If you're having doubts, totally go! The people there are very open and inviting. I would say relaxed, but some are relaxed, some are intensely enthousiastic. It's very easy to get to know new people and meet the community.
In Europe, the hub is definitely Berlin. A lot of community members living there.
Sounds good, I love this as lesswrong content!
I would worry about it not being effective after ~2 months. There's a lot of productivity techniques that you pick up and that work really well for a time, but then you get used to them and their effectiveness breaks down. Could still be very valuable to do for awhile, if your time is that valuable, but would caution about planning to do this for a year and expecting it to hold.
I can only agree with this, regular exercise makes me sleep better, helps me focus, and make me think better. Ignoring all the benefits to yard work or looks and confidence, some exercise is still worth it.
Some context from across the pond. In the Netherlands almost everyone had a gas stove, because we had lots of natural gas, and all houses were heated with natural gas.
Now all the rich people (and new houses) have started to switch to induction cooking whenever they have the chance, it's very much seen as the fancy, more expensive option that is desirable. There are some people who prefer gas, but if you're getting a new kitchen or new house, people generally want to go to induction cooking.
If you want to know more best practices for protecting your privacy, as well as alternative applications (say email) that respect privacy there is a compilation: https://www.privacytools.io/
It also has recommendations on VPN's and such. A common recommendation is to use linux instead of windows, but if you find this to be very inconvenient there are many settings in windows 10 that can be changed to disable telemetry (such as blocking in firewalls), these are gathered into one place by the application: https://www.winprivacy.de/english-home/
Because Voldermort expects the prophecy to become a reality if all the conditions it states are met, e.g. hermione dying. It doesn't matter how he tries to thwart Harry, as long as Hermione dies the prophecy will be fulfilled and Harry wil end the world. He believes this strongly because he's tried it before himself and there is plenty of lore of it happening before.
That might still just be an ordinary rock, though my confidence in that is not very high as my past results at predicting hpmor have been rather unsuccesful.
Which all seems very much like university bureaucracy, sadly.