henrikschroder

> And I think the same is true for Trump's speech

There are people who take these transcripts and re-enact what he's actually saying, but in their voice.

Doing that makes it immediately obvious that he's a rambling moron.

> and praying they place you high.

If you remove an 'r', there's the other way you can get placed high.

> A database that's accessed by multiple applications, regardless of the number of languages, is a really bad smell.

Except that really was the original model back in the 90's. All "good" databases had an extensive roles and permissions system, and a point of pride was the number of ODBC connectors for different languages and environments.

You were supposed to have The Database, looked after and controlled by the hallowed DBAs, who had their own hardware budget, their own organization, and who controlled access to The Database, giving trusted applications access to it, but only after they had vetted the schema and queries that those dirty developers wanted to run against it. Trusted users could get SELECT access, but only to the tables they needed to run their custom reports and queries.

It was a whole ass thing that's fallen completely to the wayside as database software went from underpinning Larry's latest mega-yacht, to free as in beer, and we learned how to clone and shard the data instead.

The biggest source of communication issues around these unit systems is that in metric, you're supposed to reach for decimals when working with the units, and in imperial, you're supposed to reach for fractions when working with the units.

Which is why the imperial lovers all cry out about their fractions not "working" in metric. Yes, exactly, that is the point. They don't understand that they're reaching for a tool they shouldn't be reaching for, and then they blame the unit system for it.

> Teaspoons, tablespoons, ounces, cups, quarts and gallons are all inter-related multiples, and once you internalize it, you can convert like a boss.

"It's super easy if you're familiar with it!"

Yes, that is exactly the problem that you are unable to see.

If Fahrenheit is better than Celsius because the units are smaller, doesn't that mean that the kilometre is better than the mile because it has smaller units?

It is all subjective. You like what you grew up with because it is familiar, not because it is better. You know by rote memorisation how much 100 feet is and what 75F feels like, the same way I know by rote memorisation how much 50 meters is and what 25C feels like.

> because you can divide things usefully.

Again, this is just familiarity. You think it's super neat that you can divide a cup of whatever by 2 or 3 or 4, but if I tell you to divide it by 5, you're gonna deflect and ask me "who does that?!?"

Imperial works neatly for a small domain of problems, and is useless outside that domain.

Metric is less neat in that small domain, but works equally well everywhere.

Except now you can't divide accurately by 5. Or 10.

You're making an argument from familiarity. Yes, a 12-base system using fractions works very neatly in a small human-sized domain, but it disintegrates into complete uselessness outside that domain. That's why you get ridiculousness as things being 13/64th of an inch, or that there's 63360 inches in a mile. It's unworkable for very large distances and very small distances. With a metre and standard prefixes, you don't need any conversion factors, and you can represent any distance at any scale with a single unit.

Quick, what's 11/64" + 3/8"?

Quick, which weight is bigger: 0.6lbs or 10oz?

The post-WWII order was deliberately designed by clever American politicians who realised they could leverage the untouched industrial base and built-up military capability to become a world superpower, in an alliance with Western Europe. All of these policies were and are 100% America First, because the US has always been the primary benefactor of it all, but they've been marketed as some kind of benevolent altruistic goodwill-project that "leader of the free world" simply "has to do" because it's "the right thing".

Bullshit. It's naked greed all the way down. Exceptional? Exceptionally greedy more like it.

If you've ever waded into ragebaity online discussions, for example Europeans taunting Americans about the lack of public healthcare or basic worker rights, there will always be a loud contingent of Americans spouting counter-arguments based in American Exceptionalism, claiming that everyone else somehow, magically, has the US to thank for its standard of living.

It was always easy to dismiss those as uninformed morons, but Signalgate showed that at least Vance and Hegseth truly believes it, and who knows how many more of their ilk.

