I went to Austria for skying, flew to Innsbruck and two days later caught the train to go to the ski resort.
That train was basically an intercity train (which even stopped at the little town from where a pretty regular commuter could be caught to the little ski resort) … which just so happen to be coming from some city in Switzerland and would end in some city in Germany.
So I sit down in one of those places with 2x2 seats and a table in the middle. A couple of guys also seat down there and eventually we starting chatting.
It turns one of those guys was an Italian surf promoter, who had actually been to my country (Portugal) as part of surf events in Ericeira (big surf place nowadays thanks to the almost unique massive tube waves it gets at certain times in the year).
The guy did not spoke Portuguese but could speak several other languages. We ended up having a one hour or so conversation and as my German was a bit so-so (and, let’s be honest, because it just felt cool to do so), we ended up doing with in the several languages we had in common - German, Spanish, Italian, English and French - just sort of jumping from language to language as we couldn’t remember a word in one so used a different one or because the 3rd guy only spoke English and German so we had to switch to one of those when including him.
Coming from a very peripheral country in Europe - Portugal borders only Spain, and if you travel about 1000km in Spain, you get to the only other country it has a land border with, France, and then it takes another 1000km or so of France to get to the rest of Europe - the whole “absolutelly regular train that just happens to cross 3 countries” and casually chatting with somebody and using various languages when they happen to be convenient, thing was the first time I really felt a hint of what it is to just normally be European in Europe.
Fun stories like this remind me why my country (UK) just never feels connected to Europe. We’ve got this amazing continent on our doorstep but the poor state of our language education prevents many from feeling comfortable to explore it. I would love to share a story like this.
Yeah, I was living in the UK at the time and in that sense it feels almost as peripheral when it comes to Europe as Portugal.
Living in the UK actually made this feeling in that train in Austria more intense for me because I was actually living in an European country other than my homeland but it still didn’t feel much closer to the rest of Europe than in Portugal, though I did jump on the Eurotunnel Express once in London for a couple of days in Paris, which was nice and is definitelly beyond what can be done in Portugal (were international train connections abroad are so bad that for example Lisbon - Barcellona is at least half a day, probably more).
Then again there is a little extra distancing in the UK because English being the lingua franca of this age, Britons can seldom speak any other language, and it’s not at all the same thing when you’re somewhere to use it as it is being able to speak the same language as the locals. (Mind you, I suspect I wouldn’t get the same feeling in Eastern Europe as in that experience in Austria, simply because I cannot speak any language at all from those language branches, except for Romanian which is a Latin language so I can more easilly guess the meaning of words).
Also wrote open source software to generate those fantastic visualizations. It has been forked and is maintained, and it has therefore influenced the whole genre positively.
On the topic, Brady Haran’s channels are also putting out great educational content.
Shiiiit i remember. His videos were genuinely fun to watch. It started to go down a bit when he kept ranting about plastic pipes, like it's some wort of conspiracy and copper was the best thing ever. Then covid hit and ooooh boy what an absolute wanker.
I can't remember who this was, but there was another engineering YouTuber who, during the pandemic, basically twittered about being frustrated with the lockdowns from business perspective and whingled about being scared talking about his political beliefs because apparently being anything anything right of a model leftist is a crucifiable offence in the bird site, according to him. And how the horse paste actually works. I was like "...oh shit, maybe this dude is a magahatter?"
I could kind of ignore it for a while but then he started dabbling in 9/11 trutherism and I had to nope out. At that point the paranoia and politics were infecting and degrading the actual meat of the content.
ThePrimeagen Was cool but now he’s just reacting to programming articles with insane clickbait, especially compared to other programming YouTubers, and talks about things way outside of his core skillset
I really used to enjoy his videos. A lot of insightful talk. It was just programming with an occasional meme. Now it’s 45 minute reaction videos, for a blog post i could have read in 2 minutes
Reading Sapiens changed my mind about this a lot because it always confused me too. It’s more about myths (of which we have a lot like the companies we work for and our countries) that allow us to cooperate, trust each other and work on larger more abstract ideas.
As for why it’s still around today – maybe it’s not as late as you think it is – We just made steam engines 10-15 generations ago
Considering the amount of nerds on this site how is this so hard to find?! Their last video is literally a Star Trek quiz show lol. I love these guys and like many Rich is my spirit animal.
Smarter Every Day. Used to be just some amateur prettyboy nerd just geeking out and getting behind the scenes on cool stuff. Then it seems like he run out of cool ideas and money got involved. Last episode I watched, he was hocking some obviously awful aquarium game that he was involved with.
He does have great content and some great videos still that I enjoy, but it’s also clear he thinks he can understand and make a video about stuff he absolutely doesn’t understand.
The fall for me was when he fronted some random encrypted file sharing startup with very misleading marketing.
I think he’s a good host for engaging and entertaining conversations, if you don’t take him seriously. The problem is he became hugely politically consequential, and he can’t decide if he’s just an everyday moron (ha ha) or a powerful voice with meaningful opinions.
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