The Dutch Nitrogen Regulation Makes No Sense

The Dutch Raad van State in 2019 has argued that a nitrogen deposition of 5.09 mol per acre per year is damaging De Heide (Heath) too much. This is the same as putting down about one one grain of fertilizer the size of a sugar grain per two square meters per week.

How ridiculous this may sound, this verdict has blocked thousands of farmers and builders from expanding their business or homes, and even caused many farms to close down. Furthermore, many farmers in the Netherlands, which have often been farmers for many generations, are not sure whether they will be allowed to continue farming.

Yuval Noah Harari on Science and Truth

Harari in his own words:

Truth was never the highest priority of human society. It was the highest priority of some individuals, but never of society as a whole because society as a whole does not function on the basis of truth. And if you take two of the most powerful institutions of humankind, let's think about science and the scientific community, and let's think about religion and churches and so forth. I think none of them has truth as their chief value. As individuals yes, but as institutions know, I think the chief value of science is power and the chief value of religion is order, is organization. Religion is all about having order in society and science is mainly about gaining power. Gaining power over the world. They use truth to some extent on the way to achieving power or to achieving order, but this is not their highest moral.

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Google Shenanigans

For years it has been a common theme among programmers that Google's search results have changed for the worse. It feels like the suggestions are becoming less and less applicable over time. Today, I spotted one of the worst cases that I have seen so far when searching for a documentary called "Flatten the Curve Flat Earth" (2022). This documentary is about flattening the curve of the earth and has nothing to do with medicine.

However, Google automatically interprets it as a kind of medical statement:

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The X Community Notes Are Different, Are They?

In some cases, Wikipedia feels the need to "clarify" a certain video, which a commenter aptly called the "the blue box of gaslighting":

Now X community notes was promised to be something else, but to me it does look very similar. The note posts some helpful "context":

The reason that I'm critical is that especially on a topic like this, the note doesn't add any information. People who believe that the moon landing was staged will still believe that and people who believe it was real will still believe that.

Quote about fines from YouTube

Interesting quote from below a YouTube video:

When the punishment for committing a crime is a fine, then it is a punishment only for the poor.

Google does not allow Google employees to use their new IDE

Gergely Orosz on X:

Amusing: Google does not allow its devs to use its newly launched IDE, Antigravity, for development.

Classic example of “externalisation” at Google: they have an internal (increasingly different!) version of it, but they won’t use what they launched to everyone else

(Devs with a @google .com address cannot sign up, and it was communicated internally as well to not use it)

Making IPv6 work with Caddy and Hetzner

After a few hours of fiddling, this site is now properly accessible via IPv6. My configuration uses Caddy as the reverse proxy meaning that it forwards the requests to the right service based on the Host that the browser specifies. Thanks to this, one server can host hundreds if not thousands of websites from one IP.

In my Caddyfile, I had specified the following

www.huijzer.xyz {
  redir https://huijzer.xyz permanent
}
huijzer.xyz {
  reverse_proxy 127.0.0.1:3000
}

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Do Not Put Your Site Behind Cloudflare if You Don't Need To

At the time of writing 12:43 UTC on Tue 18 Nov, Cloudflare has taken many sites down. I'm trying to browse the web, but about half of the sites show an error:

Most of these sites are not even that big. I expect maybe a few thousand visitors per month.

This demonstrates again a simple fact: if you put your site behind a centralized service, then this service is a single point of failure. Even large established companies make mistakes and can go down.

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Generating an SSH key for a webserver

Assuming you have the SSH password for a webserver called say case and email email@example.com, you can generate a key as follows:

ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 4096 -C "email@example.com" -f ~/.ssh/case

Next, add the server, which has say username user at location case.example.com, to your ~/.ssh/config:

Host case
    HostName case.example.com
    User user
    IdentityFile ~/.ssh/case

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Ondernemer op Reddit over subsidies

De enige vorm van “subsidie” die ik als ondernemer concreet ervaar, zijn de belastingen die ik betaal. Het lijkt – en ik zeg nadrukkelijk lijkt – alsof je reactie komt vanuit een positie waarin men niet hoeft te dragen wat ondernemers dagelijks moeten dragen. Zonder een gezond bedrijfsleven bestaat er geen economische ruimte voor sociale voorzieningen of luxe waar we als samenleving allemaal van profiteren.

Ik zeg niet dat vermogenden nóg rijker moeten worden, maar ik kan je verzekeren dat het tegenwoordig voor veel ondernemers, zelfs met een goedlopend bedrijf, buitengewoon moeilijk is om financieel overeind te blijven. Kosten stijgen, marges dalen en de risico’s liggen volledig bij de ondernemer. Dat perspectief verdient minstens net zoveel erkenning in deze discussie.

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