caoilte

Two things can be true at the same, although I agree with your assessment of future prospects - and the recent OECD report on school performance could be read that way too (or blamed on the war as the government has).

https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-plummets-to-worst-ever-...

Unit tests are just as important as integration tests as long as they're tightly scoped to business logic and aren't written just to improve coverage. Anything can be done badly, especially if it is quantified and used as a metric of success (Goodhart's law applies).

Integration tests can be just as bad in this regard. They can be flakey and take hours, give you a false sense of security and not even address the complexity of the business domain.

I've seen people argue against unit tests because they force you to decompose your system into discrete pieces. I hope that's not the core concern here becuase a well decomposed system is easier to maintain and extend as well as write unit tests for.

OP is probably referring to braceless syntax.

I can offer a rationale that I hope that will be interesting. Evidence is more effort than I'm willing to invest in a random internet conversation. I hope that's okay. I don't mean to cause offense, but neither do I like having an interesting discussion shutdown.

Executive leadership compensation tends to be based on, - the size/prospects/complexity of the company - the compensation received by executives in similar roles at other companies - the amount/type of oversight by the board

This incentivizes executives to increase the complexity of their role in order to justify greater remuneration. The classic example is turning a widget factory into a widget financial services provider. In this case, by behaving like Silicon Valley companies chasing the latest fad the executive leadership of Mozilla get to demand the same remuneration packages.

It's a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. As far as I can tell this is (like most complicated things in life) purely a tax dodge.

> No? They, just like every other entity, will have to achieve it's investors goals using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation is funded by donors not investors. The fiduciary duties of non-profit directors do not have to include using the least amount of costs possible.

The Mozilla Foundation's stated goals are "to advance the vision of the future of the internet and technology".

You might reasonably argue that this means copy catting every other product by slapping AI on itself, but I would counter that this actually demonstrates a lack of vision.

people will blame anyone for anything.

mozilla is a non-profit so doesn't need to respond to market signals.

it would do a lot more and a lot more sustainably if it focused on the core mission of its browser.

but these costly "big swings" justify outrageous compensation packages for its executives and so it lets its browser wither.

get the project taken over by a foundation eg the Apache Foundation.

Those are false equivalencies. The EU bureaucracy is a mess of competing factions. It isn't a corporation or a political party. A better analogy would be a US Government department breaking a law.

Ideally there are are legal avenues for redress in your situation. If there are not, that is more likely to be the problem than a conspiracy of propaganda.

You get ads outside the UK, which is always weird for me when i get back from holiday and have a bunch of shows i downloaded while I was in another country and haven't listened to yet. Actually, I say bunch - but I've deleted everything except In Our Time. Australian Broadcast Company does more better podcasts than BBC these days.

The BBC is another bad actor in this space (although increasingly irrelevant). Their decision to "hide" most of their RSS feeds whilst still labeling their proprietary app subscribe links podcasts was unethical.

I see hope in the Patreon model. I don't mind paying a monthly subscription for a specific show if I get a locked down RSS link.

i think the reason is fair, but unfortunately it is a dealbreaker for me. i would definitely have got one earlier this year if it had had one.

yes

It might even be correct. Occasionally.

Keepassxc is great and works well with keepass2android via file sharing.

I can imagine how the password sharing would be a problem tho.

H1B is a lemon market for those signing up just the same as those surrendering their passports and ending up a working prisoner. Each might luck out, but they're more likely to get exploited and regret their decision. And it gets worse every year.

H1B might not meet the legal definition of modern slavery even though many are trapped just as effectively by the system but everyone in evolved with employing them is morally compromised just the same.

> AI could take over and supplant a global government, threatening society, life, wealth etc etc.

How would we tell the difference?

Dunno if anything has changed since last year but this was a very interesting post by one of the authors of Cats Effect - https://www.reddit.com/r/scala/comments/sa927v/how_will_loom...

