Month: October 2025

My colleague John Greene has a gift few writers in the world of technology possess: He knows how to talk about complex software in words non-experts will understand. Better yet, he regularly helps spread the message as to why that’s important.

In a course he’s developing about the open source philosophy of making your code publicly available, John explains why open-source projects need lots of good documentation. First, it helps your users onboard without bombarding a team of busy engineers, often volunteers, with questions. Second, it makes it clear to potential contributors under which conditions they can and should engage with the project. If you want to support with marketing or lines of code, where do you start?

At one point, John sums up this principle in a nutshell, and it applies well outside the casings of our computers: “The best defense against misunderstanding is communication.” If a project wants to prevent user or contributor errors, the answer is not more customer support. It’s better documentation. If you’re not sure whether your colleague understood what you expect from them, the way to make sure is to follow up and ask again. And if you don’t like going to museums, it’s probably best to tell your partner that instead of making up excuses.

Communicating more, clearly, and ahead of time may feel like an “offense-beats-defense” strategy. But it’s not offense. It’s cooperation. You don’t have to do it aggressively. It’s enough to do it kindly, without hoopla. Just like good documentation: It’s there. It helps. That’s it.

Let’s all be purifiers and clear the air before it starts smelling.

“Here we go again,” I thought as the Domestos ad started playing. A kid running out of the bathroom, the dad peeking suspiciously into the toilet bowl. “Cue the yawns for yet another boring product.” But I was wrong.

As soon as the dad poured Domestos into the bowl, the commercial kicked into high hear. An animated dragon emerged from the bottle. It was colorful, drawn in an anime style, and moved fast. The dirt transformed into black monsters with sharp teeth and red eyes, which the dragon promptly eviscerated with its fire breath. Some seconds of spirited destruction later, the bottle reappeared, finished the job, and landed on top of the closed toilet bowl, flashing intermittently to show the image of the dragon, now resting.

Everyone wants a sparkling toilet. Everyone knows they must clean it to get there. But it doesn’t exactly make most of us jump out of bed with joy. How do you remind people of the essentials effectively? You show them they are more than just essential. Make it a story. Make it fascinating. A good play to act out.

If even boring cleaning products can become fabulous dragons, there truly is no limit to how you can get people involved in your endeavors.

The Sandman is a compelling TV show for many reasons. Its most genius feat, however, might be to turn the supernatural into the everyday. At its core, it asks: What if the forces beyond our power, beings like gods and demons and karma, are actually just like us? Creatures acting in an imperfect world with imperfect information, plagued by communication issues, rules, and resource limitations?

This setup leads to many curious twists in the plot, and it also makes for great thought experiments. In an early episode of season two, Dream of the Endless, our hero and main character, is looking to free Nada, his former love, from Hell. Having left said place on less than good terms last time, Dream is prepared for anything as he approaches the gate. To his surprise, it stands wide open.

Inside, Dream finds…no one. No one except Lucifer, who essentially shrugs and says: “I’ve quit.” Dream, who likes to remind everyone of their responsibilities, protests, suggesting the Devil can’t just let all of Hell’s inhabitants roam about freely. But, after ten billion years of penance for her fall from grace, Lucifer has a different take: “I didn’t ask them to come here. They chose Hell. That is what Hell is. A place for dead mortals to torture themselves. And, like all masochists, they give the orders. ‘Burn me, freeze me, eat me, hurt me.’ And what do I get out of it?” As it turns out, the Devil has no need for human souls.

“You can’t own someone else’s soul,” she continues. “They belong to themselves. They just hate to have to face up to it. They blame me for their little failings. ‘The devil made me do it.’ I have never made one of them do anything. Never. They live their own tiny lives. And then they die. And they come here. And they expect me to fulfill their desires of pain and retribution.” So, equipped with a new perspective and ready for vacation, Lucifer does what anyone with burnout would do: She walks away.

“Hell is closed,” she says and, after Dream ceremoniously cuts off her wings, hands the key to Dream in one final act of revenge. Now, the most rotten of workplaces is his to deal with, and of course, like any bad acquisition, it comes consequences no one wants. In Dream’s case, everyone nefarious and their brother will soon be at his door, eager to reclaim Hell for themselves.

It’s an interesting idea, isn’t it? What if the Devil quit? What if Hell exists for our convenience more so than for those who are running it? And if even Lucifer can walk away from a bad gig, what’s stopping us?

“The important thing is not to stop questioning,” Einstein once told a little boy. That’s what shows like The Sandman inspire us to do. And if even Lucifer can teach a valuable lesson, perhaps it’s no coincidence Einstein ended his advice with a heavenly reminder: “Never lose a holy curiosity.”

