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Cake day: March 14th, 2025

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  • dack - Dutch

    Dutch is alsjeblieft (informal), alstublieft (formal), thanks (informal), dankjewel (informal), or dankuwel (formal). The former probably means “as you desired” in old Dutch, the latter “thank you well”, and the formal/informal variants simply insert the right word for “you” (je or u). And then there’s thanks being commonly used. Or also bedankt, sounds kinda formal to me as well, not sure when you’d use that instead of dankuwel

    Just “dank” (maybe you wrote that and autocorrupt kicked in?) is not really a thing we say, it just means “thank” which you’d also not say by itself in English (unless you’re Rocky)

    Edit: writing “dank” in an English sentence feels like everyone will think our thank-yous are like dank memes. The pronunciation of the “a” there is as in Clark; the English pronunciation of dank would map to denk in Dutch and means think!


  • Have you ever seen someone use a turn lane to only jump out of it at the last moment?

    Yeah, when they have their turn signal on to indicate they want to change to a different lane

    Leaving the turn signal on when you’re already where you want to be is the more confusing thing. I know most people do it because it’s taught that way in driving schools, but it’s a matter of habit, not actually logical if we’d design the system anew and everyone learned from scratch


  • Interesting. For me, the latter scenario is the most clear. In the first one, they may want to turn into a driveway, just stop on the roadside altogether, switch to a different lane to their right (on a double turn lane), whatever: they’re potentially trying to deviate from the path they’ve chosen to take. If they just want to follow the path they’re on, turn signals off makes the most sense to me

    Of course, if you’re in a country that crosses different traffic directions on green (like Belgian and German lights that go green for you wanting to left turn, but there’s traffic coming straight on) then it’s needed to indicate you’re a turner and not someone going straight on. But then, mixing traffic is a recipe for confusion and accidents anyway (saw a stat recently that right turns having green together with pedestrians increases accidents by iirc some 60% — probably a low number to begin with and so any change looks big, but still crazy to me that countries continue to choose this)

    Another scenario that appears more universally, where you have one lane for two options (straight on or right, for example), the turn signal is also needed of course: there is no path you’ve already chosen and so you need to show intent to change


  • You mention 150€/day in the comment thread. I’m struggling to think where in the world you couldn’t stay on that budget if you spend some time looking for cheaper accommodation (hostel or something like airbnb) and mind a bit where you eat. Australia seems (per Wikipedia) to have the highest minimum wage at 18$/hour, ×8h to € comes to 127€/day. Sure, temporary accommodation costs like five times more than more permanent places, but in terms of food and transport you can pretty much do whatever the locals do so that, on the whole, you should be able to meet that budget pretty much anywhere

    In Europe, Iceland might be the only place where you’d really have to plan ahead to get to an average of 150€/day as tourist. It’s Europe’s most sparsely populated country and lots of things need to be imported, making essentials like food expensive and accommodation options few and far between. If you don’t want to drive a long distance every day (outside of the wider Reykjavík area at least) you’ll easily spend three quarters of that daily budget on accommodation, and with food being expensive even in supermarkets and needing a rental car to get anywhere, you’ll exceed the budget on a lot of the days

    So that’s challenge mode! I’m curious what values people who tried to cheapskate Iceland get to. We were at 290€/day for 2 persons. That’s including the rental car, eating out most days (not at expensive places necessarily, but sometimes simply the only place), and we booked reasonably priced but not always the cheapest option for accommodation. This price excludes costs of attractions like the lava show, boat tour, swimming pool, etc.—the country is plenty beautiful to travel to without needing those necessarily, though I’d recommend all of the above. This amount is for 2 persons, but the car and rooms don’t scale much when you’re alone so a per-person cost price wouldn’t be fair





    • 2 decades: Netherlands
    • 2 years: Belgium
    • 2 months: Finland
    • 2 weeks: Iceland
    • 2 days: United Kingdom
    • 2 hours: Switzerland
    • Somewhere between 2 minutes and 2 seconds: Netherlands, Germany, Belgium all at once

    • 6 years: Germany
    • 6 months: France
    • 6 weeks… this is getting tricky, Luxembourg is probably closest but not close enough to claim this tier
    • 6 days: Poland
    • 6 hours: Sweden
    • 6 minutes: I give up

    I didn’t realise it was a life goal of mine to spend 6 minutes in a country until this post, but now I’m not sure I can unsee this list. Maybe the Vatican is a good candidate for that? Italy can go in the 2 days slot, bumping UK up to 6 weeks another time. Germany will exceed the 6 years slot soon though, maybe I’ll need to visit all sixers to get bingo on a row of sevens instead. And where are we going for 7 seconds? Another tripoint, does that count?




  • The cross-section between high volume and easy to make

    • Vegan replacement products? Easier to make than animals, but low volume so it’s more expensive than it needs to be (and often in a higher tax bracket, classified as candy or whatever)
    • Eggs? Needs healthy animals
    • Bananas are clones of each other. Might become an issue at some point, might not. Apples, too, but there’s many more variants
    • Maize, tomatoes, potatoes? Grown by the bazillion, cheap, afaik needn’t be clones of each other to get (something close enough to) the desired product
    • Rice? The pre-boiled stuff is afaik around the same price as the raw product, that’s how large the volumes are


  • Eyeing the replies, does not one other person here get results constantly flooded with content farms? They’ve gotten significantly worse

    But then, I don’t use Google so maybe this is still better than Google Search?

    It started maybe three years ago, around the same time as LLMs became usable for this, but I’m pretty sure >50% are human-written still. Probably the LLM generates the structure (saves any time they’d have to spend coming up with plausible-sounding texts) and someone from a low-income country is contracted to make it look more legit

    Of course, queries for topics that have a Wikipedia page get Wikipedia first, recipes get tons of big-name recipe sites, products get stores. But when there’s no obvious market around a topic, 3~4 out of 5 results are content farms pretending to have useful information to show unwary visitors ads

    (As an alternative, I still have to try Kagi properly. It seemed on par with DDG when I did a few searches last year, but then their payment processor refused me trying to load my account, support was unhelpful, and I’ve gotten sidetracked since)