When doing my Bachelor degree my dad gave me an old thinkpad to run on linux. It was a horrible experience for preparing powerpoints, papers, etc. But I still have that command line muscle memory and an eye to spot errors which really helped me in my career. In my final year I bought myself a macbook because I earned real money doing a consulting internship. But the unix muscle memory stayed, and I found working with IDEs so wasteful. In my first years at my job I rejected word and excel still to do everything in groff and awk.
Set up the machine yesterday. Everything runs just fine. Will use it mainly for academic writing, and light development work, only conceptual work, PoCs.
SAP is much better than the home-grown stuff Tesla, Space X, or Amazon are using. One needs to compare the "new" public cloud solution, rather than the outdated soon not supported ECC system.
I worked with several multinationals, and the Germans always had very complex processes, but cannot at all confirm that they were the least digitised. The Americans were always behind in integrations (lots of file-based stuff), using outdated software, etc. I think the US has this problem that in Germany working for a bigger company is attracting talent, vs. the US where the talent goes to tech, while the rest is really far behind, i.e., Fortune500.
Yes, in Hamburg, Germany there are a lot of lead pipes still. When moving there I got to find this out by a letter from the government, that I should know that I have many times over the limit drinking water which I was consuming. I was always telling others to drink the safe tap water ...
That sounds unusual. Was that warning letter about lead in the lines from the public utility ( https://www.hamburgwasser.de ), or the pipes internal to the house?
No, it is now nine years ago, but I think it was from some state government agency. I know it was not from Hamburg Wasser, as it concerned not the public lines, but from the house itself. And I just saw that beginning next year it will be not allowed anymore: https://www.hamburg.de/politik-und-verwaltung/behoerden/bjv/...
Funny. If you say that kind of thing in some of the German subreddits they'll run you out with pitchforks - "Germany has the best water in the world!" is the refrain.
I'm a tap water drinker myself, but only after moving away from a city where water from other areas had to be imported to reach safe levels (according to EU regulations) because several garbage deposits of thousands of tons leaked for decades unhindered:
One might imagine that diluting such water to reach "safe" levels is not as healthy as water that never saw a toxic waste dump.
It's also not the case that tap water is always safe, even if it's declared to be. During hot summers, there's very often bacterial contamination, requiring addition of chlorine or other antiseptics. But until that is caught, some days might go by.
Sorry, the phrasing might not have been clear. Until that event, I was always propagating to drink tap water. After that I realized that research is important.
Yes, this is so true for me. Especially when I had this revenge arc, where I knew I could be good. Most of my strengths came later. Now people think that I am talented in that stuff, but there's always hard work behind it, and I was mostly the worst in class. But there was always a shining light in sight, where I knew I could, and that it is a good pathway.
I did my PhD while working, so it's not even that either or. And just to add to your point, it is really so rare to get that kind of mentoring, feedback than in a PhD program. It might depend on the program, but you finally have access to the brightest minds in your field and get to socialize with them.
reply