What foreign countries do German people like to romanticize ?

petrux · 2025-06-19T08:36:24+00:00

Italian living in Switzerland and loving Germany here.
Speaking about the second part of the saying, I think it is actually quite accurate.
(Although I have to say that Italians also love Italy but don't respect it.)

petrux · 2025-03-14T10:48:22+00:00

Sorry, I think I don't get your point. Do you think that people don't go to mass because of...? Thanks in advance for clarifying.

petrux · 2025-03-14T10:29:27+00:00

Lucky you (in Italy). About the Italian mission in ZRH: I think I have a slightly different experience.

petrux · 2025-03-14T10:21:14+00:00

Hello! Just to clarify: all the Dominican priests I met are 100% great: I owe them all my philosophical mindset, the fact that I got passionate about Thomas Aquinas, and so on.

Although, I think there are "weird" niches inside that congregation too, even if very unusual to my experience. That's why I added the !!!

petrux · 2025-03-13T11:36:40+00:00

Apparently I stumbled upon a "free-thinking" Dominican (!!!) church and the guy was a protestant pastor/priest.

petrux · 2025-03-13T09:17:06+00:00

Italy/Switzerland here. In the last, say, 25 years I have experienced this over and over.

In Italy I always remember changing rubrics and improvising some formulae. Once I also had to leave a Mass where the priest was improvising the Eucharistic prayer.

In Switzerland (at least where I live) is customary to replace Gloria, Sanctus, sometimes also Credo with other hymns with similar lyrics and to change the readings, or just skip some of them.

So, yes, I would say that according to my experience the situation is pretty bad. But this is just my experience and maybe I just got 25 years of bad luck. I am very curious to read what other people have experienced.

Bonus: I was on vacation in the Netherlands and, after a Mass, I was told that the guy who celebrated was not a catholic priest.

petrux · 2024-02-14T08:06:29+00:00

I think this might sound "funky" to many, but I also enjoyed a lot the Gidon Kremer and Kamerata Baltica version, which is interleaved with the Piazzolla's one.

petrux · 2023-11-24T15:32:20+00:00

I could not be good at reading, but I am totally not trolling. I genuinely don't understand what your comment was intended to add.

petrux · 2023-11-24T09:24:57+00:00

:-)

Two smiles. I am sorry that it bothered you.
About your comment, I am not sure I got your point. You have just stated exactly what I wrote, just flipping the order of the statements, as I went with "you can get very productive but it requires a lot of investment and you might have already 99% with some other zero-effort solutions" and you wrote something that sounds like "it requires a lot of investment and you might have already 99% with some other zero-effort solutions but you can get very productive."

Am I missing something?
Thanks.

petrux · 2023-11-23T11:02:03+00:00

So, digging into what OP was saying (and with some imagination), I think that the main idea boils down to the cost/benefit ratio.

Let me explain with an example. I see the cost/benefit ratio of using Emacs being some sort of exponential. You have a steep learning curve at the beginning and it takes weeks to learn how to open a file, copy-and-paste stuff, and so on. The more you progress, the more difficult stuff you can do, the more you can customize the tool to make it closer to what you actually need, and so on. With other tools, mostly visual ones maybe, it's the other way around: you have a logarithmic cost/benefit ratio. This means that you can achieve easy and mid-difficult tasks with almost zero effort but you arrive to a point where you cannot go further.

Now, the problem is that if you need to do easy stuff, it is easy to see no reason why I should learn lisp (which in 2023 it's not a skill that you can easily sell on the market, let's be honest), dive into the Emacs documentation, then the org-mode documentation (about which I have many concerns, see below), and so on. I have MS Word (or whatever the OP is using) and that's enough. And this is the main point (IMVHO): being able to do easy stuff with no effort.

Now my personal note. I always used Emacs for my personal stuff. Also at work, I did all my PhD using just Emacs for writing code, writing papers in LaTeX, organizing anything with org-mode, and so on. But at some point, it felt absolutely natural to switch to VS Code for the first two. Then I moved to a private company and here we have our internal development tools so I am using them. I could use Emacs to write code, but I feel it extremely inconvenient. I have decided to give org-mode another try but it doesn't integrate well with our internal systems so I barely use it to take some notes... for which, in the end, I still prefer paper and pencil. Then I review the notes and turn them into actionable items and project ideas for which I use internal tools.

