In Memory of Stiver
blog.jetbrains.com
blog.jetbrains.com
It’s another sign of the performative society we live into, where work and accomplishments don’t matter but virtue signalling does.
To be frank, fuck them. I’m not inventing an entire persona and stuff just to make some weirdos happy.
Thank you, Stiver, and R.I.P.
There were lots of "We think your patch is doing XYZZY, we see where our code should be doing that. We've updated our code and the problem went away."
Fernflower was awesome. RIP Stiver, glioblastoma can be an ugly way to die.
He opted for an assisted suicide: https://flibusta.is/node/684900.
Probably only a decade away from curing it. Unfortunately, medicine can evolve slowly.
I'm awfully sad Stiver passed away before old age, but happy that at least it was not due to adversity.
R.I.P Stiver
I've spent many hours pouring through the output of Fernflower looking for what some obfuscation algorithm has come up with.
Dogspeed, Stiver. Your work, "legitimate" or not, has benefitted the world. o7
I wonder how much of a boom Russia will see from émigrés returning home if the political environment lets up a little
One of more interesting experiences from early 2000s in Microsoft was when Microsoft Russia finally crossed 1B in revenue by finally having Gazprom/Sberbank buy all the sh*t that they were pirating before. By doing so, the country was eligible to do the yearly business review in person, instead of over whatever passed for Zoom back then, I don't remember anymore. Olga D...can't remember her last name was the country manager, one of the few women in such position at the time. She invited everyone in russian community (hello rodina email list) to come to the Microsoft conference center in building 34 to listen to repeat of what she did earlier that week to Ballmer. This was the only microsoft event with catered vodka and caviar I've been to, but anyhow, after presentation of the financial stuff it turned a bit into a recruiting event - hey, come back to the motherland, the water is nice, look they are buying software licenses like civilized people, here is the pay scale from levels 61 and up, etc etc. There were ~400 people in the room, and the uptake was 0 (zero). All of us who were there in the room were not there in motherland for a reason.
You know .. those bastard Ukrainians are trying to make us think that everything sucks in Russia because of the war.
But I guess that it doesn't matter much if you have money and connections.
As for "nobody will go back" - agree in general, but at least Anton Nossik did go back.
[0] https://publications.iom.int/system/files/pdf/WMR-2022.pdf
What I'd meant is that, having been on the receiving end of all the Okhrana's dirty tricks, and having learned the hard way, the Cheka knew very well indeed how to play those games by the time they were on top.
(I don't know to what degree Eric Blair worried about a similar fate, but we do see that after Animal Farm he moves to a remote island in Scotland, where presumably strangers would draw much greater attention to themselves than in London — and before returning to London for hospital marries a much younger spook*)
* compare a line from Trotsky: "Rakovsky cites a curious remark of Babeuf to the effect that the degeneration of the new ruling stratum was helped along not a little by the former young ladies of the aristocracy toward whom the Jacobins were very friendly. ... A census of the wives of the ruling stratum in the Soviet Union would show a similar picture."
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.74858/page/n11...
(as it is, at least the Yeltsin jokes can, like Brezhnev jokes, be repurposed for US use 2025-2028...)
(The mechanism is probably that STEMish rusticants began to selforganize learning centres)
COVID might have already started the process of Montanacation — elite diffusion to the hills —for the US (tho 2024 might actually reverse it)
For russians so far, the conscripts are so far drawn disprop from the lows; the tops prefer to emigrate/stay out of the country, so wait a bit.
Is it still true that bit-wranglers are exempt from conscription?
(in any event, one would hope that bitwrangling would pay well enough to provide anti-conscription cabbage?)
> the tops prefer to emigrate
Is that what Proshay elita![0] is about?
