Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W17: Getting real

April 20​–​26, 2026

Quick bits

  • I added subtitles to my ddenv introductory video. It’s nice for accessibility, but I mostly did this out of curiosity: I wanted to know how subtitles are handled on YouTube from a creator’s perspective.

    But now I have more questions! When is it better to split a line of dialogue? For how long does a line need to remain on screen? I’m beginning to appreciate the art and the craft of subtitling.

  • The carbon rating for denisdefreyne.com is A+, and my web site is “cleaner than 100 % of all web pages globally.” Not bad.

  • Sentence case over title case any time.

  • For no particular reason, I added emojis to my Git branch names this week. This didn’t go so well: GitHub warns about such branches, my terminal fails to render these branch names properly, and the CI service simply can’t load the build results for branches with emojis in their name.

    I don’t know what I was expecting.

  • I’m continuing (slowly) to migrate my bespoke finance tooling from Ruby to Zig. It’s orders of magnitude faster already, and that has tightened the dev feedback cycle enough that it has returned a good amount of joy.

    I’m less thrilled about my past usage of LLMs here to translate Ruby to Zig. I didn’t fully understand how much of a mess this would create, and I don’t understand the parts that I didn’t write. It’s also riddled with incorrect or misleading struct and method names, non-idiomatic Zig usage, and broken memory management. It all works (and there is an extensive test suite to prove it) but I’ll need a lot more time to dig myself fully out of this sloppy AI mess.

  • I am so done with car and motorcycle drivers treating the nearby 30km/h street as a race track. I genuinely am baffled that I can hear a Doppler shift.

  • Google has started showing how many negative reviews have been taken down due to defamation complaints. Germany’s defamation laws are notoriously strict, and it’s commonplace for restaurants to take down bad reviews, which makes ratings on Google Maps rather useless in Germany.

    Here’s what it shows for Standard Serious Pizza in Berlin — over 250 reviews removed!

    A screenshot of a Google Maps review section. The overall rating is 4.6 out of 5, with 3056 reviews. Most reviews are 5 stars, some are 4 stars, an even smaller number are 3 stars, and there are barely any 2- and 1-star reviews. At the bottom, it says “Over 250 reviews removed due to defamation complaints.”

  • I had a dream in which Zendaya chastised me for putting parmesan on the moon, which is already made of cheese — silly me!

Shower thoughts

  • There are three broad categories of sleeping furniture: regular beds (element: Earth), air mattresses (element: Air), and water beds1 (element: Water). The obvious question, now, is what sleeping furniture corresponds to the element of Fire.

  • “Why don’t we save some conversation topics for later” is a delightfully euphemistic way of saying “shut the fuck up.”

Relocation progress

I got my visa! That took only 48 hours — I submitted the paperwork and made the payments on Friday evening, and got the visa on Sunday evening. Surprisingly fast.

I find it remarkable how straightforward it is to do UK government stuff online. The communication is also remarkably clear and to the point. Compared to German bureaucracy, it is a delight.2 It is also so nice to not have to deal with physical paperwork.3

The sorting and decluttering continues. I’m not packing yet; it’s still more of a continued spring cleaning. I’ve thrown away a lot, and filled up two moving boxes with clothes ready to be donated.

The scheduling of my move will be a nightmare. On the Berlin side, I’ve got questions like “what do I do with the washing machine which I don’t want to move with me” and even “when exactly do I move?” I might’ve made a mistake by not even getting a moving company yet — though hopefully that’ll be offset by it being a furniture-light move. Perhaps I’ll put everything in storage in Berlin (man-with-a-van style) and get it moved to London later, when it’s more convenient.

Scheduling on the London side will be not much better. I want to arrive ahead of time, before the start of my UK contract, so that I can do as many apartment viewings as possible. But then I need a temp place to stay, and the temp places that I can find online all look terrible, and expensive. If you know of a spare room in London, get in touch.

This move is going to be expensive. I’ll likely end up paying rent in Berlin and London simultaneously for a while. At least I got a tax return, which lightens the financial load of my upcoming relocation.

But one thing stands out above all: it’s getting real.

No acting class performance

My acting class is coming to an end, but I am not participating in the May 13 showcase/performance. I simply do not have the energy for it right now.

My reason for taking acting classes is first and foremost to learn the craft. It takes time and effort. Having a public performance at the end of the course is a distraction, I find.

This is where I had a misunderstanding about my current acting course: the public showcase is intentionally part of it, and the goal of the course is to have something presentable at the end. But that’s not quite what I’m here for. And because there are only two classes left before the public showcase, I’m feeling more and more that I’m taking up valuable time from people who, in contrast to me, will perform.

Perhaps the best approach would be to withdraw from the remaining classes.

False bank excitement

Last week, I mentioned how my bank now clears transactions much more quickly. It turns out that this wasn’t true at all: non-cleared transactions started accidentally showing up as cleared, and when these transactions finally were genuinely cleared, they’d show up again, effectively creating duplicate transactions in my personal accounting software.

It took me a long time to figure out what was going on. At least this buggy behavior explains why it looked like I spent gargantuan amounts on groceries and eating out this month. After identifying and fixing the problem, I ended up with a surprise extra €200. Nice.

I was so excited that my bank started clearing transactions more quickly. Alas. It still takes 2–5 business days for transactions to come through.

Entertainment

  • Kingdom Come: Deliverance4 is an amazing game. I’ve had it on my wishlist for a while, but with a 80% discount on Steam, any resistance I had to picking it up faded away. I didn’t get any of the DLCs nor did I get Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, despite also being able to get it at a 60% discount. Maybe I’ll get that stuff later.

    It sure is an unforgiving game; you start out as a character with barely any skill, and it feels honest and real. The setting (Bohemia in the 1400s) is realistic in a way that no other game gets close to. I found its story gripping from the start. It doesn’t do any hand-holding, which I appreciate. But I’m still early in the game; time will tell how I really feel about it.

Tech links:

AI links:

  1. I’ve never seen one, but I’ve been told they really exist. Doesn’t sound very comfortable to sleep on — and it must be a nightmare to handle. ↩︎

  2. I’ve received plenty of letters in Germany where I could not tell whether there was an action needed on my part. I’ve also paid incorrect amounts because I could not tell exactly which of the two hundred monetary amounts on the letter I was supposed to pay. ↩︎

  3. I have a lot of physical paperwork from Germany that I will have to move with me. Even if I digitize it all, I still am legally required to keep physical copies around. ↩︎

  4. Kingdom Come: Deliverance (Warhorse Studios, 2018), published by Deep Silver. ↩︎

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