Weeknotes 2026 W20: Exorbitant amount

Quick bits

• I’m looking forward to my birthday/leaving picnic!

• Wild that these are my last weeks in Berlin.

• I saw a pretty website, and now I want to redesign my own site. Like I’ve got nothing else that is more urgent!

• When I arrived in Berlin about 13 years ago, I saw people having barbecues in the Hin­ter­höfe¹¹1 Backyards  and I assumed that, because the party is happening in a semi-public space, that neighbors would be welcome to join too. But no, not in Germany — what a faux pas that was. It saddens me how closed-off people here are.

• Jano is available for work!

Money bits

I’ve been procrastinating on this, but I finally made my Frei­stel­lungs­auf­trag.²²2 Tax exemption order  A tax exemption of €1000 on capital gains is always neat. It’s a bit wild to me that this isn’t automatic; the argument that you could have different Frei­stel­lungs­auf­träge at separate banks doesn’t hold up to me because I think it could (should?) all be centralized and automated.

So I’ve been sillily paying over 25% tax on interests on savings all these years. Not that my interest is very much: the interest rate is a measly 0.75%, far below inflation. That’s just Germany for you.

The UK seems to be significantly friendlier towards building wealth. The options there are much more tax-friendly.

Ruby to Zig

I have fully converted my finance tooling from Ruby to Zig. It is a crude translation:

• The memory management almost exclusively uses the C allocator, because that is what Ruby’s C API needed. It leaks memory all over the place, and it’s hard to detect without the DebugAllocator.

• Error handling used to be rb_raise() when using the Ruby C API, and now that’s been replaced by @panic. With a few exceptions, this code does not at all use Zig’s error-handling functionality.

It’s not great, but it works well enough for me for now.

Slowly, I am cleaning up the code and transitioning it to more idiomatic Zig code. The AI assistance has been helpful, but I’ve had to segregate the AI-translated code, and I’m slowly transforming the AI code and moving it out of containment. LLM usage was a stepping stone; in the end there will be no AI-generated code left.

As an aside, the AI usage of this project is predicted to be around $189.25 with GitHub’s new pricing model. That is an exorbitant amount of money — at least an order of magnitude more than I expected.³³3 LLM hosts were always going to jack up the prices once they snared in enough people. That has been clear to me from the start.  So much about LLMs keeps making me not want to use them, and price is now another. I genuinely don’t need them, and I’m not sure that they bring any value at all. Being able to properly hand-write code is going to be (or become again) a more valuable skill.

The Zig version is about 100× faster than the Ruby version, which I already spent time optimizing. Running a consistency check used to take over 10s; now it’s down to 0.1s. Much better.

I am not sure where I’ll take this tooling. I have been using it for so long that I am used to its idiosyncrasies which would make other people run away. If I wanted to turn into a proper piece of software that others can use, then I’ll have to start thinking about it as a product. I am undecided on whether I want that.

Links

• Nobody understands the point of hybrid cars (Technology Connections): I’m impressed by the design of this!

• weird spots in half-life 2 (6) (Pretzel): Ravenholm time!

• Oh no, I sympathized with a Victorian arms dealer (Tom Scott, Nebula exclusive): It’s Kirin Jindosh!

• How To Make Your Text Look Futuristic

• It's a Bad Week to Be a British Landlord (Tom Nicholas): I’m picking a good time to become a tenant in the UK.

• To Help Our Fan Find His Cow, We Built This... (HTX Studio): Four minutes and no filler talking about a practical solution to a real problem — how fresh!

• Robot Dogs Are A Security Nightmare (Benn Jordan)

• Amsterdam bans public adverts for meat and fossil fuels (Anna Holligan, BBC): Love to see it. (Though the title made me think: “meat fuels?!”)

• Inferno (Boards of Canada): Two more weeks.

• Why Aren't There More Dinosaur Movies? (Patrick H. Willems)

• Every Movie I Saw in 2025, RANKED (FilmJoy)

Tech links:

• GitLab Act 2: Oh no. GitLab has been going downhill steadily.

• No Outer margin (Kyle Shevlin, 2024): Not the most recent article, but 100% still relevant.

• PR: Rewrite Bun in Rust What the actual fuck is this PR. It has over 6000+ LLM-generated commits, a million lines of code added, all in just a few days. That’s much more of an abomination than it is an achievement.

• Mitchell Hashimoto on AI psychosis: That resonates.