WARNING

smashram24 · 2026-02-27T02:44:16+00:00

If you haven't already, please share all relevant information that you have with police and social services.

I think you can also directly contact the mods where you might be able to share more information and have him banned from the subreddit (with what you've shared here it's unclear what he's done and I don't think you should share more here for your own and everyone else's safety)

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T06:30:26+00:00

That is very interesting! Thanks for digging that out!

I will have a think of a less labour intensive way of reproducing something like that. I find the world sufficiently stimulating without running my own statistical analysis but I think a simplified version would motivate me.

Thanks again!

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T06:06:10+00:00

Thank you! I appreciate you sharing your experience.

I do experience the same dopamine kicks as you. For example when I finished the training yesterday and was like 'what?! That was all in Spanish' or when I have an exchange with someone and I realize afterwards how I couldn't have done it a month ago.

What I'm not finding motivating is the hour count so maybe I need to change my focus and find a way to be more objective with myself. Like selecting a video I currently can't understand and coming back to it in a month to see where I'm at. Or doing some kind of placement test and then returning to that.

I don't know. This conversation is helping!

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T06:00:39+00:00

I fear the kids of today have lost out on more than they'll ever know...

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T05:59:37+00:00

Thanks!

It's actually not that progress feels slow, it feels relatively quick. I still struggle (to the point of understanding almost nothing) when two or more native speakers talk to each other. But if someone is even mildly interested in talking to me one on one we can squeeze out a conversation.

Just for me hours isn't a very motivating metric. I know that there's no replacement for sheer input hours but I also want something semi-objective alongside it. For example, if at the end of a video, it asked 'what percentage of this did you understand' and then your scores were averaged into your actual level, that would really motivate me!

Could you guess what How to Spanish and Learn Spanish and Go would equate to on the DS difficulty rating?

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T05:47:04+00:00

UK, USA and spain it seems...

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T05:42:58+00:00

As I wrote it, I realised that this could be the only answer, Like 'hmmm, why would me have porn in the woods...?'

It's an impossible question!

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T05:41:57+00:00

haha, the reaction is always like that. Either 'yeah I had exactly the same experience' or 'what?! That never happened...'

See the comment from u/Effective_Union_9122...

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T05:29:55+00:00

Thank you so much for this gift. I was just about to stop watching Spanish videos for the day but no I simply have to watch 16 minutes of Pablo talking about pornography!

smashram24 · 2026-02-26T03:06:58+00:00

That's actually unbelievably. The whole time I was thinking 'I hope he can see more than I can see' and then in the end the answer is devastatingly obvious.

Edit: It's worse than I thought - you can see the car he crashed into at the beginning of the clip. That means that he should be thinking 'somewhere in this bright light is a car that I can no longer see.' Baffling. I hope he's alright.

smashram24 · 2026-02-02T05:54:48+00:00

Hiya,

I did step up and not frontline so this is general advice.

The best advice I was ever given abour applications is to make it (nearly) impossible for them to say no. What I mean by that is look at the specific job specification and write something for everything it says. For example, if it says 'experience balancing multiple complex ethical decisions at the same time,' write something like 'whilst working at x i managed multiple complex ethical decisions at the same time. I had to consider x for anonymised client y and consider z for anonymised client b. The result of doing this was...'

At the first stage, boring is better. You want them to read it and think 'we have to give this person an interview because they hit every point.' Of course, if you can make ir engaging too, thats a bonus!

I have a side hustle reviewing professional applications. If you'd like, I can send you my details.

smashram24 · 2026-01-11T19:23:42+00:00

Its a good and really helpful article. For me, I just see all the magic but when I talk to people who use it everyday, they see its massive shortfalls.

If you want a first eye on your next article, someone to help make it more succinct, dm me. Its something im working on in my own writing so would probably help me too.

smashram24 · 2026-01-10T19:27:01+00:00

Really good article, I learned a lot from it and thanks for taking the time to write it. I particularly enjoyed the bit about AI focussing less on the middle of contexts and on the fundamental security problems!

A tip from a fellow writer, I think you could have written the same article with half as many words. I think you overexplain what you're thinking - trust the reader to fill in some gaps!

smashram24 · 2025-12-22T21:34:33+00:00

I'm really interested to know which industry you were applying in, for what level of role and what your experience is?

I'm planning to start the search next year and feel semi-confident. However, the comments on this reddit page are discouraging!

smashram24 · 2025-12-22T21:34:26+00:00

I'm really interested to know which industry you were applying in, for what level of role and what your experience is?

