Personally loved the article. And as usual, shared it with a friend and he got actually a bit defensive. Dismissing cynically. Unsurprisingly, is kind of the same attitude here.
I found super interesting the parallels of cookie cutter contra-culture and the results of a heavily vetted AI slop. How most original/interesting thought has a great insight but is easily dismissed...
> parallel interrogation of a creative process leads to boring outcomes; serial investigation gives you creative outcomes.
denial. Look at all the other Germans saying "But all other countries are the same, it's not just Germany".
As a non-eu person living in Germany. It was easier to go to Denmark to marry because of the unreasonable paperwork in Germany. Like "Get a certificate you haven't been married in any country you have lived". Many countries don't issue those certificates.
Every scandinavian person knows how a good digitalized country looks like, Germans just can't even accept they are inefficient.
> Trust me, you're being judged (fairly, imo) a lot more harshly for living somewhere for a decade and not even bothering to learn the local language.
I had 2 years in Goethe institute. And had lessons 2 times a week at work. Kept a handbook at all times with vocabulary to repeat it in the subway. And mingled with German people to escape the expat bubble.
I'm in B1 in German standards.
But that's precisely the same judgement of "not even bothering" I normally get. After so much of that, after 3 years I just gave up.
> > My experience with the Germans not wanting to speak German with you while you stumble over everything, is simply that they want to exercise their own English, and its just not as fun for them to wait for your marble-mouthed nonsense to parse. ;)
I've seen that outside of Berlin. (Or from Germans from out of Berlin when they come and see all the "expats). Are you in Berlin?
I learned some hungarian in my 20s. Tough language, but so beautiful.
I'd say there are some very weird things about the language. I had to wait until my second semester to be able to say "I have X". There's no such verb as "having" in hungarian, but you use possessive + being to indicate you have something. And we only learnt possessive suffixes in 2nd semester.
I'd say that something that helped a lot was that in early 2000s there wasn't that much people speaking English in Budapest. So, no cheating.
But also, trying to speak Hungarian would get people smiling at you for trying. People would say "But Hungarian is the most difficult language in the world!" (maybe not true, but I'd hear that a lot).
After a year and a half, I could communicate with my Mother in law, with some mistakes, but enough to get around and get complimented on my skills.
Couldn't continue living in Budapest, had to return to my home country in Latin America. But later in life, got the opportunity to move to Berlin. I thought "Well, I learnt Hungarian, I can learn German". How wrong I was.
Being able to cheat (Everybody speaks English) and trying to do this in your 30's is much harder.
Not only that, I guess what what made everything just not worthy was Germans giving you shit every time you make a mistake, or your 5-vowel mother language makes it hard to pronounce things. Not only that, but then if you make mistakes you get judged immediately as somebody that "didn't want to integrate". People would generalize and now, after 10 years. With 2 half-german daughters I don't want to learn the language.
It seems is all about "context". A user might like an article about current election. But what does that "Like" mean? Does he actually like the article? Or maybe he liked it because it's clearly ridiculous (almost a joke in his opinion?).
Knowing that a user like let's say "Book X" but no context of "What he liked about Book X" sounds less powerful. But at the same time: Easy to quantify.
The "Having a multi-dimensional representation of people's tastes can give a ton of information" needs to be leveraged against the noise the insignificant contexts of people's tastes introduce. That IMO is half what the pitch should be about.
How to quantify reliably these "contexts" of people tastes. How to exploit them in advertisements. And how this approach is better than let's say, FB's powerful ad creation tool based on "the graph" is only part of it. You'd also need to tell, how are you planning to get your critical mass. Your approach needs to be: novel enough, pretty enough, useful enough, and viral enough, for users to get attracted to start using your tool.
I found super interesting the parallels of cookie cutter contra-culture and the results of a heavily vetted AI slop. How most original/interesting thought has a great insight but is easily dismissed...
> parallel interrogation of a creative process leads to boring outcomes; serial investigation gives you creative outcomes.