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veen  ·  15 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 13, 2024

We're slowly starting to work on a plan to get our garden from 90% brickwork to 'as little pavement as we need'. We had a garden designer help us think through and make a first design, which we promptly iterated over until it looked almost nothing like what he drew for us. But it's still useful to have done - gotta start somewhere.

Now I just hope there's a few warm/sunny spring weekenddays to get the project going. So far this winter has been oscillating between "cold as fuck" 20% of the time and "mild, but raining" 80% of the time. Last week saw the first sunny mild days which was a nice change of pace, albeit another climate record shattered.

veen  ·  64 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: January 24, 2024

Editing my fiancée's choir concert together that I recorded last month. Davinci is a surprisingly easy program to learn, when you're like me and refuse to read anything and prefer to stumble/google your way forward. The video is pretty okay considering the awful lighting conditions. It was...a bit too stressful to record (I had like 2 minutes left of disk space at the end and had to hotswap 2 batteries during recording three times) but my new Fujifilm delivered on its video chops.

The audio is splendid - as per KB's recommendation I got a Zoom H1n and put it in the exact spot it needed to be. HOWEVER, I noticed during setup that the piano chair creaks. A lot. Considering I put the Zoom something like a foot from the chair, it would be very noticable. There was an attempt to fix another chair, but it failed, so now I have a perfect recording except for that chair. Even KB with all his might & prowess could not find a good way to get rid of it in post, which is saying something. Thankfully the creaking gets less earpiercing over time, so I'm just gonna run with it and call it a learning exercise for everyone involved.

The concert did inspire me to think about learning to play cello. My fiancée not only sings well but also plays the flute phenomenally, and my MIL picked up the alt violin again. It would be amazing to play some music together but right now I have only the most basic of piano skills (it's not my instrument, I've learned) and a bunch of rusty high school guitar skills (which is also not my instrument anymore). So there is room for something else.

veen  ·  92 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 27, 2023

Hey look, it’s three Christmases in a row ruined by illness/covid! The fiancée has been ill for over a day with the covs, I have not…yet.

veen  ·  288 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 14, 2023

At work people have the habit of informing close colleagues in person of their leave, and later announcing it to the rest with a long email, often using the room to reflect on a few great years of work. Last week I learned that HR decided at some point to take control over this process, demanding control over the content and timing of the email. I had no desire to have my honest opinion sanitized like it's the North Korean state press, so I jumped the gun and sent out my email before HR could get to me. My goal was to be honest about why I was leaving without burning any bridges, so I did what any normal person would do and hid my criticism the subtext.

Keeping in mind that everything I liked about my company will effectively be destroyed by the MegaCorp, despite us making clear protests and even providing alternatives to no avail, I named my goodbye email "So long, and thanks for all the fish" (which should just sound like a funny way of saying goodbye to the uninitiated) and added this to the end:

    P.S. As a fan of Douglas Adams' absurdist sci-fi, I couldn't resist ending with this passage 🐬

    'Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending demolition of Earth and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger. But most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means. The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backwards somersault through a hoop. But, in fact, the message was this: “So long and thanks for all the fish”.'

To me it's funny in a funny-because-it's-sad way. I thought it was maybe too much on the nose but I haven't heard anything negative back from HR so I guess it'll just stay my inside-joke.

---

Anyway. I'm getting a few offers in for solar on my roof, and am getting serious about replacing our gas-powered central heating with an all-electric system . There's one who can place solar in the first week of August so I could start enjoying them pretty soon! The weather's been very warm over here. Those scary global temperature and ice cap anomaly graphs are lived through and through out here. The accompanying grass hay fever doesn't help lift the mood too, ugh.

veen  ·  290 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: I have a deep and burning desire to rag on Apple's nerd helmet.

    You see this as such an inevitability that you don't care if it works, you don't care if nobody ever buys it, you don't understand what it's for but you've been promised this for forty years and if we don't come out with it you'll think we stole Christmas. So here it is. Useless, bereft of application,

veen  ·  470 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 14, 2022

Just came back from a shared mobility conference. Learned nothing from the talks but I met like two dozen key figures in the field so it was capital G Great for networking.

