» How to draw a pair of buttocks with Mathematica. Nothing more, nothing less.

» While moving my blog to its new domain, I was setting up URL records from my old domain to the new one. Under the hood, URL records are a convenience service by my hosting service: they create an A record to their own redirection server, which then redirects the users to the contents of the URL record.

Weirdly, it was not working. Now, I am used to weird intermediate states when it comes to DNS records, so I patiently waited, but this one was new: dig showed me the correct records, so did every DNS tool I could find, but still, the redirect did not work as expected, even after I flushed my browser’s DNS cache.

Turns out that the browser caches more than just DNS: They also cache 301 redirects, which is exactly what the redirection server returned. So my browser was following the old redirect and never even hitting the redirection server, oblivious to the fact that the redirection URL had changed somewhere in between.

» Shopify is doubling down on useless meetings. I welcome that - there are multiple factors that lead to meetings with too many people:

• Lack of clarity about who needs to be involved, so people invite more, just to be sure
• Fear of missing out, so people join meetings just in case
• Lack of clarity about what is going on in a meeting, so people join meetings just to find out in the middle that they can neither contribute nor learn
• And, of course, Meetings that should have been emails.

» The weather is now too warm to operate the machinery for artificial snow. I used to work in the ski industry for a bit and can tell you that most resorts do not have a Plan B. Skiing is a luxury activity, you can’t compensate this with summer activities such as climbing.

» I just made some page changes, to make the blog overall more suitable for tiny, tweet-like posts like this one. They should now look much more compact and better. Under the hood, I also reduced the friction for me to post something on the page (it’s still not as easy as tweeting though).

» Finally: A LOL verifier.

» I did not realize that Monty Python’s Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook Sketch had a real inspiration, but here it is: English as She is Spoke.

» How to set a narrative without facts (all links in 🇩🇪, sorry!):

Part I: The police complains loudly about attacks on New Year’s Eve, without providing any numbers at all. Basically, they are just complaining.

Part II: Jens Spahn claims that “unregulated migration” is to blame. Again, no proof. Which is ironic since he was part of the government that was in charge until very recently, and while migration to Germany was at an all-time high.

Part III: tagesschau takes the unfounded complaints and unproven statements and speculates about the reasons, even quoting psychologists that give their assessment based on assumptions on top of assumptions.

And now we talk about immigration and migration again. Meanwhile,the police finally released more concrete numbers (reducing their initial assessment) and nationalities (18 different nationalities, with Germans being the biggest group).

Addendum: Here’s a much more nuanced article on that matter, which points out - among other things - that crimes committed by immigrants is on the decline, and that this whole thing might be due to toxic masculinity more than anything else.

Addendum: The number went down again, now we’re talking about 38 people, the majority of them German.. Seems like the police simply lied, and given how trustworthy the police is, most people, including Germans, believed this.

Small detail: In many media outlets, the outrage is free with the wrong, uncorrected numbers being freely available online, while the truth is behind a paywall.

» When you order Habeck-Style PR on Wish.

Related:

• Lambrecht’s apology according to the Postillon.
• Lambrecht thinks that since this is a private video, she doesn’t need to justify anything, which irritates Anastasia Biefang, the queer soldier who was reprimanded for (privately) looking for partners in a dating app.

» I fed songtexts into an AI. Here is the result: Hotel Dall-E Fornia

» How to turn a smartphone into a boring tool.

I will try to do the same now with my iPhone, by:

• Deleting Twitter and Instagram
• Removing everything from the home screen except the apps that I actually frequently use
• Removing all widgets from the home screen
• Setting “discrete” notifications to “off”
• Disabling notifications for most apps except for my work chat and work mail program, as well as the messenger where I stay connected to my family
• Scheduling D&D mode from 1 hour after work to 1 hour before work
• Disabling notifications on the lock screen

I will try this out for one week and see how it goes!

» Useful rules for interpreting metrics, such as Lead Time or Cycle Time.

» Here’s Spotify’s Retro Kit.. Even though it’s a few years old, it’s a good read, and a good complement to my all time favorite, the Retromat.

» Currently, this post about how shoddy code causes 6 minute long loading times in a game is going around. I think this is an interesting case, because it underlines the fact that if you are selling goods which are exceptionally high in demand, and for which there is no competition, then you can drastically save on quality. And that includes customers having to suffer minute-long loading times, either because no one noticed, or, more likely, no one cared.

And there will be no consequences! It does not matter how annoyed people might have been with GTA Online, they will still buy GTA VI, because the mechanisms of capitalism don’t really apply in this context.