(Justin)

Tech nerd from Sweden

  • 1 Post
  • 45 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Yeah this is definitely a brand merger in some ways.

    I imagine it might be due to profitability, too. I think the rate of articles has slowed down in the last 5 years, and I think losing Ian Cutress’s analysis was also tough for their articles.

    It feels like a lot of the hardware journalism these days has moved to YouTube, like Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, TechTechPotato, Moore’s Law Is Dead, etc.

    I think Chips and Cheese seems to be the biggest site for detailed hardware analysis these days.



  • Cloud Native development isn’t about making systems unnecessarily complex. It’s about simplifying tools down to common, scalable components, and reusing code as often as possible.

    For example We use kubernetes to run code, because kubernetes is the only platform to run code that can be automated with simple HTTP apis. It is a common platform for computing, much simpler to use than the mess of EC2 instances, cron jobs, and shell scripts that the industry used to rely on. Of course, it is a higher level abstraction than programming everything yourself in Assembly, but that’s the point.






  • Yeah, I agree with the description of Sweden here. There are some really nicely designed, walkable blocks, but there are also seas of big box stores. The big city downtowns are nice, but even the good suburbs are often not very coherent. A new neighborhood will be built with high rises and a nice design, but there are no stores, and the supermarket is 10 minutes away on foot across busy roads.

    There is definitely a lot of value in the “innerstans” and transit-oriented “centrums”, though.

    Im not sure if density is the issue in Stockholm, or if all the suburbs just suck. (insert Paris comparison here) Stockholm’s transit system is still very radial and all the suburbs are super car dependent. There are no urban neighborhoods outside of innerstan, Hammarby, and Sundbyberg. Some new towers along the new subway stations would make a lot of sense, but you’d get an even bigger impact by having more infill development around the single family homes and “towers in the park” miljonprogram.




  • Sweden is ok. Most of the big cities haven’t been emptied out for parking lots, but there are still a lot of urban highways and public squares converted into parking lots. The worst of these is the “centralbron” in downtown Stockholm, where there’s a 6 lane open highway running directly through the middle of the city, running directly alongside the medieval old town. There’s also a huge project going on right now to build a $5B+ urban ringroad straight through the middle of Stockholm’s suburbs and nature reserves.

    The peak of car culture in Sweden resulted in the famous “H-day”, where Sweden converted all of its roads and streets to drive on the right instead of the left. This resulted in dozens of tram lines being completely torn up to make way for cars.

    Thankfully, most of the car-centric projects in the 70’s attempted to include separated biking and walking paths, so biking is actually viable in most places. But its not ideal, with the journeys often being long, winding, and confusing, with many conflict points.

    Zoning is pretty sane, and there’s no missing middle. the housing projects in the 70s even explicitly set targets for building low-rises and row houses. Housing prices are decent, though they have been rising rapidly recently and there is still a housing shortage. I have unfortunately seen some municipalities implement parking minimums.

    Some newer transit-oriented neighborhoods can have world-class urbanist design, but there are also a lot of neighborhoods with big front lawns and two-car driveways. Car culture is very big in Sweden, and I have never met a manager who doesn’t have a fancy car they drive into downtown Stockholm on a regular basis.

    Public transport is very underfunded. Stockholm still has a pretty big transit system comparatively, but funding is basically non existant after various political and economic crises in the 80’s and 90’s. After big construction in the 60’s and 70’s, Stockholm since has only built a single new tram line and some new commuter rail stations since the blue line was finished in 1977. A new commuter rail tunnel was also recently built to resolve a capacity and maintenance crisis on the main rail line through Stockholm, but the new tunnel hasn’t resulted in any servicr increases. The commuter rail system has instead more or less been in a maintenance and staffing crisis for the past two years, resulting in huge service delays. Thankfully, there are finally some big new projects underway to build out new subway and tram lines over the next 10 years.