I recently came accross a text on riding motorcycles and the danger that comes with it. I hope that the text below makes you realize that in some hobbies, the danger is actually the point:
People who do not ride think the danger is the problem. They are wrong about that. The danger is part of the point. Not in a reckless way. Not in a death wish way. In an honest way.
A motorcycle does not pretend to be safe. It does not wrap you in steel and airbags and tell you everything is fine. It puts you out in the open and it tells you the truth. This is real. Pay attention. That is the thing nobody talks about.
The thrill and the danger are not two separate things. They are the same thing. The reason it feels so alive is because it actually matters. Mistakes have consequences out here.
The stakes are real and something happens to a person when the stakes are real. You wake up, you focus, you stop thinking about everything else because there is no room for it. There is only the road and the bike in the next corner.
Most of modern life is built to remove risk, to smooth everything over, to make sure nothing can ever go wrong. A motorcycle gives it back to you. The danger, the focus, the feeling of being awake.
It is not safe. That was never the point. The point is that it is real.
For me this resonates very much with riding the S1000RR on several tracks in Europe with the awesome Racing School Europe. Nothing comes close to trying to hit your brake point at the end of the Mugello Straight while going over 300kph and forcing your head and eyes to look at the next markers so you actually make the corner. The importance of getting it right makes the fog in your brain disappear.
Charging an electric car battery to 100% all the time will wear out your battery faster. Many cars have settings to manage this, and some cars even manage it themselves (like your MacBook, they learn when to charge and how much). Not so much for the Volkswagen e-Up!, but here is a trick to have it always stop charging at 80%.
The past months were hectic. Artificial Intelligence has changed my daily work faster than I expected. In just a few weeks, it went from a fun experiment to something that reshaped how I “write” software, how I think, and even how tired my brain feels at the end of the day. It brings cool new possibilities, but also new challenges. I thought I’d write some of it down for future reference.
Many applications nowadays output json formatted log files so that they can be scraped by the newest hippest monitoring cluster (think of Splunk, Elastic Filebeat, etc). That is of course very nice and I applaud that kind of observability, but sometimes you are just on the machine fighting with a service that does not want to start, or you just want to monitor it a bit more realtime, or you just are not the browser type. Luckily there is a realatively easy trick to this.
This week a colleage of mine shared an interesting video describing 
This article lists a rough feature comparison between currently available European cloud providers and their American counterparts. European cloud is available and abundant. Stackit, OVHcloud, Scaleway, IONOS, Exoscale, Upcloud are all parties you should have on your radar when building critical infrastructure for European clients. The US is proving to be less and less reliable as an IT partner. You’ve got to move.