nicbou

36 ms·

931.
by nicbou 1y ago
Commerzbank seems like a distillate of everything that is wrong with German bureaucracy and business culture. I have an account with them, but only because I can't figure out how to sell ~€500 of stock and shut it down.
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by nicbou 1y ago
I am addressing those who won't read something written by a terrorist.
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by nicbou 1y ago
Seeing my old home city stirs something in me! Oh how I miss it sometimes. I am not sure I agree with this method, especially for younger people who have never experienced the things they want. When I was twenty, circa 2015, I would have se
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by nicbou 1y ago
Despite the fact that it was written by a terrorist, it’s a correct recommendation. It has an unexpected staying power, even if you fully disagree with it.
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by nicbou 1y ago
Is it safe to assume that you were born in Germany? The system is a lot less friendly to newcomers who have to do everything at once. It's full of catch 22 situations. That aside, Germany is a federation and every state, city, office a
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by nicbou 1y ago
It's a myth. Germans are methodical and risk-averse, but definitely not efficient. Things to get stuck at the precise point in time when they were over-engineered, and never move from there. As a result, German bureaucracy tends to rel
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by nicbou 1y ago
I'm doing my best! I think I have made Berlin's bureaucracy a lot more approachable, but there's only so much you can do as a single person without official backing. Or if spun around, it's incredible what can be done by
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by nicbou 1y ago
It generally means someone translating your information to the format the government employees expect, because each attempt costs multiple weeks of waiting. Basically, if there is a 6-week response time, you want to get it right on the firs
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by nicbou 1y ago
In Germany there is also a strange zone where people bring sanity to government processes that have no business being this complicated.
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by nicbou 1y ago
My industry (immigration to Germany) has many of these services. The line is easy to draw: the cost should be proportional to the convenience it creates. Basically, is it a service or an unlicensed toll booth?
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by nicbou 1y ago
I have made the front page a few times, and I loved it. The discussion is so good, not to mention the random emails and LinkedIn connections. It's very validating when the topic would be too niche for other communities. Having a high
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by nicbou 1y ago
I call it “move slow and fix things”. Build a simple thing that solves a problem really well. Keep it scoped to your area, your crowd or a narrow set of problems. Resist the urge to do everything, and instead just keep refining. This has be
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by nicbou 1y ago
You're right about that. Paul Graham talks about "sanding" your writing - smoothing the rough edges - and that fits how I work. Basically, just reread and re-sand until the text just flows. Simplify the idea until no word can
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by nicbou 1y ago
LLMs use the work of other people without payment or attribution, and uses the models they train to compete against the people whose work they stole. It's a parasitic relationship, an invasive species destroying an ecosystem. Farmers s
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by nicbou 1y ago
I have never tried seriously coding with AI. I just ask ChatGPT for snippets that I can verify, to save a few round trips to Google and API docs. However the other day I gave ChatGPT a relatively simple assignment, and it kept ignoring the
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by nicbou 1y ago
How does that work in an AI-supported development process? I'm a bit out of the loop since I left the industry. Usually there is a lot of back and forth over things like which fields go in a form, and whether asking for a last name wil
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by nicbou 1y ago
I would measure it in multiples of the median income. At 5-6x I imagine that you can buy anything you want but not everything. You are still somewhat price sensitive but rarely bothered by a setback or an expensive meal.
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by nicbou 1y ago
Don't change anything on account of my personal taste. Here's a reddit post about the "LinkedIn writing style": [0]. It reads like a series of cliffhangers that never lead anywhere. It sounds like this [1] and feels like
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by nicbou 1y ago
The main issue with AI is that it still relies on the industries it destroys for its training data. You still need people to cover the news, to review products, to write about their feelings and to find new things to talk about. AI just den
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by nicbou 1y ago
Yes, PSD2 is overall an excellent thing. I used to be able to scrape my data with just a username and a password. This is a massive improvement.
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by nicbou 1y ago
I was really disappointed by that. I still can't easily retrieve a list of my transactions.
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by nicbou 1y ago
This is hardly a suitable analogy. Big tech is inserting LLMs before content. They're using people's work to compete against them and strangle them out.
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by nicbou 1y ago
Why should people be in either crowd? The internet needs dedicated professionals too. Someone has to test vacuum cleaners, do investigative journalism, report about quickly changing events. This requires more time than the merely passionate
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by nicbou 1y ago
If they did it any other way, no one would ever have found that website. Don't hate the players...
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by nicbou 1y ago
Or extinction
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by nicbou 1y ago
Multiplication requires something to multiply. My point again is that if you destroy any incentives to put useful things on the internet, we'll have nothing to train AI on.
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by nicbou 1y ago
People didn't get paid, but they got rewarded in other ways: attribution, gratitude, community. If I tell an immigrant what I do, there's a pretty good chance that their face will light up because they've used my website. It
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by nicbou 1y ago
As someone who is currently threatened by the Google Zero, thank you. This applies to recipes, but also to everything else that requires humans to experience life and feel things. Someone needs to find the best cafes in Berlin and document
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by nicbou 1y ago
> New models can be trained completely on generated data. How does that account for all the things that change in the world, but in ways only humans can observe? How can AI discover that a beloved tourist destination has turned to crap,
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by nicbou 1y ago
The main difference is that the click economy did not rely on printed books and magasines' continued existence. It could produce its own original information. A magasine author could become a blogger, and they could still write their o

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