No country currently accepts asylum applications from Americans as far as I’m aware, certainly nowhere in Europe.

Yet.
I’m waiting for the full nazi invade-your-neighbors moment. Pretty sure that changes for the Operation Reverse Paperclip. I’m already here in EU on a work visa. Claiming political asylum while already here and stable hopefully helps me avoid some red tape in staying permanently.

I don’t think it is about needing a doctorate beforehand and I find your characterization of @it_depends_man@lemmy.world’s advice on social etiquette weirdly non-sequitur and white knighty. Would you walk into a religious place of worship, a strip club, a gun range, or Costco without at least knowing how to interact with that space? Wearing your magic underwear? Bring enough fives? Ear protection? Membership card?

The point being virtual spaces are weird and full of weird people that live in their head. And they make communities that have implicit and explicit rules like all communities. And if you’re wading neck deep into a pool of internet weirdos (their pool, mind you, you’re the outsider traipsing in wanting their knowledge and wisdom) and want your question answered, the lurk and learn advice from above is solid.

Does it suck? Maybe? I can see it from the community’s perspective where they set the barrier to entry.

A little bit dated, but it seems like it has been receiving updates. There is a whole section at the bottom now about how to answer questions (ie. don’t be an asshole). I really want to emphasize that idea. Lots of FOSS communities now have codes of conduct which I find useful in mitigating this behavior, too.

As for the tone, it definitely has an ivory tower, individualism, pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, slanted view but I don’t think it unduly burdens a newbie to learn how to teach themselves by ensuring they’ve exhausted all the typical avenues of stored knowledge before bothering someone with a well-crafted question. It is a self-sufficiency that has very positive returns in the future.

Without more context, it is difficult to say how justified OP is in their read of the situation. Maybe the forum posters weren’t really out of line because the general topic was #random and OP asked in the wrong place?

“Have you asked the clanker yet?”

Most of my search process prior to LLM was querying google with keywords and specific phrases, clicking through several of the first page links that are from reputable sources, reading all of that, synthesizing an answer. Now that google has completed its enshittification of search, it’s index is gamed both from the SEO grifters and from inside with them making search worse because it ultimately leads to more ad impressions. The quality of those first page links is directly related to how much the stink of money the topic has.

I now pay for search with kagi (not an ad, swear) so that incentives are properly aligned. I get very useful first page links again because I can lens the search to exclude a lot of the SEO shit sites or only return academic sources. And I also use their robot assistant now for many searches because it can synthesize good summaries and good gists of topics from good source links. Prompted to always cite shit so I can always verify the clanker’s bullshit, but trust has been getting higher lately as the models get better.

At some point we will end up with a lmgtfy.com but lmpalfy.com (let me prompt an LLM for you)

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html <-- this too

What’s hilarious is that to muricans smarties are these guys: