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machinekob

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Contemporary academia especially in the West has a massive surplus of staff.

Many people pursue academic careers solely for a comfortable lifestyle, doing minimal or even no research for long period of time. With extra lack of oversight that allows researchers to isolate themselves they create circles which cover each other.

Occasionally, folks outside of the circle come in and they start finding ton of fraud in the research with multiple big cases in past few years on top universities like Harvard for example.

If someone is interested in Byzantium fall and why this war was so bad for both empires, read some more about Justinian's Plague which killed ~35-50% of population and also halved economical output. It took about 200 years to get to the same place population wise for most of the empire.

Weirdly it didn't hit Persia as much outside of Mesopotamia, most historians estimate "only" ~20-30% of population died and shifted balance of power to Persian side, from almost renewed Roman Empire at 540 which most likely was getting back to ruling mediterranean world once again.

cloud gaming is good if you live close to the servers and don't care about graphics, but playing with +60-100ms for every action feels very bad. It almost feels like playing on 15-20 fps PC and quality of streaming video is always a problem compared to native quality maybe AV1 will fix it.

If you wirte 100x faster code you could probably automate almost all of it away as it seems to be super trivial and already resolved problems. I also use Claude for my coding a lot, but i’m not sure about real gains if it even give me noticeable speed improvement as i’m in a loop of “waiting” and fixing bugs that LLM made still it is super useful for writing big doc strings and smaller tests maybe if i focus on some basic tasks like classical backend or frontend it’ll be more useful

UK also is moving to the right reform + conservatives are pooling at around 45-60% atm. Labor is only in power cause reform and conservatives split votes Only place that was in reverse of this trends was Poland in 2022 which shit to the center-right from “populist right” and possibly Hungary but we don’t know yet as Orban was losing pools for like 10 years but never lost election.

If economy is good people won’t care about politics when economy is bad folks start getting political and we see it in whole west France, Germany and Canada are without government and most folks in this countries are shifting more and more right.

DEI was so good and righteous idea that it shifted most of the western world to the right more than dozens of islamist terrorist attacks in previous decades. And ofc. all US corporations would follow this cultural change or they’ll risk antitrust/tax/law investigations from Trump and all EU government that’ll be elected in next few years.

Cyberpunk have a massive problems caused by success of Witcher 3 a lot and i mean A LOT of people move to western studios and they were best engineers in the company.

They still have people problem as pay in CDPR is pathetic compared to other studios and not much top talent want to work there.

Cyberpunk 2077 budget was overblown thanks to that + ~50% of that was spend on marketing I would assume there were also a lot of IP "costs" so overall "production" cost was probably about ~30-40% of the budget.

From Cloudflare blog about why EU prices are lower (around 50% cheaper than US at least according to cloudflare)

The value of an exchange depends on the number of networks that are a part of it. The Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMS-IX), Frankfurt Internet Exchange (DE-CIX), and the London Internet Exchange (LINX) are three of the largest exchanges in the world.

In Europe, and most other regions outside North America, these and other exchanges are generally run as non-profit collectives set up to benefit their member networks. In North America, while there are Internet exchanges, they are typically run by for-profit companies. The largest of these for-profit exchanges in North America are run by Equinix, a data center company, which uses exchanges in its facilities to increase the value of locating equipment there. Since they are run with a profit motive, pricing to join North American exchanges is typically higher than exchanges in the rest of the world.

So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working. Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it? I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?

So it seems that trying to compete with duopoly isn't working.

Can we assume it is cause there is only few big corporations dominating internet infrastructure in US compared to EU with tons of medium sized and even small business that do it?

I would love some good read about US infrastructure, especially why costs are so high compared to EU?

I mean isn't UK starving? it can't produce enough energy, it cost is extremely high to produce anything and it can't get proper industrial/manufacture power base cause of that? (and a lot of other stupid reasons)

Man blackout != energy starved, you can have blackouts cause your infrastructure is attacked or just random natural disaster, look at energy prices compare it to China or even US not even speaking about oil rich countries.

Finance in UK is indeed legacy it is mostly big old banks there is still a bit of fintech and ofc. head funds, but UK is bleeding both talent and market share to CN and US. Not even speaking about tech salaries 10 years ago London was one of the top paying places for finance tech, now it is (ofc.) USA and CN (especially with cost of living).

Most of the difference in GDP was because Dollar was a lot cheaper compared to Euro pre Recession. Also EU just stagnate from 1990 until now it is yearly losing global share of GDP.

US is energy independent and is desirable place for middle and higher class specialist. Compared to overtaxed and energy starved England which live from legacy sectors and cheap immigration workers and is not desirable for anyone not working in finances.

Weird how Western Europe stagnated after 1990, only Germany get some more “gas” for growth thanks to CEE and cheap energy. now it seems that importing tens of millions of low skilled refugees and workers with high social benefits is killing any innovation while taxing middle class and all high skilled Europeans prefer to move to US or even east Asia.

Which makes whole industry lag behinds and UK is probably biggest example of that it is just big banking and service hub with no money for any investments in infrastructure outside London making it more and more depending on single city with legacy service sector. Even Poles are coming back to Poland a country that was 7-10 times poorer 20 years ago.