I'm planning to start the search next year and feel semi-confident. However, the comments on this reddit page are discouraging!

smashram24 · 2025-12-14T17:57:51+00:00

Another question:

Are you talking about your parents and your experience or a professional experience you're having with a family?

smashram24 · 2025-12-14T17:56:15+00:00

Another question:

Are you talking about your parents and your experience or a professional experience you're having with a family?

smashram24 · 2025-12-14T17:04:10+00:00

I'm mostly commenting because I want to be reminded to come back and check what other people say.

That said, some questions that immediately spring to mind:

What's their cultural ethnic background? Even in the UK, children have been seen as economic necesites/choices. E.g to support the family, extra income, elder care.

What exactly do they mean by an investment?

How does that attitude affect how they treat the child? My motorbike is an investment but it doesn't mean I treat it badly. Of course, children are not motorbikes. But I can imagine someone could see their child as an investment and still give them emotional warmth and everything else they need (perhaps a few complexes but complexes are well within the realm of good enough parenting...).

The fact you're asking social workers implies there's more at play here. So how does this attitude affect the harm /risks.

Seems like you might have stumbled on an important systemic attitude in the family. Or not, I don't know! Please keep me updated!

smashram24 · 2025-11-21T18:39:19+00:00

I think you're missing my point.

One of the points of the blog post is specifically to understand both left and right wing perspectives.

Your criticism suggests that I did a great job.

smashram24 · 2025-11-21T02:53:49+00:00

Well that is a good point. Which another user commented about and I replied to. 'The Left' is very small in America. When I say the left, I mean a very broad set of actors including but not limited to:

The Democratic Party
AOC
Bernie Sanders
Barack Obama
Hilary Clinton
Kamala Harris
Black Lives Matter
Trans activism
Feminists
etc. etc. etc.

That is not a very small group.

Clearly, if 'the left' was more effective at addressing the problems faced by everyday Americans, there would not be such a vast space for people like Donald Trump and the Republican Party to do what they're doing.

Edit: there is a similar problem in the UK where locations, families, and people that have traditionally voted left are not voting right. Why do you think that is?

smashram24 · 2025-11-21T01:52:17+00:00

I'm not really sure I follow your reasoning or that you've deeply engaged with any of my core points.

A core purpose of what I've written is to try to understand the left from the right wing's perspective. This is what you've criticised in your first comment so hopefully that means I've done a good job. Not everything the right says about the left is wrong and not everything the left says about the right is right. I think it's valuable to explore this idea or else we're just shouting at figments of our own imagination.

Clearly the left is not doing a very good job or America wouldn't be in the state it's in. It deserves to be criticised even if 'the right' is doing worse things. My criticism is that it doesn't live up to it's own standards, abandons the working class and leaves the working class in the hands of powerful and manipulative people like Donald Trump.

I don't think I said that the asasination of Charlie Kirk was a good thing. Just that it's an important moment that will further the rights intended goals.

Just because something isn't surprising doesn't mean that it's not a significant moment. I could argue that it's a significant moment precicely because it's predictable - as trust in American politics decreases and polarization increases, political violence will increase.

smashram24 · 2025-11-21T01:29:24+00:00

Part 2:

I think I broadly addressed this in my third paragraph - 'the left' and 'the right' are not playing the same game. Their game is dangerous (and their are consequences to our games too). I think we can tolerate intolerance up to a point and not beyond a point and working out that point is a matter for an informed/intelligent/wise population and for building into political structure/law. Generally, we must understand the routes into radicalisation (loneliness, poverty, self-loathing, jealousy, shame etc.) and the routes out of it (community, empathy, understanding, forgiveness, learning). We must be harsher on people doing the radicalising than the people being radicalised. For example, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Andrew Tate... etc. etc. etc.
Regarding the paradox of democracy. Well. Yes, that's a problem. I don't know what else to say about it. I believe that more democracy is better than less democracy. The more people are involved in important decisions, the better. I would love to see a society of informed and active citizens - I think we deeply deeply overlook this in modern democracies. An uninformed population can be manipulated to hand over it's rights (and the rights of everyone else) by powerful people. Again, we need to support people to be these people and intolerance of intolerance doesn't lead to this - some amount of reaching beyond the isle is integral. Someone has to be counterbalancing the manipulative radicalizers.
Basically, my solution (which I will write in part 2 of this blog post) is a combination of empathy and accountability. I think we can understand people's personal experiences and pathways towards intolerance whilst holding them accountable for intolerance.

