rembal

Long time ago, me and a friend of mine had a joke about PMs: to calculate how managers combine, you multiply their performance rates: two poor managers (e.g. 0.5*0.7) will give you worse performance than if you had one bad manager. My similar formula about AI and developers is that it works like raising to the power of two: if you have a bad dev, you get 0.5^2: more mess more quickly. If you have a great dev, you get 1.5^2 - exponentially better :)

And rest assured, the party has a list of people and their dogs, and will use it at a moment of convenience. Public facing VPNs are quite trivial to detect, even if you don't own your country telecom infra.

I'm not sure if it should be done by the governments, but there is a huge freedom vs responsibility imbalance in broadcasting: you can reach millions of people with well crafted misinformation easily with zero responsibility, and social media algorithms actually promote misinformation as a side effect of optimizing for engagement: truth is boring. I don't think it will get fixed in any way: there is too much money to be made. Paraphrasing Leni, we will hang ourselves on the rope that we sold to ourselves :)

I think You can download the raw emails via BitTorrent...

And less noisy.

I'm waiting for the first drone-carried human airbirne assault.

So far the only drone carried airborne were Ground grone drops on the back of the enemy, some with grenade launcher drones.

Don't worry, now that Trump started protecting the refineries, the other data centers will be hit sooner rather than later. All those fresh fp2 drones can't go to waste. The only question is whats next - power plants? Water treatments? Heating somewhere up north?

I would just like to point out that the court that prosecutes war crimes was just hit with even more sanctions from the US, with the justification that "nobody will hurt American citizens", buy the guy who indirectly ordered the bombing of the school. Legal definitions are pretty worthless if nobody gets prosecutesd.

They are not politically stable, quite the opposite: weak states held together by single sector revenues. Right after Ukraine war started, I started maintaining a map of next flashpoints: got a hit on Arabian peninsula + Iran, Venezuela, India/ Pakistan. Israel and Gaza were a surprise. Eastern flank (Finland/ Baltics/ Poland/ Romania is in a slow burn. Still waiting for Taiwan, south china sea and Singapore/Malaysia+ Indonesia - but that will be the big one, and actually the conflict for the straits (Malaca and Sunday) may have gotten invalidated by the Iran mess.

If the goal of the university is to be a fund vacuum cleaner it's rational. If the goal is to output free thinking, open minded graduates...

Not to that extent: it's against regulations in most cities from Singapore (obviously) to Saigon, and it's considered 'old people thing' in general. In Papua you see people with red teeth all the time, blood like stains on sidewalks accompanied by tiny zipper bags, which are very intriguing when you're out of context. I saw a mother giving betel to her 10 yo daughter on a boat ride - It is a bit calming, so...

That's true and that's what BBC fell for (korowai tribe in eastern Papua AFAIR).

Having actually travelled there, a lot of authors assumptions are invalid in a way that reveals our (euro-american) biases. There are no roads, but people travel by plane (both jets, our guide made a joke that there are two kinds of airlines in Papua, ones that crash into mountains and into the sea, or prop on grassy landing strips, you can look up videos from visiting remote villages, those pilots are super skilled) and on the coast - by boat. Smartphones, solar panels, FC Barcelona t-shirts and catholic church made their way into the mountains and jungle before any other sort of infrastructure, and so did the tourists and fake attractions: fake cannibals, fake legends and fake customs (even BBC fell for some). Demand gives birth to supply. One super interesting thing the author does not mention is that Papua is the last stand for betel nut chewing: you can try it if you're into light psychedelics. I can also shill my video essay here of anybody is interested in listening to pseudophilosophical/journey journal ramblings in heavy accent: https://youtu.be/0cCoZguizdg?is=o-5urE4E2GTolaDv

The best de-brain rot vacation I had so far was on a remote island in Raja Ampat: it wasn't about the island being remote, but about spotty internet access. It was just the correct amount of spotty: enough for text to load and IMs to go through, but not enough for any serious photo or video content. I was able to get YouTube to download videos in 240p on one end of the island, but I had to be picky about what I select. After two weeks I felt like my old self again, but unfortunately, it popped like a bubble after just a few days.