TLDR; it didn't look like it would impact effect systems much at all and most of the benefits (initially) are to make imperative code more performant. So I guess it closes the performance gap somewhat which is good, but won't be a big deal to anyone already using their own concurrency construct.

> And the amount spent is a pittance to western governments

I don't consider well north of $100billion and climbing to be a pittance.

> We could, and imo we should, give Ukraine to means to win.

And yet we haven't. The Ukrainians are still rationing artillery fire, appear to have lost most of their air defence cover and long ago lost air cover.

If we were serious about winning the US government would have switched to a planned economy (as we did in WW2), taken control of munitions production and gotten a handle on our out of control military contract padding.

> But I would say there is a calculation going on the US about stringing out the war longer

That's certainly one way to spin trying to lose more slowly.

> Also what outcome do you want? We surely don't want Russia to win this and think its great and start more wars and repress more people. I think we should care at least.

a negotiated peace. Tricky given all of the times the US has betrayed Russian trust over the last ten years. The only plausible route feels like a massive neutral DMZ (probably everything east of the Dnipro) administered by a BRICS led UN peace keeping force.

Hugely embarrassing for the West and NATO, but would end the killing and devastation and allow us to concentrate on the real threat of climate change.

Funding this war (which we're losing) is gutting funding for further education and scientific research.

It's possible there's a secret plan which will turn things around, but it seems more likely that the only thing which benefits from our inevitable defeat is the arms industry.

It's not clear that having their positions flooded (left bank is lower than right bank) will help Russia. They've already had months to strengthen them and built an impressive static defence network. In fact it may well have washed their positions away. Ukraine has been practicing marine assault incursions for months along the river so we may well soon see headlines about "Ukrainian marine raiders taking advantage of Russia's stupidity in blowing up dam"

Being the victim of an aggressor does not automatically make everything the Ukrainian government says true. That's bad logical thinking.

They used to have an option to permanently block sites from your google results. They quietly dropped it even before they dropped reader.

It's more like it's one way to funnel money to an asset or network without raising suspicions.

But you're right, it was mostly about the propaganda. And not even particularly covert. The bit that did it has since been carved out into other agencies (eg National Endowment for Democracy).

Political parties aren't people so assigning feelings to them is of questionable value, but no more so than calling someone insane for doing so.

The underlying fact is that the Republican and Democratic Party are both constituted to represent their donors and that certain parties (rich individuals being the largest such party) enjoy the benefit of giving bi-partisan patronage.

The thing being distorted is not passing tests, it's education.

Learning the source material for tests does not give you a good education.

IMO they're more likely to mess up their cartel/monopoly position by getting too greedy than by being unable to hire competent staff (see Doctorow's [enshittification cycle](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/) for more).

> One limiting factor was that this wasn't scalable - so a lot of people would be comfortable with it because there is little potential for widespread abuse - there just aren't enough resources to search & monitor everyone's mail and houses at all times.

It's recently started to emerge that US opened and censored all international mail 1950-1989. We're talking millions of letters a week. It started as a measure to remove all reference to US use of biological weapons in the Korean War and grew from there. (the third season of the Blowback Podcast did a couple of interviews which covered it really well.)

Hacking individuals in this way is already done via targeted 0-day exploits. The targets are more likely to be journalists and activists (for their sources) though.

The noided assumption is that politicians and business leaders self-compromise in order to boost their chances of career success (and/or that they see getting compromised by Epstein et al as a career perk rather than a career mistake). It's the same principle as cops only being able to get promoted if they're known to be on the take.

This sort of law enables dragnet surveillance. Domestic Intelligence are always looking for new ways to take temperature readings on agitation before it boils over into public protest and to identify previously unknown community leaders that should be placed under more direct surveillance.

The FAANG key competitive advantage is cartel/monopoly status. Getting employees into the office is just middle management ego stroking, it won't actually help them.

The degree to which they maintain market dominance over the next 5-10 years will depend on how well they time buying out startups which threaten their dominance (and which will no doubt be built by more productive WFH employees).