Got any recommendations for good German ones? The market in the UK has been improving a lot but I do still think a lot of them taste like socks, I'd be interested in trying some more high-quality German options if I can find them over here (Aldi/Lidl probably my best bet).
I like Störtebeker Atlantic Ale, IPA style beer. Very drinkable. Available in most super markets and Späti's (late night shops). Here in Berlin there's also the Brlo Nakid which is similar in taste.
If you want a pils style beer, Jever Fun is pretty hoppy. Krombacher has a decent 0.0 beer as well. A bit on the sweet side for me but I have that sometimes. I also recall seeing a beer that was labelled as Feinherb at some point that was pretty tasty. The exact name escapes me.
Several of the Bavarian beer hall style helles beers now also come in alcohol free versions. Very drinkable. They taste very similar. Bayreuther is one that you might find in some shops.
Many of the Hefeweizen varieties also exist in alcohol free versions and are pretty drinkable. Most places will have that available.
Not German but some bars now have Guinness 0.0 in cans. Haven't seen that in the supermarket but it's a near drop in replacement for normal Guinness as far as I'm concerned and I tend to order that when I see it available.
I stopped drinking alcohol a few years ago but I still enjoy going out with friends who do drink. Mostly people barely notice what other people drink. And the lack of a hangover after a good night sleep is a nice bonus. Although you can overdo it. I always joke about all of the downsides of drinking beers without any of the upsides.
Erdinger Alcoholfrei was a low alcohol German "health drink" before it was popular - has been around for about 25 years. It's fairly available in the UK.
The French beer scene has improved over the last 10 years but yeah, it's still quite limited in terms of selection. When I was first visiting there really wasn't much at all outside of Belgian beers, though I've since had a few very good beers from Paris and other parts of the north of the country. Usually only finding them in larger markets, though, as you say.
The UK's beer scene is wildly different to the rest of Europe, and not something that we've managed to export very well. Hell, we could even export cask ale (rare outside of the UK) to Paris without it spoiling these days, yet nobody really does. Whether it's due to taste or the awkwardness of casks I don't know, but I do think it would meet with success in Paris if someone did it properly. Not all beer has to be refrigerated and fizzy. We have so many varieties that you just don't get with fizzy keg beer, and much of it notably weaker in alcohol content. Some examples:
Mild at ~2.5% (made from reusing the materials used to make Bitter), Session at ~3.5%, Bitter at ~4%, Best Bitter at ~5% etc. IPAs are the hot thing even over here now but we get notably more variations in those than most places too.
I'd be curious to know from anyone in Germany if they have equivalents to these sorts of categories, as what we get from Germany over here tends to all be about the same strength.
Due to ADHD meds I do now have to drink less, and the best non-alcoholic beer I've found so far is Guinness 0%. I'm not a massive Guinness drinker, it's alright but there are other stouts I prefer, but the 0% version is surprisingly close to "real" Guinness and has none of those sock-y flavours that most non-alcoholic beer has.
It is indeed a completely different scene, which is genuinely interested in variety.
It's a bit of a cliche but you really can split Europe into "beer country/wine country/spirits country". France, Italy, Spain and Germany west of the Rhine are wine country. Munich is clearly beer country. And Germany has focused on perfecting a very narrow set of light beers, if you want diversity of taste that's all in the wines. Similarly you're not going to get Parisians interested in beer diversity when they have French wine to argue about.
(It is possible that climate change will shift this; England is starting to produce a few pretty good wines)
Guinness 0% is fantastic. Unlike a lot of brewers the Guinness company were very keen to retain their standards rather than slop out an inferior product to tick a box.
Yeah this has been the hard part for me with both transitioning into a photography business and trying to run a YouTube channel, albeit a different variation on the issue compared to the art world. Both (most) people and algorithms want you to fit neatly into a specific little box, like "high contrast black & white street photographer"; that's the dream for them. They can't deal with or understand somebody who then also takes colour photos of birds, for example. YouTube in particular hates this and has no idea how to show your video to people if it breaks from the niche it thinks your previous work fits into. Many creators find that they get pigeon-holed into the one thing that brings them success and burn out when their attempts to break out of it are met with confusion.
It's much, much harder to build a brand that is you, rather than what people want you to be, but if you can build a brand that is the whole of your personality then you can make a success of anything you publish as people are following you for you, not just your work. As someone with a complete lack of focus this is likely the only way I can make it work for me, but it's still very much a work in progress.
Mallard (and the rest of the A4 class, though that blue is my favourite livery on any of them) will always be the best for me, but I do love steam locomotives. It's utterly beautiful whilst also being extremely good at its role, and that's the definition of design I believe in.
So much of modern design, particularly vehicles, is missing _something_. Maybe it's the lack of hand-rolled panels and everything being slightly too perfect, or maybe we've just lost a bit of that pizazz over the past 100 years.
Honestly I'll take pretty much anything over Matrix. I've tried to get it set up but it just feels unfocused. Too many server variations; none of which are at parity with the complex default stack, and too many clients; none of which I particularly liked. To me Matrix is kinda like Wayland in that early design decisions have made it awkward for how people want to use it in the modern day (in Wayland's example, the absolute shitshow of getting push-to-talk to work in apps running within it).
I'll have to try out Armada to see how it compares, as I'm always suspicious of the claims of decentralised software as they often end up having some unique downsides.
I've never liked configuring nginx I must admit, but I would be curious to see how it would handle this sorta workload. If anyone's experienced in configuring it or running it with lots of slow streamed responses I'd be curious to know your thoughts.
Are you on Linux perchance? I've had a couple of people mention this in the last day. On Mac the font is pretty close to white, but I was sent a screenshot of it in Firefox on Linux and it looked rubbish, and notably greyer for some reason.
Just as an apology in advance for people reading the article on Linux: er, sorry. I've had a few people point out that Firefox on Linux renders the font particularly shitly (it somehow seems to get both the aliasing and colour wrong, wat). I'll fix it soon, but in the meantime using reader mode might save your eyes.
How odd! I did some research into why people have been finding it looks odd and it appears to be tied to Mac doing something called font dilation to slightly fatten up thin fonts when displayed as light text on dark backgrounds, whereas Linux/Windows don't tend to have such a feature enabled by default. Shows how long it's been since I made any attempt at good typography, I've never heard of this before!
I've bumped the brightness of the text on Linux/Windows to hopefully make it a bit easier to read/overpower the anti-aliasing thinning it out. I'll have to go fish out an old ThinkPad to test it properly as I ditched most of my machines outside of my Mac when I quit programming full time (I don't really like any OS but Mac is still the easiest for photo/video I find).
Yep I find Elixir very enjoyable with agents at the moment, I've been developing a lot in it. It helps that I already liked the language and the platform, and now I just have the ability to build out my ideas faster.
I think they're good at it for a variety of reasons, but it likely helps having a smaller and newer community than many languages, meaning less out of date guff clogging up the LLM sources.
Must admit I'd not even looked about. I don't know of any off the top of my head but I'd be very curious if anyone else knows of any. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a number of closed-source ones in use at scale - it seems to be well-suited to it, in my opinion.
It seems to be used by many large companies but with less open source projects of size. I would be interested in trying this proxy in the future if you do opensource it. I use coolify myself but I’ve not had trouble with the default traefik proxy so far.
There's the option of trying something like iocaine (https://iocaine.madhouse-project.org/) behind your current proxy too, which I mentioned in my previous article. It's not quite the same as it doesn't chuck the bots into tarpit requests, which is obviously the most fun bit, but because of that it probably won't kill Traefik like my system did.
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