Hello,
of course I also started to play padel. And again got a confirmation that my biggest strength was never sports, average at best. But I can run in a more or less straight line for a long time. Fitting to my strengths… we will start a book club, but with very limited spots — link is in the snippets. A padel tournament and a running club will need to wait for now.
We literally have a couple of spots left for our AI workshop. Today is the last day for Early Bird tickets.
📌 Pinned
The other day a corporate-looking chap with good hair was waiting in front of my building, and after seeing me enter, he asked, "Sorry, are you maybe renting from Wunderflats?" It turns out his colleague wants to rent an apartment and is sending him to check if it’s a scam. I check, and it’s 3 flats, all going for €33/m2, doing the furnished apartment trick. Look, I am all for real estate as an investment, but this is sick. Ok, maaaaybe if we talked about some premium real estate. But this building is neither new nor premium, no f* way. So, dear chap... yes, definitely a scam.
What's also a scam is the abuse of people in need, for example, Indian students packed in small flats and charged €450 monthly for a shitty shared room. This should be prosecuted.
Do you know anyone needing to pay €25+/m² for a Berlin flat?
🗞 Berlin & Germany
I read a lot, but miss reading books. So Olena and Karen will help me run the Handpicked Book Club. We’ll be reading German novels in the language of your choice, starting with Der Vorleser (The Reader) by Bernhard Schlink and meet monthly to discuss what we read. Limited spots, first-come, first-served. We plan our first meeting in July.
Save the dates. Tuesday, 7th of July, Everyday AI Club edition #2. Friday, 17th of July, Summer get together with Berlin Events Weekly.
Europe 2031, a short novel (?) with an executive summary about the lack of the continent's compute power & own-AI-tech, caused a big stir in the tech bubble this week. What surprised me the most was the number of likes and comments just after it was published. Looks like some people are very fast
readersskimmers. It couldn’t have been timed better, because on Friday, Anthropic removed its latest model, Fable 5, for non-US citizens because the US Government asked them to. Absolute clown show.How does the Berlin government work? A wiki explainer by WahlheYmat.
Terror in Berlin. Oak processionary moths are still terrorising citizens with their barbed hairs, which get easily blown around by the wind. They cause skin rashes, intense itching and eye irritation. Typical of Berlin, the Senate will organise a meeting only “next week”.
Tagesspiegel made a paywalled list of great courtyard cafes in town: GM26 (Steglitz), SOFI (Mitte), La Tazza D'Oro (Friedrichshain), Schwarzes Café (Charlottenburg), Hofcafé bei Mutter Fourage (Wannsee), Breakout (Kreuzberg), Torten & Schnittchen (Weißensee), Father Carpenter (Mitte), Café Botanico (Neukölln), and Tadschikische Teestube (Mitte). Which reminded me I was only in Teestube in winter.
I learned about Claudia Wuttke's campaign. There are some good reasons for statute of limitations, but it makes absolutely no sense that rape that doesn't involve "aggravating factors" such as weapons or proven incapitation (how can you prove you were unconscious?) expires after 5 years. It makes you wonder what the rules would be if men were the ones mostly impacted.
Stats: German police records 400k phone usage during driving violations per year. ADAC did a study in Berlin and found 3.6% drivers using their phone (the national average was 1.4%). Cyclists were a bit better (1.5% vs 1.4% nationally).
Years ago, I saw this short movie by Werner Herzog. Please don't use your phone while driving or cycling.
Berlin-related headlines
"A visible sign for diversity and the queer community": Kai Wegner joins Berlin's CSD with his own truck for the first time [more]
Federal government plans to sell an island on Berlin's Müggelsee [more]
Around 400,000 young eels were released in Berlin [more]
City Chicken vs City Chicken: Berlin's bloody rotisserie feud [more]
Federal government to fund soundproofing in clubs and festivals in Berlin and Brandenburg [more]
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🌿 Worth your time
How to actually reduce your screen time: 12 tips by the Guardian. It did make me think. If I didn't think I needed social media for business (do I really?), wouldn't it be liberating to use a dumb phone or no phone at all? We really came far, adding links to newsletters about how to pointlessly scroll less. Where are the flying cars we were promised?
