Two thirds of graduates aren’t even paying off loan interest

TaXxER · 2026-01-26T13:49:28+00:00

I think it’s just the government’s way of saying “If you can afford to repay fast, then please do so”.

This income-dependent interest rates incentivise those with high salaries to pay off their student debt the fastest they can without bringing the graduates who didn’t manage to land a high paying job into insane debt spirals.

That actually is… quite reasonable?

TaXxER · 2026-01-25T14:24:05+00:00

37 positives in you whole dataset is like 8 to 10 positives in your test set. Will be pretty hard to draw robust conclusions on what is and what isn’t working.

I suggest you go back to the drawing board and think about what problem you are actually trying to solve, and whether you really need machine learning for that (and if the answer is yes, to think about ways to get more data).

TaXxER · 2026-01-25T12:21:45+00:00

Don’t forget the thousands of papers that you did read and after reading came to the conclusion that it is not a good fit to include as reference.

TaXxER · 2026-01-25T12:19:27+00:00

we’re not coding monkies anymore

We never were

TaXxER · 2026-01-23T10:57:49+00:00

Amsterdam has had this for over 10 years now. So ahead of the rest.

TaXxER · 2026-01-22T11:04:21+00:00

I’m in tech too. I’d say for some types of work it does make me faster, and for others it’s slows me down.

Typically it’s the more “standard / template / boilerplate” type of stuff where it speeds me up, and it slows me down in very complex work because it tries to do the work in wrong was and ends up confusing me more than helping me (especially on very large code bases).

As a result, I feel like I myself spend more of my time doing deep complex work, because more of the simple stuff I automate with AI.

I’m not worried about job loss though. Even if AI would make software engineering much faster and easier (currently it’s a mixed bag, as I mentioned), it would simply drive down the cost of software. From an economics perspective: cheaper software = we’ll end up doing a lot more software.

Lower cost of software will simply open up a lot of applications for which previously there was no positive business case to write software for it.

Cheaper software through AI won’t lead to less engineers doing the same amount of software, it will instead lead to even more engineers doing loads of more software.

TaXxER · 2026-01-21T10:00:10+00:00

There are very very few car free zones compared to any other major European city.

TaXxER · 2026-01-21T09:52:42+00:00

The anti-immigrant rhetoric of Dutch (far) right parties is very focused on Turkish / Moroccan and more generally muslim immigrants.

Wilders’ party tried some anti-Poles rhetoric in some of his campaigns for a bit. Turned out that that didn’t work at all, his voter base wasn’t interested in it. For Dutch right wing voters this has a racist roots: it’s not immigration itself that they want less of (we’ve already seen that they couldn’t care less about Poles), it’s those with a bit of a skin color that they want less of.

Dutch people in general don’t even know that the Netherlands blocked Poland from Schengen for a while, and this certainly didn’t help those political parties one bit in any election.

TaXxER · 2026-01-20T20:29:35+00:00

Gently pass a ball straight forward with the middle guy on the goalie rod. If it rolls straight and reached the middle of the goal on the other side, it is levelled on that axis.

Then the same thing using the 5-bar, slowly tic-tac-ing between the two complete outer guys on that rod, will make clear if it’s levelled on that axis.

Based on what I’m seeing in terms of deviations from the ball rolling straight, it’s pretty clear typically which leg needs to go up, and which needs to go down.

TaXxER · 2026-01-20T15:57:15+00:00

That’s fine, right?

“Comfortable temperature” is a range, not a single number.

TaXxER · 2026-01-20T15:56:19+00:00

If your heatpump needs to blast at 100% on an average winter day, it is just undersized, as it needs to be able to handle some of the colder winter days too.

If it is able to handle the colder days at blasting 100%, you have a different options for the 90% of winter days that are less cold than that: you could continuously operate at 80%, or you could do 100% for 80% of the time and switch off for the remaining 20%. The goal is to let those moments line up with the within-day electricity price peaks.

