Quick bits
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On my birthday, Venus and Jupiter were bright on the night sky, with the moon directly in between. How nice of the Wanderers to accompany me on my birthday.
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My electric drill is broken (the battery is dead and the no replacement is for sale), but I have my ratchet spanner, and ratchet spanners are the best.
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My Apple TV+ trial renewed into a subscription with no reminder. Bah! At least Apple got me a refund.
Shower thoughts
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This isn’t new, but I’m occasionally reminded that fire trucks are actually water trucks.
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Cheese that is eaten piece by piece is Incrementaler.
Relocation woes
Well, this move isn’t going great. The puzzle pieces are simply not falling into place. Things that are missing:
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I haven’t been able to figure out a moving date yet. Finding a reliable moving company is proving to be quite the challenge.
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I haven’t been able to schedule a key handover yet. Building service, building management and property management are all on holiday.
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I haven’t been cleared for customs (UK Transfer of Residence) yet. It could take up to four weeks, but hopefully it is much faster.
I’ve been getting rid of furniture, and the apartment sure is becoming more and more empty. No more sofa, and even my wardrobe is gone. I’ll have to re-purchase stuff in London, but I want to do that slowly and deliberately.
I’ve been reassessing my plan for moving. I’ll definitely end up in London in June, but the precise timing and steps are all up in the air.
I am exhausted, and close to the end of my rope.
Traffic hell
There might be no point giving this any more consideration (I am moving away anyway), but the traffic in my area is just nuts.
The street I’m on is supposed to have a 30km/h speed limit, but the only stretch where that limit is respected is the one without speed cameras — once past the cameras, drivers floor the acceleration pedal.
The result is overwhelming noise. The last few nights, I’ve been woken repeatedly in the dead of the night by loud tuned cars racing through my area.1
I’m putting the blame at the atrocious city and traffic planning. A long and straight four-lane road will never entice anyone to stick to 30km/h.
Berlin has no adequate traffic calming solutions. Speed bumps are rare in Berlin, and when they exist, their implementation is a failure. On the only street with speed bumps that I know of, cars swerve in and out of the bike lane. Or drive the entire length on the bicycle path. Or, when there is a cyclist on the bike path, drive on the left-hand side bike path of the bidirectional road.
I am not making this up. It’s insane.
I cannot wait to leave this hellhole.
Links
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Europe's $9BN Plan To Fix This Abandoned Airport: I ⬢ Tegel.
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Tim & Gabe Ride The Lost Railway To The Baarle Enclaves (The Tim Traveller & What On Earth Is This?)
Tech links:
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Better fluid sizing with round() (Ahmad Shadeed)
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Little Webby Press: I’ve got my own solution, but it’s a little hacky. This looks like quite a nice solution.
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Ad Infinitum (Matthias Ott) Quote:
One approach, proposed by Google Research, is what you might call a “token auction.” In this model, advertisers don’t buy ad slots on a page. Instead, they bid, token by token, on the actual text the model generates. Each advertiser brings their own LLM, and an auction mechanism decides whose model gets to influence the next word. The output is a weighted blend of competing interests, shaped by who’s willing to pay more.
Dystopian. -
Why does the arrow (->) operator in C exist?: Wild! That Stack Overflow answer taught me stuff I had no idea about.
100->a?!