>Been once to Germany, maybe twice.

Being German isn't communicable, you won't catch it on a business trip or holiday.

Pretty sure it is sexually transmissible, so I would not be too sure about that.

Not sure, there was this nature + nurture thingie.

Or as Stephen Fry put it: "Nature, Nurture and Nietzsche", very fitting here.

Anybody can spin up agents and burn tokens. There is nothing special or particularly valuable about that.

I prefer to microdose work.

It’s interesting that the countries with the weakest economies in Europe work the longest hours.

During the financial crises Greeks were getting a lot of criticism from Northern Europeans for being lazy but the reality was they did far more hours.

From an employers perspective it would make sense to have people working five six hour days rather than four seven and a half hour days.

I saw this when I worked in Germany. They might not have worked as many hours but they worked hard during those hours.

UK workplaces where much more relaxed in comparison so even though people put in more hours the results were similar.

They have been holding back the tech industry for decades now.

To be fair, the tech industry been holding itself back for decades now too, since lots of people seemingly have somewhat low prices to go from being a FOSS evangelist to wearing a "Microsoft <3 Open Source" t-shirt.

that's just a byproduct of "job creators" holding the keys to a comfortable life over everyones head.

i dont think its fair to conflate the tech industries self-owns with microsofts damages. microsoft has for decades poured untold resources and money into capturing everything they possibly could to sustain themselves with honestly what i call cultural and software vendor lock. we're only just now seeing the gaming industry take its first real footsteps towards non-windows targets, but for the most part the decades of evangelizing Microsoft apis and bankrolling schools and education systems to carry courses for their way of doing things makes that a particularly uphill battle thats going to take a lot more time. people have built entire careers out of the microsoft-way in multiple industries. pure microsoft houses are still everywhere at many orgs, so many of them don't even recognize that there is another path. there's plenty of infra/dbadmin/devops people who are just pure windows still. there's multiple points where microsoft did have the best in class solution for something, but these days you'd be hard pressed to not go another way if you were starting from scratch. problem is such a lift and shift is really hard to do for orgs that have spent decades being a microsoft shop.

in a roundabout way, this sort of translates to real long lasting impact/damage to me. microsoft has always been such a force over history that it caused a massive rift in computing. no matter how much they embrace linux and claim to not fight the uphill battle of open source anymore, that modus operandi of locking people into their suite of things still exists on so many fronts and is in some ways more in your face than it's ever been. there's no benefit of the doubt to give here, i just have a hard time choosing microsoft for... well anything.

Microsoft has been trying to kill everything in computers that's not-Microsoft, for as long as I've been alive. Their actual power comes and goes, strengthens and weakens, but it's been a continuous background threat to personal computing since the first day something other than Microsoft tried to get traction in the industry.

Looking at the rest of the tech industry in 2026 that might be a blessing.

We can explain it to you, but we can't understand it for you.

Explanation: Microslop is a power hungry, greedy and frankly evil corporation whose only goal is complete financial domination of the government, business, and personal tech industries. They actively promote making regressive software, increasing complexity, and hiding straightforward processes behind an information veil.

Example: Go to learn.microsoft.com and try to actually learn HOW to do anything. You'll read 35 pages of text talking about the concept of working with a specific microslop product but not 1 single explicit example of HOW to accomplish a specific task.

Example: Windows 11

Example: Copilot

The whole company is run by backassward tech hicks and digital yokels who can't think past a dime on the floor for a dollar in customer satisfaction, and somehow they run the majority of non-server space or personal device tech on the planet.

Funny enough, I do read the Copilot Studio and Dynamics Customer Service and Power Platform documentation and understand it. But reading documentation from any vendor is a skill. Don’t throw me in front of Google or Oracle documentation and expect me to understand it off the bat.

And of course companies in the US are wanting to make money/capture markets. They’re not a charity. None of that has any relation to holding back the industry. Unless you wish to explain how they hold back all FOSS projects.

You don’t need to be rude in your replies. This is HN, not reddit.

I suspect deaf people are more aware of their lack of hearing than headphone wearers.

I pondered doing that but thought it would agitate other road users so decided against.

Some locales are downright itching for a reason to road rage so I don’t blame you. One thing I have to say about being a motorcyclist is that our residents in California are so considerate and have never once mistreated me for beeping, lane splitting/filtering, stalling my bike at a green light, etc.

It might have been better to lump some of those costs on gas rather than electricity. Polluter pays and all that.