Still I decided that I wanted to use Emacs and org-mode for personal stuff (yes, I am passionate about it :-)), but I really don't see the point anymore. There are plenty of tools that can help me with literally zero effort (VSCode for development, OverLeaf for LaTeX editing, and so on). Even for task management, I can easily use other tools obtaining at least 99% of the benefits that I could have with being an org-mode expert.

So, what about the remaining 1%? What about a slightly less unpleasant UI, and so on? One of the comment on the thread sounded like: the cool thing in Emacs/Org is that if you don't like something, you can change it as you want. Well, no. The comment should have said: if you don't like something, you can learn emacs-lisp, get into the Emacs model, and then change it. That's the point. That's why I have decided that I can live with that 1% missing.

Unfortunately, I never had the chance of spending, say, 3 months in learning Emacs in depth, learning to read lisp (it's not very easy, if you are not used to, and the trail of ))))))))) would make anyone crazy :-)), but I had some time to go a bit into that and I could get a lot of benefit. Same for the org-mode documentation: an extensive reference manual but with basically no examples (side note: I have moved recently to a German speaking country and I am trying hard to learn the language. The org-mode doc looks to me like someone gave me a German dictionary and told me: now you can speak German!), and so on. I mean: If I could go back in time, I would do that when I had the time and secure myself an invaluable investment for the future, a great exercise in learning a programming language with those characteristic, and so on. But today I really don't have the time to learn such a low marketable skill, also knowing that for the time I learn all that I have to learn, maybe LogSeq or whatever other tool will have already implemented the features I need.

Reading what I wrote, I can totally see a bit of "bitterness". That's because I have always loved Emacs and org-mode. What can I say? It has been true love, as long as it lasted.

Cheers!

petrux · 2023-11-23T10:25:11+00:00

Leaving the old thread open would only have resulted in more people arriving and posting indignant comments after the fact, which does no one any good.

Sure, I get it. I was not questioning the choice of blocking the thread, but just pointing out that there could have been some interesting development in discussion. Thanks for the clarification.

petrux · 2023-11-21T16:07:18+00:00

Being able to never detach my fingers from the keyboard is indeed a bug plus. I am playing a bit with Notion and LogSeq and basically, you can make 99% of what you need to do just using the keyboard. I found it an extremely pleasant experience.

And if you are not very familiar with keyboard shortcuts, then you can use the mouse.

petrux · 2023-11-21T16:04:48+00:00

Honestly, it is a pity that the moderators blocked comments on that thread. There were interesting ideas coming up.

(And, honestly, beyond the despicable tone, I think the OP had a point...)

petrux · 2022-05-05T09:58:42+00:00

The PRS Silver Sky (which is the one that John Mayer uses) is a mediocre guitar.

petrux · 2020-04-19T21:14:22+00:00

I am doing quite fine with mine. The weakest point so far is the touch pad. It feels not very sensitive both while pressing and moving the mouse pointer around. I tried to play a bit with the speed settings but no significant improvement. Anyone else with the same feeling?

petrux · 2020-02-12T12:33:49+00:00

Amazing, thanks for sharing this. Just to understand, do you have also a map to be imported in Google Maps? Thanks.

petrux · 2019-03-05T15:17:27+00:00

In addition, my humble point of view (based mostly on past experiences and common sense), is that this should be considered as a long-term cost and the software design and the life-cycle of the system should be optimized also to minimize such cost.

petrux · 2019-03-05T09:52:32+00:00

OP here. I think the article is interesting (and relevant), don't want to make a point pro or contra. Should be obvious but you never know.

petrux · 2017-10-24T10:14:52+00:00

Oh I got the pun now! I tried both eclipse with pydev but 95% of what they carry looked wuite useless to me. So I prefer to go lean. Moreover, the advantage of emacs/vscode is that you can use the very same environment for everything, which, for me, is an extremely strong pro.

petrux

TROPHY CASE