Reason being: If the distributions of user types have changed over time (e.g. 2010 having a higher % of more entrepreneurial / founder type users vs employee-type fokls [like myself] looking for their next gig) then it could skew the results no?

Anecdotally the graph makes total sense. I'd just take the absolute ratio/differences with a pinch of salt.

This is to say that loneliness can be thought of as not just a sense of lack of connection to other people but a connection to the world. This loneliness is evident because of our lack of consistency of our actions with results. People have a 'back to nature' kind of philosophy when they talk about it because that is the most common way to find the consistency - farm to table and all that.

But I think it's more broad. For example, Minecraft has the kind of consistency that makes a person feel more connected to, at least, that world because it is participatory and makes a kind of intuitive sense that our normal lives lack.

I know it seems reaching to correlate the two - in some way, it is. However, the thing a lonely person lacks is more than just an empty person to talk to. It's a deeper purpose which can be often found in activity with other people but isn't limited to it.

Some of the least lonely people are those with projects they are passionate about. They have a connection to the world that feels consistent but it isn't other people.

Of course a desire for a return to nature is not necessarily "modern", see for example Walden, but I think the degree of disconnect has increased to the point it is harder to ignore for a larger number of people.

It's an amazing lesson in scale. In the early game, it's pretty easy to recover from supply chain issues and refactor your setup to adjust to your growth needs and expansion across the land. Once you reach mid to late game, and something goes wrong, your whole factory starts to grind to halt as you try to diagnose where in the whole system things have clogged up, you need to measure and monitor throughput to make sure you are producing the materials needed for consumption by other machines at a rate that is sustainable. Refactoring at this point really means shutting most of it down and building from the ground up again.

Kind of like humanity 100s & 1000s of years ago. Most of life was localized, food, raw materials. We were not over fishing the seas or pushing the soils to the limit. The scale of humanity now, is such that all the supply chains, food and resource requirements depend on such a plethora of things running as they have been, uninterrupted (gas, food, water supplies, raw materials, spare parts).

That is why this argument about "climate disasters in the past" really never made sense to me. This is an entirely different game.

And yes, "humanity" may survive. But just like the factory that stops working that needs to be largely deconstructed and re-built, a lot of people will be unnecessarily plunged into hardship, famine and probably death. Economies and societies will be affected in ways we really can't imagine.

The question then is, what will humanity and society look like after? And what will our successors and future generations think of their ancestors who had the time, knowledge and the technology to ease or circumvent their suffering.

Nitpicking here, but my god, can German companies/universities/organizations please start paying for native English speakers to do their copy-writing and STOP translating directly from German?

It's "Do you need". Not "You need..."

This is the typical translation of the German marketing "Du brauchst <blah>?" or "Du bist ein <blah>? Dann...". I see pattern this all the time, such as "You are a student who wants to work on innovating projects? Then apply...".

This may sound like a rant, but I genuinely think these little details would go a long way to actually showing that the German economy does have some sort of international mindset. This persistence in sticking to these wrong ways just makes me think that 'OK this is another conservative old-school minded German company trying to play unicorn'. If there's no attention to detail or care for the little things on your front-page marketing website - your first contact with your customer - it just leaves me with a bad feeling about the parts I don't see.

I don't know why it frustrates me enough to write a comment in the middle of the day, I guess I really can't understand how global German corporations still, as a rule all make this same error, which I suspect is just the tip of the iceberg of a larger symptom of not wanting to think outside/beyond the DACH bubble. And I feel a sense of sadness that such a country with great prospects just drags its feet lazily into the the future.

Edit: I also see this all the time in Email correspondence, you can immediately tell if a person is a native German speaker because they don't capitalize the first letter in an English email after "Dear X, we are writing <blah>" (which would be 100% correct in German, but somehow no one teaches this in English classes in Germany that in English it is capitalized). For a country that loves rules, this drives me mad.

Edit2: This is definitely a rant and it triggered me emotionally for some odd reason. I concede that my interpretation is quite exaggerated, so please do excuse me! I'll leave the comment however because I'm curious to know whether any others feel the same way.

