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  They were planning to build a new massive Opera House in Düsseldorf for over 1 billion €, mostly with the city’s money, but thankfully they’ve cancelled it. Hoping they do something more useful with the planned site.

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  Good lord Merz is such a ghoul Rough English summary: Woman suffering from skin cancer rang Merz's office to complain about the cutting of free skin cancer screening - Merz replies with an autograph. https://www.az-online.de/uelzen/rosche/kanzler-schickt-autogrammkarte-mit-persoenlicher-widmung-an-krebspatientin-aus-suhlendorf-94343612.html

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  I am _this_ close to dropping a large amount of money on a split a/c unit. I can’t with this heat again.

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  Trains are out nationwide in Germany due to the GSM signal network being down, and it’s a complete 50:50 whether it’s DB‘s incompetence or an attack.

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  I thought I was coping with the heat ok at 34°. 37°C in direct sunlight is intensely oppressive. I can’t even imagine 40+.

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  Still 29° at 23:30. So cooked. Not even hit the worst days of the heatwave yet.

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  Gutted that I’ve been out of the country for too long to vote this election. Any rich benefactors want to fly me back to NZ for a day so I can reset my clock?

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  Maybe I live in a bubble but I can scarcely believe the amount of propaganda going around about LLMs and programmers. Out of my team there’s like 1 or 2 enthusiastic about them (but having limited success and wasting a lot of token costs), 2 of us strongly and vehemently against it, and the rest don’t really see the benefit. Certainly nothing fitting the narrative that the majority of the industry is fully on board with them and seeing huge productivity gains. Maybe there are more people with ze...

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  A sweet little borb

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  I guess the nicest thing I could say is that Gloria Steinem was often on the right side of history, but more often on the wrong side. Which is guess is more than you can say about some.

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  Fire alarm started that "you haven't checked my batteries in 5 years" beep at 3AM, as they inevitably do. Slept in the lounge and managed to find a kiosk that miraculously sold a 9V battery on a Sunday... the fucking alarm has a non-replaceable battery.

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  Made Käsekuchen (German cheesecake w/ a sort of cream cheese called Quark) for my colleagues. It’s a thing to bring your own baked goods to celebrate your bday/anniversaries in Germany.

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  So much blossom in Düsseldorf it looks like snow.

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  Helped build some raised garden beds at work today. My plan to become a forest witch if I get hit with the layoff hammer is progressing.

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  Someone tried to break into my apartment building while my landlady and I were both home. Physically tried to break down the front door. Luckily she has a very yappy dog and the main police station is only a couple of blocks away. Not going to be an easy sleep tonight.

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  Some good changes (getting rid of homeopathic funding, raising alcohol and tobacco taxes), some absolutely terrible changes (reducing/eliminating orthodontic services, increasing medication co-payment) coming out of Germany's health insurance changes https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-04/gesetzliche-krankenkasse-reform-schwarz-rot-koalitionsausschuss-gxe

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  Pleasantly surprised that the Preisänderung (price change) from my power company _wasn‘t_ my gas hot water going up but the electricity price going down by 4¢ per kWh (around 10%)

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  I learnt the hard way today what stinging nettle looks like in Germany. Thankfully more mild than the New Zealand native one.

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  GitHub Copilot just announced pricing changes. /r/githubcopilot on reddit if you want to point and laugh at idiots like this

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  I finally slipped up and updated my phone to iOS 26. People weren’t kidding about how bad Liquid Glass looks eh? Time to start looking into a FairPhone.

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  My parents are arriving in Düsseldorf tomorrow evening. Haven’t seen them in person for 3 years so quite excited. Probably the last time they’ll be able to come to Europe, especially for my dad, so I’m going to try and make the most of it.

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  We don’t have the beds ready in our greenhouse at work and the radishes have escaped containment. Unfortunately been nibbled on too.

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  I'm not sure I want to go back to NZ in the near future https://www.stuff.co.nz/politics/360981025/government-wants-replace-8700-public-servants-ai-heres-what-ministers-think-robots-do

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  I‘m so fucking done with NZ aye? Fucking „progressive country“ my arse. Junk science designed only to hurt trans people and Labour probably won’t give af. Getting EU citizenship became a much higher priority https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/595798/nz-first-s-gender-bill-to-be-supported-by-national-act

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  Western/Central Europe right now: oh you wanted a gradual introduction to summer temperatures? Nope, your daily highs are going to literally double.

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  I hate paying for yet another subscription service, but damn - Kagi is actually worth it. It’s a paid search indexer and it’s like searching back before Google enshittified. DuckDuckGo is decent but it’s still just an aggregator of other search engines.

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  These are some ghoulish changes - queer refugees are often escaping regimes that make any visibility of queerness illegal. Is that "bad faith" by these standards? https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/594326/is-new-zealand-sliding-toward-a-us-style-approach-to-immigration-and-asylum