At the start of the year, my big toe started itching. One day, I pulled off the woolen socks I was wearing and… “Oh no!” The toe was red and looked infected. The nail had turned white. Clearly, there was something wrong with my foot.

The pharmacist gave me some cream and a lacquer for the nail, and I went to a pedicurist sometime after to double-check everything. Eventually, the itch and strange colors subsided, but my nail was clearly damaged. It was sort of dented across the middle, with a deep groove running from left to right where, usually, the nail’s surface would be flat and smooth.

That was nine months ago. The groove is still growing out. Once it had moved towards the middle of the nail after some weeks, a second groove appeared behind it. It’s as if you’d flicked a carpet, and now multiple ripples and bumps require flattening. Thankfully, the nail will do it automatically, but it takes forever.

The good part of the story? Every time I look at my nail again and worry when it’ll fix itself, the lesson to take care of my feet sinks in a little deeper. I doubt I’ll neglect my nails again any time soon, and if an issue comes up, chances are I’ll address it swiftly. I’ve even used some more of the cream and lacquer here and there as a preemptive measure.

That’s the reward of a long road to redemption: The more time it takes to recover, the more chances you have to learn from your misfortune. Slow healing makes the lesson last—and that’s an itch we can’t scratch often enough.

How often do you wish you had one extra hour in your day? Ah, all the things you could do with 60 minutes more! More chilling, more working, more playing with your child—maybe you’d actually get around to cooking without feeling in a rush!

But wait… What if I told you that you already do get that extra hour? At least if you’re in one of the 70 or so countries which change their clocks twice a year. In Germany, we switch from Daylight Savings Time back to Central European Time every last Sunday of October. That means at 3 AM, the clocks spool back 60 minutes, and voilà, we’re back to 2 AM. How miraculous! And yet…

Take yesterday morning. Said day had once again arrived. Under the new clock regimen, my partner and I woke up at 7:30 AM. Wow! So much time! We followed the same routine from the day before: reading in bed, getting up, doing some chores or a quick workout, then making breakfast. I bought fresh bread rolls, whipped up some omelettes, and we ate. We played video games for two hours, and…what?! It was 2 PM—the exact same time we started working on some of our to-dos the day before!

You know how easy it is to lose an hour, don’t you? It’s always hard to tell where it went after the fact. Was it an information rabbit hole on Wikipedia that we fell down? Did a certain task take us longer than usual? Or did we pass an extra 30 minutes while sitting on the can?

Whichever cracks the sands of time fall into, if you appreciate how easily 60 minutes can slip by during your daily routines, well, there’s no day like the last Sunday of October to remember: Even if you had an extra hour every day, you’d still never have enough time. I guess we’ll both just have to make do with the 24 hours we’ve got—and perhaps those are all we ever needed to begin with.

Yesterday, I paid someone to clean my apartment for the first time in my life. For as long as I can remember, I did it myself. But with both my partner and I working full-time, a business on the side, wedding plans, and lives to live, we figured we’d give it a try. It feels both nice and strange.

It’s odd to get the reward of a clean home without vacuuming, wiping, and scrubbing for two hours. But it’s nice to have those two hours back. The cleaner is a friend of our landlord’s, and she’s all too kind. I was surprised how little money she asked for. I rounded up but should probably add a bit more still.

I refused getting cleaning help for a long time because it felt too privileged. I like the grounding of the exercise, too. Cleaning keeps you humble. But with our cleaner’s busy schedule, we won’t get rid of our cloths altogether any time soon. That convinced me—and the fact that I remembered: Even my grandma had a cleaner. Everyone in the family was busy working in their little clothing store, so once a week, they got some help with the house.

Whether it’s cleaning, cooking, or doing a task that’s right up your alley: Sometimes, it’s nice if someone else does it, even if you love it. Don’t feel bad for asking for the occasional break.

If memory serves, I took my first flight when I was 15 years old. It was a domestic one in Germany, from Frankfurt to Berlin. Only an hour or so. Very passable. I’m confident I’ve taken over 100 flights since, many much longer than that.

Like most people, I developed a natural aversion towards long flights. Who wants to sit in a tight space with bad air and others’ germs floating around any longer than necessary, right? I’m also a light sleeper, so for most of my airy adventures, snoozing through them wasn’t an option either.

I remember our family trip to California in 2009. We flew straight from Germany to San Francisco. 11 hours or so. Everyone dreaded the flight before, during, and after, myself included. Some of my other long flights went better. Rarely, I managed to sleep sitting straight up in my chair like an ancient mummy on a throne. If I didn’t move and got lucky, I had a shot at passing out.

