levosmetalo

I’m more concerned what happens when we bring some microbes from Mars.

It's a fucking war there, people are sent to war to kill and to get killed. GDP in Ukraine is ~3,5k$ per year.

Your software developer friends are just outliers there.

List of countries where "the West" organized a coup against a "corrupt murderer dictator" to establish "democratic elected government":

- Ukraine - Syria - Libya - Georgia - Iraq - Iran - Afghanistan - Yugoslavia - Venezuela - Cuba - ex-Yugoslavia - Chile - ...

All those countries were devastated by the "democratization". I would like to see one example where that went good for the local population in general and where that brought progress and prosperity.

You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to package almost all dependencies with the application, while on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part of the distribution.

> It does appear as if this government really does not want freelancing to be a viable option.

This is the key. Freelancers earning their living on the internet are not inherently dependent on government and are much more likely to support opposition and fight back against the corrupt government.

It's easy to control people working in overblown administration or public/government sector, or in companies working for them, but controlling free financially independent people not afraid of dying of hunger if they oppose is not that easy.

Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.

- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters - opening Signal displays empty frame far too long - it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls - forwarding message from chat to chat is not working - messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.

And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.

Sorry, but maven is an order of magnitude better than gradle. In most cases it just works and is blazing fast compared with the alternatives.

Depends on what you consider "real work". I would say 99% of business analysts in any enterprise level company do real work 1% of the time. The rest is filled with bulshitting, talking, harassing others or actively looking through the office windows while waiting for someone to do something.

I hope this never takes off.

This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text. Then it can apply all shady practices that it previously was too expensive to do because storing voice and extracting information from it required huge storage costs and actual human labour.

Or worst, just imagine what some government you don't trust could do with all those voice call transcripts.

The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.

> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.

Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.

Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.

> I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak.

Depending on what you consider "in the wild" but German rap is very popular in Germany and other German-speaking countries. People from Germany usually don't rap in English or French. Smudo is an old school, but are quite a bit of rapper that are popular right now, like Capital Bra, Apache 207, Samra, Lea, Mero, Loredana, Bushido, Sido, Olexesh, Kollegah, Farid Bang, RAF Camora, ... just on top of my head.

and those authorities approved it because it's good and effective, or because it's the only one available on the market?

Who says AZ works around the world? It's the vaccine of the last resort, people will get it only if they can't get anything else because it's still better than nothing, at least for now.

And "better than nothing" is just temporary because AZ is very to completely ineffective against all virus mutations that are currently spreading.

If Russian and Chinese Sputnik and Sinovac vaccines were approved in the EU, we could save so many lives, but politics will rather try to force AZ than accept that they failed.

Of course, in the USA exporting vaccines to other countries is simply not allowed, and if they want to sell, they need to sell it to the US government. The same applies to UK.

The fact that EU is the only western entity that produces vaccines and where export is allowed makes it much more complicated.

AZ ban game in EU has more to do with the internal politics than with the medical argumentation.

For many of the corrupt governments it's easier to say "we don't vaccinate because AZ is not safe" that the cold truth "we don't vaccinate because we were not able to order enough vaccines on time."

The reason why we don't have enough vaccines in the EU is:

- Can't get Moderna, Pfizer/Biontech because "America first"

- Can't get enough AZ because UK was faster with ordering

- Can't get Sputnik, Sinovac because US doesn't want that their vassals buy from their enemies

Now as a politician, you just need to find the right expert that will recommend you whatever you want to do.

> Same goes for South Ossetia and Transnistria: these conflicts would long be history without Russian military footholds.

You mean "history" in a sense that the local population would be ethnically cleansed from the Georgian majority and the ones that survive relocated to Russia? And then they would be marked as aggressors because they dared to try protecting themselves with arms, and refused to just disappear from the territory where they have been living for centuries.

Yeah, we saw that many times, and the only criteria that leads to the "correct" conclusion who is right and who is wrong, who is aggressor and who defends himself, who is the victim and who is villain is whether US/NATO or Russian/Other troops are involved on one of the sides.

Nassim Taleb actually cites Prof. Gigerenzer in the topic of simple heuristics.

> I like Bitcoin as a diversification for being a “better version of gold” - it has the scarcity ...

Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation?

All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point.

As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.

The most secure communication is the communication that doesn't happen. He can be pretty sure his communication channel will not be abused by some big advertising corp.

Only after switching my family to Signal, I noticed how much better international voice and video call over Signal than over Whatsapp.

With Whatsapp I would often get lag, echo and generally poor voice quality, with Signal it just works perfectly, even better than regular phone calls.

Give it a try and check if it's worth it for you.

We hear the version of every day as "why does Signal still doesn't have feature X? whatsapp, telegram and most other messengar have it since ages."

And that's why telegram has at least 10x and whatsapp 100x more users.

LastPass is a commodity. There are many free or open-source alternatives that are as reliable and as secure as LastPass that provide similar functionality. It's hard to justify even the small price for a commodity service unless you provide the best possible solution, and sometimes even that is not enough.

I switched from LastPass premium that costed 15$ per year a few years ago to Bitwarden because LastPass could recognize password fields on all web pages, while free Bitwarden just works everywhere.

You speak here as if it's somehow not fair for the companies that employers get paid more? As if the competition only works in one direction, to reduce the salaries, because employees are interchangeable.

Instead, let's enjoy the interchangeability of employers for a while and use the competition of companies for the best talent in our advantage. At least while it lasts.

Croatia, as well as other post Yugoslavia countries is more of an exception here.

And then your application has to schedule a recurring weekly meeting happening at exactly 9:00 CST, and suddenly, you have to update your DB schema and all code instances everywhere to actually deal with the time zones. And then you realize you'd be better off if you were just using a sane time zone library from the start instead of pretending time zones don't exist.

Isn't it obvious that the same people who are actually looking for a translation of some word would not have any issue* seeing that some word in an ad?

* - at least not bigger issue than seeing any ads at all, but those would run ad-blocker anyway.