dunkelheit

> Many companies, like Netflix, are suspending services because they have no way of getting paid anymore. As of this week, Russians don't have credit cards or convertible currency anymore.

That's not true. International payments with cards issued by non-sanctioned banks continue to work.

Your comment is a bit historically illiterate with respect to World War I. All of the fighting was done by the Russian Empire, the Soviets by contrast immediately signed a disadvantageous peace treaty (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Brest-Litovsk).

> IMO the best reasonable outcome I see for this war is for Russia to annex the Donbas, and possibly the Azov coast. Ukraine will commit to neutrality from NATO and no missiles, but leave open the possibility to join the EU as an economic partner.

This looks "nice" on paper, but how would this neutrality be actually enforced? I'd imagine that a situation where Ukraine has a relatively small army and commits to not hosting either NATO or Russian military bases would be a) quite uncomfortable for Ukrainians and b) highly unstable, with the balance bound to tip to one of the sides sooner or later. Are there any historical precedents of a similar arrangement that worked?

Many boycotts in the current round don't make any rational sense. It is all emotional reaction and desire not to be seen as collaborators.

> Twitter is also a source of claims that civilian objects are out of bounds for the conflict. Well it proved to be an evidence of not being the case.

This claim could be true, but outdated.

> “Most of the information on this topic is crap.” “What do you mean by that?” Crade demanded. We all looked at him, because in an instant he had become markedly defensive. Sammann raised his eyes from the screen of the jeejah and gazed interestedly at Crade. He let a few moments go by, then responded in a calm and matter-of-fact tone: “Anyone can post information on any topic. The vast majority of what’s on the Reticulum is, therefore, crap. It has to be filtered. The filtering systems are ancient. My people have been improving them, and their interfaces, since the time of the Reconstitution.

We haven't yet reached this degree of sophistication.

This works only to a degree. Reserving judgment can't entirely stop emotional reaction which is the target of many of these info nuggets. Also, it can be really hard to notice that you are in an echo chamber, when e.g. you see a highly liked tweet claiming X, then some reputable newspaper reports X, then someone you personally know and respect says "have you heard that X", and X is also generally consistent with your worldview, it is very hard to reserve judgment.

The only reason why this is not happening is that there is more than one such "federation" currently and no one is unquestionably stronger. And at no point in history had a stronger faction submitted to the will of a weaker faction just to avoid hostilities. In a sense war is just a reality check when it is unclear who is really stronger. While studying history, it struck me that many countries (current unit of sovereignty) honor some person who was a "great unifier" - created a cohesive whole and put an end to internal conflicts. As a rule, this person was a war-mongering psychopath.

As you notice, at the end of the 20th century we almost had this kind of "federation" when the US and its allies were the only center of power in the world. The US arrived at that point by winning an economic and cultural war. But its coalition failed to entrench itself, grew weaker and more bloated and now we are facing these dangerous rifts between different factions of humanity.

Note: in the current emotional climate this may sound like war apologism. It is not - war is unspeakably horrible for everyone involved. But this is what an impartial alien looking from an orbit would deduce about the humanity.

Indeed. Though I think this is the measure of last resort for them. Right now they announced a very steep base rate hike and ordered exporters to sell 80% of inbound currency and these measures seem to be working - ruble rebounded from the high of 110 per USD early in the morning and is now trading at around 95-100.

USD savings accounts are accessible to everybody with a bank account and pretty popular. Although recently less so, because interest rates dropped to almost zero.

Yesterday I was at a local branch of my bank. There was a queue (~5 people), but the ATMs worked and the cash was plentiful, no unusual withdrawal limits. Photos are probably not fake, because the demand for cash is obviously there and some banks may have logistical problems with resupplying ATMs.

> There were reports (hard to verify obviously) over the weekend that places like jewelry stores were busy as people were trying to change their rubles to a hard asset.

This is business as usual in a currency crunch. Already happened twice in my memory (2008, 2014) - some people would panic-buy expensive items like plasma tvs. This is not indicative of some systemic collapse.

Thanks. This is advocating total cyberwar. This isn't going to be pretty for anyone.

> Perhaps that is even the right thing to do.

Interesting discussion, I personally don't think so. Truth is important. If one claims some kind of moral high ground, it is important to base one's actions on accurate information whenever possible and encourage others to do the same, otherwise it will only lead to some kind of "are we the baddies" moment down the line.

It has been very disheartening to see some of vocal propaganda critics on my twitter timeline turn into unabashed propaganda machines for the content that they like.

No official info from Roscomnadzor, and I wouldn't expect them to be shy about announcing it (in fact they already throttled twitter a few months ago).

Indeed. This is war and at war nobody is interested in telling truth - that would only help the enemy. So far Ukrainians have been really good at propaganda, churning out high-quality memes at a good cadence and achieving almost total "social media superiority". Later their reports turn out to be exaggerated or outright false (it is crazy, but they posted a dogfight clip from a video game like it was a real thing), but people just want to like and retweet what they want to believe, so they accept it uncritically. By contrast, Russian trolls have been relatively quiet.

Works for me...

> Access to healthcare might be an answer. (Probably not the only answer though, but likely other answers will be aligned similarly)

I wonder how much of this is explained by the obesity epidemic. And this isn't something that is solved by better access to healthcare - the best treatment that modern medicine has to offer (diet and exercise) is kind of obvious and accessible to everyone. One can argue that access to healthy and cheap nutrition options matters, but again, this is not something that one would classify as "healthcare".

