tsupiroti

Exactly. For Ukraine, a peace treaty now that allows Russia to regroup and invade again in N years is not really helpful.

The gap between haves and have nots is more related to politics than economics IMO. It's about how the value is (re)distributed.

> there's no way the top 10% receive 10% of the services.

Depends on how you value the service of protecting that wealth. Prooperty rights enforced by the state, and the more property one has, the more one benefits from that.

Rereading the previous comments, I agree you're right. Good analogy.

That's exactly what GDP measures: how much money people have paid and gotten paid for things.

"GDP measures everything except that which is worthwhile"

Well, there are often threads lamenting that open source maintainers don't get paid more.

LLMs cannot explode. People need to be educated that LLMs are as trustworthy as a random page or post on the internet.

> You can be a great studio painter, but not be able to "talk to" Stable Diffusion at all. Likewise, you may have zero artistic ability in the traditional sense, but be a prodigy at getting the computer to spit out what you are imagining, or something even better than that.

I'm not so sure about this. Both require visualizing something upfront, evaluating the resulting images and understanding what needs to change.

It's a bit like digital and analog photography. Digital makes the skills of getting a good exposure less relevant and allows post-processing. But a photographer still needs to know what makes a good photo.

This doesn't invalidate the original point though. Making a living as a photographer became harder with the advent of digital photography.

> The logic of most prominent programming languages, such as Python, is based on English vocabulary and syntax — using terms like “while” or “if not” to trigger certain actions — which makes it that much more difficult to learn for non-native speakers. Furthermore, many of the most popular educational resources for learning to code, including Stack Exchange, are also in English.

It seems to me that the latter is a much bigger problem for Spanish. Programming languages have relatively few keywords. I imagine English keywords might be a big problem for people who doesn't know the latin alphabet though.

I understand, but I must say that it doesn't sound very efficient to be working in an office for 8 hours every day in order to have useful spontaneous connections every once in a while. Meetups and other events also provide such interactions without having to be there all the time while coding, writing, etc.

The someone was Pedro's brother Miguel. After losing the war, he was banished and his descendents removed from the succession line, but they now claim to be heirs to the throne of Portugal (which nobody really cares about).

This all happened after the royal family escaped the French invasions to Brazil and Rio de Janeiro became the capital of Portugal. The story of Pedro, the independence of Brazil and the Portuguese liberal wars is really interesting.

I think b) without a) would be a bit of a red flag. Almost everyone I know has lived together in some way before getting married.

I agree children can cause problems in relationships. My point was more that they're a very strong reason against splitting up.

Good point, it's indeed common for couples to get married when having children.

Still, I think what's helping ensure commitment in that case are the children, rather than the marriage. It's much easier for a married childless couple to split up than for an unmarried couple that has children.

> We could agree that marriage, everywhere in the Western world, is declining in popularity, and non-marital cohabitation rising. This is especially true of Europe.

In my experience, many young couples in western Europe don't see marriage as signifying that a relationship is stabler. It's something you just do after you've been living together for a while since it simplifies some bureaucracy (especially if moving outside the EU) and it's a good reason to have a party. In many countries being in a domestic partnership is very similar to being married from a legal perspective.

> The educated class decides cohabiting partnerships are just as valid and important as marriage. And they also believe it’s okay to walk away at a moment’s notice from a cohabiting relationship.

This is very dependent on whether there are children or not. I don't think the educated class believes that it's ok for a father to just walk away from their children and refuse to be a major part of their lives.

I've found Nokia/HMD also okay.

I find it reasonable that Python doesn't enforce the type checking. The owners of each project can choose how much to enforce it and how.

Defining such style rules and validations is necessary with almost every language. A codebase where developers are allowed to use any C++ feature or browser API will become very messy as it grows.

Does anyone know online lectures/courses on BCI basics and whether there are any relatively inexpensive devices that are good enough to allow hacking something useful?

There are also stable and peaceful borders, and Putin could absolutely have chosen to have one with Europe. Instead he chose instability in order to expand by force to areas that Russia used to control.

The only reason for US military presence in Europe is the Russian threat. The US would gladly move forces to the Pacific and Europe would be happy to have a peaceful and democratic Russia on their border and to see the US go.

Putin chose empire-building by force. He could have chosen peace and economic prosperity instead. Just compare the development of Russia and the former Warsaw pact countries.

Why would Russia, a large nuclear power, need defensible borders? To prevent an invasion by Ukraine, Finland or Estonia?

Taiwan is not a member of NATO, and neither are other US allies in east Asia.

I think Switzerland is not bad in this respect. There are several health insurance companies, but the basic plan's coverage and price is set by the government and it's quite comprehensive. Those who can't afford it get it through social services.

Hot water bottles are quite common in Portugal. You should be able to find one at any large supermarket (e.g. Continente).