Progress isn’t driven by peace and cooperation. Most of human inventions, improvements, everything you may call “progress of civilization” boils down to “how can we fuck over other people for our benefit”. No matter what kinda change you may try to call “positive progress” it was really someone profiting by fucking over others.

There is a road in Poland. A4 it’s called. It’s officially a highway but never in it’s history did it satisfy requirements for that title. Label of highway cannot be removed for as long as road is under repairs, renovations or upgrades.

So there is a highway that shouldn’t be one, permanently in construction and never finished. It’s also paid road, one of the most expensive roads to use in EU.

And yet people still pay to use this road because alternative is a slower route through smaller roads and varied towns.

Software is the same - your application can be buggy shit, but as long as it’s best buggy shit available people will prefer it over more finished ones.

I made a free esoteric knowledge app for android. It’s named Baba Yaga. It has tarot, runes, astrology and some shamanic guides.

Currently I’m in the progress of reworking visuals to look better, after which my goal is to add herbs and dream symbols.

Pacifism, like democracy and capitalism, are functional only if everyone participate in them in good faith. There was never in human history a group of people where everyone participated in something in good faith.

I have similar experience. LLM is about as good as Google was before enshittification. All it does it replaces 10 minutes of me searching for the correct piece of documentation with 2~3 minutes of using LLM to grab the same information.

Intern could find it for me in an hour, two if he used LLM since AI works much better with jargon.

Poland

My country may be poor backwards post-soviet hole, but social media and news present USA as Fallout-style post-apocalyptic dystopia.

Every member of my family has a family doctor assigned (it’s the same one for convenience). This doctor reminds us about mandatory vaccinations and tips us if there are any diseases spreading (for preparation sake). If anyone is seek we can usually schedule visit within a week, and most standard medicines are fairly cheap due to governmental control.

Yeah. Democracy kinda forces lesser evil, no? Like you can’t find politician that has platform of any value to you, but everyone tells you to vote regardless, so you end up voting for whoever looks like a lesser evil.

Well, USA is quite dominant and their imperial politics have been permeating across the world for quite some time.

Europe should probably focus inwards and try to gain more independence from outside actors. EU can do it, mostly, it just doesn’t want to because milions of voters cannot outvote a lobbying company.

1. Yes
2. No

This was my mindset when I dropped out of college after a year. I then entered the working professional world and did that for 10 years. Then, while still working full time professionally, I went back and completed my degree. What I found was that I had been missing a lot that college filled in those gaps. I was much more successful after getting my degree.

Different experience then. After finishing university I had to learn a lot in my first job in the exact field university was for.

More importantly, college teaches you how to learn.

Strongly disagree, but perhaps your college had special training on this. Mine just gave me material and told me to learn. There was nearly no difference in grades between people who worked on their education daily/weekly and those who just marathoned through this on last week before exams. The biggest “effort” in some cases was either getting over 50% attendance or buying book authored by professor. Luckily it was mostly for some niche subjects.

What I was missing was understanding of the organization, finances, law, markets, geopolitical impacts, risk management/mitigation, and sometimes even the ethics.

If those were part of a single college course, it must have lasted for a decade to cover all of that. At which point job market will prefer person with 10 years of experience instead.

I don’t think I can fully understand your position. I neither been a college dropout, neither have I ever wanted to know why company I work for makes specific decisions. I don’t even have ambition and pride necessary to switch from position of expert to position of manager. From the very beginning of my university years my goal was to become a specialist and never ever agree to any position that would require skills that I neither posses nor are passionate about. At which I largely succeeded. My chances of advancement are zero by choice and I hope I will manage to keep them this way.

What I was aiming at is that university often misses tools, frameworks and knowledge that is more up to date with needs of current job market, instead opting to “give a good base” that is also half a decade outdated in most optimistic case. I guess my take does not match goal “let’s advance as high as we can in company”.

Thank you for your story though - it was an interesting food for thought.

While I understand that China gets much hate for not respecting american copyrights or patents, copying them in Europe might be the right choice. USA is mostly patent trolls anyway

I have several mixed opinions on this.

University is deliberately prolonged. They give you small snippets of knowledge and tell you that you need to wait a week for the next snippet, frequently with knowledge that makes sense only when you have all the pieces shown together referencing each other. And then exam at the end - it rewards people who laze through most of the course and only start learning in the last month or week before exam, turning most of the education into stamp-collecting game similar to watching a tv series (and people marathon/binge those too).

Most of the university education is also worthless on job market. 90% of knowledge you will be using in a company will be company-specific (processes, rules, tools, people) and thus not possible to gain at the university. Employers require university degree as a proof that you are able to come to the same boring, tedious place and waste your time for eight hours a day, five days a week each week. Online courses would be better off tied to specific companies rather than to degrees.

Then again I firmly believe no skill can be attained through theory alone. Not every university has practical exams, but no online course has them at all. This is, I guess, the only advantage of universities. Perhaps a hybrid system would be best? Theory can be learned at your own pace from online course, but then exams - both theoretical and practical, must be done at the physical location.

AI was supposed to take my job last month, last year, last decade…

I would be more interested in EU-wide firewall that blocks all advertisements from outside. Just a little quality of life.

Being able to browse the web without being exposed to disturbing material without consent

Advertisements on the internet are very disturbing…

Except bots will be “verified 30-something human persons” quicker than the most tech-literate human manages to go through verification.

Adding to what Pommes_fur_dein_Balg said.

Political movement originally pushed for responsibility of social media platforms over content they show, when such content is moderated by them. For example if you subscribe to crackpot theorists rambling about secret vampire society controlling the world that’s on you, but if social media shows you this content without subscription or annotation that this is misinformation as “recommended”, that is on them and they should be penalized by the law.

But of course money wins over people and lobbyists managed to re-scope the idea into “systemic age checks”, pushing responsibility from companies onto consumers and topic from misinformation to protection of minors.

In the end one can either assume it’s a honest advertising agenda to show people more targeted ads (showing twice the amount of toys to kids) or you may form suspicions about why rich and powerful want to know who online is a minor after their precious island got busted.

Yup.

At work, at home, perhaps not on the internet.

Poland. 30-something years old. I am the only one with a house, half of my friends have flats in the city and the other half rents or lives with parents.

I found Royal Republic way too late in my life