glogla

List of places I worked from last month:

- my desk at home

- my couch at home

- my dinner table at home (in a boring call while preparing and eating lunch)

- my desk at work

- like 15 different meeting rooms in offices across two continents

- couch on terrace at work

- beanbag on terrace at work

- hotel room desk

- airport lounge

- airplane (if you count watching conference talks as working)

Flexibility is great!

That is a better response than my sad little post deserved. Thank you.

Of course! But why would you think that this is achievable?

Look at the enormous amount of hatred even a small change like "your car, your house heating and your stove will use electricity instead of compressed refined dead dinosaurs" got. Look at how many people when told "we need to change things or this planet is going to be uninhabitable in a few decades" stick fingers in their ears and say "nu uh" or actively start claiming this is all made up.

I'd love to have more sustainable vision of the future, but since most people would rather see humanity end than give up tiniest comfort or accept any change (even a good one, like people in walkable cities are actually happier than people in suburbs). So we don't exactly have a lot of manoeuvring space.

The current Honda hybrids (Civic for sure and I think CRV also) work kind of that way - in slow speeds it works like a series hybrid and only in freeway speeds it connects the ICE to the wheels.

The claimed mileage is similar to Toyota's planetary power splitting thingie, no idea how it works in the real world.

You could also say that hydrogen fuel cell vehicles are series hybrids, since the fuel cell mostly charges a battery, which is much more flexible in what power it can provides and can be recuperated into, unlike a fuel cell which is one-way.

> Religion is just as much a choice as an occupation.

That is a bit tricky.

Religion is definitely a choice if you're enough willing to make a choice, but most people just keep their parent's religion. People just believe what they were taught as children.

I'm atheist from atheist country so I don't necessarily get it, but it seems to be that way - see ratios of Muslim and Christians in Saudi Arabia versus Europe, for example.

Then there's more tricky cases where religion and ethnicity are heavily correlated or tied in even stronger way (e.g. Jews).

France does, though.

The police violence is not as normalized - see riots because they executed a minority race teenager for no reason, something that would be seen as pretty normal in US - but the culture is definitely as messed up.

I think the consensus on why heat pumps _should_ be the future is that you can power them with low carbon electricity, as opposed to literally world destroying natural gas.

Do you want there to be only one browser, owned by a monopolist megacorporation that is striving for a world where everyone consuming ad 24/7 while having zero privacy? If so, use Chrome or its clones.

If not, your only way of fighting back is using Firefox and Safari, so that people still make websites that work in something else than Chrome and Google's monopoly isn't complete.

I will never understand why Mongo and Elastic get so much hate when all the did was to try to protect themselves from AWS parasites.

I guess having yourself exploited and ultimately destroyed by monopolist overlords is the moral choice or something? Or do boots just taste good?

Interesting idea.

On one hand, I think the world's attitude towards the tech companies has changed sufficiently that Google's "sinking Windows Phone by making Gmail and Youtube not work on it" trick might not work out for them this time.

On the other hand, given the sorry state of Windows - all the privacy issues, integrated ads, forced upgrades, whatever else - the Windows Phone would probably end up being terrible experience.

I wonder what kind of gun would you need to chase away an orca. I'm going to assume 9mm wouldn't even penetrate their thick skin and subskin fat.

I mean Microsoft is now building the AI that will take livelihood of hundreds of millions of people and according to some might be the first step towards AI wiping out humanity. So the jury is still out.

They announced plans of only allowing sharing images with account and deleting all "unowned" ones.

Yeah, I thought he was literally locked out and how "smart locks" sound like a bad idea due to failure modes like this. Not that he couldn't use his smart nonsense.

Still, it is a good lesson on control.

If your data fits into Postgres, using Databricks is just plain waste of money.

Databricks is very much like Microsoft or Oracle - it is not sold by technical merit but by sales slides for CTOs. It is unfortunate but this will not impact their bottom line at all, because technical people already overwhelmingly don't want Databricks.

> (Rheinmetall is generally known as a military supplier, think "General Dynamics" or "BAE Systems". I didn't realize they made anything for civilian use.)

