thoughts on stuff, views on things
#llm #AI The Nirvana Fallacy is a fallacy that dismisses something on the basis of not holding up to an unrealistic alternative. I see this kind of argument a lot when it comes to LLM - a casual scroll through Mastodon is enough to uncover a handful of things that LLM can't do well, or at all, which serves as an explanation why LLM are overhyped at best, and useless at worst. The canonical example…
Last Update: 2025-12-01 The End of the Year As I am updating this page, I am sitting in a hotel room in Berlin, during my last work related travel of the year. I contemplated skipping this one, but since there's a motto party at work and I have a killer idea for a costume, I ain't going to skip this one. Likewise, my wife and kids have their respective end of year festivities at work and school,…
#Misc The evolution of trust, exlained with Game Theory.
As I am watching Season 5 of Stranger Things, I am catching up on reviews and recaps for past seasons, given it has been years since the last season. What amazes me is that Americans bring up very frequently just how plain weird it is to them that the kids of the series are roaming around the way they do. Commenters then reassure each other that it's a realistic depiction of the 80s, because back…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor 📍 You are here Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 5: A Text Editor Now that hecto can read files, let’s see if we can teach it to edit files as well. This chapter will be lighter on new concepts,…
We, the users, have yielded control over the systems we use bit by bit and handed it over to the tech companies. Opening the devices we use and tinkering with them is increasingly difficult, risks bricking the device and immediately voids all guarantees. There has always been a vocal group pushing back on this, and there have been other people - like me - who didn't mind. As someone from that…
I recently visited a friend, who introduced me to ice hockey (how awesome is that?) and also provided me with a list of movies I missed for one reason or another: Meg and Meg 2, Moonfall, and: Valerian. How awesome is Valerian, please? Yes the main actor has been mis-casted, yes the story itself is shallow, but my gosh, the visuals! The intro alone is an absolute masterpiece.
#misc #scifi I recently found some words about what it is that bothers me about the majority of current media. I actually don't mind sequels per se, nor do I mind reworks or reboots of already-existing work. However, what bothers me is narrow storytelling. Let me explain this with the example of the objectively best series ever, Star Trek. Star Trek is a collection of movies and series which…
In 2022, I started running. As of 2025, I run 4 times a week, around 10 km each time. This note is dedicated to this hobby. Personal Records (PRs): 🏃♂️➡️ 10 km in 49:16 - Silvesterlauf 2024 on Dec 31, 2024 in Münster 🏃♂️➡️ Half Marathon in 1:51:16 - 6. Maxilauf Hamm 2025 on May 18, 2025 Milestones & Races 👟 Sept 21, 2025 : Münster Marathon, Relay Race (two segments) 👟 Sept 19, 2025 : 22.…
#leadership I found a term for the kind of leadership style I prefer: Red Carpeting. In this leadership style, it's the lead's responsibility to roll out the red carpet, ensure everything is in place, so that the stars can shine. The metaphor of a lead being akin to a director for a stage play really resonates with me - because it's the job of the director to ensure everyone can perform to the…
#llm #leadership LLMs want to make me feel smart, but make me feel dumb. When I mentioned this to someone else the other day, they argued that I shouldn't be so insecure, which made me realise that the whole "feeling smart" thing is something I always assumed to be widely known, when it apparently isn't. Let's start with semantics. I am firmly talking about feeling smart here, which is not…
#adhd #productivity #SelfOrganization This article on Managing ADHD has some pretty good advice. Two key learnings for me: I have come to many of the conclusions and strategies outlined in there myself. A very important one for me is writing things down , even if they are trivial, sometimes even then when writing them down takes the same amount of time as doing the thing. The risk of being…
#productivity Here's a short tip to stay on top of things. In my job, I have to stay on top of a lot of things, many of which take months moving along, with only occasional involvement. Sometimes, topics need my attention for a bit, then they disappear from my radar for some time (in extreme cases, even years) before they come back. What I strive to achieve is a state where I can go to any of…
I just watched Everything Everywhere All At Once and loved it (despite the fact that it's way too long). In stark contrast to Michelle Yeoh's performance there, I also watched Section 31 , which has to be the worst Star Trek movie of all time. But at least I can still claim that I watched all of Star Trek...