In the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_emigration#Controversy department, I was impressed that Urgant[1] preferred losing his show over retraction.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfhV0Sew0j4
(TIL, while trying to answer in my own words)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regularity_structure
:::::
Re: ikigai & magic/yuurei & contraints
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faddeev–Popov_ghost#Footnotes
[hokusai said? But painted a few lone wranglers in 甲斐 province]
::::::
Re: Leningrad MTV & Russians
1) Intentionally not hiring locals for NPC role, out of respect for hosts or irony? Drink is Hainanese coconut? Visually refined + verbally profane, such Pansclavonia!
2)nomenklatura/engineers, could keep their kids away from lows as far back as 1950s, or even earlier. Military still more effective diffusive optimizer in AG’s time? Or further back, the Minimes.
::::::: Edit
Proto response to econ rot
EDIT: and I have to give props to HONK FU! The hand-drawn motion blur is a nice touch; who has the time for that these days?
There ought to be a way to cross Gogol's Dead Souls with Pauli–Villars ghosts, but both my po*-russki-fu and my unitarity-fu are too weak.
(unitarity keeps things group-like; semigroups/monoids have an "arrow" in that they make irreversible transitions between J-classes; could it be easier to generalise to the latter than to add ghosts?)
* TIL the waste material from copra harvests gets sold for hydroponic use. Is the appearance of the 水耕龍 an auspicious portent for grow rooms?
EDIT: two important differences education-wise here: (a) kids can signal reasonable intelligence and high conscientiousness through vocational school (although a son of my former landlords started on this route, then swapped to the university track after encouragement by his coworkers), and (b) it's way more difficult to set up a degree mill, because kids have to test into becoming eligible for university and the resulting support.
(Upon reflection: I had a career advantage due to my sheepskin's branding being high intelligence, meh conscientiousness, and low conformity; somehow here I am at the other end of my career still faithfully signalling those same weights on HN)
ive unfortunately (ego quoque!) degenerated to link/comment taiji for now,
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42134920
A way to resolve the elite defo conundrum by separating out the laptop class (but merging car dealers into the working class?)
>as a dean i was … sitting under … swords while being perceived as the sword…
are these triangles determinate, or is there a search process involved?
(maybe I ought to be looking for "ghost faces" that'd simplify my existing edge & vertex model of computation?)
(Image Search for “3-gluon vertex” to get a language independent sense)
On (regrettably still halfass’d) reflection,there are necessary subtleties which your question is stalking but it will take me a few days or weeks to page in
(but now I'm reminded —physics envy, mind you— of a "renormalisation" in regex engines. Recall the definition of A*:
A* == ϵ | A | A*A*
A* == ϵ ⨁ A† ⨁ (A*A*)†
Otherwise one risks getting stuck recognising ϵ an infinite number of times (leaving squares in is harmless); anyway the presence of the ϵ means that during* recognition of A*, there is one incoming edge but two outgoing.)
* speaking in terms of left to right traversal, but we can also go right to left, which (by a folk theorem) means we can also calculate bottom up. I'll have to reflect upon what A* might produce, edgewise, in that last case.
Here: how far is this regex from non-associativity.
[& this connection is exactly what i was hoping for! I’d hoped the regular in regularity structs would trigger smth, & save us both weeks (of procrastination, in my case)]
Was i born decades earlier, i might have wandered into a VC “human capital destruction” job, since i have a roughly equivalent mix of traits..
The binary ops, sequencing and alternation are associative (monoidal).
The unary op, kleene star, blocks reassociation.
However, it is occasionally useful to use the associative-adjacent identity A;A* == A*;A (and more generally, A^n;A* == A*;A^n;A* == A*;A^n == ...)
A Chirurg, an Architekt, and an Informatiker are discussing whose profession has the most patina. The Chirurg points out that when God removed Adam's rib to form Eve, He was doing surgery. The Architekt points out that when God made Heaven and Earth out of the Chaos, He was doing architecture. The Informatiker just smiles broadly and then asks, "Und? where then think you the Chaos came from? a cereal Gimmick?"
Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Fry_Richardson#:~:text=h...
(had Lenin been less confident in world revolution, could he have asked creditors to take a haircut on their Imperial Russian bonds?)