Some 16 years after that first boarding procedure, however, I found a new perspective: I took a long flight to Asia with my girlfriend, and we had the grandest of times. We didn’t feel bored at all. The time passed quickly, and it turned out to be a nice break from a busy stretch of work leading up to the trip. We played games. We read. We watched a movie. And voilà, we were in Singapore!

Since then, I look forward to long flights. They’re gifts, not curses. Who wouldn’t want a 12-hour-break from work and everyday life with zero expectations? Since there’s little to do, you can pass the time however you like! Nowadays, I look forward to finally getting some reading done, writing and editing articles, and perhaps watching a TV show or movie I haven’t had a chance to see yet.

I just got back from the longest flight I’ve ever taken. Between the wait after boarding and some delays, I spent 15 hours in a metal tube—and I didn’t even get halfway through my in-flight to-do list of reading, writing, and watching. I’d be happy to turn right around and take another one.

As usual, everything matters. I’m short, so I don’t get squeezed too badly even if the plane seats are small. I’m also not traveling with kids yet. But if those factors count, so does my opinion. And my opinion, it turns out, is something I can change.

Here’s to long flights—and all the seeming misfortunes that turn into lucky breaks.

This week, Reddit sued Perplexity. Reddit is a community platform with over 100,000 topic-focused “subreddits,” where real people talk about all kinds of real and unreal subjects. Perplexity, meanwhile, is one of many AI chatbot vendors.

To make its chatbot useful, Perplexity needs a lot of data. There is no shortage of data freely available on the internet, of course. But quality data? That’s a different story. Some studies suggest almost 75% of new web pages already contain, or consist entirely of, AI-generated writing. This content is often passable but rarely groundbreaking. The noise is slowly drowning out the signal when it comes to information. So what is a company building a large language model supposed to do?

In Perplexity’s case, they allegedly decided to raid Reddit, one of the last bastions of almost entirely human-generated content. Reddit claims Perplexity hired third parties who, disguised as normal user accounts, scraped data off their platform en masse, then fed it to their AI. Mmm, millions of messages from real humans, yummy!

Reddit believes this infringes on their rights. The platform is free to browse in theory, but if you want to use large swaths of posts, you’d first have to strike a licensing agreement with the company. Ergo, lawsuit time.

In what’s undoubtedly a clever PR move, Perplexity was swift to issue a response to the breaking news—on Reddit, no less. They claim their models don’t train on the content. They merely summarize it and then provide the user with links to the original discussions.

In the comments, people quickly argued for both sides. Perhaps Reddit should be open to all, like most of the internet? Maybe Perplexity needs to respect when someone asserts they don’t want their website to be crawled by their bots? “Hope you guys win against Reddit!” one user cheered them on. In the thread underneath, an interesting discussion unfolded.

Reddit, as it turns out, is also an AI company. They have their own Answers feature which, lo and behold, generates answers to questions using Reddit’s millions of users’ posts. What’s more, Reddit has long been selling access to its data to the highest bidder—including to AI model builders. Like Google, for example, which shells out some $60 million per year for what Perplexity supposedly took for free.

A user with the apt name “Nonchalant_Demon” hit the nail on the head: It’s “a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black.” But, actually, it’s more than that. Because in most of the discussion, the elephant in the room remains unaddressed: The only folks with true rights to the data are the real people posting their ideas, thoughts, and opinions on Reddit. Without humans who create good data, Reddit has nothing to sell, and Perplexity has nothing to allegedly steal.

So, really, the situation is more akin to a pot and a kettle arguing in front of an elephant. While the two discuss who gets to ride the elephant first, if it rose up, the elephant could simply walk over both of them and be on its way. And while the elephant hasn’t done just that so far, in the past, it has at least twitched a little.

In 2023, Reddit decided that, after 15 years of free access, it would start charging for its application programming interfaces, or APIs. The move forced many apps to shut down and caused massive backlash among the community. Over 7,000 subreddits temporarily boycotted the platform. Some shut down their forums in a blackout. Others set them to “not safe for work” in order to make them unsuitable for ads and thus hurt Reddit’s revenue.

Still, two years later, Reddit makes more money than ever from its members’ content. Both daily and weekly user numbers have almost doubled, the latter totaling over 400 million people worldwide. And although they’d never admit it, this partially goes back to the very kind of deal Perplexity refused to make: After Google agreed to pay Reddit for using its data, Reddit posts started showing up much more frequently at the top of Google’s search results. Because if you’re paying someone for their information, why not help them generate more of it? You scratch my back, I scratch yours, right?

