aden1ne

Another case is government bureaucracy. For most of the EU countries I've been to, the official language of the country is their local language and only their local language. This means that government employees are not required to speak any other language other than the official one to you, plus you might be required to fill in forms and communicate in the official language if you want to talk to them.

This is true, and something I have indeed experienced. However, this is likely true for _any_ country where English is not the official language, not just those in the EU. Besides, understanding bureaucratic lingo is not just a matter of pure linguistics. Governmental concepts rarely translate 1:1 to another nation, even those with the same official language. If you migrate to another country, part and parcel of the experience is that you _must_ contend with bureaucratic principles, rules and institutes with which you are not familiar. There is no escaping that.

That said, at least here in the Netherlands, there is certainly a movement to provide more and more governmental information in English as well. I'm not going to dox myself, but for example my muni's English website looks nigh-identical to the Dutch one.

Europe really needs to fix the funding issue and language fragmentation.

The language fragmentation certainly is an issue in the general workplace. But academia does use English as its lingua franca throughout most of the EU, though it might depend on the country. Certainly in places I've worked in academia - and yes, that has been in multiple countries in the EU - I've never had to utter a single word in something other than English in the workplace. But it is International English alright, which may be somewhat of a novelty to the native English speaker if they haven't been exposed.

Even Amazon orders

That's wholly Amazon's problem. If I order something from BOL or Coolblue it arrives within 12-24 hours. Even small pop-and-mom webstores usually deliver within 1-2 business days. It's only Amazon that somehow manages to average more than a week (my last order at Amazon only arrived after 2 months. Guess why I no longer use their service).

Insanely fast experience.

Those "Flash Answers" are insanely quick. I don't know how they're doing it. But it's amazing.

Shell ads are quite common in the Netherlands. Usually it's shell trying to greenwash itself.

That sounds like an odd setup. Any chance this was near the airport?

Also did you visit the Netherlands, or only Amsterdam? Because honestly, Amsterdam is in a league of its own with the hordes of tourists who have no clue what they are doing on a bike.

Dutch cyclists also do all these things. As a driver in the Netherlands, you'll quickly learn that cyclists don't stick to any rules, they will cross red lights, use the wrong lane, use the sidewalk if it saves them 2 seconds, ignore yield signs etc, and in general they will come from every direction imaginable.

In a car, the onus is still on you to pay more attention. Defensive driving style is the norm - assume mistakes will be made and rules will be ignored. After all, you're driving a 1-2 ton machine whereas a cyclists will be generally be <100kg at slower speeds, bike included.

That said, road design of course matters a lot. In the Netherlands, bike lanes in 50 kph (~30 mph) zones are preferably separated by a curbstone. Meaning it is often physically impossible to cross into the car lane. Bike lanes for roads with higher speed limits are rare in urban areas, and nearly always curb-separated where they exist. Intersections will have islands for cyclists and pedestrians to pause. Most residential areas are 30 kph (~20mph) zones, where most bike lanes have dashed lines. Counterintuitively, cars are expected to drive with two wheels on the bike path in these cases. This prevents cyclists from being in the car's blind spot[0].

[0]: See example from wikimedia: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/eb/Fietsstr...

Yeah, the official docs for python rarely if ever show up on the first two pages of search unless I do `from: python.org`.

In my first job out of university, I inherited a data pipeline that had been written in Make using ~40 Makefiles. Needless to say, it was a hell to debug.

This is the default in the Netherlands for many office jobs as well. Usually in the form of 'Subclause 2: The nature of the job may demand work beyond the stated hours in subclause 1. If this occurs, no additional payment shall be made'.

Never had a job where that wasn't a clause in the contract.

This is one of the reasons why I'm paying for Claude and not for ChatGPT. ChatGPT really goes into uncanny valley for me.

Had a similar experience. What killed it for me, is that no statistics can be gathered for JSONB columns. This in turn really messes with the query planner once you do something like `select a.* from a join b on a.id = b.a_id where b.my_jsonb_column ->> 'foo' = 'bar';`.

Given the lack of statistics, the query planner loves going for a nested loop rather than hash or merge join where those would appropriate, leading to abysmal performance.

There is an thread[0] on the PostgreSQL mailing list to add at least some statistics on JSONB column, but this has gone nowhere since 2022.

[0] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/c9c4bd20-996c-100...

Just tried it. This is the first model that immediately gives me the correct answer to my test prompt: "Hi <model>, can you give me an exact solution to pi in python?". All other models I've tried first give an approximation, taking several prompts to come to the correct conclusion: it's impossible.

Huh? I'd have said Amsterdam is actually a real good example of immigration driving up rents. When covid happened, Amsterdam rates actually went down, whereas they kept going up in the rest of the nation. Why: the expats stopped coming.

Smaller families? Historically families were large and the entire extended family helped out, across all generations. In the modern age our families are smaller, and we consider it morally abject to have children work, with the elderly being expected to retire.

And how are they going to deal with the inevitable disinformation/hallucinations?

TIL

Holy cow, that's so unintuitive.

My main issue with multiple displays on Mac is that the dock sometimes suddenly switches display. Sometimes this doesn't happen for weeks, other times it happens multiple times a day. When this happens, it tends to move the dock from the internal display to the external display, and the existing window on the external display suddenly gets smaller. The only resolution I've found when this occurs is unplugging and re-plugging the external display.

Yes, this is a thing.

Teams has network effect behind it. Because so many businesses already use Teams, in a B2B-setting you're almost expected to already have Teams as well.

Ah yeah that same Dutch policy that made public transport 12% more expensive this year while simultaneously reducing service and with outages up a literal 300% from pre-covid times.

Names changes are only permitted in a very narrow set of conditions in my place of residence. And this would not be one of them. And I imagine that's the case in many nations.

Docker on MacOS runs through a Linux VM. Native containerization on MacOS is so badly supported many container runtimes don't even try. E.g. Podman on MacOS also runs through a Linux VM.

not OP, but I use terraform instead.

Possession is still technically illegal, tho it hasn't been enforced since the 1970s.

That said, since December 2023 there has been fully legally-produced cannabis on the Dutch market. While media tends to call it "state weed" ("staatswiet"), it's not nationalized, it's just licensed production. Currently it's only available in a number of cities, chiefly in the South of the country, but more cities should be onboarded onto the system this year.

you always get free tapwater in restaurants if you ask for it anywhere in Europe

In the Netherlands you'd have a hard time. Most places will refuse, especially if that's the only thing you're ordering.

As an example of this: Americans tend to expect plates being picked up as soon as one is finished eating, even when others on the same table are not finished yet. In my native Netherlands this would be considered (very) rude, with plates only removed after everyone is finished and then some grace period. Picking up plates early here indicates the restaurant wants you out the door quickly.

Carpets are absolutely unhygienic tho, especially in an environment that sees many different individuals use them. They are much harder to properly clean than hard surfaces, and if they ever get wet due to a leak or spill the entire room will stink for a significant time thereafter.

I much prefer hotels with hard surface floors for that reason.

Also, most high end hotels I have been at have a key drop box at the front desk if you want to just go.

Interestingly, I associate the key drop box mostly with cheap hotels.

You can extract the DNA and store that instead - and they already had to that to their analysis in the first place. Far smaller volume than the raw sample.

Storing this for an effectively indefinite amount is not uncommon. I used to work at a clinical genetics lab, and some material had to be stored (by law!) for a whopping 120 years.