Edit3: I will also say that translating between German and English is hard as there are some fundamental differences in their structure. There are very colloquial ways to say or not say certain things. That is why native speakers are essential for such things.

Edit4: Please take this comment with a pinch of salt. This is the rant of an fatigued expat who decided to blow some off steam about the oddities of their host country that drive them bananas. For posterity, I will say there at least 10 amazing wonderful things about German culture that I love, for each odd cultural thing. But you know, at some point when you see something for the umpteenth time, something snaps inside of you and it all comes out, especially on a mid-week day like a Wednesday.

    www.ibm.com
    www.siemens.de
    www.salesforce.com

The English wording? A minor problem. I'm thankful that Andrew explains what is wrong and how to fix it! As a German, I'm annoyed by Germans who use every chance to tell other people that their English is much better (than mine).

I am a native English speaker who has lived and worked in many countries around the world. In some of those countries English was the primary language, in others it was formalized in the workplace as the business language, in others it was just a lingua franca used by immigrants and expats of many different backgrounds to communicate with one another. One of the best things about English is that it easily adapts to all these roles. It's a flexible language, and there are many different ways to express the same thing. I believe that's one of the reasons why it is so popular as a second language.

English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in Germany is different to the English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in the US or Canada or England or Australia, and that's fine. Ditto India, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa... Unlike Spanish, French, Chinese etc there is no central regulator that defines how the English language is supposed to be used. Grammar can change depending on where you are. English speakers all over the world essentially understand one another, despite using different structures and idioms.

While it is true that completely bastardized grammar can become more difficult to understand, and may result in the language being spoken getting classified more as a pidgin or creole, I don't think it's especially helpful to "nitpick" over this particular issue - a sentence structure that is easily understandable by anyone in the world who can speak English. If "do" gets dropped by English language speakers in the context of questions, what's the big deal? Especially in written language where we use a question mark anyway. Who cares?

I really recommend "Oxford English: a guide to the language" by Ian Dear. It is/was published by Oxford University Press but if you look around on eBay, Abebooks, amazon secondhand etc., you can often find a very cheap "IBM Edition" -- they co-published it along with a dictionary of quotations (presumably they helped compile the latter).

It's a really fantastic volume that goes into such detail about Indian Standard English, for example, that it will make you love English even more.

The international mindset is to be tolerant with non-native speakers. I find it perfectly ok when a German company uses expressions that hint at their origin. Similarly, I'm not bothered when a British company uses British words or a Texas company uses expressions that are typical for their region.

What triggers me, however, is when people misspell expressions in ways that reveal that they have no clue about where the expression comes from. For example, if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they want to appear.

That's a nice eggcorn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

But I think that most people (in the international business community) don't notice the details your talking about, so in the end, it really doesn't make sense to pay for a translator. I live in Germany, and even my most brilliant German friends (with basically native English skills) cannot grasp the subtle differences of when to use "this", "that", or "it" (as in, "this one time at band camp" vs "that one time at band camp", "it's awesome" vs "that's awesome" vs "this is awesome"). It's a dead give away, but almost nobody would ever know except native speakers.

I don’t get it, which part is supposed to be capitalized, “dear” or “we”? As a native English speaker the sentence looks correct as it’s written. Or maybe I have bad attention to detail.

We would like to inform you..."

vs

" Dear Ms. Smith,

we would like to inform you..."

However you can always tell your correspondent is German by their capitalization of second-person pronouns! Also the awkward use of "kind regards" because they can sense that "with friendly greetings" doesn't sound right.

"Dear Ms. Smith, we would like to inform You that Your cloud subscription will soon be expiring. Please send Your payment by registered letter to..... Kind Regards, Dieter" ;-)

TIL thanks.

Sadly once you are in the professional world, nobody correct you anymore, so you can't improve/fix your English easily.

>nobody correct you anymore

Should be "nobody corrects you anymore"

Would you also have corrected it if had been text written by Nigerians or others that use a creole or dialect of english?