Only five more workdays and then a Christmas break filled with quality time with friends & family. Already exhausted (my fitness level is...nonzero) but I'm gonna get through it and it's gonna be fun and I'm gonna be real glad this year is FINALLY over.

veen  ·  518 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 26, 2022

I'm fiddling with synths and Reaper again! I fell into a YouTube rabbit hole of modular synthesis, and while I don't see myself building a Eurorack anytime soon I learned just enough that I was able to build a few sounds with Reaktor 6 blocks, whereas I previously ran into a wall. I feel like Korg's DFAM could be a lot of fun; I really like to play with the DM1 drum sequencers to make beats, but haven't found a good sequencer from within Komplete Kontrol yet. I'm eyeing Sequis but I'm still in my Dunning-Kruger phase with sequencers.

veen  ·  540 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 5, 2022

After years of carsharing I am now getting my own car from my work (on lease? is that how you say it?). It’s not that I desperately need it, but the carsharing options are very sparse where I live now. I’ll be doing more sales work on the road, so I politely asked at an opportune moment and will be driving a VW ID.3 for like €150/mo for at least the next few months (that’s including charging and insurance). There’s also an option to lease an e-bike and I still get to keep my unlimited work PT card (there’s a 30 trains an hour train station ~25 comfortable bike minutes away) so I have, like, all of the options now.

veen  ·  587 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Californians asked to cut power use as extreme heat approaches  ·  

I'm off for three days and you guys start talking about EV charging. Literally doing 1200km in two days in a 66kW Hyundai. A few points to add to the discussion:

1) you charge where you park. You top up in quick breaks when you need to go further. Nobody wants to fastcharge, so we expect it to become a much smaller part of driving than gas stations are now. Over here we expect just 13% of all EV charging to be at (highway) fast chargers. Imagine if you could fill up your car with water. Would you really opt to fill it up at a random industrial parking lot you could also drop a hose in it on your own driving lane and at work for half the price? How about your employer realizing they could make money by offering you free charging when you allow them to use your car as a battery storage? Opportunity charging, which is that you charge when your car is standing still anyway, is the inevitable way forward.

2) The US is dearly lacking in both fast and destination chargers. Range anxiety disappears once those two are remotely reliable - I know this from first hand experience and from a bunch of studies done on the Dutch charging station network, which happens to leave every other country in the dust. As soon as it's a common sight for there to be a charger in a parking lot, people stop complaining. Because I already have the luxury of a dense and reliable network of destination and fast chargers, I almost never have to worry, and I also almost never fastcharge. Colleague of mine has a charger at home and at work and he's never even used a fastcharger. Because if you leave full and can charge at your destination, that's two charging stops eliminated. So a <car range> mile trip both ways is made possible by just one charger at my destination, that happens to also be a decent way to make money for businesses with a large energy connection. Tesla drivers love their Superchargers, but normal people will avoid them if they can. And if you do need them - for most people, as soon as your EV can do 100+ kW of fast charging, which is "most new models and probably whatever first model upper class people will buy", nobody minds the stops because you'll be ready to drive another 150-200 miles right when you're done taking a piss or grabbing a coffee. Especially when you factor in that charging is cheaper per mile than gas.

3) What will drive the change in chargers? Well, the business case for EV destination chargers is decent. The case for rapid chargers is VERY good as soon as you hit a certain level of daily users. There is less overhead and less insurance than a gas station. It never needs refills, and you can basically just plop one down and wait for your investment to pay off. Even a small station can draw traffic, or can boost sales. The number of rapid chargers that aren't Tesla has doubled in less than eighteen months over here. We fully expect every supermarket, DIY store, McDonalds and Starbucks (any place that you will park at for more than 20 minutes and that owns the land it's on) to follow suit.

4) Smart charging capabilities have been made mandatory on all public slow charging stations here. The collective energy use of EVs will be a hit on the grid, but it's in the form of "small spikes in many places", which is something that grids are in theory perfectly capable of handling if dimensioned correctly. The real problem that will fick things up are heavy vehicles. They consume a factor 10-15 more energy than cars per km and require near 1MW chargers if you want to top them up along the way. The energy use of industrial zones can easily increase by TWh's if adopted widely, which is not the case of personal vehicles. And the TCO, which is nearly always the main driver of any EV adoption rate, however is good enough that the trucks will be here before the infrastructure is upgraded.

5) I still dream of a V2G system of energy brokerage whereby we can delay daily power use with cars and home batteries. The realities are complicated, and the rise of EVs seems to be going just a bit too fast for V2G to catch up. My city is one of the first to realize what you guys are theorizing about.

But it's the result of one incredibly entrepreneurial dude who's been at this problem for 8 years. Wider adoption... I don't know. I hope so.

veen  ·  606 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Given ideal conditions, how far can you travel by train in 5 hours in Europe?

I appreciate the shoutout, but you're legit the fifth person to send it to me after it was already all over my Twitter feed, lol.

veen  ·  617 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End

    that capitalism as practiced from the Renaissance onwards has been absolutely dominant compared to everything else it encounters.

How does the last century of social democracy fit into this?

Unbridled capitalism creates a system whereby wealth flows to the top x%, who then out of luxury / boredom / freedom might create new shit. Science, for example, has historically mostly been done by white rich dudes with way too much money and time on their hand. It's a direct consequence of the power and wealth structure that capitalism generates.

