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Since moving to Portugal, one of the things I miss (not too many), from Romania is the food. Not all the time, since the Portuguese food is quite good, but there are some things that I really miss: sarmale, mici, salata beouf.

I recently found out about a village in Algarve called Almancil, where there are lots of Romanians, apparently. And they have a Romanian restaurant there. Since I will be traveling to Algarve for a short workation soon, that’s where I’ll go :)

I’ve found out about this from Teleleu.eu, a really nice project about Romanians living abroad. The project is in Romanian, just so you know :)

I didn’t really like Algarve too much, frankly. I’ve been there once previously, stayed in Lagos for 10 days and kinda hated. It rained for 7 out of the 10 days. Everyone said this doesn’t normally happen. Didn’t help. Of course, it was March, but still. I hated the wind, the rain, everything (almost).

Well, I was “convinced” to come to Algarve again this week and… I might change my mind. And the water is actually “warm” by local standards, so I might go in. And I’m comparing the “warmness” with the Mediterranean temperature, which can be really, really warm.

I’ve seen the TV show and that’s what got me hooked. I recently started to read the books (to see what happens after season 5, to be frank).

What surprised me: the books are as good as the TV show. Which is an amazing thing for the TV show, of course. I actually think the books are a little too much some times, but the TV show streamlined them a lot and mostly for the better.

If you enjoyed other and you didn’t read/watch the other one, I think you should give both a chance.

There’s opportunities everywhere, right? Well, apparently there’s one (or more) in creating a “phone shaker” to beat fitness targets during the day. Of course, not real targets, since the idea is to NOT have to walk 10,000 steps and things like that.

I was curious who would need this kind of product, but apparently some games and even corporation reward movement:

• This phone shaker device can achieve your weekly fitness goal without efforts, unlocking rewards at distances in Pokemon Go.
• The phone walker is ideal for those people who are doing corporate steps challenges to get rewards with freebies for getting fit.
• The step counter device features three kinds of working modes, running mode(fast speed), jogging mode(medium speed) and walking mode(low speed).
• It can earn 9,500 steps(running mode) in an hour equivalent to 4 miles approx, cheating your way to 10,000 steps in a short time.

Now you know! Here’s the Amazon listing, in case you want to buy one.

I realized I didn’t really think too much about accessibility. I mean, I don’t have any issues whatsoever to limit my day to day life in any way.

So this is why it’s interesting to read this article, on a blind TikTok star’s favorite accessibility apps:

Do you know how you look?
How does a blind person socially distance?
How does a blind person pick up guide-dog poop?

Her followers and fans have sent her those questions and hundreds of others—all of which she’s answered with her signature candor, charm, and wit.

For Edwards, starting her TikTok channel last year was as much about self-preservation as educating others. “I would go out in the world and get this underlying discrimination and not be able to put my finger on it,” she says. “I would think, ‘Am I going crazy? It’s 2020. This can’t be happening.’

“But when I started answering those questions, it was like a weight was lifted. I got to another level of accepting myself, because you have to be quite strong to answer questions like ‘Can you brush your teeth?’”

There was an additional benefit: The more questions she responded to, the more thoughtful the questions became. “Do you dream in pictures? What do you see? Thinking about how to articulate that helped me develop as a person,” she explains.

It’s a really educational and eye opening read.

Via DaringFireball

Featured photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash

I genuinely don’t know if this interview with Marc Andreessen is a parody or the real thing (apparently it is the real thing), but you should read it nevertheless.

Henrich describes in his book how some people (us) are culturally WEIRD — Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic — but most people in the world aren’t. Yet.

[…]

I find this thesis enormously compelling and largely optimistic. I predict that we — the West — are going to WEIRDify the entire world, within the next 50 years, the next two generations. We will do this not by converting non-WEIRD people to WEIRD, but by getting their kids. Their kids, and their kids’ kids, are going to grow up on the Internet at least as much as they grow up in the real world, and the pull of WEIRD culture will overwhelm all existing non-WEIRD cultures. I realize this is a very strong claim, but this process is already underway; at this point I think it’s inevitable. The cost of this will be a collapse of global cultural diversity exactly as you and Rozin predict.

From here: The Dubrovnik Interviews: Marc Andreessen – Interviewed by a Retard – Fisted by Foucault.

via Marginal Revolution

Seeing the flurry of IPOs and acquisitions in the tech space I didn’t somehow expected StackOverflow to be sold to Naspers/Prosus. I actually think it’s the best outcome, since the buyers will probably want to increase the value of the asset and Naspers has a history of doing this successfully and not selling assets after fluffing them up a little bit.

