Christof Damian: 08.2025

Friday, August 22, 2025

Friday Links 25-16

Lots of good stuff again this week.

I recommend listening to the history of TrainingPeaks and coding in the red-queen area.

Leadership

Using postmortems to break out of infinite loops | Adnan Karač | LDX3 London 2025 [YouTube] - a quick talking about how to make them useful.

Team OKRs in Action - they have to be co-created, not top down.

Why Do Interviewers Ask Linked List Questions? - tradition. I last worked with linked lists in C on the Amiga.

AWS CEO says using AI to replace junior staff is 'Dumbest thing I've ever heard' - “How's that going to work when ten years in the future you have no one that has learned anything,”

Engineering

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest is back for 2024 - I think that is cheating.

Vibe Coding: The Shadow IT Problem No One Saw Coming - I recently vibe coded a simple version of Officevibe. I am sure it is full of bugs and security issues, but I could easily have started using this in a company. Now it is sometimes easier to vibe code something, than ask for subscription to some SaaS tool.

Email is Easy - test your email parsing skills

opencode - kind of open-source Claude Code

This Website is Served from Nine Neovim Buffers on My Old ThinkPad - well, that's one way to do it.

Coding in the Red-Queen Era [Podcast] - you have to figure out what you can do, what the machines can't do.

Urbanism

I went to America's road trip hell [YouTube] - pretty, in an ugly way.

Dear Britain, it’s now clear: 20mph zones save lives and don’t slow traffic. Implement them - Sadiq Khan - Dear Germany too.

States rethink a long-held practice of setting speed limits based on how fast drivers travel - this is even worse than the German way

Use of Bicivia bike lanes up 21% in five years, with 75,600 daily users in 2024 - these are inter-city routes

Online tools for IRL amateurbanism - some new ones for me

I changed my mind about these bike protests [YouTube] - I miss critical mass

David Seymour was right to question our compulsory helmet laws - cycling without helmet can be unhealthy, not cycling is worse

Global Insights from The Future Design of Streets [Podcast] - reports from different cities and roles.

Environment

Spain wildfires are ‘clear warning’ of climate emergency, minister says - most are burned ever.

‘Unlike any other kind of fear’: wildfires leave their mark across Spain - this numbers are old, I think it is up to 400,000 hectares now

Spain faces its worst wildfire season in 30 years, with 40 active blazes and more than 30,000 evacuated - a bit newer

Civio - Forest fires map - surprisingly many in the north-east

The Future of Climate Change Is on Mauritius - today's dystopia

Random Raves

The Butterfly Who Flew Who Into The Rave - RISING 2025 (Trailer) [YouTube] - love it. Via The Guardian article.

Accidental Icons: The Roland TR-808, TB-303, SP-404 and More - if you never played around with a 303, you got to try it, in the best case a hardware one.

ChatGPT will apologize for anything - "they're just continuing with your improv session."

There's a Reason Bar Ice Looks Better Than Yours (And You Can Fix It) - my first try at this was a failure. I have to dig out my insulated container.

Why Leather is Unbeatable - Motorcyclist Review while Sliding [YouTube] - I am more a textile guy, but this is fun.

Why isn't anyone Talking bout the INSANE CASSETTE PRICES [YouTube] - my taste is cheaper.

‘I didn’t realise pigs were like, massive’: the London rapper who fell in love with farming - this is a fun watch, and free on YouTube.

Amiga Developer Docs - I am still sad that I threw all of them out, except of the Design Manual.

Scroll bleedthrough - more realistic e-book reading in the browser.

"It's one of the most powerful software sound design tools on earth – and it's free" - Composers' Desktop

How Spain put up wealth taxes – without chasing away the billionaires - seems to mostly work.

AI Is a Mass-Delusion Event - yep

Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash - we will see, the money has interest in it going on.

Denmark to abolish VAT on books in effort to get more people reading - from 25% to 0%.

"In addition to reading and writing SQLite database files, the sqlite3 program will also read and write ZIP archives." - what?

Building TrainingPeaks [Podcast] - another lovely podcast looking into cycling related businesses.

The Life Scientific: Anthony Fauci [Podcast] - more than the Covid guy.

Friday Links Disclaimer

Inclusion of links does not imply that I agree with the content of linked articles or podcasts. I am just interested in all kinds of perspectives. If you follow the link posts over time, you might notice common themes, though.

More about the links in a separate post: About Friday Links.

Friday, August 08, 2025

Friday Links 25-15

I liked the work bringing Doom to the Amiga, without actually using Amiga code.

And I learned some new things about the history of Civility in the BBC podcast.

Leadership

How We Encourage Self-Improvement at Buffer - $1000 is nice, it is more than in many organisations. I don't think it is enough.

TBM 370: Dependencies Aren't Your Problem - "Shift the goal from managing dependencies, to focusing on the throughput of potentially value-creating activities"

Vibe Engineering: A Field Manual for AI Coding in Teams - rather than "vibe coding". I think this mostly has to come bottom up.

How Octopus Energy used culture to reach the top - some good ideas, and some of them might actually be in place. I like that they don't use "no-reply" emails.

Engineering

Cordoomceps - replacing an Amiga's brain with Doom - I used to juggle the Blitter and Copper a bit, but this is pretty out there.

How far can we push AI autonomy in code generation? - not quite there yet, especially about implementing the functionality

Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity - in this research, the developers think they are faster, but are slower.