Interesting essay about the lemon stage of the internet. The part about random brands popping up resonated strongly. Try clicking on an ad on Instagram and brace yourself for dozens of variations of the same product. Buying online truly feels like rolling the dice on the quality of the product. The same for online dating?
⏱️ Briefly
Outside interests #1: EU regulators rejected Apple's request for an 18-month exemption from the Digital Markets Act, after the company blamed EU rules for not rolling out its upgraded Siri AI in the bloc. [more]
Outside interests #2: Meta was fined €100k for delayed compliance with a German court-ordered Facebook deletion. [more]
Outside interests #3: The EU Commission ordered Meta to allow competing AI chatbots on WhatsApp free of charge within five business days or face fines — a rarely-used interim measure aimed at preventing lasting damage to competition while antitrust proceedings continue. Meta called it overreach and will appeal. [more]
Outside interests #5: A Munich district court issued a preliminary injunction against Google, ruling the company is directly liable for false statements made in its AI Overviews. Two Munich publishers had been wrongly linked to "dubious business practices". The court distinguished AI Overviews from classic search results, finding they make "independent" statements rather than just displaying third-party content. [more] Pretty big!
Mercedes-Benz started large-scale production of its electric axial flux motor at the Berlin-Marienfelde plant. [more]
Delivery Hero (Berlin, food delivery) Uber's pursuit of the company faces a fresh challenge from a Saudi competitor. [more] More drama!
Burgermeister (Berlin, food) is expanding to Vienna.
Foodwatch (Berlin, consumer NGO) found EU-banned pesticides in rice, tea and spices sold across EU markets. [more]
Swapfiets (Netherlands, mobility) continued to post annual losses despite acquiring Berlin competitor Dance. The subscription service operates 35k bikes in Germany. [more]
Bending Spoons (Milan, app holding) filed for a multi-billion-euro IPO. The Italian holding owns Komoot, Eventbrite, AOL and WeTransfer. [more]
OpenAI acquired Ona (Kiel, cloud dev environments) for an undisclosed amount. Ona has provided secure cloud workspaces for 2M+ developers since 2020. [more]
Frasers Group (UK, retail) made a takeover bid for Hugo Boss (Metzingen, fashion), offering €38 per share and valuing the company at ~€2.7B. [more]
Schwarz Gruppe (Neckarsulm, retail) reported €185B in revenue. The conglomerate (owner of Lidl and Kaufland) is quietly building a European ecosystem spanning supermarkets, cloud infrastructure and data centres. [more]
Siemens Energy (Munich, energy tech) expects strong growth through 2035, driven by AI data centre demand for gas turbines. [more]
Carl Zeiss (Oberkochen, optics) announced a new cost-cutting programme after H1 FY26 revenue grew only 1% to €5.8B (vs 9% prior year). [more]
C24 Bank (Munich, fintech) was ordered by the Frankfurt regional court to refund a customer's full €100k Festgeld deposit. [more]
German defence companies including Rheinmetall and Hensoldt are planning thousands of new hires. Defence-industry job postings are up 65% since 2021, driven by larger budgets after the security policy shift. [more]
Stuttgart 21, the major railway station reconstruction project, has been delayed again. Completion is now expected no earlier than late 2031 — five years later than the most recent plan and 12 years behind the original 2019 target. [more]
Stats: German company insolvencies rose 15.8% YoY in March 2026. [more]
Most popular in the last Careers newsletter
Coffee talk, jobs, events & what the community is up to, every Thursday. Free.
😅 Meanwhile
is this a dad joke?
Weekly social and outside interests
Instagram: World Cup started, organised by institutionalised mafia FIFA. How much are the tickets?
Reddit: Speaking of rents, how can you successfully reduce them without an agency? Redditors experience.
Instagram: You own a balcony? You can: sunbathe naked (but not too visible), party (until 22), barbecue (unless forbidden by your contract or disrupting your neighbour with smoke), smoke (but with conditions).
YouTube: AI can never replace this: Sunday Nobody. What a great art channel.
Last week I asked you about how you feel about AI surveillance only doing “sticks”:
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