YouWillNeverBeAWoman

I went for Comp Sci. (B.Sc, two M.Sc. and a PhD). The most important part ist finding your own personal learning type. Theres a distinction between those who learn best listening to lectures, reading textbooks, explaining a topic to others, etc. Start by finding what suits you best.

Here are the things that helped me most (after years of trial and error):

• Going to all appointed lectures and exercises (treating Uni like a job, basically)
• Actually doing the assignments of my Prof gave me
• Avoiding my Laptop/Tablet/Smartphone at Uni. I uses a thin notebook for each lecture and wrote my notes with a pen (more focus on class)
• Using flashcards (I wrote them by hand, but there are software alternatives) for topics, that require a lot of fact memorization
• Making friends with fellow students to help explaining topics to each other and share notes

In which context?

What exactly are you complaining about?

The ignorance of people, while at the same time using services like Whatsapp or Instagram (despite better knowledge)? Why aren‘t you consequent in your hatred of these Apps and uninstall them? Are the things you need them for more important, than the protection of your privacy?

You can rant all you want, but people have certain needs, that are met by these Apps and unless you come up with a better solution for their needs (that is also privacy concerned), you should come off your high horse.

Very true video!

I make quite some effort to avoid and actively block the news myself. Unfortunately I‘m not completely „free“ as I still lurk on link aggregators like lemmy now and then, but I managed to substitute all the standard online news sources with good books and the RSS feeds of some personal blogs.

Good points! I have to admit, I rarely consider the "inner workings" of a platform like lemmy from a moderator point of view, but this is an important aspect to be thought of.

I would still disagree on subjective votes as a good thing on a social network. All the "echo chamber" effects, that already have been discussed to death, come to mind and I am personally not a big fan of metrics that, in a worst case, stem from pure ideological or current-trend driven opinions of people. People may also never really fathom why they are being down voted, because of the features anonymous nature.

Your argument that "Votes still leave the content in place", also sounds questionable, considering how often posts on big platforms get "down voted to oblivion" and completely disappear from the first few pages (Not saying this happens here, but the example of the mechanism applies, imho). Sure the content is technically still existing, but will the information reach the people that request it?

I personally think, old timey internet forums and even certain imageboards feel much more objective content-wise, even if they are more chaotic moderation-wise.

No technical solution can prevent bad human behavior... Still wish mechanisms like up-/down-voting would be avoided, though.

I feel like there's a lot to unpack here. This impending sense of doom can be a very powerful emotion and has the nasty property of distorting our sense of reality so it can present itself as an objective state of the world/truth.

We all have certain emotional biases depending on our environment (like the social media, discussed in OP), the people we interact with the most, how we were raised, our genetics of course and probably a dozen other factors. All this things influence our perception of the world, none of them are objectively true. Looking at the same situation, from another perspective, could paint a completely different picture which is just as valid.

I completely agree with you on focusing on the causes, not on the effects. This is something that is done way too little, these days. But how we deal with the causes we found, is now entirely dependent on our perception of the world. Many people feel helpless/depressed when opposed to "big" abstract ideas like you listed: Capitalism, Fascism, Climate Change [we need to differ between the term itself and the concrete effects], etc., because they perceive them as ubiquitous and omnipresent. But taking "a step back", putting these things in another (maybe historic) perspective or breaking them down into small solvable problems, can help to form practical solutions, even when they are on a small scale, and escape this emotion of helplessness.

On a side note: My father was a historian with the early 20th century as his field of interest. Growing up, he often read to me from his textbooks, showed me the pictures from that time and visited with me museums and historic places all over Europe. All the hardships from just a hundred years ago, the wars, the Spanish Flu, the Great Depression, the political uncertainty, are completely incomprehensible in our modern times. I often try to compare our problems today with the problems people had back then and I wouldn't trade.

A lot of people seem very pessimistic about the future in general, because they are bombarded with negative posts, news, messages, etc. 24/7. This is imho one of the most devastating effects modern technology (i.e. internet, smartphones, social media) has on our culture today. This technology is so effective, because it exploits the fundamental mechanism of our psychology and neurology. Until we collectively decide to reduce the use of those technologies (some would even say we destroy them completely) and start opposing this trend, we will always be negatively affected by them.

This short video may be relevant in this context: Why social media preys on negativity

Here's the thing:

We don't live in the end times, with the doomsday clock just about to hit twelve! In fact, we may even never lived in better times, depending which metric you apply, and we still have much better times ahead, if we don't dwell too much on negativity, but keep our optimism and start working towards a better future.

People are vastly overestimating the german military in points of equipment (quality and quantity), personell (training and experience) and organisation/logistics (it's as corrupt and bureaucratic as a german public office can be).

I could spend hours telling stories about its desolate state...

Trust me when I'm saying, that the german military will never be a real military super power or even a strong contributor to any military alliance.

Leetcode is famous for being a perfect platform for practicing coding problems and to master coding interviews

It is famous for being yet another malicious HR tool to filter out applicants, playing them off against each other and depress wages of professionals. Leetcode "problems" have basically nothing to do with actual day-to-day software developing work, a fact many interviewers seem to be oblivious about. Answering those questions about abstruse algorithms or abstract problems isn't a indicator of how well you do on the actual job. Gaining experience through working on small (Open Source) projects on your own, interning at different companies or being able to integrate fast in existing workflows/project structures is.

Before wasting your time grinding those useless questions and stupidly memorizing the answers, ask yourself: "Do I really want to work for an employer who treats his applicants this way and puts so little effort in understanding the actual requirements of this job?". Because the way applicants are treated speaks volumes about the rest of the company.

Very good comic, but what are we gonna do?

Using (FOSS) alternatives* for OS, services or browsers on personal basis only seem to work for a small group of tech enthusiast/nerds while Big Tech keeps increasing its market share.

* assuming the alternatives are actually better in a privacy sense, which isn't always the case.

I'm honestly curious how one can sincerely frame any form of humanitarian aid as racism.