It’s really not at all at the same level as other European cities. It’s so bad that basically every year high up officials write a Brandbrief (urgent appeal) to either Deutsche Bahn or Ministry of transport that the situation is unbearable. Having lives in 3 different German cities, it’s by far the worst and most unreliable.

In contrast to the US, many people exclusively rely upon public transport and eg a drivers license costs north of 4K € (approx 5k USD), in addition to much higher gasoline prices - making a car way less affordable.

# 1. State Minister Bernreiter's Brandbrief to DB InfraGO (2026) https://www.bayern.de/kritik-an-langsamfahrstellen/

# 2. Pullach Municipal Brandbrief on the S7 (2025) https://www.pullach.de/buergerbrief-uns-reicht-es-jetzt-geme...

# 3. MVV & Stakeholders Brandbrief to Deutsche Bahn (2022) https://www.abendzeitung-muenchen.de/muenchen/s-bahn-muss-zu...

# 4. Mayors' Joint Transit Funding Brandbrief (2025) https://www.bild.de/politik/friedrich-merz-neuer-brandbrief-...

# 5. Landräte Transit Cuts Warning Brandbrief (2024) https://in-motion.me/articles/2024-12-22_es-drohen-kuerzunge...

# 6. Pro Bahn Munich Analysis & Brandbrief (2024) https://www.pro-bahn.de/oberbayern/pbp/pbp202401.pdf

Karl Marx' coined the term "Alienation" for describing most of the negative societal/human consequences of this principle, leading to isolation of humans "from themselves" (their natural will to construct something whole meaningful, not just complete a task in a process, but also isolation between humans themselves)

Wow, this gitlab instance looked so much cleaner/simpler and less clunky than my past experiences! Also loaded really fast on first page load as well as subsequent actions

Frontier LLMs still suck a lot, you can't afford planned degradation yet.

No team at Amazon should be larger than what two pizzas can feed (usually about 6 to 10 people).

Worst case I'll end up being on unemployment insurance for a year, ~ 2800 EUR per month while travelling the world in my late twenties...

When property costs 1 million+ (the case in Berlin/Munich), financially it really doesn't matter whether I net 6500 EUR month working 50+ hours for FAANG or 4500 EUR working 35 hour weeks for a German corporate, even though the gross salary for the FAANG job is twice the German job.

Our current Chancellor (Merz) publicly boasts that Germans work too few hours and calls on them to work more [0] implying this would generate more tax revenue. Yet working has arguably never been less rewarding for workers: Germany currently has the 2nd highest tax wedge among all OECD nations (≈48% for a single worker, nearly 13 percentage points above the OECD average) [2][3]. This is compounded by demand-side welfare measures for low earners such as Wohngeld (housing benefit) and pension supplements like Mütterrente ("Mothers' pension"), creating a massive redistribution from working people to non-working people.

Meanwhile, the German government has spent years failing to fully prosecute the CumEx/CumCum tax fraud scandal, a scheme through which banks and investors systematically robbed the German state of an estimated €36 billion in tax revenues [4][5]. The contrast could not be more glaring: squeeze workers harder while letting financial fraudsters off easy.

I've handed over my resignation for my FAANG job and am looking for a job in other countries as I don't see myself building a future here.

- [0] Merz urges Germans to work more CGTN (Feb 2026): https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-02-28/Merz-says-Germany-must...

- [1] EUFactCheck Merz's claim rated "Mostly False": https://eufactcheck.eu/factcheck/mostly-false-we-need-to-wor...

- [2] OECD Taxing Wages 2025 Germany: https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/publications/report...

- [3] Tax Foundation Tax Burden on Labor, OECD 2024: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo...

- [4] CumEx-Files Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CumEx-Files

- [5] Stanford GSB CumEx and CumCum Scandals: https://casi.stanford.edu/news/germanys-cumex-and-cumcum-fin...

Hayleigh, when I asked on the discord about how to solve my JSON problem in order to get structured logging working, you replied that I’m the first one to ask about this.

Now reading this: > It's ok if you don't vibe with Gleam – no ad-hoc poly and no macros are usually dealbreakers for certain types of developer

Certainly makes me even more feel like gatekeeping.

- No ad-hoc polymorphism (apart from function overloading IIRC) means no standard way of defining how things work. There are not many conventions yet in place so you won’t know if your library supports eg JSON deserialization for its types

- Coupled with a lack of macros, this means you have to implement even most basic functionality like JSON (de)serialization yourself - even for stdlib and most popular libs’ structs

- When looking on how to access the file system, I learned the stdlib does not provide fs access as the API couldn’t be shared between the JS and Erlang targets. The most popular fs package for erlang target didn’t look of high quality at all. Something so basic and important.

- This made me realise that in contrast to elixir which not only runs on the BEAM („Erlang“) but also runs with seamless Erlang interop, Gleam doesn’t have access to most of the Erlang / Elixir ecosystem out of the box.

There are many things I liked, like the algebraic data types, the Result and Option types, pattern matching with destructuring. Which made me realize what I really want is Rust. My ways lead to Rust, I guess.

Based on the podcast "Microsoft: Powering Israel’s Genocide? | Hossam Nasr," here are the main human rights issues alleged against Microsoft:

1. Complicity in Military Operations - The podcast claims Microsoft is a key tech provider for the Israeli military, specifically using the Azure cloud platform to run combat and intelligence activities. - It alleges Microsoft sells AI services (including OpenAI models) to military units like "Mamram," which are linked to automated targeting systems used to accelerate lethal strikes.

2. Surveillance and Infrastructure - Microsoft is accused of hosting roughly 13.6 petabytes of data used for mass surveillance. - The "Al-Munassiq" app, used by Palestinians to manage movement permits, reportedly runs on Azure and is described as a tool for collecting vast amounts of surveillance data. - The company reportedly sells technology directly to illegal settlements in the West Bank.

3. Internal Labor Rights & Suppression - The speaker alleges a double standard and discrimination against Palestinian and Arab employees. - Microsoft is accused of "weaponizing" HR policies to fire workers (including the podcast guest) for organizing vigils or protesting the company's military contracts.

4. Historical Context - The discussion references Microsoft's history of providing tech to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in the US as part of a broader pattern of supporting "systems of oppression."

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo

Prompt: “ According to this podcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A95asBbCNZo

What are the main human rights issues of Microsoft?”

Used Gemini 3 (Thinking) via WebUI

Totally felt the same during the live-translation demo, when these two casual business folks were talking about "the client will love the new strategy". Dystopian corporate gibberish.

The two experiences couldn't be more different. While I loved the great development speed for my personal projects, where I am writing more code than reading it, joining an existing project needs the opposite, reading more code than writing it. And I can only repeat what many people say, dynamic typing makes this so much more difficult. For most code changes, I am not 100% certain which code paths are affected without digging a lot through the code base. I've introduced bugs which would have been caught with static typing.

So in my conclusion, I'm bullish on gleam, but also on other (static) languages embracing the cooperative green-thread/actor model of concurrency like Kotlin (with JVM's virtual threads). (On another note, I personally also dislike Phoenix LiveView and the general tendency of focusing on ambiguous concepts like Phoenix Context's and other Domain Driven Design stuff)