Exactly. I used to think like this when younger, but I now see how stupid this mentality is. Basically anything we care about as humans is “non-productive”. Music, art, video games, musicals, movies, sports, etc. just because I don’t care about something doesn’t mean that it’s not important to someone else.

I think it’d because the Trackmania arcade mode doesn’t really let you affect anyone else. Everyone in the server is obviously trying to go as fast as possible,and to a degree also get as high up on the session leaderboard as possible, but you can’t ruin each others laps. And while finishing high on the session leaderboard is nice, the overall goal for everyone is to get a good enough time on the map in general. To beat your own PB, to get all medals. So essentially the real opponent is your past self. This leads people to get quite cooperative. Having discussions about how to tackle certain parts of the track, congretulating each other with setting a new PB, etc.

Playing against random people and especially with random people in other competitive games seems to generally get toxic. People blaming you for ruining their game, people getting mad. To me it’s very stressful. Even if I know that it shouldn’t affect me, and I’m never going to meet them again, it still does affect me negatively

At the moment basically anything competitive/ranked. I don’t want to compete online anymore because I know that I’ll have to go on an insane grind to get good. Only exception is trackmania because it somehow doesn’t upset me quite like other ranked online games. But even then I only play the “arcade” mode and not ranked

Yeah same, but with like 2K hours. At some point I was Grand Champion 1 or something. I could probably win against 2 noobs without me using jump and boost, but in the few moments I played against pros I got equally clapped. It’s insane to me how much better pro players are.

After Epic bought it the whole game slowly went to shit though. Psyonix once treated the game and its community as their baby, but it just became a soulless money printer without any decent innovation. So I barely play anymore, even though the core game is ultimately still fun.

Yeah I don’t really feel the difference either. Intriguing. Whether I’m wet from the shower or from sweat, it feels about the same to me. It’s only after it’s drying that there’s an obvious difference to me

I’ve unfortunately bought a phone (Pixel 8) now without a headphone jack. Already had multiple moments where I had to confront the consequences of this action. Why don’t modern phones have them anymore :(

Apart from the obvious stuff like wheels and fire:

I recently got my hands on an analogue camera (Canon EOS 300), which I’m now using to take some pictures. The first batch of pictures got back last week and confirmed to me that the device is still in working condition.

Besides that I also have an old Philips tape player that used to use until one of the gears snapped in half. I ordered a replacement gear but getting to the gear and replacing it has proven more challenging than hoped so I’m not using it currently.

And I still collect CDs, even though I also use Spotify.

I’m probably too old (29), but I do tend to buy CDs of artists I like. 2 weeks ago I was at a festival and bought 3 CDs (as well as some other stuff). Today I’m expecting another CD to arrive in my letterbox.

Because words have different weight for different people. I feel like Americans are so sensitive about words like “fuck” (and many other words). Here in the Netherlands I grew up with much more liberal use of swear words. So to me it’s way less harsh to say “fuck this rain” or something, it’s just a way to communicate my feelings about the rain, just like I’d say “kutweer” in Dutch. Saying it in a more eloquent way, i.e. “this rain is pretty suboptimal” would not accurately convey my feelings.

2K per year, subsidized by the Dutch government afaik, because International students pay way more.

Not anymore, since I got a real job… They do sometimes give some money as a present to buy something nice, but it’s no longer necessary. They did help me during my study though, paying the ~€2K uni fees every year and some other smaller stuff, so I could focus on rent, groceries, study material, etc. Combined with that, I had some side jobs to keep the study loan pretty small and manageable .

Based on anecdotal evidence, that was kind of the middle of the road. Some friends had very rich parents, who basically paid everything. Other people basically had to pay everything, which lead to huge loans. I think this level of support was pretty much optimal. It forced me to think about money instead of just buying everything I wanted, but also made it easy for me to focus on my study instead of surviving.

But we also don’t call our language “Dutch”, we call it Nederlands. It’s a relic of an old time, but actually German should be called Dutch and Dutch should be Netherlandish. It’d help a lot with the confusion of young German and Dutch people learning English for the first time haha. Would also resolve the confusion around “Pennsylvanian Dutch” being German.

Dutch is such a weird one. We don’t call ourselves “Dutch” in Dutch, we call ourselves “Nederlands”. This would be something like “Netherlandish” in English. We do call Germans “Duits” though, and they call themselves “Deutsch”. Somehow in English German and Dutch got a bit messed up. The reason is probably that during the middle ages we did refer to our language as “Dietsch”, so that probably stayed around.

What’s wrong? I find this a reasonable result. Most people looking for megabyte to bytes are actually looking for mebibytes, since the mega- prefix is literally just times a million but a lot of programs actually list mebibytes as “megabytes”.

I probably wouldn’t. Over time the multiple versions of me would diverge in terms of experiences and opinions. And knowing how stubborn I can sometimes be I’d probably get very annoyed with my own clones, which in turn will make me dislike myself more. It’ll force me to perceive my own behaviour as an outsider, which will make me judge myself even harder.

One of me is enough :3

Hmmm yeah, now that you mention it I do remember a few occasions of launching soy milk throughout the kitchen. Still I prefer it over the second one though. After it’s been opened once, it’s much less in the way.

Many of the new bottle caps I encounter will actively push back into the closed position, meaning I have to keep them out of the way when pouring if I don’t want to pour over the cap. Since I tend to encounter them on drink cartons rather than bottles, because I don’t drink soda etc, it becomes even more annoying. Bottles you can turn whichever way, but drink cartons need to be kept at a certain angle for optimal pouring. Quite often the cap is in the way and there isn’t really a nice place to put it.

This is even more frustrating because I never lost these caps anyway, I always threw them away with the packaging. I understand that it probably helps in the bigger picture, but for me personally it solves nothing and is incredibly annoying.

Edit: two examples

This one is fine, it snaps into a position that’s handy and out of the way:

This one is very annoying. It’ll stay in this position and requires constant force to keep out of this position. When opening or closing the packaging the attachment point also rotes, meaning it’s always in the wrong place:

I guess it’s similar, but here in the Netherlands we have “fresh” pizza’s at the supermarket. They’re kind of in-between frozen pizza’s and a pizza delivery in terms of price, but imo they’re actually by far the best. For 6-7 euros you get a pretty big pizza with fresh toppings, that’s done faster than a frozen pizza or waiting for delivery, and also tastes really good. In the Netherlands it’s common to live very close to a supermarket, so for me it’s be like a 2 min bike ride to get myself a pizza.

I try to (except from here I guess). I feel like a lot of political discussions here lack any nuance, and are often very US-centric. I’m moderately left wing myself, but I still often feel like I have little in common with the sometimes extremely left viewpoints here. They are usually also seem to be defended in a very black and white way. If you don’t agree you’re quickly deemed a fascist or nazi.

Honestly, I feel like online discussions often don’t really achieve anything. Differing opinions are downvoted and often met with name-calling or accusations. I’d rather discuss in-person with friends and colleagues across the political spectrum, that tends to actually lead to a friendly sharing of thoughts rather than the unsatisfactory hate spewing you get online.

Depends on your definition of “know”. Honestly nowadays I don’t feel too scared to try something in any language.

I’m most proficient in Java and Python. In my free time I nowadays spend most of my time messing around with Haskell, Julia, or Rust. And I have some basic knowledge in a lot of other languages, including C, C++, C#, Kotlin, Groovy, Prolog, JavaScript, SQL, etc, etc.

But as I said in the beginning, I’m not too scared of learning something new. If someone were to ask me for a job where I’d be using Go or Kotlin or something then I’d be fairly confident that I could adjust quite quickly.