DrBazza

We're talking about historically, up until now. They've continued to bring online more fossil fuel and nuclear plants in last decade, whilst Europe has done the complete opposite. It's only this year that fossil fuel plants are predicted to peak in China. The point being plentiful 'anything' forces prices down, including energy, and China are doing exactly what I said in the previous point: not shutting down nuclear or fossil fuels yet.

For example - https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/charting-chinas-evol...

Europe on the other hand, has shut down nuclear and fossil fuels over the last decade and removed a source of cheap energy from the grid. And by cheap I mean, the build costs, are a sunk cost.

That quote mentions gas only. What about coal, oil, and biofuel?

Record energy costs are a thing. If solar and wind are 'free', why have European energy prices risen so much?

The real-world contra-indicators are the USA, China and pretty much any country outside the groupthink of the G20.

Whilst state interference is a factor, more tellingly they haven't slavishly followed the suicidal empathy of being 'green' and shutting down nuclear and fossil fuel power plants before a sufficient replacement was available.

File access isn't the same as tool access. You need to run tools on your ssh host as well. And a devcontainer does indeed equal a (docker) container. The name is very specific and describes shipping a full developer environments so that 'you' do not have to install gcc-toolset-15, or boost 1.83, or mold, or python 3.11, and so on.

https://containers.dev/

> Why is VS code the defacto answer nowadays?

For what I do, there's no reasonable alternative at the moment.

I'm sure someone will correct me, but it's the only editor that correctly (for some definition of correct) allows remote editing and devcontainers:

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box]

[desktop OS] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

[desktop OS] -> ssh (jumphost) -> [dest box] -> [devcontainer]

I won't name and shame other editors (or IDEs), but either they simply can't do that, or their performance is absolutely, shockingly, abysmal.

Yes, looks like it. I see it was licensed to a few other companies.

Yeah, I think that's it. Thanks.

I'm old enough to remember the first attempt at 'mobile underground'. Maybe I've forgotten the name but it was something like BT Phone Zone, though google returns zero relevant results, so perhaps it was called something else. In lieu of public call boxes, BT trialled a base station that was installed in some tube stations (almost certainly Oxford St and Tottenham Court Rd), and with the correct 'wireless handset' as long as you were within 10 feet of it, or thereabouts, you could make a call. I'm sure I remember a semi-circle painted on the ground that if you stood in, you were in range.

Monty Python has its own version. https://montypython.fandom.com/wiki/Johann_Gambolputty

Every single financial institution on Wall Street, the City of London, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Dubai and so on, uses Python. Very few contribute.

I've worked at a few that use the 'mold' linker to dramatically reduce their build times. Again, very few contribute. In this particular case, I managed to get one former employer to make a donation.

But the list goes on.

Short arms, deep pockets, as the saying goes.

The American shopping experience is weird as well. There's a spectrum of supermarkets.

Versus the UK, any US supermarket I've ever visited (I lived there for a couple of years) seemed to have far less fresh food, especially vegetables and fruit, but stuff in boxes was piled high.

Then again, the UK vs. Spain or France is weird, by the same metric, they have even more fresh food than us in supermarkets, and much less boxed stuff.

Geography and having continent sized country probably doesn't help either.

In what scenarios are they terrible? I hope not every scenario. I've found Codex adequate for refactoring and unit tests. I've not used it in anger to write any significant new code.

I suppose part of the problem is that training a model on publicly available C++ isn't going to be great because syntactically broken code gets posted to the web all the time, along with suboptimal solutions. I recall a talk saying that functional languages are better for agents because the code published publicly is formally correct.

From my perspective - do you even need a database?

SQLite is kind-of the middle ground between a full fat database, and 'writing your own object storage'. To put it another way, it provides 'regularised' object access API, rather than, say, a variant of types in a vector that you use filter or map over.

The number of deaths due to the Kim dynasty is in the millions, including their kwanliso murder camps and man-made famine, and vastly outnumbers war casualties unfortunately.

This release of MacOS is the most retrograde backwards step I've seen Apple make.

To use a famous movie quote: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn't stop to think if they should"

Just because you have HDPI and opacity, doesn't mean that you have to use it by default, everywhere.

