I remember one Polish diplomat recalling that his boss told him "I am sending you to the safest outpost in the world" when offering him embassy in North Korea.
I think I've read somewhere that JIS was phased out after Philips standard included some of JIS features and that theoretically modern Philips screwdrivers should be compatible with JIS.
For me the biggest problem was never memorizing the suffixes but determining whether the verb belongs to group 1 or 2. While you can tell immediately that some verbs belong to group 1, the others (e.g. kaeru mentioned in the post) are not so easy (as far as I know there's no algorithm for that and you just need to memorize with every verb to which group it belongs).
A fab takes years to build even when you have the necessary know-how. If you don't it'll take some additional experimenting before you can compete with the established manufacturers. By the time you can produce a usable chip the shortage might be over.
Slack recently introduced this option where it can tell you what kind of animal you are (not kidding) based on the conversations you had. When I saw this I immediately thought "managers pushed poor folks at Slack to incorporate more AI into the product".
Anecdotal, but the company I work for offers to the juniors only +15% to what it used to offer 15 years ago. The salaries are growing mostly because previous government introduced huge increases to minimal salaries, but I don't feel the wages in IT grew significantly over the years. Which actually make sense - we used to have huge disproportion between regular worker salaries and IT ones, now the difference is getting smaller.
I know that Ukraine takes Polish experiences into account and consults with Poles on what went well and what not during our post-communist transformation and later the EU membership. They are keen on not repeating our mistakes. There were many Ukrainians working in Poland long before the full scale work so naturally many Ukrainians were looking at Poland hoping that their country could eventually replicate polish success.
But I don't think our example has an effect on morale and spirit of resistance.
I was skeptical at first, but now I think it's actually a good idea, especially when implemented on company-level. Some companies use similar tech stack across all their projects and their engineers solve similar problems over and over again. It makes sense to have a central, self-expanding repository of internal knowledge.
A couple of years ago someone associated my email with their bank account in Santander UK. I tried to get in touch with Santander but turned out that the only way to do so is to either make an international call (I don't live in UK) or send them a paper letter. I gave up and just routed these emails to separate folder.
Long before AI era I read an article about homilies exchange online forum in Poland. The priests spoke how they struggle to come up with a fresh content every week for Sunday masses. AI is not the source of the problem, it's just an attempt at a solution.
Like the article mentioned many EU countries have their own payment systems. The challenge is not to build something from the scratch but rather to make existing solutions interoperable. The first talks about cross-border integrations started many years ago but they went very slowly. However, some work is being done, just a week ago a first transfer was done from Spanish Bizum to Polish Blik.
TBH many European payment apps use the phone number as an ID and people seem to love it. I share the privacy concerns but if I don't want someone to know my phone number I just give them my IBAN.
Currently: Lead QA Engineer at VML (after series of rebrandings Cognifide -> Wunderman Thompson -> VML) Poznań, Poland (Feb 2017-present)
Previous positions:
Education:
website: https://maciejewski.eu
[ my public key: https://keybase.io/jacek; my proof: https://keybase.io/jacek/sigs/3XArjWFBqBHtwB0NujKq9C9x-t4hAmLa9ntXBFHMCsM ]