The only question that remains is this: Who scratches the elephant’s back? Because so far, it’s us, the human writers, creators, and everyday social media users, who’ve gained neither sufficient consent, nor credit, let alone compensation from all the steaming AI-pots and -kettles out there. If internet history thus far is any indication, no matter who sues who, we likely won’t receive either anytime soon.

Perhaps it’s time for the elephant to pull a Perplexity: Don’t ask. Just move.

As always, I packed the schedule for my partner and I’s Japan trip a little too tightly. There were just too many cool places to see and activities to do. So it’s not like I didn’t try to make the most of it.

Yet, about halfway through the trip, I caught a feeling: “This is it.” I didn’t know exactly what “it” meant, but I knew the trip was important. It could have been our honeymoon. It was my first journey back to Japan in 12 years. It might be the last for another 12 years to come.

I’d been worried about how much money we’d spent both on the travel and during the trip itself, at least a bit. But once I realized these two weeks were a unique chance to absorb as much as I could in my favorite destination in the world, I started rolling with it. Money comes and goes. Memories last.

As fate would have it, almost everything about our trip worked out perfectly. The weather. Our location switches. Hotel rooms. Even our daily plans, which, of course, still faced many adjustments. But we got to do and see so much more than most people would have done, and I know I’ll cherish this holiday for the rest of my life.

A small consolation prize for my wallet was that I collect Pokémon cards exclusively in English. Still, Japan had a lot to offer, and some cheap deals I just had to jump on. Plus, several artworks you can only get in Japanese.

On the last day, destiny sent another message. After visiting many shops during the trip, I finally found the #1 Japanese-only card for my master set of all cards of a certain Pokémon. It’s an old card, Karen’s Umbreon, and nearly impossible to find in Europe these days, let alone in good condition. And apparently, even in Japan it’s not as common as it used to be.

I hit up some stores in Akihabara in the afternoon, and suddenly, there it was. A Karen’s Umbreon, and seemingly in great condition. I debated whether to buy it while going to other shops, but I think once I saw it, I already knew what I was going to do. Miraculously, I found a cheaper, more beat-up version in another store a few minutes later. I bought that one without blinking twice, and then? For one last time, I kept rolling with it. I bought the other one as well, and I’ll figure out what to do with one of them later on.

I might look like a frivolous spender right now, but in the end, it was the perfect ending to a perfect trip—and I’ve already started shifting into a different gear again while waiting for the plane back home. I’m neither proud nor ashamed of how much I spent on this journey. It was just the right amount.

Sometimes, you have to keep rolling with it—and the more you trust, the more clearly the path will keep appearing in front of you.

The teamLab Planets art museum is a unique, immersive experience in Tokyo. You walk through various segments, each different than the last, most in dark settings but guided by various light setups.

One of the rooms is called “Floating in the Falling Universe of Flowers.” It’s a dome-shaped space with mirrored floors, upon which you can sit or lie down. Then, you observe thousands of flowers flying, changing, taking form and then dissolving, on the massive, singular, all-around screen covering the walls and ceiling of the dome, all accompanied by beautiful music.

A neat little twist at the museum is that the signboards describing the artwork only appear on your path after you’ve left each exhibit. There’s no biasing your point of view ahead of time. First, you experience, then you get the information.

For this particular one, part of the board reads as follows: “Flowers grow, bud, bloom, and in time, the petals fall, and the flowers wither and die. The cycle of birth and death continues for perpetuity. The artwork is not a pre-recorded image that is played back; it is created by a computer program that continuously renders the artwork in real time. As a whole, it is continuously changing, and previous visual states are never replicated.” Finally a good use of generative AI!

If you pay attention while in the room, you can notice it, of course. A big red flower floats by but never reappears. A bunch of tiny yellow sunflowers scatters, and you won’t see them again. Ergo, you could spend hours in that space, and you’d never be bored. The art is not only immersive but mirrors life itself: No matter how mundane or déjà vu–inducing the second that passes for you right now, the overall state of the world will never repeat in quite exactly the same way.

While you’re making your 8,000th coffee with the same push of the same button, somewhere, someone is driving on a highway for the first time. Someone is dying, and someone is being born. Meanwhile, someone else is pushing a coffee machine button for the first time.

I like it, this kind of art. It calls on us to be where we are. When we are. And it issues an important reminder, a reminder you can read in the last sentence on that sign at teamLabs should you ever have the good fortune of visiting: “The universe at this moment in time can never be seen again.”