Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future. If they do, and succeed, Rome could become part of the new Soviet Union(which Putin has explicitly said he wants to bring back)
Once that happens, it's likely to lead to poverty. At least that's what happened in the last USSR
>Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future
only if the near future includes the year 2150 because as of right now the Russian defense ministry is celebrating the liberation of individual bakery plants on their state media
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.
The fact that it's a fragile kleptocracy basically reduce to 0 any possibility of a normal future. Puppet state at best, if someone is willing to take them. I expect they already planned what to do with the returning soldiers, not that they will like it or accept gracefully what's in store for them.
> there is no real world use case for a middle-ground (c) where you want someone with algo implementation details rote-memorized in their brain and without the very deep understanding that would make the rote-memorization unnecessary!
I was watching a video recently talking about how Facebook is adding KPIs for its engineers' LLM usage. As in, you will be marked negatively in your performance review if your code is good but you didn't use AI enough.
I think, you and I agree, that's obviously stupid right? I imagined myself as an engineer at Facebook, reading this email come through. I can imagine two paths: I roll my eyes, find a way to auto-prompt an LLM to fulfill my KPI needs, and go back to working with my small working group of "underrecognized folks that are doing actual work that keeps the company's products functioning against all odds." Or, the other path: I put on my happy company stooge hat, install 25 VScode LLM forks, start writing a ton of internal and external posts about how awesome AI is and how much more productive I am with it, and get almost 0 actual work done but score the highest on the AI KPIs.
In the second path, I believe I will be more capitalistically rewarded (promotions, cushy middle/upper management job where I don't have to do any actual work). In the first, I believe I will be more fulfilled.
Now consider the modern interview: the market is flooded with engineers after the AI layoffs. There's a good set of startups out there that will appreciate an excellent, pragmatic engineer with a solid portfolio, but there's the majority of other gigs, for which I need to pass a leetcode interview, and nothing else really matters.
If I can't get into one of the good startups, then, I guess I'm going to put on my dipshit spinny helicopter hat and play the stupid clown game with all the managers so I can have money.
I think the influx of many truly self-driven and resourceful self-taught programmers in the 2010s established a perceptible need (not necessarily an accurate one) of needing to "properly vet" non-degreeed candidates. Stuff like Leetcode is what emerged. The truth is, the "vetting" was originally done via self-selection. Generally computer-oriented and creative people gravitated toward application development and it was worth something to the world. The world probably didn't know how to value this group of people, so continuously tried to put in some kind of formal process.
But like Art, the artists came from everywhere. We're being dishonest if we don't acknowledge what truly made these developers get to where they are, and it wasn't because they originally went "Oh, I know what I'll do, I'll do thousands of Leetcode problems', that is absolutely not the true story of the developer in the last decade.
Leetcode is a sloppy attempt at recognizing and appropriately handling developers. It was an "attempt", a failed one imho. It fundamentally ignores the spirit in which these developers operated in, it reduces them to gym rats, and that's not how they got there.
This being a spiritual problem is what makes the most consistent sense. Even those that grind Leetcode will tell you their heart is not in it (just like GP mentioned above).
I've been getting more and more into retro gaming lately, and something that really made it click for me is leveraging shaders (or overlays) to simulate period-accurate displays. For a Sega Saturn, that'd be some kind of CRT. The art direction in these games are designed to take advantage of the quirks of the CRT, and often look significantly better on a CRT. Noodle just did a decent video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC-8y2R6IxI
I strongly recommend anyone getting into retro gaming, try some CRT shaders (or lcd ones for portables)!
Or get a CRT if you live in a populous area, have the space, and a strong back! It’s gotten harder since Covid when they were seemingly everywhere, but if you’re lucky you’ll find a good curbed unit. Gave my buddy a 24” trinitron recently I just couldn’t keep around anymore and he is having a blast playing his PS2 on it with component cables. FFX really sings as do racing games.
That being said there are a lot of emulators and little pieces of hardware now that simulate it really well, which is a very viable option, especially when space is at a premium (or if your poor pet hates the whine of a CRT like my dog did ha)
Hah, I wish I had the space for this and original hardware! For me it's hard to justify the space and cost when I can just have all the videogames ever made on a couple SSDs and run them on emulators.
Then again, I seem to have accidentally started a small GB/GBA cart collection...
Well, I will love to go to Portugal someday, but for now I used the internet, and found out that since Portugal decriminalized heroin, its drug usage has fallen below EU average:
Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
Sf fire department has also a pdf with what you should have in an at home emergency kit. It's some simple things you can get in one trip to a camping store and Walgreens. https://sf-fire.org/media/794/download?inline
I also recommend SF people consider joining NERT: neighborhood emergency response team. Disaster after disaster should teach us the opposite of what you argue in terms of response: in fact it's more likely that the scale of people affected will quickly overwhelm resources, and the existence of choke points will severely limit movement of people and resources, especially if infrastructure is damaged and people are flooding out of the city. That can be mitigated by having locals trained to help facilitate emergency response efforts. It's less "pulling people out from under bookshelves" and more "help managing the bureaucracy of the fire department," forms on forms on forms! Though the training does involve pulling someone out from under a bookshelf. It's a week long and quite fun!
> Using a cryptocurrency (originally) meant basically opting out of the governmental violence-as-a-service for cryptocurrency/-token purposes and taking care of this aspect by yourself.
Cryptocurrency was a hidden blade. People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism, but then cut by a more unregulated version of the same.
If you're going to dismantle all of the institutions of liberal democracy and capitalism so you can send a billion dollars to somebody, why not just go ahead and get rid of money while you're at it?
> People were drawn in on the promise of avoiding the things they don't like about capitalism
Quite the opposite: the marketing was always about more "pure", "unrestricted" capitalism without all the "evil" restrictions and red tape that the governments set up and (depending on the cryptocurrency) no option for the governments to turn on the money printing press to devalue the currency by their will.
Yes! I've been thinking for a while that crypto/libertarianism borrows a lot of language from anarchist philosophy, but redirects that energy towards an environment that's even more capitalistic than our liberal democracies. Which is the opposite of the supposed values of these crypto libertarians, but because libertarianism is a schizophrenic ideology that tries to combine capitalism with anarchism, it of course goes the way of all libertarian projects and turns into a nightmare (at least this time there's no bears).
> Work is literally THE worst place to make human connections
I don't necessarily disagree, but I make a slightly different argument, in that, humans will make human connections, whether they like it or not, and the most typical human experience is to make stronger and stronger connections with people you see regularly. Furthermore, depending on the company, there's the desire to be a part of something bigger, there's social conditioning setting in to prove yourself among your peers, there's the desire to not appear like you're lazy.
Where I think you'll agree is that your company will 100% exploit these human aspects of you to get a better margin on the value of your labor vs the compensation they pay you.
Let me clarify my point: in the absence of life outside of work, work is the worst place to make connections. If you treat work as “just” a complementary source of connections, then it is fine. But if it’s your only source, then you need to get of this situation asap.
This woman lived through fascist Italy and everything that came after, and then says this about the way the world is going.
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