inglor_cz

The Russian propaganda is more along the lines of "Ukraine is an illegitimate state led by Nazis and drug junkies, they steal children's organs and sell them to the West, cook up dangerous viruses in their labs and prepared to attack innocent Russia, hence they have to be crushed, which our glorious Russian power will soon accomplish with mighty Oreshniks that have no parallel anywhere".

There is way too many mixed marriages etc. for any reasonable Russian to believe that their formerly-closest East Slavic neighbour has turned into a Fourth Reich.

The glorification of Russian military power after almost five years of static attritional war and dozens of burning refineries and ships is in a category of its own...

If every parochial peasant could recognize Russian official propaganda, why are so many people on board with whatever the propaganda says?

I mean, it took longer than the Great Patriotic War before Putin's popularity started visibly falling and people started questioning what the entire "SVO" is for.

Yes, Trump is quite an outlier in his non-standard behavior, I agree on that.

That said, Americans still enjoy very robust protections of freedom of speech and association, about the strongest in the world, and your SCOTUS does not seem to be inclined to hollow them out. Many of the pending lawsuits will end there and eventually bind this administration, plus the following ones.

This just does not happen in actual authoritarian countries, where no judicial remedy is available and the justice system is just another arm of the tyrant, rubberstamping punishments pre-determined by him.

Yes, I agree that vigilance about infringements of freedom is necessary, but the current US population is plenty vigilant. Trump is nowhere near as popular as, say, Erdogan is, and cannot simply raid offices of the Democrats and shut down oppositional media.

I remember peak wokeness quite well and it was pretty obvious that it was driven by the Twitter activist mob and not the Biden administration, which was quite visibly behind the times and followed the trends.

Already during the Biden administration, defections from the orthodoxy started and then multiplied - some businesses like Coinbase or IIRC Cloudflare refused the demands outright. Musk bought Twitter with an explicit task to make it less progressive.

And the White House did precisely nothing against this defection trend.

"US has been using the violations of human rights to impose sanctions or to especially get countries in line which are not supporting the US agenda when it comes to global politics. However, they were more than happy turn a blind eye if the respective country that violates human rights (most middle eastern countries) if they are allies of US doctrine."

I do agree that the US is hypocritical about human rights, but actual violations of human rights should be a reason for sanctions, and the fact that this is done only partly/imperfectly, IMHO, beats the potential alternative when it isn't done at all. This would be a much worse world in my opinion.

Do you seriously believe that if you ask Grok or ChatGPT their opinion about tariffs or the Iran war, they will simply regurgitate Trump's talking points because they were programmed so on the threat of shutdown?

People with no personal experience of an actual totalitarian system don't really know what they are talking about when it comes to actual information control and micromanagement by the government. Hence they make nonsensical comparisons with a straight face.

While true, you neglect the fact that US corporations have some autonomy from the government. I doubt that any of the current American AI corporations get regular dossiers of desirable responses to sensitive political topics from Washington and implement them. That would be a reason for a major lawsuit and a major scandal.

In China, the image of the country and the preferred narrative is under much tighter control of the government and local AI shops won't have any autonomy in this regard at all. Either obey or get shut down.

BTW What you mean by "weaponizing human rights", exactly? I am curious. If anything, I would say that the US foreign policy didn't promote human rights sufficiently, especially in Latin America, where the "bastard, but our bastard" attitude was typical.

OTOH in Europe, US human rights policy was probably relevant in saving some dissenters in the former Eastern Bloc from torture or execution.

Same in Ostrava:

https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Milady_Horákové_(Ostrava)

Most of that I knew, but I was surprised at the beans. I thought beans were a standard medieval fare.

It turned out that these were fava beans, which stem from the Old World.

I used to be a young mathematician sometime at the turn of the century...

"waste their time trying to prove it" is the MBA approach, where you should spit out results and articles.

Outside the MBA-thinking box, attacking hard problems, even unsuccessfully, is the way to gain deeper insight into various results and tools that you can later apply to other problems, i.e. no waste of time at all, unless you go to the extremes (like spending years on a single problem and nothing else).

I was in Copenhagen (DK, not NO, but close enough) in June and yeah, it felt like Barcelona in late February.

Beware of the weather, though. It may be geniunely soul-crushing for someone used to sunny skies.

As I am growing older, I also feel a tug to move from Central Europe to maybe the Mediterranean, precisely because of the winters. And Norwegian winters are even more dark and rainy.

The picture is more complex. It is possible that Minsk has some shelters, rehabs and psychiatric wards that can house many of the homeless anyway, and policies that incentivize them to use one of such options instead just building a camp. (IDK)

American homelessness problem is massively fueled by lack of inpatient psychiatric healthcare. People who are clearly out of their mind are allowed to live like wild animals, so that no one violates their rights not to be institutionalized.

While the asylums of yesterday were quite often bad, this is no better and a balance should be reached. Instead the pendulum just swung wildly from extreme A to extreme B.