Are those directly comparable though? From what horrors I have heard of the US healthcare system, one can easily pay $5000 for a procedure that someone in my country can easily get just by walking into a private clinic and paying $50 out of pocket. So outstanding health expenditure per capita in the US can just be the symptom of how uniquely bloated their healthcare system is, and not the sign that US citizens use health services so much more.

This is kind of what Hanson is angling at. As I understand it, his thesis is that outside of obvious emergency stuff like infections, tumors, broken bones and such most health impact comes from lifestyle variables such as diet, physical activity, level of stress and quality of sleep. This is not traditionally understood as "medicine" (i.e. something doctors prescribe). But when people have easy access to medicine, they will be compelled to go to doctors more and doctors have an incentive to prescribe more treatments than necessary to maintain the prestige of their profession. So in the end many of these treatments will have either negligible effect on health or even be actively harmful.

> Built-in replication without the need to run Zookeeper, with multi-tier sharding support. They rewrite the ZK protocol using multi-paxos within CH itself. It's great.

AFAIK this description is kind of misleading. When they say that they got rid of Zookeeper people expect that they can just connect clickhouse nodes to each other and the replication will work. But that is not how things work - you still have to run external service called clickhouse-keeper. Basically what they did is they rewrote Zookeeper in C++.

It is nice when a program can be significantly sped up by a local change like that but this is not always the case.

To go truly fast, you need to unleash the full potential of the hardware and doing it can require re-architecting the system from the ground up. For example, both postgres and clickhouse can do `select sum(field1) from table group by field2`, but clickhouse will be 100x faster and no amount of microoptimizations in postgres will change that.

I actually have a lot of respect for old school game programmers because they have two traits that many of us who develop mainstream commercial software often lack: a) they care about performance and not in the abstract, but performance as evaluated by an actual human (latency issues in a messaging app are tolerable, a game with latency issues is simply not fun to play) and b) they can sit down without much fuss and quickly write the damn code (the ability that slowly atrophies as one works on a multi-year-old codebase where every change is a bit of a PITA). Sure, the constraints are different, but a lot of it is simply learned helplessness.

We left the exact same comment :)

There is quite a lot about DBMS history in the Red Book and references therein: http://www.redbook.io/index.html

For the history of data model proposals in particular, there is this paper: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=73661829057771494...

So the info is definitely out there if you are interested in that sort of thing.

The answer is status. Most developers are (despite being comparatively well-paid) quite low-status: people tell them what to do all the time and they are expected to comply. By contrast CEO is pretty much the top of the status pole. It is natural for human beings to crave status so it is natural to dream about being CEO even if most won't particularly enjoy it.

> There is no user representation at any $techco. The future of everything is being architected by closed door committee, free from competing ideas.

"User representation" sounds nice, but I wonder how that would work in practice. After all, there is "citizen representation" in modern democratic governments but most decisions are being architected by closed door committees free from competing ideas as well.

One of the examples that comes to mind is the battle of activists with ICE. ICE is a government agency, so activists, being citizens, at least in theory have a say in how it is run. Instead, one of their main tactics is shaming private companies for cooperating with ICE, which is kind of backwards if you take the idea of "citizen representation" at face value.

I think it is important not to demonize Facebook too much. I'm no fan of them, but I guess they don't really care about what people read on their feeds, as long as they are glued to their phones and clicking on ads 24/7. Sure, they have tremendous power over the information that people consume, but my guess is that they are quite reluctant to use that power because with this power comes great responsibility and also vulnerability.

On the other hand, others see this power and want to use it. Thus recently we see a lot of "they are a private company, they can do whatever they want" when somebody likes how they handle some situation and "they have become too powerful, they need to be regulated" when somebody doesn't like that. This is a kind of a game where whoever makes facebook do their bidding wins, and facebook itself is reduced to maneuvering between various demands and interests without much agency of their own. That's quite scary as well.

My guess is this will end up with some kind of quasi-censorship regime, "voluntarily" installed by facebook (because, you know, first amendment), so that they can continue to collect their ad dollars unmolested. The beginnings are already there - various fact-checkers etc.

I remember a pretty similar dialogue that I had with a PM once, it went like this: PM: so what is your estimate for this feature? Me: 4 weeks to prod. PM: hmmm, that looks like a lot for a small task that is also very important for us, maybe you can do it in 2 weeks? Me: no, considering the amount of additional commitments that we have, I’m pretty sure this will be done in 4 weeks. PM: well, I’ll provisionally set the deadline to 2 weeks and then we can revise it. Me: whatever. 4 weeks later the feature is delivered to prod, nobody bats an eyelash.

The thing is most of the time these deadlines are totally artificial and simply a psychological trick to induce a sense of urgency. Moreover, PMs know that deadlines will slip and are prepared for this , they just want them to be slightly unrealistic so that you feel pressured (even better if you yourself suggested the deadline under their intent stare, then the pressure is higher).

> SAY NO TO URGENT ONE-OFF REQUESTS FROM MANAGEMENT!!!

The thing is, saying no to requests from management (if it is your management of course) is going to hurt your career prospects too. Instead you should say "sure, but this thing will move the completion date of this hard and extremely important project X days, is it ok with you?" (Not having any hard and important project in the works? Fix that ASAP as the article suggests). Then ideally you reach some kind of compromise (sometimes these requests are urgent and you are the best person to handle them). If instead they say "no, I want you to do this urgent thing and complete your other projects on time, here is a nice weekend that you can use", then it is time to look for a new job.