Publicly, it's about oil, privately, it's also about China getting a foothold in South America, on the USA's doorstep and denying them a source of cheap oil from the world's largest proven reserve. It's the modern version of the Great Game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Game

The only 'leaders' that end up in the Hague and convicted are those forcibly captured via military action. And those 'orders' declared by the UN can, and be vetoed by China, Russia, USA, UK, and France. Guess which two use their veto all the time?

On the other hand, in an alternate reality, this could be preventing a North Korea style dictatorship. Or to flip it, had the USA stayed in South Korea and carried on fighting, it might have prevented North Korea and the Kims and saved literally millions of deaths of North Koreans at the hands of their own government.

What do the Venezuelans actually think about this, given that Maduro rigged the last election in 2024 and denied them their democratic choice?

Well, 'western' 'rules based order' involves democratic elections and being in 166th place for government transparency isn't a good sign. Appointing your successor isn't exactly democratic, in fact it's very much the sign of most countries that end in dictatorship:

"Chavez was elected to a third term in October 2012. However, he was never sworn in due to medical complications; he died in March 2013.[95] Nicolás Maduro was picked by Chavez as his successor, appointing him vice president in 2013."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venezuela#Bolivarian_governmen...

And simultaneously denying China a source of oil and (yet another) foothold in South America on the USA's doorstep?

It's like Cuba all over again.

The unstated implicit difference between online and real world interactions is that you talk to people in real time, can't scroll by, block a person, or be rude to them. Well, you can, but, good old fashioned discourse, and friends telling you to stop being a weird idiot was/is human societal interactions for all of history until the creation of the internet. Facial and physical cues are also part of the lost tapestry that social media cannot replace.

I feel sorry for the young 'uns that have grown up with the internet, that have been able to isolate themselves and their opinions from the real world simply by choosing to not interact physically, and block those whose opinions differ.

When I graduated, ahem, a few decades ago, the main difference between Oxbridge (maths graduates) and non-Oxbridge, specifically the Cambridge Maths Tripos, was that is was teaching the same content it had for the previous decades, whereas the maths courses at mine, and other 'Russell Group' universities had been dumbed down for the first couple of years. You could reach the same level as previous graduates by the final year, but you had to take a new additional course.

The same could be said of Jira.

I could switch on the dev console in the Browser, and see which one loads the largest amount of Javascript, but I'd be disappointed with both.

I like to think the Plumbob bore cap overtook Voyager 1 quite some time ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plumbbob

The cost of nuclear is two fold - government bureaucracy, and the lack of commercialization due to decades of misinformation from the eco-groups.

The plans just to build a tunnel under the Thames in the UK in 2025 is over 2 million pages at the moment, imagine what it is for the Sizewell C reactor - the environmental assessment on its own was 44,000 pages.

SMRs are a good middle ground because they can be commercialized and cost can be driven down once the government gets out of the way.

Fisherman frequently dredge up stone age (or earlier) implements from there.

> they _really_ hate nuclear

The general public don't understand nuclear. And we can thank CND, Greenpeace, and the mainstream press of the 60s onwards for regurgitating their misinformation and poor science as fact.

Modern designs are effectively melt-down proof. Nuclear waste storage is also hilariously funny. People understand not to tread on a railway line or get electrocuted and die, but somehow have a problem with burying waste at the bottom of a sealed mine in a geologically safe area many miles from the nearest village or town (never a city) in containers that have been tested to literal destruction is somehow a problem.

The sad irony is these eco-people's opposition to nuclear for decades has resulted in gigatons of CO2 from coal/oil/gas power stations.

British Telecom. Party lines and waiting a couple of months to be connected were part of the fun times in the 70s.

Imagine having one mobile phone provider.

You mean the Harrow, Lewisham and Hither Green accidents in the late 50s and 1960s under British Rail?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_in_the_...

Welcome to the UK and its innovation hostile environment. We don't have the US culture of throwing VC money at things and seeing what sticks.

> I am not sure how we silently got ourselves into this position

Two things:

1. converting all the old Polytechnics to Universities, in 1992, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universities_in_the_United_Kin...

followed by

2. trying to get '50%' of kids into further education https://www.theguardian.com/uk/1999/mar/08/johncarvel

The state already paid for education to the age of 18. Another 3 years of specialized education costs (the state) more. Getting more kids into HE, costs more even when they fees that are still state subsidized. Hence the increase in unsubsidised foreign students.

It's debatable whether the desired outcome of better educated and 'more employable' 21 year olds was actually achieved, or whether it simply removed a large cohort from the unemployment figures.