The #llm sphere is moving so fast - a while back Claude was my favorite LLM, but these days I find that both Claude and Gemini have a strong tendency for sycophancy, overengineering and making mistakes. Gemini is especially bad at this: Whichever problem I throw at it, it a) congratulates me on having hit on a common issue b) designs a solution that goes well beyond what I wanted and c) stating…
#Murderbot is so awesome… Speech? Acid Bath?
I'm currently preparing a presentation about Systems Theory, and I figured it would help me structure my thoughts if I write down some of the things I intend to present - starting with the basics: What is a System? Instead of finding a formal definition, we're going to approach this by investigating an example. Let's assume you're doing your groceries. You approach the checkstand, but you're not…
The #esc this year was one of the best ones I ever saw. Lots of great acts, some very funny ones and Germany got a decent result. Kudos to the host, Switzerland.
OMG, the awesome #Murderbot Diaries are now a series! Here’s the trailer . I loved the books and will definitely re-read them now. The first episode was pretty good, and to my absolute delight they have actually shot episodes of the in-universe Soap Opera Sanctuary Moon . And, almost a given since it runs on Apple TV, the production value is pretty high.
I'm no lawyer, so take this with a spoonful of salt. I ran this story by an LLM which thinks it might be correct. I heard it years ago from a student at a police academy, and it sheds a light on the (sometimes necessary) obscurities of the law. Assume the following: Bob hates Alice and wants to get rid of her. He decides that he is going to poison her. However, his knowledge about the poison is…
Here's a piece of info that I totally missed, which shows just how out of the loop I am for active web development: The View Transition API . This works when clicking an internal link (which results in loading the new document from the server). What it does is: Store a snapshot from the current state on screen Load the page in the background Do a smooth transition from the snapshot to the loaded…
3 years ago, DALL-E was really popular as one of the first widely available AIs capable of creating images. The concept of AI was so new that we needed to learn to actually use it - to prompt it in a way that it produces the desired output. This seemed like such a mysterious art back then that for a short time, people believed that "Prompt Engineer" will be a job in its own right within a year or…
The images in this post have been made with DALL·E mini On a dark desert highway, cool wind in my hair Warm smell of Colitas - rising up through the air Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim - I had to stop for the night There she stood in the doorway, I heard the mission bell and I was thinking to myself: “This could be heaven or this could be…
Not sure where all this inspiration is coming from recently, but here's another #braindump for potential future blog posts: The history of saving, coming from systems like the C64 where saving was neither the norm nor trivially possible, moving on to systems where saving was expensive in terms of time and memory, and arriving at today, where saving as a concept is fading out. Things that might be…
Another short #braindump : the following quote is stuck in my brain and waits to be persisted here at the very least, or reasoned about and turned into a proper post: Der Wurm muss den Fisch schmecken, nicht dem Angler . This translates roughly to: it’s fish who needs to like the worm, not the fisher. Which is a great mantra for #ProductManagement .
Don’t mess with my daughter, she’s level 100.
Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log 📍 You are here 2024 Version Change Log The tutorial overall Moved to new blogging platform and therefore a new design. Fixed weird formatting issues with arbitrary newlines, broken links…
I added a lot of QoL improvements for this page. I logged a lot about what I did here: My Digital Garden Setup . Once I have more time I consider transforming this note into a series of shorter blog posts.
This page is dedicated to my current website setup, my customizations, bugs, rough edges which still exist and potential workarounds. The Setup I write texts within Obsidian.md . I use the plugin Obsidian Digital Garden , which publishes notes of my choosing firstly into a GitHub Repository. Said repo is derived from this template , which houses an 11ty project. 11ty produces a static page which…
philipp flenker 💬 he/him ⋮ 📍Luedinghausen, 🇩🇪 ⋮ 💼 Zalando Hey, I'm Philipp. I'm a husband and proud father. I like to run , and I collect Super Nintendo games. I am an Engineering Manager in Zalando Payments, and a Software Engineer at heart. I like to understand things. Helping teams and people grow gives me joy. philipp flenker 🕤 01 Dec 2025 As I am watching Season 5 of Stranger Things, I…
I started my first blog in 200 9 8. Back then, setting up a blog was a tedious effort, as you had to set up and maintain the server, the database and the software yourself. I only used it infrequently, but it helped me focus on current topics and mentally put things in a certain order. Back then, Blogs where already a firmly established medium, especially since the early Social Media at that time…
Here's a Multi Line Regex for VSCode: [ s S n]+? ( Source ). It comes in handy e.g. when you want to move stuff around in a file, and I use this a lot when refactoring my notes. Let's say you want to use the title tag from your front matter as the first heading: Example.md : --- someprop: "foo" title: "My Title" someotherprop: "bar" andanotherprop: "baz" --- This is my note, it started out without…
Quick #braindump of a few things that popped up on my radar. Some of which might make it into blog posts later, but I wanted to persist them here before I forget. I really enjoyed The White Lotus , Season 3. I didn't like the intro as much as the respective intros of the previous seasons, but the extended version is absolutely awesome. In one of the recent episodes of The Pragmatic Engineer, the…
I now moved all my Mastodon posts over to my Blips page and closed my accounts. I wanted to do the same for Bluesky, but then I realized I closed my account already a while ago. Next, I'm going to delete Instagram (and threads, if it's still active), and then all my social media accounts will be gone!