Pretty bold claim. I bet there are many other languages where the first letter after the salutation isn't capitalized.

I also bet that some native english speakers make the same error.

> BEFORE GOING ANY FURTHER: BRIEFLY ABOUT THE PROCESSING OF YOUR DATA

But... that said, as someone who's only done a bit of German on Duolingo, I don't mind, especially for early-stage services. It says to me more work needs to be done around l10n and copywriting, but as long as they keep improving the core product, it's okay.

In fact what annoys me more than awkward English are teams that download and use generic English-language website templates, resulting in super-generic product pages.

Is this an option in German business culture? Are Germans open to conveying the (mere) gist of a sentence?

Ages ago, we translated our manufacturing software to German. Our German team were an absolute joy to work with. They were so thorough, they'd correct our English, and then translate to German. In other words, our German translators caught mistakes missed by our own technical writers. So awesome.

I'm not sure the reverse is even possible, culturally. Can a German marketing and PR firm accept a localized version of their message? Off the top of my head, I can't think of a German lifestyle product or consumer brand. And the German brands I do know -- BMW, Mercedes, Kraftwerk -- don't much use words for marketing. They don't need to.

NIVEA, Braun, Miele, Bosch, Birkenstock, various chocolates ... and so on. Lots of marketing in awkward English.

Let me try again...

Bullshit is hard to translate. Culturally, German branding may have comparatively less bullshit. And therefore less compulsion to translate nuance. Just describe what the product does.

Amazon recruiting will say stuff like "code ninjas needed to invent future!" Versus "get beaten like a rented mule for two years, to make Bezos even more rich, then fall over dead". (How would one translate either version?)

This LIDL/Schwartz pitch, perfectly normal for America, comes off kinda weird, like maybe satire, from a German company.

Well, I think that Germany's commercial balance shows this much better than non-native-sounding-yet-fully-correct grammar.

I imagine something like "Our customer support is being overworked by completely banal minutiae, what can we do?" We compare different intake funnels, and customers that were presented with a badly translated homepage never reach to support with such issues. Let's make sure to always run that page from now on, those customers aren't worth the hassle. Make sure they stick with AWS and bleed them dry.

When American websites are translated to other languages, sometimes some things end up weird.

By the way, I feel Indians speak that way in casual conversations; "you want coffee?", "you want biscuit?" etc.

I want to make clear - it's not the language issue per se. I think native English speakers are incredibly privileged to have their language as one of if not the international language, so I could never fault a person for not speaking a foreign language well (I'm sure I butcher the German language in ways that would make Goethe himself cry out in anguish).

It's the fact that this is an international company launching a product in a professional setting. Again, I don't quite know why this bothers me so much, but I feel its within the context of other cultural things I experience.

Except it doesn’t.

"You need X?" works in a casual setting. But IMHO it looks pretty out of place in a more formal sentence like this with so many fancy nouns.

If I can read the text and guess what language the original text was in, I would argue that it's not a very good translation.

You can have a big brown bag, but if you have a brown big bag, something sounds wrong. You can have an excellent blueberry muffin, but not a blueberry excellent muffin. You can meet your 27-year-old Ukrainian friend, but not your Ukrainian 27-year-old friend.

Unless you majored in linguistics or learned English as a second language, you probably never once even thought about the rules of adjective order in English (and in other languages the rules are often different!). But you know them, follow them, and people who don't follow them don't sound right to native English speakers.

And there are so many weird rules like this.

This is like ranting about Microsoft's website using American spelling when clearly they're selling to British people as well, only worse. This is pretty short-sighted. To OC, please keep thoughts like this to yourself. I hope you're not doing this for all the different stylistic usages of English out there, otherwise things are not looking good for literally any Australian business.

Or to put it more abruptly - if the release marketing is so low effort they haven't even bothered to get a professional translation, it suggests the same care and attention may have been lavished on the product.

Then after much tinkering with the parameters, exploring the limits, plotting graphs, slowly I look at it and recognize what is going on and realise "gosh that is actually really F**ing simple"

I wonder how much of "learning" math is really spent on decoding the representations we are provided, rather than understanding the concept they're meant to represent.

