Weeknotes 2022 W29: Belgium

I am in Belgium! These week­notes will be a bit lighter than usual.

My train trip to Belgium on Thursday did not work out as planned. All trains before noon were fully booked and I had to take a train just after lunchtime. My connection from Cologne to Brussel got cancelled due a train breakdown. I ended up with two hours extra to spend in Cologne, and arrived only close to midnight at my mom’s place — around 12h of total travel time. Whew.

I made a sourdough loaf on Wednesday, but by the time I gave it to my mom, I felt it had already dried out a little and somewhat stale. I should’ve packaged it better. (There’s nothing quite like a fresh loaf.)

I attended a family gathering on Saturday for my grandmother’s 90th birthday. I hadn’t seen many of my family members since 2012, and I couldn’t immediate recognize some of my cousins. Wild!

That gathering was also the largest one I’ve been to since COVID-19 hit, and I was a bit worried because all COVID-19 restrictions in Belgium are gone, and I have literally not seen a single person in Belgium wearing a mask. The vibe I’m picking up from Belgians seem to be “we don’t do it because we don’t have to” — which I find to be rather egocentric and not community-minded at all.

I got the second COVID-19 booster on Tuesday, before my trip to Belgium, and felt just fine afterwards! Perhaps just a little sore on my left shoulder and a little tired, though the tiredness would probably be explained by the hot weather too.

Links:

• Did People Used To Look Older? (Vsauce): Wild!

• Elon Musk Pulls Out (LegalEagle)

• Harry Potter (Shaun): A good analysis of how problematic the Harry Potter books are.

• Soft Deletion Probably Isn’t Worth It (Brandur): I think I agree! Back at SoundCloud, I worked with a system that had no soft-delete, but rather moved data into separate tables, and it was kinda nice. (I also worked with a system that kept all historical data, not just for DELETEs but also for UPDATEs, and it did not work well.)

• NFTs Don’t Work the Way You Might Think They Do (WIRED): This article is a good explanation of why NFTs really don’t achieve what they claim to be good for.

• Generation moonshot: why young investors are not ready to give up on risk (Financial Times): I think Stephen Diel’s response is important, because the zero-sum (or even negative-sum) nature of cryptocurrency investments really is just “desperate people screwing other desperate people.”

• @Digiconomist’s tweet on renewable energy and crypto mining: Green, renewable crypto-mining does not exist.