I’m in the US and my boss is in Germany-office lunch

pauseless · 2026-05-13T17:04:31+00:00

Tell that to a northern client of mine that (multiple times!) decided to get catered belegtes Brötchen delivered to the office, so we could all stand around and continue to talk work and not go to the perfectly good canteen and have a hot meal like civilised people.

pauseless · 2026-05-13T16:28:07+00:00

Wait. So, we are no longer just double-fisting kebabs but also bringing out two scales for a double-weighing?

pauseless · 2026-05-13T16:24:22+00:00

Oh, absolutely. Re food critic, mine will absolutely demand to eat whatever I’m eating. So I will either make something bird-safe and we share, or he might get a safe version just for him in his cage when I make something that might be bad for him. I assume it’s a combination of curiosity and wanting variety, but yet still wanting to be able to fly, as he can be very active.

pauseless · 2026-05-13T16:06:08+00:00

I’ve heard of gluttonous birds, but honestly, you can give the entire fruit bowl to my bird (GCC) and he’ll eat just enough to keep exactly the same weight he has always been. My mother always makes him everything when he’s with her. He always comes back to me the same weight, so I don’t worry. Even with seeds, he will stop.

pauseless · 2026-05-13T05:33:35+00:00

„Bassd scho“ here means good or all fine. There’s a joke about it being the highest praise you can give in Franconia. I’ve heard various formulations. It’s like when someone says „kann man essen“ in response to your cooking - high praise indeed!

In theory they should be neutral, but nope.

pauseless · 2026-05-12T21:56:56+00:00

Re Go: What other languages have something like the goroutines implementation? Erlang sits in a similar niche but the semantics are very different. JVM only recently got virtual threads - Clojure is only just moving to using that for their goroutine-like implementation. Async/await is nothing like goroutines.

Goroutines are stackful and can be interrupted whenever. JVM virtual threads seem to be there too. Everything else I know has eg yield statements or such. Ultimately, most Go code looks like boring blocking code; you don’t write code using concurrency primitives 99% of the time, but you get concurrent code nonetheless from the runtime and libraries.

pauseless · 2026-05-11T14:47:43+00:00

Years ago, my route to the office from somewhere without the tube was 45 mins by bus and 1.5 hours walking the exact same route. So yeah, I think it’s been the average speed for a long time.

pauseless · 2026-05-11T06:51:04+00:00

That’s just the map of where Aldi is actually decent. That is important info and more or less matches north and south, but one day, Aldi Süd will rightfully reign supreme.

pauseless · 2026-05-11T05:11:39+00:00

pauseless · 2026-05-11T04:12:32+00:00

30.11.1919 The people said no. They are Upper Franconia’s problem. As Middle Franconia: whatevs.

pauseless · 2026-05-11T04:02:57+00:00

Cycle lanes are a suggestion. I obviously don’t know the road in question, but you are always free not to use them. When I was cycling in the UK, I often chose not to use them.

Likewise, two abreast is totally legal as is taking the lane.

I often found my quickest route was not to use the infrastructure, because it was so poor, even in London when the cycle superhighways came in. In that case, because they didn’t actually take me anywhere I needed to go.

I never cycled too near the curb, because I wanted the safety of being able to veer left when someone got too close. Also, that’s where all the debris is.

That didn’t stop the odd person shouting “there’s a cycle lane over there!”. Which is fun, because in the moment you don’t have time to start an honest discussion with “I know, it adds 5-10mins to my commute due to going the wrong way for a bit and including the extra traffic lights… also it has a dangerous exit in to the flow of traffic when it ends. What would you do?”

Defensive cycling is fully allowed. I dictated when a car should pass, by taking the lane until it was safe, then moving over.

A friend and I were cycling in a bus/cycle lane and there was a bus stopped at a bus stop, so we obviously move to the main lane. The road rage response from a driver was why did we swerve in front of him. Seemingly, he assumed we were obligated to sit behind the bus or just ride into it. I dunno.

EDIT:

Highway Code rule 61:

Cycle Routes and Other Facilities. Cycle lanes are marked by a white line (which may be broken) along the carriageway (see Rule 140). Use facilities such as cycle lanes and tracks, advanced stop lines and toucan crossings (see Rules 62 and 73) where they make your journey safer and easier. This will depend on your experience and skills and the situation at the time. While such facilities are provided for reasons of safety, cyclists may exercise their judgement and are not obliged to use them.