Up until 2016, the US was predominantly governed by people who understood the post-WWII world order, who understood the immense benefit of Pax Americana to the US itself. People who understood soft power and diplomacy, people who understood that although the upfront costs of maintaining the military hegemony, of playing world police, the benefits far outweighed the costs. People who understood mutually beneficial trade agreements, and that a trade deficit is a small price to pay to maintain the USD as the world's reserve currency.

But now, it's the spoiled grandchildren who are in power, who have been brought up suffused with the exceptionalism such that they take America's position for granted in eternity. And they look at the cost of all of these things, how much it directly benefits other countries, and react with stupid short-sighted greed, thinking that getting rid of the "free-loaders" will make them richer.

I remember the TPP trade deal. It took eight years to negotiate and the US strong-armed everyone else into accepting its provisions on IP, which would have allowed the US to maintain its position at the top of the value chain, countering the ascendancy of China.

All gone, in the trash, because the people who are once again in power fundamentally do not understand how it would have strengthened the US. So now we're back to some kind of mercantilistic trade-war, that the US will lose.

> With fewer students applying, there will be more room there for Americans.

The US has benefitted enormously from being able to brain-drain other countries for their best and brightest. As a country, you are much better off offering the limited amount of spots in higher education to smart and driven students from abroad, than to average Americans.

> suppressors are likely to become legalized here in the coming months.

The fallout of reversing the brain-drain is going to take decades to have an impact, but you don't care, because you're getting your toy now now now.

The thing that's "wrong" is that we're very good at detecting it, but comparatively very bad at curing it.

If there was a simple cure for it once detected, we could screen and test everyone all the time.

No, you don't recover. Many men will get prostate cancer when they're old, but they'll most likely die from something else before that one becomes an issue.

But if we do scan and test and screen, a lot of men will find out they have it, become anxious about it and will want to do something about it, which leads to a lot of unnecessary treatments that decreases people's quality of life and wouldn't extend their lifespan anyway.

My understanding is that it's net negative to test too much.

A lot of men die with prostate cancer, because only very few die from it. And if you belong to the former group, knowing about it or doing any kind of intervention means a massive loss in quality of life. So the best course of action overall is to close our eyes and stop looking. And hope you don't belong to the latter group.

> They get lazy if you don't explicitly ask for well-written code (or put that in the system prompt).

This is insane on so many levels.

> > historically we have exactly zero expectation of privacy in public spaces in the UK.

> True, but we also had zero expectation of permanent records being kept of so much of what we do in public spaces, or being under such constant surveillance in public spaces. I think that is a concern.

I've been watching a bunch of "auditor" videos from the UK. These guys are basically trolling by going around with a camera in public, filming stuff, and fishing for reactions that they can then post on Youtube or TikTok or Reels or whatever for views and engagement.

One thing that's very consistent across these videos is how many of their victims truly believe that you need permission to film people in public, or that they can walk up to the guy with the camera and demand to know who he is or that he deletes the footage. So a lot of people are acting as if they had much stronger rights to privacy than they really do, people think they're generally safe from being constantly surveilled, when the opposite is in fact true.

Another thing that's also hilariously consistent is when these auditors film businesses, and representatives of those businesses, usually the store manager, goes out and tells them they can't film the customers going in and out of the store because that's "against company policy" or "because of respect for our customers' privacy". At the same time, those stores have tons of security camera inside the store, recording every little thing every single customer is doing all the time.

The hypocrisy is blatant. Everybody wants to monitor everyone else, but no-one wants to be monitored by anyone.

*sigh*

"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do laundry and dishes."

This thing is whimsy and fun, it's not a chore to be automated away.

DST is completely silly as far north as the Nordics. The rate of change in daylight is so rapid around the equinoxes, that the effects of DST are erased in less than two weeks. It's completely useless.

The first time I visited the tropics, I never realised how much I associated the dark with it being cold!

