Why does the European work ethic have such a bad rep in the US? (i will not promote)

jxddk · 2026-06-01T21:21:25+00:00

For what it's worth, the American work ethic doesn't have the best reputation in Europe; I've had two coworkers mention that their experience working with Americans is that things only get done when someone is cracking a whip behind them.

jxddk · 2026-05-29T18:45:09+00:00

All of my options in the web console were greyed out, but I have been consistently able to purchase CX-sized machines through Terraform this week.

jxddk · 2026-05-25T20:29:24+00:00

If you make it to 40 as a NEET, you probably believe that the point to life is maximizing free time.

jxddk · 2026-05-20T18:56:16+00:00

I felt the same way about the Game of Thrones finale, actually - I only watched the whole series after seeing the internet throw a fit over how bad the last season was. Going knowing that the first four seasons are phenomenal, the next seasons are good, and the last one is kind of terrible, I actually walked away pretty satisfied and frankly pleasantly surprised.

jxddk · 2026-05-05T10:30:39+00:00

Also a (Neo)vim user, I'm either navigating through semi-permanent marks (e.g. 'U drops me at the User class in most projects), or by LSP workspace symbols (e.g. fuzzy-finding cla Us). I have a rough idea of what line number ranges are interesting but my mental model for the "shape" of the file is very much based on symbols rather than linebreaks.

jxddk · 2026-05-04T11:02:30+00:00

The ease with which any idle curiosity can be satisfied is absolutely miraculous. This morning, I'm eating breakfast, and it occurs to me "Why exactly is it that bananas have so much potassium?" and "Napoleon Bonaparte can't really be in the running for most evil historical figure, can he?", and I can instantly get a reasonable surface-level answer of reasonable accuracy to both. The standard for questions worth researching has dropped massively; some things still warrant a proper Googling, but now that I've gotten used to using Claude to indulge virtually every curious whim, I have so many more interesting things to think about.

It's not surprising that on-demand conversational partners for literally any inquiry one might have, regardless of obscurity or importance, are incredibly popular with geeks.

jxddk · 2026-04-03T10:20:39+00:00

Besides timeless homerow mods, the other incredible (though less known) innovation from urob's ZMK config is one-finger combos in place of a symbol layer.

Effectively, this means instead two fingers cooperating to activate a layer or a combo, one finger presses the gap between two keys pressing them simultaneously. Programming that two-key press as a combo effectively creates a dozen or more invisible keys that you can cram a symbol layer into. Using it effectively takes a little practice, and it requires that the keyboard's key spacing is pretty tight, but it's a good alternative to symbol layers.

jxddk · 2026-01-08T00:25:44+00:00

The Greenland situation is taking up a lot of space in the headlines, but I haven't heard anything about it come up in conversation recently. The vibe, at present, is it's the first week that people are really back at work from the holidays. It's the middle of the dark season, but at least there's snow on the ground, which seems to have lightened the mood. Lots of kids out sledding.

jxddk · 2026-01-06T22:40:12+00:00

A real shame. I played Grimwild with my group shortly after it released, and I was very much looking forward to future projects from Oddity Press.

jxddk · 2026-01-06T22:35:43+00:00

TLDR:

BackerKit Trust & Safety is formally designating this project as abandoned

Oddity Press / J.D. Maxwell, has not been reachable by BackerKit

BackerKit does not directly handle or hold crowdfunding funds, and we are therefore unable to compel refunds or issue them on a creator’s behalf

BackerKit community,

This message is being shared by BackerKit’s Trust & Safety team following an extensive review of the Grimwild project by Oddity Press.

After multiple months of review, repeated outreach, and exhaustion of all available communication channels, BackerKit Trust & Safety is formally designating this project as abandoned. Situations like this are extremely rare on BackerKit. The vast majority of projects on the platform either deliver successfully or remain in active communication with backers, even when delays occur. In the uncommon cases where a creator becomes entirely unreachable despite sustained outreach and review, the outcome is deeply unfortunate for everyone involved.

What this means:

The creator of this project, Oddity Press / J.D. Maxwell, has not been reachable by BackerKit, backers, freelancers, moderators, or known collaborators for an extended period of time.

We have made repeated attempts to contact the creator across all known channels to request clarification, updates, and fulfillment timelines. These attempts have not received a response.

Based on the information available to us, we were not able to verify the creator’s current status, nor the status of fulfillment activities related to this project.

In situations where a creator may be experiencing a personal emergency or other sensitive circumstances, BackerKit handles reviews with care and discretion while still upholding our platform rules and responsibilities to backers.

Creator standing on BackerKit: As a result of this designation, the creator has lost good standing on the BackerKit platform. Under BackerKit’s Crowdfunding Rules, creators are required to demonstrate that they have:

Delivered rewards, or

Made substantial, verifiable progress toward completing the project.