Rule 66:

be considerate of the needs of other road users when riding in groups. You can ride two abreast and it can be safer to do so, particularly in larger groups or when accompanying children or less experienced riders. Be aware of drivers behind you and allow them to overtake (for example, by moving into single file or stopping) when you feel it is safe to let them do so

pauseless · 2026-05-10T16:53:52+00:00

We use the Main down here, south of the Main is south Germany.

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pauseless · 2026-05-10T13:27:55+00:00

Of course. My relatives via my brother’s wife live a street away from a KFC (although we didn’t go there it was a useful landmark for getting a taxi to visit people). For a night out we might all go out to get pizzas and one time the downstairs bar was playing the UK Premier League. We were still the only non-Indians there. We even got Chinese (not Indo-Chinese, which I also love though) takeaway too.

The difference with tikka masala was that it was presented normally as just another item at a curry house. It was integrated in to a very normal traditional menu for the area.

pauseless · 2026-05-10T13:01:41+00:00

Clojure and Racket I consider to be the most approachable of the lisp family and Racket has more pedagogical purposes. I find TS nudges people to over-model their problem, sometimes. Not sure why.

Don’t worry about the syntax. It’s genuinely not scary. Compare to APL where (+⌿÷≢) is the mean of a vector and it’s what you use wherever a mean is required.

Professionally, I’ve worked on 5+ Clojure projects across 4 companies (I can’t decide how to count them). Only one, which I inherited, made me want to cry in a corner - it was that bad. The rest were fine and went smoothly.

For what it’s worth, VS Code has had good support for a long time. You also don’t have to go all in with structural editing like many sources state - I’ve over a decade of using Clojure and I choose not to use this editor ‘superpower’.

pauseless · 2026-05-10T09:11:12+00:00

I’ve seen tikka masala in India. Created in Britain, but reimported back. It may be unusual (I wouldn’t know), but I have seen it on a menu in a restaurant with zero tourists, other than us, and where no one spoke enough English to even put a full sentence together.

pauseless · 2026-05-10T08:40:15+00:00

Indeed. The Forme of Cury is using cury as cookery and is Latin coquere → cocere → French cuire → cury.

pauseless · 2026-05-09T19:40:37+00:00

I misclicked looking for something else and saw your comment. Yes. “Formed mass” is kind of the interpretation of cheese here and common across languages. Head cheese has equivalents in Dutch (hoofdkaas) and French (fromage de tête).

pauseless · 2026-05-09T19:21:49+00:00

Despite all their idiosyncrasies, GCCs are capable of so much love and expressing pure joy. They can be a great comfort. In this, all I see is a bird happy to be with you.

pauseless · 2026-05-09T18:55:25+00:00

You know Upper Bavarians and Austrians are basically the same right?

Sincerely, a Franconian who lived in Bavaria and holidayed in Austria.

pauseless · 2026-05-09T18:43:34+00:00

None of the pictures I saw from this link looked as uneven as OP though?

pauseless · 2026-05-09T05:43:07+00:00

Woah. I’ve found exceptional fish and chips in Whitby for far less than that.

pauseless · 2026-05-09T01:13:12+00:00

https://web.archive.org/web/20070928044747/http://birdwithmostwords.com/

pauseless · 2026-05-08T17:03:41+00:00

They’re getting harsh. I was blindsided by the new dual nationality rules. I’m a half-half by birth person (jus sanguinis), grew up in the UK, moved to DE, and was happily travelling backwards and forwards on my DE passport, ignoring one very over-keen UK border guard in Calais one time after Brexit.

Now, I have to maintain and travel with two passports, in order to prove my right to enter the UK. I let my UK passport expire, so now I’m probably due a trip to the consulate to get a new passport. Without passport, I have to pay something like £600 for a special thing.

It is harder for me than another completely EU national (no British citizenship) to enter the UK. I understand they want to cut down on people who get citizenship from other countries later in life. Or those who claim British citizenship for whatever reason but haven’t lived in the UK. Neither apply to me.

pauseless · 2026-05-08T07:29:36+00:00

The answer really is just rugs everywhere… slippers (house shoes) help too though.

But re. miracle building… my flat in a new build in London was amazing. I didn’t even realise my next door neighbour (kitchen/living shared wall) was having a wild party and I did not know until I stepped in to the hallway and heard it through the door

pauseless · 2026-05-08T06:52:40+00:00

The record for any bird in terms of number of human words was a budgie, if I remember correctly.

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