We went for dinner in the afternoon, sun was up, it was blazing hot, everything normal so far. We had dinner while the sun set in a nice air-conditioned restaurant, so it was dark when it was time to leave, and I walked out into the tropical night and was so confused why it was still warm and moist outside!

I was at a wedding in Sweden near midsummer with a lot of international guests. They were quite surprised to get out of the reception dinner at 10pm and see that the sun was still up. We were below the arctic circle, so no midnight sun, but it doesn't really get dark during the night, you get an hour or two of twilight, and then the sun rises at 2am again.

Well, tons of scammers have made tons of money, so technically, yes?

For the average person not so much.

> you can expect conflict.

Ok, so who started the war?

> Nobody gave the slightest fuck about Russia.

It really is tiring listening to the Russian apologetics coming from other posters in this thread.

"Russia felt threatened"

No. Nobody wants to invade Russia.

The deal since the end of the cold war has been this: Russia can do whatever the hell it likes inside its own borders. Its oligarchs with Putin at the front can rob and pillage the country to their hearts content. Putin can use his loyal FSB to suppress the opposition, rig elections, and dominate the domestic media and brainwash his population to believe whatever he want them to believe. The rest of the world will do no more about this than hand out tiny wrist slaps, while holding their noses and trading with Russia. They kept their seat in the UN security council. They were invited into G7. They were treated as an equal to larger, richer, liberal, democracies.

The only reason there is war in Ukraine is because this incredibly generous deal was not enough for Putin and his ilk, they wanted more. More influence, more power, more vassals. They want to restore the mythical glory of the Russian empire, or the Soviet empire, or both. They want all the territories that Russia has ever held dominion over. Getting control over Ukraine would have given that dream a big territory, population, and economical boost.

> Facts are usually universal and rarely disputed.

The parent poster claimed that Zelensky started the war.

How do you even begin having a conversation with someone who disputes the main fact on how this war started: Vladimir Putin, the dictator of Russia, invaded the neighbouring sovereign nation of Ukraine.

Russia started the war by invading Ukraine. Russia can end the war any time they want by simply moving all of their troops out of Ukraine and back behind their border.

Any concession to Russia means we are saying that it's ok for nuclear-armed states to invade their neighbours at will, and to expand their territory at will, because "oh no, ww3!".

That is unacceptable. That is unjust. There is exactly one guilty party in this conflict, and it is not Ukraine. We do not appease dictators who invade their neighbours.

> First, that Donald is not the master negotiator / business genius he claims

We're talking about someone who appears to believe a trade deficit means you're somehow being screwed or getting the short end of a deal. That's mercantilistic nonsense. It's economical thinking on par with a child who believes Scrooge McDuck is a good capitalist.

> Zelensky isn't just a dumb clown, he got tricked into starting a war

How do you have a political discussion with someone whose reality is completely upside-down to your own? With someone whose grasp of reality is also factually wrong?

Nobody wants to invade Russia. The only reason Russia and Putin are opposed to NATO expansion is because it stops them from being able to bully their neighbours. Calling that "putting pressure on Russia" is crazy.

The EU contributes and has contributed quite a lot more than the US has to Ukraine.

In addition, most US contributions are done in the form of donating surplus/outdated military equipment that was manufactured by the US defence industry decades ago, at a fictional list price.

And yet, way too many Americans seem to think that each billion-dollar contribution the US has done to Ukraine consisted of someone taking that money out of the US treasury now and giving it to Zelensky as a sack of cash or something.

No, the money left the US treasury many years ago, and went to US defence industry. The aid bills also typically contain an agreement for future spending on US defence industry to replace the donated equipment. In each case, the tax money went to US companies in the MIC, and it is quite something to see how so many people on the right wing now thinks this is a bad thing.

> So why would "fraud and waste" skyrocket under him?

TSLA doubled in value in the month after the election, despite the financials of the company going down. The only reason for the increase in share price is because the market expects Musk to benefit from Trump's corruption, in the form of less oversight and more government subsidies.