The lack of vegan options — and Trump flexing his one-day McDonald’s internship — finally pushed me to boycott McDonald’s altogether. Also it became slow with all the delivery drivers queuing up as well.
Burger King might be raising prices too, but at least their deals are still decent, and every burger has a vegan option (which is supposedly even cheaper for them to produce).
My actual favorite “fast food” is IKEA — surprisingly good as a coworking spot, and their vegan Köttbullar are great.
And honestly, in Germany who needs McDonald’s when there’s a good Döner place around? It’s basically a 5-in-1 burger: real bread, salad, sauces, and your choice of meat/halloumi/seitan.
From what I see here, McDonald’s mostly survives in low-density areas or as car-dependant late-night junk food where alternatives don’t exist. But if people go out less, or can’t afford a car anymore, that model gets shaky fast. There are simply too many better options now.
It reminds me of the same shrinkflation/bloat cycle we see with American pickup trucks: beds get smaller while prices balloon, and then people act surprised that these wank-tanks fail in Europe where efficient vans just work better. “Free market” also means that bad products eventually lose.
Same story with phones: everything keeps getting bigger, heavier, and more bloated with features nobody asked for. Bring back the iPhone Mini — not everything needs to be Super-Size Me.
I noticed this when I studied abroad in the Netherlands — a highly educated, slightly more digitalized country than my own. Politics there splintered into micro-parties, each “hardly exchanging between bubbles,” as the study puts it. First impressions were warm, but dates always ended with splitting the bill. Friend groups felt just as closed off, except for Dutchies who had just as me lived abroad before, learned to bridge cultures and still are my closest friends today.
Digitalization and the pursuit of perfect information seemed to invite more binary thinking — and with it, more opportunities to disagree every single day. Meanwhile, other forces found easy consensus on simpler, more immediate issues: cheap gas, housing, grocery prices, job security, immigration. Complex, long-horizon topics like the climate crisis rarely stood a chance.
When I was in Amsterdam I was with a group of acquaintances of a friend who lived there. One of them offered me an extra piece of pizza they had when I showed up. When the bill came, they asked me for the exact percentage of the bill that that piece of pizza cost. First time experiencing something like that.
I also offered to buy several people a drink while I was there. This was received every time with suspicion and I was treated as if I was trying to gain something transactional besides a simple friendship in the moment. It was an interesting part of that society to experience.
Nordic social norms like this get made fun of all the time by westerners and southern Europeans. A lot of people will take the crappy socioeconomic situations of non Nordic countries just so that they can have warm relations with their families and a culture that doesn’t hate loud noises.
Liquid Glass design + This lineup is a middle-finger to ergonomics and accessibility.
I just want a non distractive phone with good battery life. E-Paper screen, compact format, yet still great cameras - maybe LoRa capability for Meshtastic / Meshcore, embedded swiss army knife.
We spend so much time in tech talking about UX, interfaces, and user adoption. But the most important interface we all use every day isn’t digital — it’s the street outside our door.
In most places, cycling is framed as sport or adventure: Type 2/3 “fun” at best (miserable in the moment, sometimes fun in retrospect). That’s not culture, that’s a design failure. A well-designed cycling system should be like a great interface: predictable, low-friction, boring in the best sense.
I wrote about why everyday cycling feels like Type 2/3 fun in most places, and how to make it Type 1 fun — calm, obvious, ordinary. To me, the parallels with UX are striking: adoption ladders, dark patterns, equity of access, and the invisible power of design choices.
Interestingly I have seen a high share of iPhone Minis in my tech-affine bubble around Berlin / Amsterdam etc. - also my grandma switched from SE to 13 Mini.
Also bought used iPhone SE (2016) in 2019 and 2020 - both time from (UX) designers - but the same people also ride bicycles, trains - or if car, really reflect their user requirements - be it a small EV or a van for vanlife.
Average consumers just buy the largest, most marketed (high margin) or "whatever the neighbour has" option - aka SUV or Pro Max.
Born in 1995, I used to joke that kids from 1998 wouldn’t know what a VHS tape is. But turns out “digital native” doesn’t mean digitally literate. That hit me again recently, observing someone rewatch an Instagram reel several times in the supermarket just to grab the ingredients on the fly — no notes, no structure.
I realized I do the same: contextually Googling terminal commands I’ve used 10 times before, then forgetting them. So I started writing them down — first for family recipes, then for shell commands.
This is my “terminal spellbook” — a collection of the commands I actually use and automate. I'd love to see yours too, especially the ones where terminal still beats a polished UI.
I use Figma daily. Now it wants me to buy stock. This got me thinking about how design has shifted from craft to capital—and whether we’re still building for people, or just feeding the machine.
Just an article that reflects on my purchase of a social media promoted product. One of those "Monitor light bars" - and how it joined forces with an unused IKEA vase. Not a startup, just a quarantine hack that made me rethink consumption and design.