Lagniappe: https://gagosian.com/media/images/exhibitions/2009/alexander...
Mostly figured out the deal with the Leningrad (just noticed the logo animation..)
Shnurov runs a restaurant in Peterburg, “Cococo”, those are prob his employees, and the drink could well be his fave counterseasonal laptop class drink
(Who is his man in Hainan i wonder)
Update:
Lions for ZA?
Closest I found so far to that blue and white package was in Singapore, and the site kept trying to FOMO me: "Jessie Ni just bought ${PRODUCT}" etc.
Next thing you know, the websites will be wanting me to 讨价还价?
Then again, spout pouches are easy enough to get in your own livery, and filling stations run anywhere from USD 1'500 to USD 45'000 depending upon how many pouches you plan on filling per setup op. I'll have to see if Shnur has any CoCoCo house branded goods.
Or is it Matilda getting the Hainan goods? https://www.forbes.com/sites/annabel/2020/11/16/how-russian-...
> Shnurova had faced challenges before. She had studied biochemistry but [that was] incompatible with being half of one of Russia’s most glamorous couples. And so she ... became a restaurant entrepreneur.
I suppose this way Shnur will always have a place to play on weekends, even if his style is not so compatible with the CoCoCouture concept?
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRlYp6IZsV4
PS. meanwhile, in past-orientation, Zhihu shows me ads for water from "ancient aquifers". Hard to argue with geologic patina!
1. Slavophile, past (god save the tsar!)
2. Laptop class, cosmopolitan future (tomorrow the universe!) Here be tropical dragons..
3. “Car dealer” class gastropub, present (dont worry abt that hangover)
In liberal democracies there tends to be no gap between 1,2,..(or 1,3) thank Bibendum??
I think i’ve a reasonably good handle on other-people’s-ikigai.. a shared meal or 2 can lead to some confidence intervals on their future returns — measured in ikigai!
Ikigai trading, otoh, a very delicate matter..
Edit: possible to trisect hn based on how adversarial the relationship to those who pay is ( no tops, but plenty of semiretirees in the uppest house)
One would think widespread smartphones would help with this? Stuff that in my childhood was only available in university towns is now accessible to almost anyone with an aptitude and an interest...
EDIT: Did Pioneer Houses ever do STEM? "What you've learned, teach a buddy" was a nice slogan...
Just this week some part of the US ruling class got some better seats in the game of musical chairs. The game's not much different anywhere in the world, other than the window dressing.
If the mid wishes a circulation of elites, they must ally with the low against the high; if the high wishes to prevent this, they can ally with the low against the mid.
A crucial point on which Goldstein, Squealer, and the 2 Ronnies, agree is that no matter which way these alliances are sorted in theory, somehow in practice the low always wind up more or less where they started.
> Oh, it's the meek! Blessed are the meek! Oh, that's nice, isn't it? I'm glad they're getting something, 'cause they have a hell of a time. —Mrs. BN
People who made the decision themselves and have already settled in the new place seldom come back.
And how do you suppose this will happen? By Trump cutting a deal with Putin leaving Ukraine out to die, or what?
The Russian soldiers might return home. The Ukrainians won’t. There won’t be a home to return to, and in many cases, there won’t be anyone left to return.
Wars end, true. Exactly how this war ends is crucial.
The problem is that USA twice messed with Ukraine sovereignty, first in 2004, and then in 2014 turned this country to a proxy, puppet state, bulwark against Russia. And that's why this war started, because Russia can not allow Ukraine to be turned into a hostile state, ideologically driven by hatred towards Russia and Russians and manipulated by NATO, with bases on its territory.
Russia is fine with Ukrainians, if you're unaware, Russia accepted the largest number of Ukrainian refugees of all countries. Most of these people got Russian citizenship. It's actually Ukraine, that turned Zelensky into a king with absolute power, dismantled all the opposition party, oppressed Russian language, culture, religion, wiping history, and basically brainwashing population with targeted hatred. The reality is: Ukrainian dystopian regime is hanging on Western support. Without money and weapons they can't even feed their people anymore, but already turning women to cannon fodder, and no doubt, that in a few month they'll force their kids to go to tranches also. Because Ukrainian leaders don't care about Ukraine or Ukrainians, all they care is their pockets, that are filled by the war, and their goal is to prolong this war for as much as possible.