That's exactly it! It's basic clean coding style where it's better to use meaningful names and sometimes write something in 2 or 3 lines that is more interpret able than to write a perfect one-liner that no one will be able to unpack.

In this regard I almost wish we had a de-facto standard in math of presenting the 'condensed' perfect form of the equation and a more chunkier version.

What I like is that recently I saw some researchers annotating the symbols in their equations [1].

[1] https://twitter.com/sibinmohan/status/1480583840858996743/ph...

How to get from one state to the other is the whole problem.

The terse symbolic language is someone's best attempt to communicate the beautiful simple idea in their head. More than any other discipline, I think, mathematicians write to be understood, to be clear.

Yes, there are certainly aspects of computers, the internet and especially social networking and instant-texting that have a net negative impact on our lives.

But this argument strikes me as a "I'm such a victim" argument. Surely if you allow some device to have such a massive negative impact on your life then this would be the case even pre-90s before computers and the internet became mainstream?

- Maybe you might have spent too much time hanging out at your local bar? - Perhaps you'd have been addicted to television?

The one area, where I wholeheartedly agree and recognize the serious dangerous of the internet and computer devices is in children. The threat of cyber-bullying and indeed, rather more subtle, the attention-seeking culture of always producing content at a young age is IMO, very scary when thought of in the context that these will be future adults who didn't know better. We need to guard against these enabled social pressures like we protect kids from smoking, drugs, alcohol and even to a lesser extend (i.e. it's not illegal) addictions to things like TV, video games and other behaviors that they might fall prey to.

I guess, summed up what I am saying is: It appears that there the internet has developed a predatory nature on one's attention that extends to threaten one's social status and reputation.

Where I disagree is that - as adults - we know better and can combat this with self-discipline and by choosing our friends/social circles wisely (I don't engage with friends who constantly text or post online. I'm happy to meet but they know not to expect my participation there).

Where I agree is that, children are vulnerable to this and must be protected AND TAUGHT how to treat / interact with the internet.

Unfortunately, since this is relatively a new thing in society. We have not yet developed a solid culture around what is acceptable and what is not. Just like it is inconceivable now to smoke inside a closed room, or someone's house, I do hope that in the future it would be inconceivable to upload compromising information/pictures to random servers in foreign countries. But alas, we are not there yet.

The mechanisms of addiction and socialization are definitely more complex than "it made me do it". I'm not saying that without the internet I would have become World President, but the technology definitely nudged me towards indulging some of the worst traits in my character. It also allowed me to tolerate situations that, probably, I should not have tolerated - which feels good in the immediate but can actually postpone a necessary reckoning. And it heavily influenced my career choices, with mixed results.

> Maybe you might have spent too much time hanging out at your local bar? - Perhaps you'd have been addicted to television?

Maybe, but those are well-known behaviors, fairly easy to spot and compensate for. Bars are actually hypersocial and promote local connections and some degree of personal expression. TV is very passive and boring, whereas on the internet there is always something new to read or do.

It wasn't until the '80s that we got a fairly solid (and popular) understanding of the mechanisms of broadcasting, some 60 years since it had become mainstream; as you said, there are a lot of things we don't know about the new world of 24h online access. Undoubtedly my life choices are ultimately my fault, but "no man is an island" cuts both ways - particularly because I see a lot of my (bad) experiences replicated in a lot of my friends.

I guess it's not as simple as boiling it down to the individual's own self-control. To some degree maybe my stance is also biased in that I want to empower myself to be the one to reduce my time online.

Curious what you mean by "the mechanisms of broadcasting" here--what discovery/formalization/legislation/else do you mean?

This is always an interesting discussion to me as one of the first kids to really grow up online. (It still weirds me out that my childhood is illegal now.)

> Unfortunately, since this is relatively a new thing in society. We have not yet developed a solid culture around what is acceptable and what is not.