However, social democracy and in particular wealth redistribution through serious taxation creates the much more preferable social order whereby there's a less rich top x%, but the rest of us plebs has enough of a social safety net that innovation can come from a much larger portion of the society. Which is beneficial for all of us, and also for capitalism in the long run, but isn't a system that has the evolutionary strength to survive against populism and fascism as the past decades have shown. I could argue that the postwar social-democratic (pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher) capitalism is a better version of capitalism that lost to the current strain of short-sighted capitalism, even though it is better, which seems to me to fly in the face of the idea that the most powerful version of capitalism will win out.

veen  ·  631 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: July 6, 2022

Waiting to board our Eurostar back to the mainland after a surprisingly packed week away in London. It's done me quite well to (slowly, steadily) move a lot the past week.

The city's hubski-friendly, although I forgot to bring any stickers!

veen  ·  664 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: "A still of Kermit the Frog in..." by DallE

Initially I only saw the first one, but the entire thread is AMAZING.

Personally I feel like we're just scratching the surface as to what is possible with diffusion models. Being able to gradually change images from one thing to another opens up so much possibility space, it's hard to even imagine.

veen  ·  666 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: June 1, 2022

You'd be surprised at how easily impressed banks (and nontechnical people in general) are at any effective use of a few napkins of math. Here's a secret formula for ya: pick 3 simple indicators that you can research that are indicative of your potential audience. E.g. "nearby gameboard/nerd stores", "residents age 18-35", "number of basements per sqmi". Layer them and see where they peak. _Et voila._

veen  ·  736 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 23, 2022

Got Covid. After two years of careful tiptoeing we ended up getting it not because of going to large crowds, not from the thirty odd colleagues at work who just came back from carnival, but just from my dad who came to visit for a bit. It's now been eight days and I am finally feeling mostly normal again, although my throat is still a bit full. The SO had less of a fever but seems to have a longer tail, as she's still not able to get back to work properly. I envy those who have a runny nose and that's that. That's the covid lottery for ya I guess. What probably sucks the most is that we had a whole week of workcation planned in Antwerp which we had to cancel entirely. Would've been fantastic with how nice the weather's been this week, but alas!

veen  ·  778 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: February 9, 2022

Finally, we're making lots of plans again. House search is gonna become serious starting next week, as my SO has more time after a wedding she helps plan this weekend. First concert in FOREVER next week, and I got tickets to see Thom Yorke again. Workcation booked for March, family weekend for April, holiday to London in May and a big three (or four?) week camping trip to south France and Italy at the end of the summer.

Feels good, y'all.

veen  ·  868 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: How to Bitcoin by mk

Are you selling anything today?

veen  ·  889 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: The Best Time-Management Advice Is Depressing But Liberating

    A life spent chasing the mythical state of being able to do everything is less meaningful than a life of focusing on a few things that count.

I read / leaf through Essentialism with a frequency that's rare for me. I'd give it a read if you want more advice on the above.

If everything that's being thrown at you matters to you, that means that nothing really matters to you. This week alone, I said no to two speaking engagements because I had more important things to do. I try to be incredibly strict in how I spend my time, moreso when I am under a lot of work load. If that means disappointing people along the road because I don't do what they ask of me, so be it.

veen  ·  890 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: October 20, 2021

These days most of my programming is in PostGIS, which is an extension on regular PostgreSQL to enable very powerful geo-functions. Sometimes I write more Python, and in the past year I've also combined the two, writing Python scripts that call the database and send some data back and forth to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Today I went back and forth between writing big, heavy queries in a PostgreSQL database, and writing lightweight dynamic queries in Retool. I'm using that for the first time to create an interactive dashboard for a well known client of ours. The other project will probably entail some large tables that show the result of the analysis and a map visualization as an output, which what my deliverables are in most projects.

veen  ·  988 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Delta Variant

In case anyone wants a taste of what Delta can do when let loose on large swaths of unvaccinated people:

We opened up entirely just at the point Delta was gaining traction, with <5% of young people vaccinated, which lead to superspread events that every expert warned about but our government refused to listen to. A rowing club tried to give a party of 400 people with mandated testing beforehand...and now they're looking at 230+ cases. The primary reason we're not growing more now, is that we have reached testing capacity limits already.

Delta will flare up in communities of unvaccinated. It's no longer a choice of 'vaccine or not', it's a choice of 'vaccine or gnarly/deadly Covid', and I am saddened that too many will realize that fact too late. But at the same time, vaccine willingness is now at 94% over here, so I am hopeful that we can get out of this to some degree this fall. It's gonna be a bumpy ride, but we know vaccines work, we know lockdowns work. Helplessness has been replaced with reluctance to act, which is less bad.

veen  ·  1044 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: May 19, 2021

Finally all of my parents have vaccination appointments. Supposedly next month we are going to double the rate of vaccination and open it up to anyone over 18, but I'll believe that when I see it. It does feel like we're in the home stretch, but reading the online discourse and especially that discussion last week on here about masks feels like you're all in a different world from us. Not just because you're ahead of vaccinating, but because masks are all but despised over here, with the head of our CDC calling them useless well into the end of last year.