So the police was lying, or at least heavily exaggerating about #silvester. deutschlandfunk.de/silvester-k…
Its done - flenker.blog and philippflenker.com are now merged again. You’re looking at the new shiny world right now.
It's been around a year since I updated my web presence , and I did it again. A year ago, I moved from GitHub Pages with the then-default, Jekyll, to omg.lol and bearblog.dev . I used omg.lol for my /now page as well as a profile page, and I moved a selection of blog posts to bearblog.dev (and bought flenker.blog to go with it). This time around, I move away from both of these platforms to a setup…
It's been long overdue that I updated my place on the internet. Here's what I did: philippflenker.com now shows a profile page about me instead of my blog. I'm experimenting with status.lol as a way to post about what I'm doing currently, without getting dragged into social media rage mechanics. I've updated my /now page and plan to update it around once every two weeks. I archived my old blog and…
Here is a mystery unsolved which was bugging me for decades - it's about the iconic white railway clocks that used to be on all railway stations at least in Germany. The thing with these clocks is, that once every minute, the hand for the seconds stops for a period of time which is noticeable longer than one second, and I always wondered why this is the case. My most favorite explanation (they do…
My wife and I are re-watching The White Lotus, Season 1 right now. I want to capture here a quote from the resort manager, Armond , who over the course of the season enters a downward spiral, after having been sober for five years. The quote seems like a good opening quote for a potential future blog post about my fear of becoming an addict, so I'm leaving it here: I know you’re too intuitive for…
I wonder what another 4 years of Trump would do to the US. bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-6…
All my bearblog.dev posts have also moved over. There are a few tidbits missing, but all in all I am ready to flip the switch and make this the main page.
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting 📍 You are here Appendices Change Log Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting We are almost done with our text editor - we’re only missing some syntax highlighting. Assignment 32: Colourful Digits…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search 📍 You are here Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 6: Search Our text editor is done - we can open, edit and save files. The upcoming two chapters add more functionality to it. In this chapter, we…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer 📍 You are here Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Let's see if we can turn hecto into a text viewer in this chapter. Representing Text Handling text correctly in a program is a…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output 📍 You are here Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Welcome to Chapter 3, where we'll explore the ins and outs of reading from and writing to the terminal. But before we dive…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup 📍 You are here Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 1: Setup Ahh, step 1. Don't you love a fresh start on a blank slate? And then selecting that singular brick onto which you will build your entire…
How the annotated commits work Most steps in this tutorial are presented as a link to an annotated commit. Each commit shows you the changes you need to make to the previous step’s code to get to the current step, with comments explaining each interesting code line. Here is an example commit . Each diff contains one block per modified file. Each block starts with a header that contains the…
Table of Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Setup Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode 📍 You are here Chapter 3: Raw Input and Output Chapter 4: A Text Viewer Chapter 5: A Text Editor Chapter 6: Search Chapter 7: Syntax Highlighting Appendices Change Log Chapter 2: Entering Raw Mode Let’s try and read key presses from the user. Remove everything in the main.rs and replace it with the following code: use…
The following quiz will help you in finding out how good of an estimator you are. Let's say a good estimator is confident that their estimates are 90% correct, in other words: 9 out of 10 estimates are correct. For the following list of 10 items, please provide a range - a low and a high estimate - that gives you a 90% chance of including the correct answer. Please be careful to not make your…