Today we’re pleased to announce that Stack Overflow is joining Prosus. Prosus is an investment and holding company, which means that the most important part of this announcement is that Stack Overflow will continue to operate independently, with the exact same team in place that has been operating it, according to the exact same plan and the exact same business practices. Don’t expect to see major changes or awkward “synergies”. The business of Stack Overflow will continue to focus on Reach and Relevance, and Stack Overflow for Teams. The entire company is staying in place: we just have different owners now.

This is, in some ways, the best possible outcome. Stack Overflow stays independent. The company has plenty of cash on hand to expand and deliver more features and fix the old broken ones. Right now, the biggest gating factor to how fast we can do this is just how fast we can hire excellent people.

From Joel on Software

Also, the press release from Prosus:

With expertise in scaling communities in high-growth markets globally, Prosus can help accelerate Stack Overflow’s growth ambitions, with a particular focus on reaching a wider international community, while also further scaling the company’s Teams product to position Stack Overflow at the center of product and technology development within major enterprises globally.

Prosus has built a significant presence on the enterprise side with a focus on the future of workplace learning. Prosus will reach 90% of the Fortune 100 across its corporate learning companies including Stack Overflow, Skillsoft, Udemy and Codecademy.

I’m not 43 yet, so it’s not about me, but I’ll be soon, so I wish it was about me :)

I always wanted to stream. Not because I want to make money out of it, but because I enjoy talking about games and most of my friends don’t really play a lot.

This lady, though, started to Twitch in January 2021 and has a lot of fun, apparently:

Echoing from some cavernous depth I thought I’d sealed off years ago, the voices came, whispering every negative comment I ever received in 20 years of games journalism: “She’s not funny.” “Who does she think she is?” “This is why girls shouldn’t play games.” “What kind of dickhead gives Sonic the Hedgehog 4 a 9 out of 10?” (Fair.) But there, in the chat windows popping up on my screen, were new voices. Keep going, they said. You can do it. There were lots of laughing emojis and smiley faces. I started to relax, realising that it didn’t really matter that I was rubbish at the game. This wasn’t about skill, it was about people with a shared interest having a laugh. At me, mainly, but still – a laugh’s a laugh, as all attention-craving comedians (read: all comedians) know.

I want this!

I don’t like living in big cities anymore. I like visiting and spending some time there, but I love living in a 100k+ population city. And while I moved here before the pandemic, I was so happy I made the move when it started.

And I’m not the only one. There’s now a name for the cities/towns that allow people to work remotely while balancing a good life close to nature: Zoom towns.

Rumore bets there’s a good chance many Zoom towners will remain in their new homes, too, particularly as towns evolve alongside their latest residents.

“Once they reach this tipping point where they’re a pretty cool town with a nice coffee shop and cool bars and good restaurants – when they get over the hump and become a place – people want to stay,” she says. “So, what’s interesting about this flood of amenity migration is that it probably tipped a lot of these communities over that hump.”

Sherlin, the remote worker who traded Los Angeles for Northwest Arkansas, says she feels like she landed in the right place at the right time. “So far, I absolutely love it,” she says. “I don’t see myself leaving, but I’m going to complete the year and figure it out from there.”

No one knows whether companies will keep remote-work policies forever, so it’s hard to predict the future of these nature-adjacent Zoom towns or the workers who’ve flocked to them. At the moment, however, for outdoors-loving workers who are able to pick up and leave, many Zoom towns have rolled out their welcome mats. Step on in.

From here: The ‘Zoom towns’ luring remote workers to rural enclaves – BBC Worklife.

It’s interesting to see an explanation from the horse’s mouth about the algorithms that drive Instagram.

One of the main misconceptions we want to clear up is the existence of “The Algorithm.” Instagram doesn’t have one algorithm that oversees what people do and don’t see on the app. We use a variety of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its own purpose. We want to make the most of your time, and we believe that using technology to personalize your experience is the best way to do that.
When we first launched in 2010, Instagram was a single stream of photos in chronological order. But as more people joined and more was shared, it became impossible for most people to see everything, let alone all the posts they cared about. By 2016, people were missing 70% of all their posts in Feed, including almost half of posts from their close connections. So we developed and introduced a Feed that ranked posts based on what you care about most.
Each part of the app – Feed, Explore, Reels – uses its own algorithm tailored to how people use it. People tend to look for their closest friends in Stories, but they want to discover something entirely new in Explore. We rank things differently in different parts of the app, based on how people use them.

From here: Shedding More Light on How Instagram Works.

Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash