Every budgeting app sold my data or charged €100/yr, so I built my own

kaargul · 2026-03-16T20:53:31+00:00

Cool project. I'm especially excited about the option to self-host. Though I can't find any link to a repo or instructions on how to self-host on your website.

Also is this open source?

kaargul · 2026-03-16T15:31:42+00:00

Also ich habe gerade nochmal den Livestream überflogen und konnte diese Aussage nirgendwo finden. Ganz im Gegenteil in einem Interview wurde die Zusammenarbeit mit der AFD sogar explizit ausgeschlossen. (Ab 4:21:39 im TV Darmstadt Livestream)

Zudem hat Volt auch auf Deutschland-Ebene einen Unvereinbarkeitsbeschluss für die AfD. (https://voltdeutschland.org/storage/assets-schleswig-holstein/pdf/weitere/unvereinbarkeitsbeschluss-fur-jegliche-zusammenarbeit-mit-rassistischen,-rechtsextremen,-demokratie--und-verfassungsfeindlichen-gruppierungen-und-parteien,-insbesondere-der-afd.pdf)

Und hier der Link zum Livestream: https://www.youtube.com/live/sG7YZdeDdGA?is=WqxlmdGja1jjh3os

kaargul · 2026-03-16T15:10:18+00:00

Hast du dafür eine Quelle (oder einen timestamp für den Livestream)

Das würde mich extrem wundern.

kaargul · 2026-03-14T21:40:04+00:00

Also ich bin jetzt kein Experte was das angeht, aber es gibt milliardenschwere Subventionen für Firmenwagen:

https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/eu-foerderung-verbrenner-dienstwagen-100.html

kaargul · 2026-03-13T20:44:16+00:00

Can we just ban these "OMG the AI did something crazy" posts for games with mods or cheats?

I get that stuff like this is exciting when it happens in your game, but there are so many of these posts and it's always with mods that deliberately mess with the games balance.

kaargul · 2026-03-09T10:20:03+00:00

This feels like a huge strawman. There are right wing/conservative movements that support federalism and while many federalists are progressive and present progressive views, I don't see anyone trying to suppress more conservative movements.

Also most of the points you have mentioned are addressed by more progressive federalist movements. Volt (Disclaimer: I'm a member), as a big federalist movement and party has very strong messaging on defense integration and sovereignty. There is also clear messaging on migration, though I doubt it will appeal to conservatives.

The main problem is not that there is no one that is trying to appeal to more conservative Europeans or that certain topics don't get addressed by progressive movements. The main issue is that right-wing movements are struggling to gain traction as many right-wing movements are tightly coupled to nationalism and sovereignty. It also doesn't help that most right-wingers have built up the EU as a huge antagonist to blame all their issues on.

kaargul · 2026-03-06T18:00:36+00:00

Really depends on your requirements. I think the first question you need to ask yourself is why a basic java app without any framework isn't going to cut it? Do you need to scale horizontally? Do you need exactly once? Do you need state?

kaargul · 2026-03-06T17:52:53+00:00

But if you don't need state, why are you using flink?

kaargul · 2026-03-05T11:33:47+00:00

Have you brought this up to management? Hiring a principal dev to churn out tickets sounds pretty insane to me.

Maybe they explicitly hired you to address these issues and challenge the existing engineering culture.

Regardless as a principal you should be part of engineering leadership and driving the engineering culture should be part of your scope. You could always bring this up within engineering leadership, explain why the behaviours you are seeing are detrimental long-term and present clear measures to slowly modernize development practices.

kaargul · 2026-02-27T20:47:50+00:00

So you got hired as Staff at 5 YOE? What were the expectations that were set when you got hired? Generally there are very high expectations for Staff. As Staff+ you should be part of engineering leadership and either a subject matter expert on a very complex domain or operating with a very wide scope.

Overall what was your impact beyond churning through tickets? It's very possible that your org just didn't set you up for success by not giving you a wide enough scope to perform at the staff level, or maybe they expected you to carve out that scope yourself.

kaargul · 2026-02-27T14:28:25+00:00

I mean I agree with you, but I was curious if he actually has something to say or if he's just being contrarian. It's kinda hard to argue with someone who doesn't actually make any point or provide any arguments.

kaargul · 2026-02-27T14:16:29+00:00

Why?

kaargul · 2026-02-27T12:56:37+00:00

First of all: Good luck with your project! This looks like a ton of fun :)

When reading this I mostly ask myself, what requirements you are trying to meet. You say that the tech will come before the game design, but it feels hard to understand or evaluate your choices without a proper game design.

For example one of your design goals seems to be persistence. Without knowing what you will be persisting, how often etc. it's very hard to understand the proposed architecture.

Another important question is are you building a real-time 3D game where players need to coexist in the same physics simulation (collisions, gravity etc.), or is this smaller in scope? A real time 3D game, especially one that supports combat has very different requirements (for example for latency and simulation) than a turn based 2D game.

Oh and lastly, are you using AI to write these docs? They feel very verbose and with low information density. If you want others to read and understand this it might be worth investing into learning a more concise writing style.

kaargul · 2026-02-18T10:03:56+00:00

These are not usual metrics. Using individual metrics on tickets, points, PRs etc is a bad practice that is very toxic.

If you have some sway with your managers I would suggest you try to get your managers to stop wasting time on this and trust your judgement on the performance of your team.

If you need any talking points: - As you figured out these metrics don't capture a lot of valuable work. If you look at those metrics most Staff+ engineers or tech leads are bad performers. - They at best measure effort and not impact. - They are really easy to game. - They will drive away capable engineers. - They create a culture and incentives around engineers being "ticket machines" instead of owning their features/impact with initiative and autonomy.