Vibe code is legacy code - fully agree.

On the use of LLM assistants for kernel development [LWN] - mostly about the policies.

From the archive: Bicycle graveyards: why do so many bikes end up underwater? [Podcast] - because we can't have nice things.

Urbanism

Summer Streets returns with uninterrupted car-free stretch across Manhattan - only in the summer, only some roads, only on Saturday, only in the morning, … well, it is something.

Girona to count number of tourists and map their routes across Old Town - by monitoring mobile phone signals.

The Case AGAINST One-Way Streets [YouTube] - Superblocks are one-way streets, it's not all bad. Big one-way roads are bad.

La nova Gran Via des de l'aire [YouTube] - some more drone shots of the new bits of Barcelona

Random Fires

Visualization of forest fires 2025 Provisional data - I finally found the current data and a visualization about local wildfires.

I Deleted My Second Brain - this was in one of the extra links yesterday. If I deleted my second brain, I had no brain.

The NNCPNET email network [LWN] - go weirdly old school. I used to use UUCP for email.

Germany’s ‘oldest and biggest’ gay nightclub declares bankruptcy - killed by Berlin and apps.

Civility: talking with those who disagree with you [Podcast] - I wasn't even aware of the reformation origins.

Friday, August 01, 2025

Friday Links 25-14

These are too many links. I was on holiday … twice.

I could stagger these, but there will be more next week.

There are still many good things here.

Too many.

I am sorry.

Leadership

How We Plan Retreats, After Hosting 14 over 12+ Years (+ Get Our Retreat Planning Playbook!) - important for fully remote companies, and I didn't often see this done right

Middle managers fade as AI rises - Six people doesn't seem too bad.

Failure to communicate - nice way of putting levels on failures.

Why workplaces should be doubling down on DEI - everybody knows that. We shouldn't listen to the trolls.

Moving from an orchestration-heavy to leadership-heavy management role. - different companies, different types of approaches.

Rands Cheat Sheet, #1 - 1:1s

AOE Technology Radar - A static site generator for AOE Technology Radar

Cofounder & CTO of Geordie AI on the paradox of giving control with Benji Weber - you can't give control to people, you have to create the environment where they can take it.

Engineering

I still care about the code - working with LLMs

de-pixelate_gaV-O6NPWrI - removing pixelation from videos.

State of Developer Experience Report 2025 - "The widening disconnect between leadership expectations and developers' actual experiences"

Using Radicle CI for Development - interesting distributed CI

Cursor makes developers less effective? - apparently you spend more time checking the results.

The JavaScript Date Quiz - this was fun

Shifting Left on Security - The DevOps Handbook [Podcast] - maybe I have to read it after all. (there are more podcasts in that series)

Amazon, Google and Vibe Coding with Steve Yegge [Podcast] - some insights into the companies and why he is back to "coding"

Inside the 3rd largest Rails monolith in the world with Cisco Tech Lead Ed Gibbs [Podcast] - being an outlier is nothing to be proud of.

Environment

A change in the Southern Ocean structure can have climate implications - "we’re seeing that the Southern Ocean is drastically changing, as sea ice coverage declines and the upper ocean is becoming saltier. This could have unprecedented global climate impacts."

M25 protester sorry for delays but has no regrets - It's unfortunate to see where the UK is going.

Afghan taxi drivers beat the heat with handmade air coolers - as all ACs, probably worse for the environment.

First electric flight lands at Gatwick Airport - currently mostly useful for training.

Dams around the world hold so much water they've shifted Earth's poles, new research shows - they also affect sea levels.

The Scale of China's Solar-Power Projects - the future - it's not in the west.

Atommüll bleibt finanziell eine Ewigkeitslast [German] - nuclear waste is a financial burden forever. Germany spends 1.7 billion Euro of their 2.7 billion Euro environmental budget on nuclear waste management.

Primer mapa global de la contaminació lumínica a Catalunya desenvolupat mitjançant modelització avançada [Catalan] - light pollution map of Catalonia

Motherfucking Wind Farms - "like a middle finger to CO2"

Urbanism

Die Stadt der Viertelstunde [German, Paper] - 15 minute city. Many German areas are already 15 minute cities, or can easily reach this goal.

Percentage of Airbnb's in Barcelona - interactive map. It is pretty centralised.

Barcelona moves to limit cruise tourism by reducing terminals from 7 to 5 - are they just going to build bigger ships?

Some nice drone videos from redesigned public spaces in Barcelona

Recorre la nova via Laietana amb dron [YouTube] - the missing bike lane going down is a mistake. There will be accidents with cyclists.
Sobrevola l’avinguda Diagonal, de Glòries a Verdaguer [YouTube] - So nice from above, I haven't used that tram yet.
La ronda de Sant Antoni, a vista d’ocell [YouTube] - the one most tourists are probably not going to see

Between two trees: Vancouver man maps more than 2,600 places to hang a hammock - brilliant idea.

The world's most liveable cities for 2025 - and what it's really like to live there - it's pleasant.

Bicing bike sharing reaches 100m trips since 2019 - The previous one started in 2007.

FEATURE: The pros and cons of the UK’s Low Traffic Neighborhoods - not that many cons?

NYC’s Congestion Pricing Is Paying Off As Motor Traffic Drops Through July - surprise!

Helsinki goes a full year without a traffic death - nice.