Also unfortunately, I doubt we will until Gen Z and Gen Alpha grow up and start having their own kids. I didn't really start to reckon with the bad parts of growing up online and the ways that it may have shifted my development until I was in my 30s and starting to see the same behavior in current kids and realizing 'wow, that was f'ed up.' Right now, there just aren't many adults who can speak to spending a shit ton of time online as pre-teens, and kids can smell inexperienced bullshit a mile away.

The other possible outcome is that the curriculum/culture for this will be written by people in power who have no idea what being a child on the internet is actually like + it will be written as a political football, so it will be completely ineffectual.

Yes, but we are not living in the pre-90's. The internet is the TV/bar/etc. for us now. Some of us recognize that we not only gained but lost something as well.

And we want what we lost back.

I guess my stance is more kind of to protect my mental sanity, to try and make this a "self-discipline" problem that I can control, and hence reduce my exposure/time online. That suits me but I do agree that to some degree there needs to be a wider societal change and I do agree that it can't all be placed on the individual to be super strong mentally when the internet is now literally a life necessity for operating in society in any dimension.

I think a lot of social validation once came easy by mere virtue that we lived so closely to one another, and suburbia flipped that on it's head. Once it was the case that social activity required a) transport, b) money, c) time, it has become increasingly devoid from weeknights. We could remedy this by changing physical structures, but we won't.

The DMV feels to me like the only place now where I share a seat with people not like me.

But I can't for the life of me understand why KeePass isn't the defacto gold standard.

It's secure, open source and you have control over the data. I would never for the life of me think of storing my important passwords with a company ever. Am I over reacting?

Honestly never understood why joining startups is meant to be so amazing unless 1) They are working on exactly the niche that YOU personally want to work in and 2) The startup's company culture is exactly your kind of weird/niche culture too. IMO unless it's a perfect match, you're going to have a bad time as there is less stability and diversity of ideas/experience in small startups.

I love large orgs because there are tons of characters, experienced professionals and frameworks designed to support and enable me. I can always move projects when I get bored or something isn't right.

I would join a startup however if there is something very very specific I want to build and I want to circumvent all the corporate barriers/rules to move fast and ship something. But so far, I've not felt that yet.

This comment is so underrated. In most big companies, if your manager is an asshole or the project is boring, you can always move to a different role.

People who switch faster either have very accommodating leads or they feel secure enough to give an ultimatum.

On the one hand - an adult should be able to make their own choices regarding something like this. I mean, we're all slowly decaying day-by-day and I can understand that one might want to live while their alive and suffer the consequences of a shorter lifespan. Also sometimes one could argue it's actually encouraged not to become obsessed with _never_ doing anything that is bad for your health, we all accept that there's value in stress reduction to sometimes just go out and have an intense night with friends, order in some junk food or just do something really risky for the adrenaline rush.

On the other hand - the intense addiction factor of cigarettes is really quite terrifying and is really unprecedented when compared to other unhealthy habits. A lifelong smoker who quit once told me that the Cigarette, is more like a companion. There in the good times, (celebrate, have a cig), there in the bad, there when you wake up, take a break, or call it a day. They are optimized to be a lifelong companion and the amount of suffering caused by them (directly - to the smoker and indirectly - to loved ones impacted by their addiction) is significant enough (IMHO) to warrant questioning of its impact to human life. Alone 80-90% of lung cancer deaths are attributed to smoking [1], that isn't some minor thing at all. And although for some people cigarettes may start or may always be just a source of relaxation or indulgence occasionally on a night out, once the addiction and habits set in, it becomes a point of stress and suffering when they are not available - which IMO negates any benefits they might provide at the start. You also don't see this sort of wide spread addiction with things like cigars - which to me is a dead giveaway that they are not just some form of indulgence.

I personally would love to see them disappear and never return. I think they provide far more suffering to the individual and individuals surrounding smokers than any of the benefits could ever hope to offset.

If that's not possible, then I'd be satisfied if the addictive substances in them were highly regulated and reduced or removed entirely.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/lung/basic_info/risk_factors.htm