Ramil

@onlinedopamine @dennis_kortsch Oh yes. It is crazy how many person days are wasted between Cologne and Frankfurt.

I still don’t understand how we don’t have a functioning internet grid as well. Two years ago i was in Georgia and hiking in the mountains where I’d get 5G even on the peak. Meanwhile, in germany, I’m on edge connection 80% of the time during train rides (and think about all the professionals taking trains for client work and aren’t able to be productive)

As a German who lived in Berlin for 35 years, this is 100% my experience as well. Every single point: - it is SO hard to make it as an entrepreneur. also entrepreneurship is frowned upon in society in general. even founding a business is so elaborate. you all heard the notary horror stories and its 100% true. and then afterwards a dozen of weird state institutions nag you about bureaucratic stuff. one of those wanted to have our finance info in a very specific format which only was achievable via a special software which costs 500+ EUR. - high taxes but especially tax waste. most of us were okay with paying high taxes as long you got something back for it. that was the deal since ww2. but that deal does not exist anymore. the bureaucracy and idiocracy is wasting it all. - infrastructure is broken. my daughter was told to put on warmer cloths (jackets & hat) during school classes because they could not heat the class room enough. their old windows were too leaky. the trains are outright unusable if you have to get anywhere on time. we made around ~10 longer train trips as a family the last few years and every a single one had severe problems. over 60+ minutes delays, trains outright canceled, no working toilets (on 4 hour rides!), wrong reservations (we had to sit on the floor with 2 small children). - the society became so anti-children. I don't know when and why that happened. but you feel it in every situation every day as a parent. - housing market is completely broken. even in "bad" areas the normal German will not be able to afford a house ever. - Its also not only the housing market, its also the renting market (in cities) that is crazy. people are not moving anymore because they live in an apartment with an old (cheap) contract. but nothing new is being build (mostly because of regulations and bureaucracy). the few new buildings are so expensive they are not affordable for the middle class. You can imagine how stressful it is for families to find something to live. our apartment had a really nice price and the landlord could only increase it by 10% after we moved out. when we put up the ad we had over 1000(!) offers 30mins after putting it online and the website closed our account because they thought we were fraudsters. - free speech is also a problem and the funny thing is that most people in Germany always point fingers to the rest of the world from their moral high horse thinking they are so much better. and then demand even more laws to surveil the citizens for hateful speech. what is hateful? no one knows! Or they just define it themself. Naively never thinking about that the same laws could be re-defined and used from the other side as well. - the political system has become a total stalemate. people are not dumb and obviously noticed that 10 years ago already. and started voting for the more far left and right parties. once they became too popular the agency for protection of the constitution (which is controlled by the current government) just defined they are extremists and anti-democratic (which I think is probably correct for some members btw...). and now every other political party just uses that as an argument to not talk/cooperate with this far right party. but citizens can still vote for them. and 20-35% still voted for them. but these votes are basically not accounted for. this creates all kind of (maths) problems when you need majorities to rule. for example in the current case most people voted for a real right government but get left politics. - the social system is abused and I cant even blame those fraudsters. When working for nothing with no real perspective for the future is the default.. - people do not feel save anymore in the cities. and then they tell us to look at the crime statistics - "it has always been like that, it got even better in the last years!". maybe for a few categories of crime but safety is a lot about perceived safety. and that is completely gone. All of that creates a gloomy, hopeless perspective on the future which kind of multiplies the problems and creates that vicious downward spiral. As he said: It's a sinking ship. And it's all fun and games until you have children.

You can now see a nice little pie chart showing the distribution of your logged input time on YouSpeakWhatYouHear.com I am surprised that I already have 26% of cross-talk accumulated on my Spanish-learning journey.

@FedEx The only thing they managed to send to my address is an invoice for 15€ because they had to pay ~1€ (!) in customs fees upfront. That is quite some margin for doing such a lazy job, don't you think @FedEx ?

@FedEx Not only was any communication completely absent, but the tracking information I found online was plain wrong: It mentioned the next *delivery date* that kept being shifted into the future.

Very frustrating experience with @FedEx in Germany. Package cannot be delivered because I am unavailable - alright. Courier leaves info sheet but blank, no info (2x) - okay? Tracking number not recognized by system - aha Client support is AI that constantly interrupts you - nope

I prefer LLMs which take their time with their coding task. It gives you time to breath and prepare for the next step. I also acknowledge that this shows how much of a bottleneck I actually am to the workflows the agents of the future will be capable to.

You can now easily export the language profile data you have entered using the input tracker on YouSpeakWhatYouHear.com

@zivdotcat People learn languages as a hobby and for personal development. To communicate with other people, not to understand tour guides. I do not think Google's live translation will stop people from learning languages. But Duolingo was never real language learning in the first place..

duolingo investors right now:

This is my “Screenless phone” I will be using for my year without screens I write on paper I scan it in It follows my commands: send a text, send an email, print me this beautiful artwork (I love John William Waterhouse) The future is near

@levelsio Yes, immersion is king

Flying to a different country for a week to learn the language is more effective than a year spent on Duolingo

Had my first genuinely good experience with AI customer support at Etsy. It was smart enough to match my email address with guest orders, found the order I was having trouble with, helped as much as it could, and handed off to an agent at the right moment. Well done @Etsy team!

Quirk of knowing a foreign language but growing up in a different culture: While gendering job titles in Germany is not socially mandatory (yet) and often a sign of politeness (Arzt/Ärztin), in Russian it is considered rude for certain professions (врач/врачиха).

Knowing people who are a net positive for the world and share your views on controversial issues is a blessing in the suffocating climate of safe, socially expected opinions.

A presentation should aim for low entropy, minimized to the relevant and then minimized further. The listener should be approached with the necessary humility to cut out all secondary information. Even if it hurts. The talk is not for the speaker, it is for the listener.

If you want to be aware of your actual input time on your immersive language-learning journey, create an account on YouSpeakWhatYouHear.com and start logging it! (6/6)

My final take: The results reflect my expectations: the average movie has around 50% speech content (Oscar winners as a representative). If you enjoy movies, great — 50% immersion is better than none. Just be aware that progress-per-time will be somewhat slower. (5/6)

Alright, using my website, I have evaluated the speech coverage of all Best Picture Oscar winners from the years 1930-2025. These are the results🧵