A friend joined them to get protection because he got beaten a lot. He left again after his first drug trafficking job was offered to him. (and fortunately he was allowed to leave because he didn’t know enough yet)
My schoolmates rented a club house for parties and the bikers wanted to do the security themselves. The have beaten people and kicked one drunken guy lying on the floor who argued too much with them. Completely unprofessional.
This was late 2000s in rural Germany.
That’s not an issue anymore. There is an Duolingo course, tons of Anki vocabulary decks, the app Drops supports Esperanto and the website lernu.net has a pretty good free course to learn Esperanto grammar.
I really like the idea of Globasa and Interslavic. I tried learning Toki Pona for one week, but did not stick to it for some reason, maybe some day.
I speak Esperanto and I am quite active in the movement and write for the Esperanto Wikipedia. In 2011 I had quite a cool trip to an Esperanto Youth Congress in Kijiv. But it’s hard to talk about it because most people see it as a failed project from the early 1900s, not as a modern subculture.
A good way to get an impression about real america as an outsider is to follow smaller hobbyist YouTubers from middle sized towns. One guy from Michigan I follow has a remarkable boring life that’s completely different from every American stereotype.
Not every atheist is a humanist or even pro science, so they definitely exist. For example some regions in East Germany have a high Atheist rate and a very right wing population.
A German Black rapper (Sam Deluxe) once said: “as a black person you can’t really choose your political opinion freely, because one side only wants you out of the country.” Many join the left because it means protection.
I think parts of hiphop culture fits quite well to a conservative worldview when it comes to money, masculinity and the role of women.
One of the papers about it https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.07682.pdf
But bigger models have new “emergent” capabilities. I heard that from a certain size they start to know what they know and hallucinate less.
This. If it was about robotic propes and landers I would give it a lot more attention. I can even imagine humanity sending unmanned propes to other stars in a century or so, but the first ones would probably be flyby missions. Space could also be full of low tec probes such as Voyager.
DHNO (dihydrogen monoxide)
I would never put something in my brain that doesn’t at least have a public API documentation. If the company discontinued the product I want to be able to keep using it. Open Source software would be best.