What progress are you referring to? The shiny blinky things that scroll across our screens while the poor stay poor, war rages everywhere and the internet is overwhelmed with fake AI generated content.
The more I look back into history, the more I realise that besides the sparkling blinky-blinky gadgets, we have made no progress at all - on a species level. We’re still living in caves, we’re still believe in God myths that make no sense and let ourselves be blindly led by folks who claim legitimacy because they won voter approval based on the lies they told.
No, for me progress is a fiction invented in hollywood or silicon valley. Real progress would be understanding our place in the universe, understanding that we are one of many species with which we share this planet, that we don’t have the right to strip clear the planet for our sole benefit. And that shiny bits of metal or bits of paper with numbers and faces on them aren’t important and most certainly won’t help us achieve true progress.
Who was asked, i.e. tourists visiting Brussels? How many were asked? How were they asked, i.e. leading questions such as "you do like the EU don't you"? Who didn't respond?
And more importantly, who is doing the asking? Oh, the EU itself is doing the asking. They are, of course, not biased in any way at all.
These numbers are then provided by the same folks that just timed a vote on our privacy when a) MEPs were known to be on holidays b) reversing the vote procedures, i.e. the 'no's have reach a set minimum c) are happy to sign away our collective privacy.
All that for 52% - all time high. When I was going to school, 52% wasn't a score that I went home to my parents with and told them how good things were going - even if it was an "all time high".
Crazy, how the EU have mixed up mediocrity with democracy.
The idea behind _representative_ democracy is that _we_ take holidays and our representatives do the work of upholding _our_ democratic values. These MEPs took their holidays before the parliamentary session was complete.
If we're talking about _direct_ democracy then we have to do the work ourselves but because we don't want to do that (because we want to go on holydays), we give up our rights to those who _want_ to represent us.
That, of course, falls apart once those representing us start to only represent themselves.
I'm kind of surprised that this is even moving the needle.
Really, what do you expect from a "profession" that has been trying to lower the entry level to a point where anyone with access to an AI is a programmer?
I remember when folks had to have a degree to enter the "profession" of software developer. Nowadays all you need to be a "programmer" is access to AI. And correspondingly the quality of the output has fallen to such a level that it no longer possible to distinguish between human generated or machine generated code.
The bad quality is hidden away with euphemisms such as "release early, release often" or "move fast and break things". The constant requirement to update because updates were broken is just another symptom of an industry gone badly wrong.
Worse still, the solution coming out the tech hubs isn't to slow down and reflect about these issues in IT, rather it's to throw even more technology at it. Technology that then also fails. Technology that is designed to cause vendor-lockin and dependence on a few controlling companies (OpenAI & Anthropic being the latest in a long line ... AWS for servers and Google for spreadsheets and email).
Hm ... now what do we do? More of the same probably.
Third option: Facebook changes it's business model from data gathering and selling to pay-to-use. Make Insta and FB both be gate communities where folks have to pay to post.
Fourth option: product becomes less addictive and the algorithms stop optimising on "angry users click more". Less advertising profits, perhaps less engagement but probably still profits on advertising.
Fifth option: don't aim to continually increase profits and instead change the rules of capitalism to be less focused on making "profit at any price" to perhaps a more gentler form. After all, Monopoly(TM) is restarted once one player has all the money, it's about time that we do that in real life too or how many more trillionaires do we need?
So there are also grey choices here and not only b/w.
> The simple text editor has a lot to answer for when it comes to how we think about programming
I wonder whether those that used punch cards said the same about those punch cards?
It’s weird how our mobile devices aren’t programmed using keyboards/text as input devices. Or our microwaves. Or refrigerators.
Programmers are stuck with text because their programming paradigms are stuck in a text-based paradigm, hence AIs spew out reams and reams of simple to understand text.
There is definite room for improvements and room for keyboards. However the focus should move on from keyboard to mouse to XR environments using 3D glasses. Our programming paradigms have to move aswell.
Using a visual first paradigm means using higher level constructs, things such as Blockly from Google isn’t a good example of visual programming. For music, things such as noisecraft are. For more general programming approach, Node-RED is a good example of visual programming based on flow based programming paradigm which is well suited to visual programming.
So lets bomb some sucker nation or assassinate folks we summarily don't like, without due process. F'k it, if they do it, then we can also do it.
How does that make anything better? It results in a degradation of societal values where morals and positive norms are assigned to the pages of history.
There was a time when positive examples, folks standing up and resisting was seen as a something good. Nowadays everyone just does it because the others are even worse. So who should start making the world a better place? The others.
But is ‘Learner’ the japanese word for beginner? English speakers might well have an association with ‘L’, Learner and a car but other language groups might not.
Interesting to read such a colonial comment in 2026 - the British Empire is long gone.
I was thinking the same thing. Seems unpopular opinion but in way, it’s the world we built.
Video stores vanished and everyone bought Netflix. Record stores disappear and everyone left for YouTube. Complaining now is a little late, perhaps boycotting those services would have been better.
But these services are so convenient like amazon … why is my corner store now disappearing? Progress and everyone seems to want it.
Omg, I don’t now know how to cope without reading your comment.
It was probably really relevant and life-changing. Well I guess I’ll just get on the way I did before.
The same with Siri, I don’t need it and don’t care about some hyped up AI that Apple wants to push down my throat.
Similar to your comments, I don’t need it and if you (and Apple) don’t want to share or comply with the rules, well why should that make me unhappy? Or make me get angry at the EU?
I've started visiting quiet rooms[1], just to hear myself think again. The world and the internet has become so loud that some quietness is refreshing. Luckily for me there are several where I live so I've even got a choice.
Strangely these rooms are quite different to being silent at home or somewhere else private. For me it seems to be that these spaces are public, you are being silent in public spaces - a different setting and experience than in places that are private. Being silent together can be disconcerting!
It's also different to using noise cancellation or listening to music or other forms of "silence", truly unique in many aspects.
The more I look back into history, the more I realise that besides the sparkling blinky-blinky gadgets, we have made no progress at all - on a species level. We’re still living in caves, we’re still believe in God myths that make no sense and let ourselves be blindly led by folks who claim legitimacy because they won voter approval based on the lies they told.
No, for me progress is a fiction invented in hollywood or silicon valley. Real progress would be understanding our place in the universe, understanding that we are one of many species with which we share this planet, that we don’t have the right to strip clear the planet for our sole benefit. And that shiny bits of metal or bits of paper with numbers and faces on them aren’t important and most certainly won’t help us achieve true progress.