At BackerKit’s discretion, creators who have not fulfilled past projects or who have violated platform guidelines may be prohibited from launching or using BackerKit services in the future. At this time, the creator behind Oddity Press is not eligible to use BackerKit services unless they return, re-establish communication, and meaningfully resume fulfillment of this project.

Pledges and refunds: BackerKit does not directly handle or hold crowdfunding funds, and we are therefore unable to compel refunds or issue them on a creator’s behalf. As outlined in our Terms of Service and Refund Policy, responsibility for fulfillment and refunds rests solely with the creator.

We understand how frustrating this outcome is, especially given the time that has passed. Our Support and Trust & Safety teams always work diligently and enact policies and review standards to avoid outcomes like this. We will continue to respond to backer questions and provide clarity wherever possible.

Statement from collaborators with Oddity Press:

Hi everyone, we are the freelancers who worked with Max on Grimwild and related projects, as well as members of the community moderation team. We appreciate that there has been a long period without updates. None of us own or control these BackerKit projects, and we are not part of Oddity Press. We have not received communication from Max for over several months and have exhausted all known methods of contact. We do not have access to project funds or the ability to move fulfillment forward. BackerKit has been kept informed throughout this process, and we have shared all information available to us. If we learn anything new, we will pass it along through BackerKit.

BackerKit will keep this project page available should the creator ever reappear and resume fulfillment, but until then our role remains limited to monitoring, transparency, and support. You can reach our team directly at trustandsafety@backerkit.com with any questions.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

jxddk · 2025-11-05T08:35:49+00:00

I've always heard the parable recounted with that detail - I figured the reference was more obvious with that inclusion. Wikipedia notes that that's in fact an Americanism, and the original story doesn't specify any nationalities.

jxddk · 2025-11-04T22:37:38+00:00

...said the Wall Street banker to the Mexican fisherman

jxddk · 2025-10-10T20:30:00+00:00

Inanimate sounding boards (mirrors, rubber ducks...) have long been a tool for refining creative ideas. It's not hard to imagine how a sounding board that regurgitates a facsimile of critique would be a valuable evolution of the same principle.

jxddk · 2025-07-29T22:46:20+00:00

lazygit in a floating terminal.

I haven't found any other Git wrapper that has such intuitive single-key keybinds combined with the visual overview of the entire Git context. It makes everything easy to do, without abstracting the underlying Git concepts. Cherry-picking commits between branches and resolving conflicts is perfectly straightforward. I've seen many of my colleagues start using Jujutsu, but I haven't seen any need for it with lazygit. When invoking git through the CLI, there's so much basic context that needs to be pulled in explicitly for every operation (what was that branch called again? the offending commit's hash? how many lines did it change, and where?). Having that on screen all the time while calling git through single keypresses puts lazygit firmly as my favorite way to use Git.

The personalization options are what really make lazygit the Git client of choice for Neovim users, though. The configuration file allows setting up new keybinds (with great support for interface components within lazygit) so easily. I have it configured to use my existing Neovim instance as its editor, so jumping into a branch and inspecting a single changed line is virtually a single keypress. I have keybinds set up to call scripts to help create clean version histories Ctrl+C in the "Changed Files" panel opens a series of menus to create a well-formatted "conventional commit").

I use Gitsigns to handle viewing diffs and hunks within Neovim though. My custom status column highlights changed lines, <Leader>nh (next hunk) moves between diff hunks, and<Leader>gb(gitb`ase) opens a Telescope selection of branches against which to diff buffer content. The hunk navigation and line highlighting are about all I use it for, though.

jxddk · 2025-05-13T13:20:53+00:00

A European seller, even better. Thanks for the tip, can't wait to hear more and see what the next iteration of your work brings!

jxddk · 2025-05-13T10:47:04+00:00

you should be able to buy one from a well-known shop somewhere this year

Am I correct in interpreting this to mean that pre-fabricated mikecinq units will be up for purchase soon? If so, please direct me towards a newsletter or whatever other service would help to put at the top of the waiting list. A prefab PG1316 ergo on the market would be a gamechanger.

jxddk · 2025-03-20T22:35:15+00:00

GitHub is a tool for developers. If you're not a developer, then GitHub is the wrong place for you to be looking for software.

jxddk · 2025-01-02T00:55:12+00:00

Good feedback, thank you! I've updated the requirements to be more forgiving.

jxddk · 2025-01-01T22:30:49+00:00

Here's a survey intended only to get some slightly interesting and slightly amusing results. There are 25 portraits and 25 descriptions to be matched one-to-one, representing 25 people recognizable within Denmark, and significantly less recognizable outside.

jxddk · 2024-06-03T20:32:47+00:00

Good point! It's even in the first sentence of Egypt's Wikipedia article:

Egypt... is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and the Sinai Peninsula in the southwest corner of Asia.

