Yeah, investing it in bitcoin sure beats selling the power to India at bargain bin prices during summer time only to have to buy it back in winter time at premium rates. I think this really shows his majesty's wisdom and ability to think ahead (iiuc it was his decision to start mining bitcoins using green energy).
Tourism is not really a growth sector. There are too many hotels already, with hoteliers complaining they can't get bookings at a decent price because there's too much competition undercutting them, and tour operators demanding lower prices than is sustainable.
Truthfully, the GMC is Bhutan's best bet at growth. The idea is to attract foreign talent who can train and educate locals, so that it can act as an attractor for youths, and a flywheel for prosperity in the country.
Same with the big Crowdstrike fail of 2024. Especially when everyone kept repeating the laughable statement that these guys have their shit in order, so it couldn't possibly be a simple fuckup on their end. Guess what, they don't, and it was. And nobody has realized the importance of diversity for resilience, so all the major stuff is still running on Windows and using Crowdstrike.
I wrote https://johannes.truschnigg.info/writing/2024-07-impending_g... in response to the CrowdStrike fallout, and was tempted to repost it for the recent CloudFlare whoopsie. It's just too bad that publishing rants won't change the darned status quo! :')
People will not do anything until something really disastrous happens. Even afterwards memories can fade. Cloudstrike has not lost many customers.
Covid is a good parallel. A pandemic was always possible, there is always a reasonable chance of one over the course of decades. However people did not take it seriously until it actually happened.
A lot of Asian countries are a lot better prepared for a tsunami then they were before 2004.
The UK was supposed to have emergency plans for a pandemic, but it was for a flu variant, and I suspect even those plans were under-resourced and not fit for purpose. We are supposed to have plans for a solar storm but when another Carrington even occurs I very much doubt we will deal with it smoothly.
> When someone uses my name in conversation, it makes me think less of them, because it's so unnatural and clearly they might be doing it to manipulate me.
Oh man, I always find it so slimy when people do that! I've also noticed it's mostly HR people or sales people who do this, so clearly it's a phony technique they learned somewhere. But I suppose it gets taught because it works, maybe for people who don't pick up on the fact that it's so forced?
This is also how you can identify decent places to work at: look for job postings that emphasize you aren't expected to already know the language.
For example, in the recent "who's hiring" thread, I saw at least two places where they did that: Duckduckgo (they mention only algorithms and data structures and say "in case you're curious, we use Perl") and Stream (they offer a 10-week intro course to Go if you're not already familiar with it). If I remember correctly, Jane Street also doesn't require prior OCaml experience.
The place where I work (bevuta IT GmbH) also allowed me to learn Clojure on the job (but it certainly helped that I was already an expert in another Lisp dialect).
These hiring practices are a far cry from those old style job postings like "must have 10+ years of experience with Ruby on Rails" when the framework was only 5 years old.
To do that you need a mixture of elements: work in a somehow "exotic" language [1] and the company can afford to pay top-talent salary [2]
[1] all those examples check that box, but please let's not start a language war over this statement.
[2] for Jane Street I hear they do, DDG pays pretty well especially because it pay the same rate regardless where you are in the world, so it's a top-talent salary for many places outside SV.
Sounds like the best type of place to work for me. Instead of being a replaceable cog in a meat grinder that doesn't even pay well, working with boring tech, you get to work with talented people in an actually interesting language and get decently paid.
And best of all, you don't feel the need to keep chasing after the latest hype just to keep your CV relevant.
It doesn't look like any of the TTS solutions are sufficient. I'll be removing the language limitation sometime next year, once the interfaces are built out for custom audio and custom annotations.
If a good Dzongkha TTS comes out, then I'd be happy to integrate it natively!
The AI winter happened. And the AI they talk about is classical, symbolic AI where you try to explicitly represent knowledge inside the computer. The new LLM stuff is all neural networks, and those benefit more from fast low-level vector implementations than high-level ease of symbolic manipulation.
So modern AI is all mostly C or even Fortran, often driven from something more pedestrian, like Python.
Nope. I mostly happily used Python in my previous job for many years, now I'm doing Clojure. There are benefits and drawbacks to each, but I don't know if I'd want to go back to Python. I'm a Lisper (Schemer, really) at heart so maybe I'm biased.
Having said that, I don't think I'd pick Clojure for unpaid (hobby) projects. The JVM is such a hog and I don't like anything related to the Java culture...
I don't know if this works well in general, but for example Kodi has "basic", "advanced" and several progressively more advanced steps in between for most of its menus. It hides lots of details that are irrelevant to the majority of users.