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Edit: I must come back to your statement:

"Minsk people must live in fear of losing their homes, knowing that if they do, they will be disappeared."

There is a hidden assumption in there, namely, the expectation that if someone loses their home, their inevitable fate is to camp in the street, start fires etc. It might be so in your jurisdiction, but that is not really true worldwide. Many places in the world will try to help you somehow, at least up to a point.

Of course, if you have such help available and still refuse to make use of it and instead start living in an encampment and bother/harass other people, you aren't an innocent victim anymore, but a general nuisance. In that case, why shouldn't you be punished for your anti-social behavior? Unless you are insane, of course. In that case, a hospital should it be.

Ultimately it is about which level of antisocial behavior under which conditions is tolerated by which society. I noticed that the American left is really into glorification of antisocial behaviour, which it re-interprets as a creative rebellion against the capitalist society that should never be corrected by anyone. This worldview is much less widespread in Europe and almost absent in Asia.

Outside the US, you will often get at least some help, but if you turn it down, the law will prefer peace of the commons to your right of doing whatever you feel like. E.g. most countries will at least try kick smelly people out of libraries and public transport, because it is an expensive, subsidized commons that shouldn't be repulsive for median customers, who are quite often poor-ish themselves.

If Simon reads this debate, I would gladly vote for such a gallery. It would belong to "digital heritage of mankind".

I have read quite a lot about it and my conclusion is what I wrote above. A mostly ideological distinction without real difference - even less difference than your examples of theft (intellectual property aside - that is not theft by any definition, but infringement).

People have always tried to conquer other territories, make use of them and settle them. To make an artificial slice out of this continuous and omnipresent phenomenon and call it by another name is incoherent, but then ideologies are mostly incoherent, and colonialism as a very specific sin was a very good and efficient argument in Cold War propaganda and its struggle for influence in the Third World.

Soviets excelled in propaganda, and many of their ideas (like AIDS being an artificial disease, unilateral nuclear disarmament, or the fake contrast between colonialism and membership in the Socialist Bloc) survived the fall of the country.

That said, a very similar line was already pushed by the Japanese in order to paint their own brutal empire as some kind of Pan-Asian utopia. But their trace in global discourse is negligible to the Soviet one, which was much more sophisticated and long-lasting.

They started the largest war in Europe since 1945 and I fervently hope that Putin will pay for that in a way similar to Hitler.

That entire war is a massive, futile attempt to revive their glorious imperial days by annexing lands that they consider their alienated property. Fuck them and their bombs and their disgusting oscillations between paranoia and megalomania.

Contemporary Russia has fewer people than Pakistan and a smaller economy than Italy. It has no business playing a "mighty superpower" role anymore, but it ignored that reality (Putin is very much a person of the past, as is his inner circle of post-Soviet siloviks in their 60s and 70s) ... and it is learning the hard way.

The best possible outcome of this war from Kremlin's point of view is that they will become a de-facto resource colony for China, somewhat benevolently managed by actually competent people.

That requires buying into the very concept that "colonialism" is a specific sin different (and worse) from ye olde "I am stronger than you and will occupy your territory and take your wealth". I have even met people who claim that Russian expansion into Siberia was not colonialism, because it wasn't done using ships.

I don't really buy it. It feels to me as unnatural as if somebody decided that theft of, say, a smartphone, was a separate and much graver offence than theft of anything else.

It only makes sense to me if there is an underlying ideology, or maybe very practical demands for reparations which shouldn't be hindered by other demands for reparations, and thus the others need to be downgraded pre-emptively.

It may also come handy for distraction from domestic governance failures, such as bad security situation, rolling blackouts, subpar maintenance of infrastructure and endemic corruption. "Hey, don't look into this, you know how bad the colonialists were?"

(Fairly similar to the way the contemporary Russian propaganda tries to pin the failure of their current war of aggression on anyone and anything but their own stupid decision to go all in.)

"Colonialism" is a weird Western guilt fetish that some others successfully milk.

After 10 generations, the people are every bit as local as the previous population was. 300 years is such an abyss of time that most of us would fail to name a single of our ancestors by name.

Kladsko was a Czech city from approx. 1000 to 1742. The old town still looks a bit like very small Prague [0]. Was lost in a war (to the Prussians no less), it is gone, not our anymore. Tough luck. Others live there now, it is theirs.

[0] https://cs.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kladsko_(město)#/media/Soubor:...

"I doubt many secretaries were replaced by postgres."

The maximal relative share of typists, secretaries, admin assistants et al. in the US workforce was 4% and this apogee was reached in 1980 after ~ 100 years of sustained growth. In 1980, the curve bent and started declining as systematically as it used to rise. Now it is less than half of that. So are other office roles.

https://forklightning.substack.com/p/the-past-present-and-fu...

