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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • Every region should build the public transit it needs and can afford. The most boring, proven transit won’t win beauty or speed awards or attract tourists but gets people cheaply from A to B and boosts the economy. To build a high speed connection, you have a certain economic start-threshold where the investment amplifies the economic output enough to benefit the region and not suffocate it in debt before it can flourish. So I’d expect more high speed rail between economically well faring regions, which increases the ‘euro per person’ but could be the same or less spending relative to gdp or avg. income.

    Equality discussion aside: the spending discussion needs to be split in maintenance and expansion. Regions with currently more rail should be spending more on maintenance than those with less. Underinvestment in this area means decay, so to see decay of german rail compared to swiss rail, you need to compare how much they spend on maintenance, and normalize to account for differences in bridges, tunnels, high-speed, low-speed, single track, etc.

    Expansion is a differrent beast, especially because the price decreases if you build steadily every year and economies of scale kick in. If only our polititians would get that… RMtransit made some good videos how to decrease the costs of transit expansion.




  • As EU citizen watching from the sidelines, I’m disappointed nobody is rallying for political reforms. The UK government has proven multiple times now it is incapable of governing and policing to adapt for changing realities. I don’t think the UK is ready for any future until painful structural reforms of their parliamentary system and executive. This mess was and is caused by UK politics and they deserve all the anger as fuel to fix their workplace. Until then, an effort to rejoin would occupy the executive for years and make UK life only worse because necessary local policy-making would’nd get the attention it deserves.




  • if your layout is part of the keymaps (/usr/share/kbd/keymaps depending on distro) you can load it with ‘sudo loadkeys -u awesomelayout’ and make it permanent with ‘localectl’ except on debian and heirs. There it would be ‘sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration’








  • When you don’t use windows for a few months, you’ll feel like that on first boot. ‘Oh, you haven’t used this program on your desktop in a while (lists entire desktop). You want me to clean it up into a folder, because you don’t use it anyway? I would also like to attend you to some urgent updates you need to install right now, and after that I have updates for your updates waiting, like 3 increments in a row with reboots each.’ And of course, during the chore of updating, Edge appears and becomes your default browser. Take that you dirty cheater!





  • We are in a new phase and what you call stagnation is actually the maturity and stability of the internet that is spawning new services at the moment. For example:

    Logistics are coming online. Loading lists, import/export paperwork, scheduling your truck unloading time from your smartphone. Lots of saas startups in that area.

    Factories are coming online. Scheduling production across factories/countries on a single product level is still sci-fi, but they are working on it.

    Trades are coming online. Billing software, planning, documentation. Each sector has their own ways to get accelerated and now they see value in it.

    Plenty of stuff that was happening in excel sheets is replaced with a tailored web services which are content aware and allow live data entry/analysis from multiple end points.

    There is so much work to be done. Universal availability and reliability of data centers, mobile networks, fibre connections were the backbone neccessary to build the next generation of services. They are in the making.



  • I foresee tagchaos with multilingual instances. It would be great if identical but translated popular tags could be LUTted together such that a ‘technology’ tag also gives ‘technologie’ results if the user sets their preferred language tag settings accordingly. The tagger also needs to be stopped from using both.