> China now has more robots per 10,000 workers than Germany.

This is truly a sleeper change in manufacturing that most of Europe has not been following. There is little public talk about how to improve factories in Europe.

www.ft.com/content/7244...

It’s crazy to think that Schengen is less than 30 years old (and more recent than that in some countries)

It’s such a defining part of the modern European experience that it’s hard to imagine it not existing, even if I was alive then.

From the @europeanreview.bsky.social

Let’s recap:

BBC uses custom Elixir DSLs to serve

📈 600m+ monthly unique views
💻 12 servers (down from 100
🧑‍💻 7 #elixirlang engineers!

Mind blowing! 🤯

The New GitHub Innovation Graph data shows the EU overtaking the US in git pushes. 📊

How else is the global developer landscape shifting? 🤔 Explore 5 years of trends ⬇️
github.blog/news-insight...

2024 terminou com um excedente orçamental de 0,7% do PIB. Acima do previsto pelo Governo (0,4%) e abaixo do valor de 2023 (1,2%). Para este ano, o Governo espera um superavit de 0,3% do PIB, embora o Banco de Portugal antecipe já um ligeiro défice

Free sample of my "Bug Hunt : Volume 1" guidebook is now live.

Check it out here:
bh-1.skillstopractice.com

(10 of 56 exercises included)

Please preorder if you expect the full guide will be useful to you after trying the sample.

Much more to say on all this, but for now, happy hunting!

"It’s impossible to read about the internet-based frenzy of the late 1990s without drawing parallels with the AI-based frenzy we’re experiencing now. (...) In 1999 the price-earnings ratio for the S&P 500 hit 33, which looked, and was, crazy. As I work on this post, the PE ratio is about 30."

for those who believe nothing can get better: you don't have to get in the way of those who do

my personal favorite comic of 2024

Listening to a discussion of the whole Sam Bankman-Fried debacle, and one thing I remember that struck me, and which I haven't seen talked about, is that it's one of the few cases where a liberal arts education might have had the benefit it's reported to supply. Short thread:

Oddly symbolic that the most valuable European company - ASML, valued at ~$280B - was funded not by VCs, but the EU and the Dutch government. And by multinational Phillips (all this funding in the mid-1980s)

No VC money involved.

From Focus: The ASML Way by Marc Hijink

if you like christmas so much why don’t you merry it

This cartoon is as cute as the dickens...

Interviewing people for jobs that they're not really a match is a horrible experience of crushing innocent people's dreams

be brave
be bold
be unlintable

I need to pick this game back up

It’s so nice to be at the stage of a lifetime of a platform when everyone mostly agrees the people running it are working hard and doing a good job. Let’s enjoy that while we can!

New blog post / newsletter:

noelrappin.com/blog/2024/11...

Object Constellations -- more on ways to use dynamic typing to manage state, in this case, with the Null Object pattern and its relatives.

Email newsletter heading out now...