(Look at the "The Rise and Fall of Office Work" graph in the middle of the page.)

Given the neat correlation with the tech revolution, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a causal relation. Maybe not exactly with Postgres, but with automation in general. Data collection and management does not involve nearly as many people as it once did.

Setting Nazis aside, Germans are used to having a single source of correct grammar and vocabulary.

The first Duden was published in 1880 and helped standardize German language a lot, even though local accents and dialects still persist. But speaking in dialect is considered somewhat low-brow in German language space, unless you are Swiss; even there, people will code-switch all the time.

(E.g. during class, both the professor and the students would speak High German, but during recess, they would switch to Swiss dialect.)

A rural language of peasants who do not use even old tech such as newspapers and radio and reside on a huge territory will necessarily diverge into a barely mutually intelligible family of local dialects, at least in the spoken form. Basically the Medieval or Early Modern standard situation.

"it's now feasible to create all kinds of experiments, test fixtures, visualizers, analyzers, and support software you never would have had time for before, which you can use to improve your process and create a better product."

Yes, yes, yes, so much yes. Log analyzers, consistency checkers, performance evaluators, all sorts of hooks and helpers, precisely of the "single-use application for a single user - what a luxury!" sort, which made the entire development process so much more secure and comfortable. Most of the tedious moments (looking for a single bad value in a heap of logs etc.) went away.

The scaffolding I have now is a castle. The scaffolding I had a year ago was a log cabin. Nothing against log cabins in general, but castles are a lot harder to break into and have fewer holes for problems to sneak in.

My experience with regard to quality is quite the opposite.

With LLM at my disposal, I had the time- and effort-budget to expand test suites considerably, I was even able to attack a somewhat thorny question of reproducible builds on MSVC, which is not exactly friendly towards determinism.

These tasks would take me personally so much time that I would have to set them aside, at the cost of output quality.

Yeah, it is a big difference to undergo aggressive treatment at 50 vs. 80. Not just because of the potential years or months gained, but also because older bodies don't heal that well, or at all.

This is something that may be revolutionized through regenerative medicine, but hasn't so far.

But the origin of SpaceX is not one of a government-cultivated monopoly. There were more than 200 space startups so far, I believe, and the vast majority of those simply went belly up. SpaceX was once an absolutely unremarkable element of this large set and they almost went belly up as well - their fourth (and first successful ) launch of Falcon 1 was literally the last one that they had money for. Even 5 years into their existence, no one would be able to foretell that it will be them and not anyone else who eventually becomes the behemoth is its.

If someone really fits the description of a quasi-monopoly systematically supported by the government for decades, it is Boeing and ULA in general. They get/got all the cost-plus contracts that were the real cash cow. SpaceX only got fixed-cost contracts.

I rooted for a lot of companies, my favorite was Armadillo Aeronautics by John Carmack, because I admire Carmack. But space seems to be genuinely hard.

Sending robots to space is still a form of building presence there. Not every colonist has to be a human. In fact, they are probably coming last, into pre-prepared positions and bases.

Logistics of food distribution is a technological problem, and nowadays famines tend to happen less due to absolute shortage of food in a wider region, rather than due to insufficiently developed transport infrastructure.

IIRC no place in the world which has hard-paved highways has ever seen a peacetime famine. That's almost exclusively the domain of mud road territories. Of course, this is partly a correlation (mud road territories have worse governance and more banditry), but there is causality as well.

In some places.

Starlink is a global phenomenon, good ISPs were at best a local phenomenon.

"I'd consider this public pollution caused by extremely greedy billionaires ruining the planet."

This is such a weird framing, as if Starlink was a frivolous project for some rich person's fun.

There is genuine demand for orbital ISP from people, including people in poorer countries whom a better connectivity may help improve their incomes and lives, where an alternative is basically impossible (you won't get optic fibre in the Himalayas or Papua or the Andes anytime soon, if ever).

20 million people are now using Starlink and that number will almost certainly grow to maybe ten times as many, eventually. Ukraine uses Starlink to defend itself from being devoured by an aggressor. Sailors and other people in far away places use Starlink to keep in touch with their families.

Did you know that before Starlink, the South Pole Base had just 2x256 kB connection for everyone?

I get the "pollution" angle, but not the "hey, one guy is ruining the planet" angle. At the very least, all the customers are complicit, and I would add all the governments that don't seem to be able to build terrestrial connections for their own population.

When I was a teenager in early post-Communist Czechia, Internet connection was also expensive. So what we did was that we pooled resources. Five or ten households had a common connection and shared it.

I don't doubt that similar schemes will be used in Africa or India.

BTW Median income in India is about $3K a year.

He definitely does not want to put this power into the hands of EPP and S+D, which are precisely the two fractions that pushed this through.

I cannot imagine Musk simply submitting to this sort of EU demand, and he has enough hue-and-cry capability on X to maneuver other tech firms into very uncomfortable positions in the same regard.