://register.epo.org/application?number=EP16704121&tab=m...

Here is the document describing the claim: https://register.epo.org/application?documentId=E2DY02O02738...

Nitpick on one of the image captions: "A queue of Trabants passing Checkpoint Charlie on their way to West Berlin, November 1989." In the front I mostly see a couple of Wartburgs not Trabants. The Wartburg was East Germany's fancier "quality" car.

There has been a staggering amount of innovation in machine translation. Google has some of the leading groups in research for neural machine translation and they put a lot of it into production.

Saying that it works just like Altavista's Bablefish of yore is ridiculous, at least for the European languages I am familiar with. Translation quality as offered by all major services is leagues ahead compared to the state of, say, three years ago.

(Disclaimer: I work on a competitor to Google Translate)

The switch from Python 2 to 3 was slowed down tremendously because major libraries did not fully support Python 3 immediately. The question regarding the dependencies was legitimate.

We use Zoom for that.

But we still rely on Slack for general messaging and chat rooms.

Car2go started out as a joint venture of Daimler and the car rental company Europcar. Nowadays it is a joint venture only of car makers Daimler and BMW.

I actually wonder how profitable these very short term rentals are on their own. Maybe part of their profitability is long term brand development? Certainly city dwellers like me, who gets by with bicycles and public transport mainly, are exposed much more easily to the experience of driving a nice, modern BMW or Mercedes than they would without these "car sharing" offers.