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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • And don’t feel bad for getting an e-bike. Riding that is still a good workout if you get into the habit of going fast. E-bikes usually have a hard speed cutoff (25 km/h by law where I live); if you want to go faster it’s all you and the motor is just there to give you better acceleration and take the pain out of things like hills or opposing wind.

    If you don’t want to go fast, the bike still expects you to put in a certain amount of work. Low-intensity training is still training. Most crucially, getting that bit of assistance might get you to use the bike when you otherwise wouldn’t, turning no exercise into some exercise.

    People underestimate the benefits of light exercise. Even brisk walks or relatively leisurely motor-assisted bike rides can absolutely be beneficial if done regularly.



  • The logic board has the CPU built in, that’s true. However, the Framework 16 has a swappable GPU and all models make the ports independent of the logic board through a USB-C-based expansion module system. So that’s even a few parts other manufacturer might consider unreasonable.

    (Also, to be fair, I forgot one other thing most laptops let you swap: The WiFi/BT card, if only because it’s cheaper to have that on a swappable module.)


  • I mean, asterisk. Most laptops let you swap the storage and RAM and many let you swap the battery. Beyond that it usually gets difficult.

    Framework let you swap everything, which is a major difference. But of course you pay for that privilege; modular design has its costs.

    Still, good on you for getting a cheap upgrade. No need to throw away a perfectly good laptop if you can make it work fast again with a new SSD.




  • Well, that heavily depends upon factors like what kind of lifestyle you’re living. For example, I save a shitload of money by not needing a car.

    In general I’d say that someone who lives in my town and makes roughly what I do could save 1k to 2k per month depending on how much discretionary spending they want to be able to do. Possibly more if they’re very frugal.

    In case we’re comparing to the USA here, Germany has lower wages and higher taxes but a lot of stuff is way cheaper, especially education and healthcare. My health insurance premium can’t exceed 14.6% of my income, deductibles don’t exist, and most procedures are fully covered – for instance, when I went to a hospital for surgery and stayed for four days, my total bill was 40 €.


  • No, I misread (“do” instead of “make”).

    I went from something like 25k to something like 50k, which still wasn’t impressive but okay for a junior-level dev. And vastly better than what I made before.

    These days I’m somewhere north of 80k but monthly bonuses tied to company performance make it hard to give an accurate number off the top of my head. Depending on who you ask that’s either above or below average for someone of my experience level.


  • Germany.

    The minimum notice time scales with employment duration (if the company terminates the contact) or is four weeks (if the employee quits). However, the contact can state a longer period; this is often done to make the notice time symmetrical. The notice period for the employee can never exceed that for the company. Usually, contacts can only be terminated effective at the end of a month so that can extend things a bit further.

    At-will employment is not a thing in Germany except for informal arrangement like paying the neighbor’s kid to mow the lawn. Even during the trial period (a period of typically six months at the start of an employment where firing the employee is much easier) two weeks are the absolute minimum.



  • I used to work as a cheapo part-time-on-paper software developer to pay for university. All devs in the company were student workers and the quality of the work reflected that. That clown show of a job actually took so much of my energy and attention that it delayed my thesis by two years. Yikes.

    My boss was straight up delusional. Among his many bizarre ideas was the assumption that I’d stay on for about nine months after my graduation, obviously for the absurdly low pay I was making as a student. That arrangement would’ve worked out very well for him so he assumed I’d be all for it.

    Unfortunately for him, I was already working out the terms of my employment with another company. On the other side of the country. Who actually employed real full-time devs for real market-rate pay. There was no chance I’d stay on for longer than necessary.

    So I hand-delivered my written resignation, effective in two months – that being the legal minimum notice period based on my employment duration at the time. Boy, was he upset. He thought we had an agreement (that I never agreed to) and that I’d take as much time as needed to finish up that major project we’d recently started (because clearly that’s a reason to work for pennies).

    Hell no. I did tell him I’d reconsider… if he beat the other company’s offer. That would’ve meant a 200% pay rise. Suddenly he was much more amenable to my leaving.



  • How about some weird ancient ones?

    They’re as much not to everyone’s taste as the shows themselves but I love all of the HaréGuu openings. The original’s a bop, Deluxe continues this while adding a spoken-word section the singer can barely keep up with, and Final is the best of the bunch. HaréGuu Deluxe also has a neat showtune-y ending.

    I also think that Nerima Daikon Brothers has a great opening; it very much fits with the main characters being dollar store Blues Brothers.

    If you want something that oozes cool, I can recommend the original Hellsing. A World Without Logos is an extremely stylish song as long as you don’t mind completely incomprehensible lyrics. (The song sounds as if it’s in English but is really just onomatopoeia. Basically Prisencolinensinainciusol in menacing.)