This is a lie.
Russia is trying to eradicate the Ukrainian culture. It failed with corruption and tried with military muscle during the invasion. This also failed.
So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
You're lying yourself. It's Russian culture that's getting eradicated in Ukraine by renaming cities, streets, destroying monuments, burning books, prohibiting Russian language usage which is mother tongue for majority of population of Ukraine etc. In Russia nothing like this happens. Ukrainian language is being taught in schools that has significant Ukrainian population, nobody renames anything related to Ukraine.
>So now they try to freeze people to death, kill civilians and do human wave attacks to gain territories.
You're watching too much of your local propaganda.
>People living in the occupied territories are killed for showing any Ukrainian culture. Torture is common. This is the russian Mir.
Yeah, yeah, that's why Russia has the largest population of Ukrainians outside of Ukraine, absorbed the most number of refugees from Ukraine, and people from "occupied territories" are getting Russian citizenship. Brainwashing is real.
The Russian language is not prohibited in Ukraine, and it is not, by any stretch, "the mother tongue for [the] majority population of Ukraine."
I think that getting through a russian concentration camp will make people do anything and say anything to save themselves and their children.
There is no prohibition against speaking Ukrainian. I think you should learn about why people reject your culture while speaking the same language as you. This is somewhat amusing to me. That you can speak a language while rejecting the culture that comes with the language.
About smashing Russian monuments and renaming streets?
This is happening all over the previous Russian sphere of influence. People don't want you there. Let the people decide their own fate instead of invading them and telling them what to think.
It seems you may not appreciate the extent to which the sources you're getting these narratives from may be woefully uninformed, and/or simply lying to you.
None of this "puppet state" stuff, or the descriptions of events in 2004/2014 that you're echoing here has any connection to reality. If the Ukrainian government were simply a "puppet" of the United States, then it would have evacuated from Kyiv after the 2022 invasion just like the former was advising it to do. But it did the complete opposite, instead.
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nato-75-russia-progr...
The year is 1997, but the conflict started much earlier than that, during the fall of the Soviet Union.
For all the brainwashed and self-righteous: feel free to hit the downvote button. I won't respond to stupid questions along the lines of "how is this relevant", "whataboutism", and so on. You can read.
Which is a pretty strong indication that it most likely isn't.
This guy is a USA professor that specializes in international relations. He was warning for years that USA course of actions will result in Russia Ukraine war. And he has multiple videos explaining in details the history and how step by step we ended with this war, what could've been done to prevent it, and what steps actually made it inevitable.
The main thing is that what he tells is true, well known to Russians, but it's that other side of the story, that is wiped and generally not allowed in Western mass media, so most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
So most of USA and other NATO countries citizens are totally unaware of it.
They're perfectly aware of it, because the Russian narrative has been echoed and propagated incessantly by left- and right-wing news outlets and social media commenters ever since 2014.
Let me just say this: No political fear of any foreign influence on a bordering country ever justifies invading this country, killing its citizens, and destroying its infrastructure. No matter how you try to frame it, Russia committed crimes in Ukraine, which it is completely responsible for. You may try to blame the victim here, but that will never become the truth.
We can forget about history for a second, but just look at what's going on with China, for example. They've never attacked USA or any Western nation, they're restoring their country after centuries of foreign occupation, making their people life better, expanding markets with their goods, and USA is intended to destroy them. Why? Because they're an economic threat absorbing world markets and pushing USA out, so USA needs to act fast to preserve own dominance over the globe, because China's also building their military, so window of opportunity for military aggression is getting narrower.