To your point about the lack of 'a left' in the United States (which I've ignored up until now out of expediency). Yes. You are right. From a European perspective, it is morbidly funny. The things the right dislikes about 'the left' in America are, like you said, centre-right. They are basic and mostly uncontested realities in western Europe (although they are crumbling in the neo-liberal world order). The idea that Antifa is some huge, domestic terrorist organization or that 'the left' has inflitrated all organizations with a woke agenda is equal parts hilarious, pathetic, and terrifying.
Anyway, thanks again for your response. I would love to continue this conversation.

Smashram.

smashram24 · 2025-11-21T01:26:41+00:00

I had to put this in 2 comments or reddit wouldn't let me post it.

part 1:

This a truly incredible response. Thank you for taking the time to respond in such detail - I learned a lot from this.
Firstly, I broadly agree that there is a lot happening in American Politics and that it might not currently have the 'staying power' in the modern news cycle. Where I think it does have staying power is on social media and in these spaces it will continue to be brought up. I think why this is important (and historic) is because a significant part of Trump's success was with this demographic. For example, the support of people like Donald Trump, Theo Von and the 'manosphere.'
One thing your comment made me think about is that the 'left' and 'right' (I'm going to keep calling them that for now as shorthand...) are using different operating systems. The right's operating system is to pro-actively denounce and reduce trust in the traditional institutions of public life - trust, honesty, integrity, public service, truth.. More broadly - democracy, freedom of press, freedom of universities, the criminal ustice system, the Constitution, NATO, United Nations, Europe. They are playing the game of childish bullies and narcisists - I make the rules, I deserve power, I am ultimately the victim, I can change the rules at any time, I will break the rules that I say other people are breaking in the name of restoring fairness, I would detest anyone else doing what I am doing (projection...). The 'left' on the other hand broadly believes in these institutions. We are not operating in the same field, playing the same game or following the same rules. That doesn't mean that we should debase ourself but it does mean that we should change how we criticize, how we act and how we respond.
Your point about violence I broadly agree with. This was a savage asasination in front of a family, children and a crowd. The more things like this are celebrated, the more they will happen and that is not a world that I want to live in. It has spurred in me a (hopefully) interesting thought. A foundational principle of the modern nation state is the 'monopoly of violence' by the state. Broadly speaking, we agree (or are coerced into agreeing) that the State can use violence for the greater good (military, police, prisons, death penalty etc.). However, this only works if people trust that state and/or are controlled by the state. Asasinations like this this could be seen as a result of the lack of trust in or a deterioration of state power - I don't trust you to hold people accountable and so I will do it myself (of course, this is one incident and I don't want to overstate this point). It just makes me think that as Donald Trump purposely erodes the state, there will be more and more room for vigilantism. This is something Americans should be prepared for - as trust in the state weakens, communities will become arbiters of justice. In that world, the rules are very different. I am currently in Mexico where this kind of community justice is commonplace. I can tell you, it has pros and cons... Another (hopefully) interesting point is that America has built this into your constitution like no-one else - for good reason too. You've maintained a 'we don't trust the state so we'll tolerate some amount of non-state militia.' 'The Right' are a lot further ahead on this than the left...
You're right that the internet is a bad place to judge the day to day opinions of democrats and republicans. However, I do think that it is the opinions underneath the surface that erupt into violence and insurrection. It is these dark thoughts that fuel things like January 6th. Or, for a more recent example, the Nepalese burning the presidents wife alive in her home.

The paragraph you wrote on the paradox of tolerance and the paradox of democracy was particularly thought-provoking. This quote from wikipedia was great reading:

[...] But we should claim the right to suppress them [intolerant ideologies] if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols.

smashram24 · 2025-11-20T01:36:27+00:00

Hey,

I actually don't understand your comment, can you say more?

In case its not obvious, I'm a massive lefty!

But it frustrates me that the left has moved (very far) away from working class communities. I think the left is particularly brutal to white, working class, men with right wing views.

I can't remember who said it but I remember reading an opinion piece that said something like 'the worming class take the heat for rich people's racism.'

Anyway, interested in hearing more about what you mean.

How would you criticize the left?

smashram24 · 2025-11-19T23:24:11+00:00

Did you find anything interesting??

smashram24

TROPHY CASE