Personally I've given up on...caring? getting angry? a while ago about how things are going or what policies we should be doing, because it's clear that I'm powerless and I too know the Serenity prayer. I just have to suffer through until the end, hopefully staying healthy, accepting that this country of mine is a neoliberal paradise whose left wing has crumbled and that accepts unnecessary deaths to allow people to go to restaurants.

Anyway. Eurovision is BACK and it's wonderfully ridiculous. We are hosting this year, so it's a bit more special, watching for example my hometown in the completely unnecessary tourism-pre-song-promo's they're always doing.

My aquarium is doing fairly good, I have one kind of algae that I may or may not have under control now that I've culled my largest plant and everything is growing at their maximum rate again.

veen  ·  1051 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Tim Urban: How to Pick a Career (That Actually Fits You)

There's a great deal of your milage may vary with this topic. I can totally see how other people can live happy and fulfilling careers with a your advice, but I know that's not enough for me. The part of life that is work is so grand, the time invested is so large, that I find it absolutely essential to know to the best of my ability why I'm doing what I'm doing. A motivation that fits on a post-it seems woefully inadequate for something which will dominate the next years or decades of my life. So I quite like the level of depth this reaches - in my mind it's a topic that deserves to be taken apart carefully and inspected thorougly.

Maybe it's also a factor that my options are rather large; I am naturally drawn to learning new tools and putting myself in new situations or dynamics, so I am competent at an unusually large set of things. I could adapt to work in an architecture firm, a department of transportation, as an academic or a database engineer if I'd put my mind to it. There's no logical job for me that follows from my previous work, so I have to do a lot more work to create or find something for myself that I enjoy doing.

veen  ·  1133 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 12:30 p.m.—Perseverance Mars Rover landing day livestream for all students

So turns out Percy has a TON of cameras, including on the sky crane itself? And it's also video? Which it sent along its umbilical cord be fore flying away?

veen  ·  1134 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: 12:30 p.m.—Perseverance Mars Rover landing day livestream for all students

I'm watching the realtime simulation over at https://eyes.nasa.gov/, which is close enough to Kerbal to make me even more excited about this.

veen  ·  1141 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: All of the World’s Money and Markets in One Visualization

That Fed red really puts the money printer in perspective. "Yeah, we added the same amount of money as all the gold reserves to our balance sheet in less than a year."

veen  ·  1210 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: PSA: Why Is the Risk of Coronavirus Transmission so High Indoors?

If you dig deeper, you can find out why it does that: this Zeit article is based on this Max Planck Insitute model which points to this scientific article which has the ventilation assumptions in table 3. 'No ventilation' is replacing air 0.3 times per hour, 'Active ventilation' (windows open) is twice per hour, and 'Ventilation system' assumes nine times per hour.

kleinbl00's bitchin' medical-grade system does 11 per hour, so no, regular people don't have that system. I'm pretty sure that, since home ventilation systems are very rare in Germany, this is a lost-in-translation thing where ' ventilation system' means something else to you than to bratwursteaters.

veen  ·  1212 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 2, 2020

If you haven't taken a good look at this Zeit article and tool on aerosol risks yet, you're missing out. Get good masks, bring some for your family.

https://www.zeit.de/wissen/gesundheit/2020-11/coronavirus-aerosols-infection-risk-hotspot-interiors

Personally we're doing a week of quarantine before meeting any at risk family member. Beyond that we're probably accepting the risks. The car drive there will be on the same order of magnitude of danger, realistically.

veen  ·  1212 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: December 2, 2020

Mixed week. Am building a new PC which is a lovely puzzle as I'm building on mini-ATX scale. Government continues to stumble and fail in new ways. Had a terrible workday yesterday because of a bad and restless night before. Today was wonderful, I spent my first workday in three? months in the office becauseI genuinely missed it and I loved it. Slowly seeing more people again... I know the risks awfully well but I am also keenly aware of my less stable mental health. Hope it goes okay.

veen  ·  1256 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Funski: A goofy bit of fun with movie descriptions

A bunch of people have dreams.

veen  ·  1273 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Donald Trump tweets he and first lady Melania Trump test positive for Covid-19

My imperfect communication this morning:

    >hey <SO>, Trump tested positive

    >no waiiii>

    > and Melania too

      >  AND MALARIA TOO ?!?!

They're flying the Doomsday plane, just to be sure...