To make it clear: international politics is never about justice, it's about interests. Those who're relatively strong trying to force weaker powers to submit to their demands. USA is the current King of the Hill, and they're trying their best to not allow anyone to topple them, by invading other countries directly, toppling governments, provoking wars by proxies etc.
But the political system will have to be reformed first.
Russia actually has a rather functional bureaucracy that is holding the country together. All it really needs is decentralization of power, probably similar to the German's model.
Pretty much everyone employed by the state, from school teachers who en masse rig elections to the judges who do FSB's/president office bidding, have to be assumed irredeemable.
Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
Nope, it actually works well within it. I'm talking about the bureaucracy that ensures that the water is running, people can get driving licenses, register real estate deals, etc. All the "boring" stuff that keeps the country working.
> Russia didn't to the "lustrations" that Poland, Czechia, East Germany and some other countries did, and the Hydra survived.
Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Historically, lustrations worked well only in smaller countries where everyone knew everyone through one or two handshakes, and that still had people who remembered living in a functional democracy.
I don't see one can look at recent history and come to support this view.
The lustrations in the former Warsaw Pact countries, and denazification (such as it was) in Germany after WW2 seem to have worked well enough, and to have been crucial enablers of the process of democratic transition in these countries (having had very little history of democracy as such until that point). If anything West Germany suffered from not being sufficiently robust in its denazification process until far too late.
Of course, such purges should never be simply imposed from the outside, on the heals of an invasion which should have never happened anyway, which is the key reason why de-Ba'athification failed so miserably in Iraq.
Maybe utilities and some other functions that are not related to how Putin enacts his political control can be spared. Not gutting the machine that does - and that's courts, the entire FSB, whole departments of the MVD, large swaths of the education system and regional governments, really need to be gutted and replaced by new people, old ones only allowed back after thorough examination of their track record.
>Lustrations ("purges") are a bad idea in general, especially for larger countries that don't have a history of democracy.
This is an opinion, and it's not supported by facts. Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well. No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
>Want an example? Iraq. The US Army purged all the BAATH members from the new government, replacing them with new people who were inexperienced in day-to-day administration. And then all those exceedingly nice and newly-jobless ex-BAATH-ists went and formed the core of ISIS.
Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
The FSB _itself_ needs to be split and de-powered. There should never be a state organization with this amount of power.
However, people who were working there should not just be blindly purged. This way you end up with the Iraq scenario. From the practical standpoint, FSB also contains border guards, law enforcement departments, counter-terrorism, etc. They are all needed in a normal state.
Instead, there should be _personal_ prosecutions of people responsible for political persecution and for the illegal foreign operations that started the war. This is probably far less than 10000 people.
> Poland is not that small, more than 1/4 the population of Russia, and their lustrations worked very well.
Their version was pretty mild, and even then had problems with false documents used to libel even Lech Walesa.
> No living person there had any memory of democracy at the time they happened.
Poland was occupied in 1939, so people who were 20 at that time were 70 by 1990.
> Way to conflate civic lustrations with a war, and by total destruction by a superpower onslaught at that.
That's another argument: you probably won't even _have_ a chance to do a massive purge (never mind if it's a good idea or not). But reforms are a possibility.
Personal prosecutions by the compromised prosecutors and courts won't work either. The war is only the tip of the iceberg, an external manifestation of absolute corruption.
>Russia's population is 1/2 that of the US and it's irrelevant.
not yet. Quickly moving that direction though. No yet there mostly because of USSR built resources like nuclear weapons, space program, educational and scientific foundations from that time (USSR was an empire of 250M population of proper USSR plus the Eastern Block which in particular produced technology - Bulgarian computers, Hungarian buses, Polish built ships, including Navy ones, etc.) All that in Russia is falling behind and apart.
(that said, china seems to have done much better with broad secondary education than india did with targeted tertiary education)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2024/02/01/perc...
"The percentage of adults in the U. S. between the ages of 25 to 64 with college degrees, certificates or industry-recognized certifications has increased from 38.1% in 2009 to 54.3% in 2021"
so something like 100M.
And if we look here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_... it is more like 70M.