For this very reason, I’ve set the watch face on my Apple Watch to always show UV index.

It allows you to gauge whether you should maybe wait under that tree over there while waiting for a friend.

In Australia for example, this is a matter of life and death! There are skin cancel clinics around every corner (no exaggeration).

The background is so green that when I go look at a website with white background afterwards, the white will appear like red because the cells for green in my retina have been depleted.

Relevant context might be for example that there are 4 mentions each of Claude by Anthropic and XGPT by ThreatBook, both based on LLMs.

AI attribution might be one reason people are particularly curious.

I missed that, thanks for pointing out

Especially the (slightly frightening) animations they show!

Can you give examples? I'm curious which of your beliefs have changed

I don't think it's an obvious joke.

In general, you can totally be against the way immigration is handled in one place while being an immigrant elsewhere.

The family you mentioned likely considered themselves different from the immigrants that they complained about.

I'm not agreeing/disagreeing with these people I don't know, but the general point is fair.

There's two things at play here:

1. Defensiveness; one could describe it as "Stockholm syndrome"

2. What outsiders don't understand about the language thing is that it's not about how much German you need to get along in daily life. That's a similar challenge everywhere in the world.

The crux is that in Germany, correct use of the language is a social status thing, more so than in other places. Any person, whether German or foreigner, who appears to have difficulty with the language, is easily looked down upon.

The point about correct use being a status thing is such a good point, that you almost never see mentioned, but definitely feel it.

Recently I saw a discussion on Reddit where the author made a minor mistake in the title, that sounds perfectly fine and understandable to me, as a non-native speaker. They used "Mit was" instead of "womit". And more than half the comments were people pointing out the mistake and making fun of the person due to it, rather than engage in the topic that was raised in the first place.

Yes. I don’t want to invalidate people’s bad experiences, but I think it’s a more general problem and not specifically xenophobia. What you describe can happen to anybody!

The same is true for speaking English, which is considered very high status in Germany. If someone has a strong German accent, they’ll be made fun of. I always find this ironic because the people laughing usually don’t speak much better. (Not that I would care; I love people’s accents.)

I see two big problems:

1. A "meta-problem": While many Germans agree that things are bad, people favour completely opposite solutions.

My meta-solution to that would be decentralisation and letting more things be decided locally, but unfortunately Germans are united in favouring centralisation these days.

2. There's a strong superposition of "things are bad" and "we are still the best"; a high degree of defensiveness and stubbornness. This was accurately described as "presumptuousness" in another comment.

>2. There's a strong superposition of "things are bad" and "we are still the best";

These can be reconciled by good old xenophobia: "Yes, things are horrible, but the way they do it is worse because it is not the way we do it"

Correct. German culture is to take any idea to its conclusion, until the idea is dead.

or someone else is dead