It's maybe much easier to create code, but it's still hard to create good software, and for the next few years we have a monumental challenge of figuring out how does one create good software when cost of code is approaching zero. It will be harder to decide what to build (or what to not build), increase the velocity, even if only for infosec patching, make use of increased velocity for features, massively increase experimenting capacity, and close the biggest loop. Even the best teams now are barely scratching the surface of what tomorrow brings, and it's super exciting, interesting and definitely not easy. It will be hard, but not in the part that was hard before.

And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living with 3 kids in studio apartments, playing with a lot of kids while waiting in mile long-lines for totally mundane rationed foodstuffs, school classes starting at 2 pm and ending at 8pm (too many kids), and my parents reaching out via their network to a director of orthopedic shoe factory because even money couldn't get you that kind of stuff. And in the 40 years since we had sustained growth rates comparable only to China or South Korea, and similar problems with childbirths. I don't buy any economic arguments.

It's a well known movie, I'm pretty sure that Elon was either inspired by the movie or by the British code breaking computer from WWII. Frankly, I forgot about the movie (saw it in late 2000s), and assumed the inspiration came from the UK :)

+1 on the IAM over engineering, though to AWS credit, I suspect it was evolved rather than design, and that's what you get when evolution has to maintain some level of backward compatibility (think humans still having to be able to lay eggs). Another thing that happens occasionally for saas companies is AWS creating a copy of their product in a bit sus way - but it's not a technical problem, it's a business model problem.

I'm pretty sure I got prescribed an antibiotic at least once :) Also, my father has been through 5 cancer "journeys", all successfully treated via public healthcare, last few caught "too early to operate" due to early detection PET scan programs. I don't know much about 19th century medicine, but it seems off.

Not much I think. I had long discussions about it with my Ukrainian friends: we came to the conclusion that it was mostly the fact that Ukraine was part of the USSR (much harder crackdowns on opposition, actually including the church) - and that also built stronger ties with Russia. A lot of people forget that USSR really was a multicultural empire: you had families where in the 90s siblings abruptly woke up in different countries: Russia, Belarus, Ukraine. Post-2022 some of those families stopped talking to each other, the propaganda is stronger than the family ties. Before the situation got clarified by falling bombs, the east/west choice was much harder.

They have been indicating it constantly for last 12 years, regardless of who is in power...

I don't know. I have to admit that things might have been better, we could have been more active in international politics or trade, but we are a sort of low key, and maybe the money and effort is better spent on improving life of citizens. Would I like more Polish footprint in the world? Yeah. Do I prefer clean streets, nice infrastructure and safety? Hell yeah.

Most Ukrainians (and Belarusians) settled in major cities, starting with Warsaw. In 2022 I had a Belarusian girlfriend, and at some point I tried convincing people coming here to target smaller towns, to no avail. Still, most of them stayed here, work hard and make it, despite rents literally doubling since when the war started.

So, who elected Stalin? He was the head of the USSR after all.

15%? With some legal footwork you can get to 10 or 5%, depending if you count general medical I surance as a tax or not.

Many countries in Europe have free universities: avoiding a few hundred thousands in debt maybe be worth moving in the long run.

That could work if the actors were rational. Unfortunately, they are largely ideological.

I'm too lazy to double check the numbers, but as far as I remember, Germany in order to increase it's average generation by 10% had to expand capacity by 70% in solar plus wind. With stats like this, there's a thin line between progress and waste. And all this while we have nuclear. (How the world really works, Vaclav smil if anybody is less lazy than me)

I love the water/ice metaphor, but the author tends to completely ignore the physical world. Example with cardiologist - we all know what happened to the radiologist prediction. Example with defence (or war) becoming mostly a case of having a better AI model: well, try to win without a solid, distributed production capabilities, energy access and safe supply chains, in a geographical disadvantage. Embodiment is coming, but it will require moving a lot of atoms. Also, even in text heavy domains, a lot of knowledge is not written down, often of purpose (especially in legal), and that's the juicy part...