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.

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.

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.