Yeah, I read the title and thought "is it for tanks?"

It is funny because I feel the difference, yet can't really explain it easily because my native language has just one word for both concepts.

The story goes, the internet propagandists that are paid for the work are paid more if people respond. Best to just downvote, flag, move on.

> Much less weight should be given to someone "feeling uncomfortable"

I think it depends what you're uncomfortable with. I remember some drama about removing some speakers from security conferences a while back, because people were understandably uncomfortable with them being rapists.

But being uncomfortable with ... talk about how compile time reflection might work in future versions of Rust? Huh? What?

Also I do agree about the language. People are from different cultures and so on, yada yada, but to me the used language feels very overdramatized and childish.

It is funny because at least for me personally, it is the other way around.

I am most interested in deeper technical talks (or cool lightning talks that broaden my horizons) and keynotes often feel like highlevel generic talks that are very skippable - often aimed at CTOs and not engineers. Also, "prominent spot in the morning" is exactly the opposite for me as well, because conferences are all about networking and evening networking means hangover ...

He didn't just ran to Russia, he went to China first.

It would be lot more believable he did it for the greater good, if he only took documents related to internal spying (and not bunch of other stuff) and if he didn't take the documents on joyride through territories of biggest ideological enemies of his home country.

But now he has to live in Russia, which I guess is punishment enough.

Your other comments mention living in China, and you also deny Uighur genocide, so thinking you're pro-CCP is not exactly a stretch, is it?

CCP could buy Western vaccines, but they instead chose their own, even when they knew it is less effective, because their people's lives were less important to them than their ego.

War between the West and China would be naval and air affair (with the exception of Korea I guess), so the traditional draft doesn't make much sense I think. The war would be mostly about whether US can blockade China into a collapse, because China is not self-sufficient in energy (by a huge margin) and food (by a smaller margin).

You might see people drafted into factories, given how much stuff is made in China and the impact on global trade, though.

Eh, it's not like you people would share SinoVac, even if it worked properly.

I would say, they are both complicated.

Afghanistan shows that trying "nation building" on a place where they don't actually want any nation doesn't really work. But it did work for Japan and Germany after WW2, so maybe it was worth trying. I'm sure the women who are now forbidden to learn to read liked the Americans more than they like Taliban, but does that mean extending the war was worth it?

As for Iraq, the WMDs were a complete lie and Bush and Cheney just wanted more war - some say Cheney was the mind behind and Bush was just idiot, some say Bush wanted to finish what his father started - but average Iraqi is now better off than with Saddam. That doesn't help those who died in the war, of the people who could have has better lives for the money the war had cost though.

It was actually Ukraine that changed my opinion on Iraq, because the arguments "Iraq under Saddam's brutal dictatorship wasn't that bad, there was no reason to war" started resonate with "don't help Ukraine, their lives aren't going that bad under Putin's brutal dictatorship, tell the to surrender" little too much. Was Iraq different from Ukraine only because in one the dictator was status quo and in the other it wasn't?

Yeah, complicated.

People find this difficult to grasp, because of black and white thinking.

COVID vaccines significantly reduce how many people who get exposed to COVID actually get sick. They also reduce just how sick people get. Both of those reduce how COVID spreads, how much it impacts people's lives and how much it impacts society by people being sick.

But some people just have that black and white thinking where if the vaccine doesn't make you completely immune, it "doesn't work and it's all fake". If you get sick with COVID while vaccinated, you can't compare with alternate world where you weren't vaccinated and see whether it would kill you instead.

It is being downvoted (hopefully) because it is known Russian propaganda point.

They also saved millions of lives.

Yeah, that would be my answer as well. I actually forgot to mention that - Snowflake and the like store data away from compute so no matter how you misconfigure clusters (though Snowflake isn't really that configurable) the data is safe. Messing up database that stores data locally means the data is gone - and that makes all operations like resizes and upgrades much more scary.

But of course the local storage is much faster. Tradeoffs.

I know ClickHouse Cloud uses S3 as well, but I don't know much about it, so I don't want to comment on it.