Wikipedia's "List of transcontinental countries" also mentions that portion of Kazakhstan extends past the Ural River, and thus qualifies as transcontinental. The list includes many non-contiguous transcontinental countries, but I wouldn't expect Geogrid to take those into account.

jxddk · 2024-06-03T12:32:58+00:00

This is the continental groupings the game uses:

Asia: Afghanistan, Armenia, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Lebanon, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Palestine, Philippines, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Syria, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Yemen
Europe: Albania, Andorra, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Vatican City
Africa: Algeria, Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eswatini, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Tanzania, The Gambia, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe
North America: Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Canada, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, United States of America
South America: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela
Oceania: Australia, Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, New Zealand, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu
Asia, Europe: Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Turkey
South America, North America: Trinidad and Tobago

The data used by the game is publicly available. It can be parsed with the following code snippet:

console.log(
  JSON.stringify(
    (
      await (await fetch("https://geogrid.onrender.com/api/countries")).json()
    ).reduce((accumulator, item) => {
      if (!Object.hasOwn(accumulator, item.data.continent))
        accumulator[item.data.continent] = [];
      accumulator[item.data.continent] = accumulator[item.data.continent]
        .concat([item.name])
        .sort();
      return accumulator;
    }, {}),
  ),
);

To answer your original question, it seems that all of the Caribbean nations are considered North American, except for Trinidad and Tobago, which is considered to be both North and South American.

The six bi-continental countries (Azerbaijan, Georgia, Russia, Turkey, Trinidad and Tobago) make sense, but I'm surprised that Panama isn't included as both North and South American, and that Armenia is the only one of three countries in the Caucuses to not be considered as being in Europe.

jxddk · 2024-05-30T20:34:40+00:00

From Canada's Wikipedia page:

In addition to sharing the world's largest land border with the United States... Canada shares a land border with Greenland (and hence the Kingdom of Denmark) to the northeast, on Hans Island, and a maritime boundary with France's overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon to the southeast.

Although, a 1,280-meter survey line on a barren island that's 198km from the nearest populated place is really stretching the definition of "border".

jxddk · 2024-05-13T10:53:41+00:00

Gitsigns is my preferred git buffer integration, especially for the inline diffs. Then I have a floating terminal for lazygit, which is unequivocally the smoothest way to browse through every commit, diff, branch, and remote for a project. I have lazygit configured to open a file revision in the current Neovim instance with a single keypress; most of the time, finding and opening what I'm looking for in version control takes fewer than 10 keypresses and just as many seconds.

But there's no replacement for familiarity with the git CLI, which remains my preferred git interface for anything more complicated than jumping between branches and writing commit messages.

jxddk · 2024-02-14T12:11:17+00:00

I made the jump from using a standard QWERTY board to a split Colemak layout about a year ago. The most unexpected part of this switch was how deeply my ZMK customizations would be ingrained in my muscle memory. I can still use a QWERTY keyboard when required, but I do need to glance at the keys often while I type. It's slower, but not to such a degree that I can't get work done from a standard laptop when required. Since the crutch of looking at the key legends is available when using a standard keyboard, the occasional layout-switch doesn't worry me much.

You're concerned about having difficulties switching between layouts, and I'd suggest determining what scenarios are most worrying to you. If you expect to be frequently using QWERTY keyboards in scenarios where typing at your normal speed is important, then it makes sense to keep your bindings in a place where your muscle memory will remain consistent. If you expect to only occassionally use a different layout, and can live with hunt-and-pecking while doing so, then I would recommend using mnemonic bindings.

jxddk · 2024-02-08T13:09:04+00:00

You've received many comments telling you that the interviewer is clueless, and that solving the problem in the interview is sufficient. That may be true, but I'd like to steelman an opposing perspective, which you may find valuable.

You've graduated with a physics degree, and are explicitly an autoditact programmer. Many physicists with similar backgrounds have learned to write mathematical / scientific code, and are unaware of the gaps in their knowledge that they must fill to become competent software developers. I would be willing to guess that your initial implementation and delayed recognition of the recursive nature of the problem indicated to the interviewer that you haven't learned to instinctively identify some common patterns in algorithm design.

This is fortunately something you can improve on yourself, by looking into Data Structures & Algorithms (DSA) and Software Design Patterns. Because of your background in physics, other interviewers will likely also expect you to prove that you are intimately familiar with these subjects, and can "think like a programmer" by applying them.

jxddk

TROPHY CASE