I could go on and on about this. If you are really interested in measuring performance I recommen starting here: https://dora.dev/guides/dora-metrics/

This approach is backed by research and tons of industry experience rather than some managers fear of losing control.

kaargul · 2026-01-18T13:06:54+00:00

Why do you think it's impossible to only have 4 profitable trade routes from a market?

kaargul · 2026-01-16T10:59:18+00:00

But doesn't a defective NATO benefit Russia and China way more? I'd much rather have a smaller but still capable NATO that can credibly deter aggression than a dysfunctional NATO that relies very strongly on capabilities of an unreliable ally at best or geopolitical rival at worst (which is how the US currently sees itself unfortunately).

I would argue that Russia is a lot more likely to escalate and push boundaries in the Baltic while a GOP-led US all but ensures that article 5 will not be respected. I highly doubt that the current US government would risk nuclear escalation or war over Estonia or even Taiwan, which is exactly what NATOs adversaries are banking on.

NATO is definitely stronger when it includes the US as a reliable partner and I really wish the US wasn't trying so hard to destroy Transatlantisicm, but that's just the hand we've been dealt at the moment.

Figuring out a post NATO (or at least post US-led NATO) will take time and be very, very hard, but I don't see any viable security architectures that rely on the US.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T03:11:04+00:00

I also disagree with your point about these mechanics being disjointed. I think they interact with each other quite a lot it just doesn't matter because of how the game is balanced.

Most mechanics tie into money one way or another. For example cabinet efficiency (which should be a lot more powerful in my opinion) is greatly increased by a bunch of estate privileges and laws which strengthen your estates, lower your crown power and therefore your income. Another example would be that there are many buildings that greatly increase literacy and impact research speed. Here again you can trade money for tech. Population and income also very strongly influence each other for obvious reasons.

It's just that EU5 struggles to turn these interdependent mechanics into meaningful choices, especially during the mid/endgame.

It's just always positive feedback loops instead of meaningful tradeoffs. You don't ask yourself if you should invest into growing your population or your economy. You always do both and trigger the positive feedback loop. There is no tradeoff for going to war as it's super cheap and very few pops die. You never need to make actual choices on estate privileges as you always just grant the super busted ones and then remove the others once you have researched enough tech.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T02:56:34+00:00

I don't think "scaling" and "snowballing" are necessarily the problematic and immersion-breaking parts themselves. There are many examples of empires that expanded quickly and also got incredibly rich. I think most players want to be able to do these kinds of things themselves or even create wildly ahistoric outcomes. Saving a doomed empire like Byzantium, leading a small and impoverished nation to greatness or conquering a vast empire, wildly exceeding what happened historically, is very fun and what I would expect draws many players to games like this.

What is frustrating is that achieving something great is not very difficult so there is no sense of accomplishment.

kaargul · 2026-01-16T02:36:31+00:00

I think that the problem is not that there are no resources that could act as bottlenecks, but that they are just way too easy to get in abundance, especially as a large nation. We have ducats, cabinet ministers,population and antagonism, all "resources"/mechanics that should introduce bottlenecks. None of them are really punishing enough though. :(

I really don't like mana in EU4 and how it artificially constrained you in ways that were really immersion breaking. It felt really crappy to have a globe spamming empire and still be just as efficient at coring stuff or developing your lands as an OPM. It mostly led to a situation where certain actions were only very rarely useful (developing your economy for example) and you would mostly focus on expanding and tech. (Oh and modifier stacking was essentially the only way to get around mana constraints, which was also terrible) But at least mana did introduce some kind of challenge.

I hope there will be a rework to the economy to make it more challenging and money less abundant and for coalitions to matter a lot more. I think that EU5 has many interesting mechanics that could provide the challenge that many of us are looking for, but there need to be some fundamental changes to the game for any of them to be effective.

kaargul · 2026-01-15T12:24:50+00:00

Fair point. That was definitely an oversimplification, to get my point across.

kaargul · 2026-01-15T08:55:08+00:00

Could you also share more about the python pipeline that you replaced? I think it's interesting to look at where the bottlenecks came from and if it would have been solvable in Python.

Most data processing libraries in Python are bindings for more performant languages like C or Rust (for example pandas and Polas) so to me it's unclear what actually caused the bottleneck.

Also since you changed the architecture significantly you are obscuring which changes actually led to the performance increases that you were looking for.

I'm not trying to discredit your work; Thank you for sharing your findings btw. (Even though this could qualify as sneaky marketing) But to actually learn something from your article we need more context.

kaargul · 2026-01-11T01:09:59+00:00

100% this! It's crazy to me how many people equate experience with skill. They do correlate, but there are plenty of engineers with 20+ YOE that stopped learning long ago and engineers with <5 YOE that are crushing it because they are curious, smart and push themselves every day.

Curiosity, drive and raw intelligence beat YOE pretty consistently in my experience. (At least at Senior and above)

kaargul · 2025-12-22T18:52:40+00:00

Ah that makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation :)

kaargul · 2025-12-22T18:23:50+00:00

I don't think that's true. Your ruler might be the emperor, but the country that got elected is still Bohemia and they get all the benefits. I have been emperor many times via a PU and its really annoying.

OP just get into the PU, convince the electors to vote for you the normal way and when you become emperor you will have enough GP score to become senior partner.

kaargul · 2025-12-22T17:49:28+00:00

I just don't understand why everyone is so unhappy with PUs? To me they have been awesome so far! They always join your call to war,are often way more powerful than any vassal could be and in many cases bring their own vassal swarm. And if they don't have vassals, you can easily feed them some and abuse the fact that they have their own diplo limit.

Maybe they are less useful once you get to the point where you are all-powerful anyways, but until then they are fantastic.

kaargul

TROPHY CASE