chasteinsect

I think that though we are a railway company, we consider ourselves a city-shaping company. In Europe for instance, railway companies simply connect cities through their terminals. That is a pretty normal way of operating in this industry, whereas what we do is completely different: we create cities and then, as a utility facility, we add the stations and the railways to connect them one with another.

This model was pioneered in the 1950s by what became Hankyu Railways. Hankyu’s network connects central Osaka to its northern suburbs, as well as Kyoto and Kobe. Its innovative founder Kobayashi Ichizo first built suburban housing, then a department store at the terminal station; he then created a hot spring resort, a zoo, and his own distinctive brand of all-women musical theater, the Takarazuka Revue. He also began to run bus services to and from his stations. Other companies emulated Hankyu’s example: Tokyo Disneyland is a collaboration between Disney and the Keisei Railway, while Hanshin in Osaka owns the Hanshin Tigers baseball team.

Found it really interesting how railway companies diversify their investments and reduce risk. Smart.

Thanks!

You got a link to the photo? Would like to know when it was shot. Can't seem to find the exact pic on their site

If anyone wants a good video covering this strait and other important ones, here's one by TLDR News Global:

Mapping the World’s (other) Maritime Chokepoints - YouTube

• Something like 16 % of all sea‑borne trade by value passes through the Bab‑el‑Mandeb compared to about 6 % for the Strait of Hormuz.
• In normal times something like 20 % of all oil and gas trade consumed by the world passes through the Strait of Hormuz compared to more like 10 % for the Bab‑el‑Mandeb.
• Saudi Arabia started relying more heavily on exports via the Red Sea which mostly flow out towards Asia via the Bab‑el‑Mandeb
• Most sea‑borne trade between Europe and Asia passes through the Bab‑el‑Mandeb.
• The next most direct maritime route includes an 8,000 km detour around Africa.

And on Easter ... god damn

Great advice. I would suggest as you're reading through whatever material you're trying to understand, there are parts that you don't quite "get it". Try to formulate answerable, isolated questions that would help you "get it" or solidify your understanding and try to answer them by re-reading, finding the relevant parts or doing a bit independent research. In general, creating questions to strengthen your understanding is a great way to make learning more like a game and it prevents your mind from feeling frustrated as it wants to understand everything all at once. You just need to answer that one question and for the most part your brain will handle the rest when it comes down to the bigger picture.

Obviously, you need to strike a balance here.

One of the more curious details to emerge from the publication of Claude Code's source is that Anthropic tries to hide AI authorship from contributions to public code repositories – possibly a response to the open source projects that have disallowed AI code contributions. Prompt instructions in a file called undercover.ts state, "You are operating UNDERCOVER in a PUBLIC/OPEN-SOURCE repository. Your commit messages, PR titles, and PR bodies MUST NOT contain ANY Anthropic-internal information. Do not blow your cover."

People don't like AI contributions so they hide it, cool

Yet it only makes sense that most web developers need a job and to get that job they need to use an overkill stack for their personal and community projects.

When I was a noob learning web dev a few years back and had no sense of direction and I was doing these tutorials on Youtube where you build a 0 user CRUD app with like NextJS, typescript, all sorts of libraries for state management, data fetching, css, auth ,forms, tables, UI components, database ORM's.

It's just such nonsense, especially if you're a noob getting into all of this stuff. You think you need to know all of this so you spend your time learning more how to use these tools rather than actually solving interesting problems and learning to code. The whole ecosystem, including the content creators just encourage this.

I didn't even host my own DB, who has time for that? Just sign up for this service they do it for you bro. And at the end you would just host your site on Vercel.

And don't get me started of how quickly things just completely change there.

Modern web dev is a jungle and a mess. Complexity is the default, not something you add on later so I completely agree on your point.

I read 12 hours / week and thought damn Russians are progressive out of the sudden 💀

Thanks for taking the time to write this out.

Does lifting sanctions on a country that you're at war with the smart thing to do? Literally helps to fund their enemy.

Also:

Energy analysts, including Brent Erickson, a managing principal at Obsidian Risk Advisors, have said the administration’s efforts to control prices would not have a meaningful impact until the strait is opened to vessels.

They even lifted sanctions on Iranian oil

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/20/us-sanctions-iranian-oil

They're doing great