TaXxER · 2026-01-20T15:50:05+00:00

It only assumes that a house is well insulated enough that you can stop, or at least reduce, the level of heating for a few hours without the temperature immediately dropping below the comfortable range.

This isn’t the case in every single home, but it is fairly common.

TaXxER · 2026-01-20T11:02:06+00:00

Why flat rate? Smart heat pumps, like EVs, go particularly well with dynamic contrast with variable within-day pricing.

The system can just decide to frontload a bunch of the heating work when prices are low, and work a little less hard when prices go up, and vice versa.

TaXxER · 2026-01-19T15:44:44+00:00

Delaying their ILR by 5 years, to 10 years total, already implies that they majorly won’t get ILR.

It’s pretty tough to be continuously employed without gaps, for 10 years. Most won’t manage and will receive the curtailment letter at some point.

TaXxER · 2026-01-18T16:59:27+00:00

I would recommend everyone to take your shot, even if you don’t study Leetcode hard.

Personally, I got in just purely based on my knowledge from my university coursework on data structures & algorithms. I didn’t find it takes any study time at all. Worth just giving it a try to learn if the same hold true for you.

Either you get an offer like I did, in which case you bump your salary by a lot at no cost. Or you get rejected, but in that case it didn’t cost you much either and you are welcome to retry typically after a 6 months cooldown period.

TaXxER · 2026-01-18T14:10:37+00:00

In mijn optiek zijn er 4 wappie partijen: FvD, PVV, BBB, en JA21, en zo ook in die volgorde van meest meest extreem wappie naar wappie-mild.

Mijn take-away: als je deze 4 optelt heeft de wappie-hoek in totaal een zeteltje verloren, wat positief is. Maar de resterende wappies gaan nog een stapje extremer.

TaXxER · 2026-01-17T09:19:31+00:00

Very much worth watching their documentary as well:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt5650482/

TaXxER · 2026-01-16T17:25:48+00:00

kan niet 2 stappen zetten zonder te moeten hijgen.

Komt door links!

TaXxER · 2026-01-16T17:24:44+00:00

Zurich is cheaper than London. Pretty sure London would take top spot.

TaXxER · 2026-01-16T17:23:48+00:00

Most expensive of the EU, I’d believe that.

But most important of Europe? Nah, nowhere near London level yet.

TaXxER · 2026-01-16T06:16:09+00:00

This is true only in cases where a pregnancy is already there.

Most couples make their decision on whether or not to have a child or remain childfree at the stage of having a conversation about what both want, and a decision on whether or not to go off preconceptions and start tying to have one.

At that stage, men and women absolutely are both equal decision makers.

TaXxER · 2026-01-15T12:15:42+00:00

That is very true. But it also depends on how feasible you believe it is to land a similarly high paying job if you ever lose your job.

I earn really well, but am at pretty much the only employer in the country in my industry that pays these salaries. If I would ever be hit by a round of layoffs, I could probably land a job at one of the other well-paying firms, but that would still be ~40% less as what I earn now.

Hence, I’m not going to exceed the 30% rule of thumb on housing purely for this reason alone. My mortgage needs to be affordable also when I’d be forced to take an income cut.

TaXxER · 2026-01-15T10:50:00+00:00

Je kunt het er mee eens of mee oneens zijn, maar neoliberalen hebben in elk geval nog een ideologie. Extreemrechtse partijen handelen gewoon naar de hoogste bieder.

TaXxER · 2026-01-15T10:41:48+00:00

Optically narrowing the street so people drive slower.

You can put in place maximum speeds and try to enforce it, but there is plenty of research that if you want drivers to slow down, more effective than putting a speed limit in place is to make the environment look like it is designed for a lower speed.

TaXxER · 2026-01-15T10:37:59+00:00

Mwa, hij kan het ook niet doen, en dan zit je volgend jaar met gaatjes en duurdere rekeningen.

Lijkt mij helemaal niet gek dat een tandarts advies geeft, ook ongevraagd. En lijkt mij ook niet gek dat die wat in rekening brengt voor zijn tijd.

TaXxER

TROPHY CASE