kakacik

Illegal? Probably no, but treason certainly is. But since he is an extremely visible politician and former chancellor, ties should be investigated thoroughly, and they are not even hidden. He is openly pro-russian even 4 years into brutal war which russia repeatedly declared on all western Europe, including Germany (as in 'we will raise your cities in nuclear holocaust' to quote them).

Nobody actually pro-democratic or sane is getting such generous 'donations', these don't come for free, in russia this is not private matter but fully state controlled and orchestrated.

If you can't connect 2 and 2 form above and publicly available info and see no problem there, I guess its pretty obvious where you stand on topic of russia - vs - western democratic world war currently happening. An attempt to make this 'just another war this is happening everywhere all the time' ain't true if you live in Europe, this is our existential threat and most folks here realize that very well.

Nature itself ain't in no long term stasis, its just us humans projecting our wishful thinking on our environment. Planet is warming since last ice age (ie all glaciers in the Alps are provably receding since 1850 when measurements started, and ie vineyard region where I live was provably under huge glacier some 25k years ago).

Often cited mosquito eradication (at least those transmitting malaria, dengue, yellow fever, zika and so on) would change few things even though most folks would not even notice... and I couldn't welcome it more intensively. These academic discussions in the west would quickly die off when people around you start dying frequently from these (especially small children, but also grandparents or just weaker / more unlucky folks).

Massive droughts this summer still continuing here where I live wreaked way more havoc not only in insect world than any such engineering would do, yet I see no violent mass protests all around the world about banning cars, huge transport ships or commercial & private jet flying for example, or some other big pollutants. Literal frog in boiling water situation.

apple and unlocked devices, is this some new level of hardcore sarcasm, or good ol' cluelessness about the actual topic on new profound levels?

Apart from whole post feeling like a PR, but thats not that uncommon here

Why is anybody surprised with meta ? Seriously, you guys ignore all the news about that company and privacy for last 2 decades? Privacy for them is an obstacle to engineer around and nothing more, and this is baked to the core of their philosophy, not some rogue fringe team pursuing results at all costs for past 3 months.

There was a time I had their FB app and messenger on the phone. Then it was found out that their crappy engineering couldn't hide the fact their apps were constantly watching users and other apps on entire phone, causing >15% additional battery drain, even when they were not opened.

I've removed all of them, never needed them on phone (or at all) and can't complain at all. Don't expect privacy form meta, any, ever.

Looking at timespan, 1998-2005. Of course under Gerhard Schröder, who is by all accounts a traitor to his own country, openly conspiring with enemy power (russia).

Schröder is getting elected in various russian companies as member of boards still to this day (read last one like 2-3 days ago). Question is, why is this tolerated and there is no international warrant for his arrest. If French can arrest their former PM (heck, italians tried the same), Germans should also accept their missteps and do the necessary correction of their course.

I could go on in very similar vein with merkel, but she clearly still has a small army of uncritical followers who are completely oblivious to all the damage she has done to entire EU even here.

Even current apple is not the apple that gained the big initial momentum that got it where it is. No revolutionary products or services for decade+, just milking user base and heavily investing into marketing around supposed privacy. You can take ie their phone and compare it with 5 year old model and struggle to find differences (which is valid for most but not all manufacturers at this point).

Market is simply too mature and saturated and moving phones into foldable phablets/tablets is an evolution at best. Also it started and was perfected elsewhere so nothing novel or shocking and 0 WOW factor.

Socialism is not left wing extremism even from already-right default view in US. Its of course up to definition what that word actually means, but one could roughly say ie current France and Spain are socialist countries.

It normally means strong social & welfare state, massive workers protections and so on. Nordics could be also labeled as such. Economy is not that performant and often utterly lost when some bigger changes happen on markets, with corresponding economical under-performance.

For extremism, look at proper communists or neo-marxists (aka forced mass takeovers of private businesses and any non-small private properties/ownerships by state, bloody revolution & rule by proletariat aka new elites). There is not much economic performance to speak of.

Very confident statements when know practically nothing substantial in this topic

Hopefully not musk's grok

> If my wages are 90k in Germany, they do their calculations as if I earned ~105k just so they can immediately subtract the entire 15k again and call it a burden (for expenses my employer pays on my behalf).

Aren't you talking about social contributions that your employer is forced by law to pay on your behalf? You realize that if this was not in place, those money would go directly to you since your salary is whole sum your employer is paying towards your employment? Doesn't seem you grok it fully from your words.

I am not claiming if its good or bad (dramatic global financial changes will test viability of all these systems rather well in upcoming years, I'd expect many people will be unhappy when their naive views hit reality of numbers). I am outside of such system, in mostly private social system in Switzerland (aka I save for myself, mostly) and wouldn't want it any other way.

I'd say paranoid-by-default folks are a huge red flag on any agenda. Something about disservice to the cause and all that.

Anyway since they kill north of half a million folks yearly and infect couple of hundred millions as official minimums, I am more than happy with some other species of small insects take their empty spot. Of course not everybody cares much about poor folks dying quietly half around the world, but some do. One of very few benefits of global warming is the migration of these bastards more north so rich folks in US and Europe will have more personal stake in this topic rather than usual 'oh that's so horrible, next'.

Some minor re-adjustement of ecosystem is more than fine, anyway we do it constantly for rather pathetic reasons if any. I would add ticks, all forms, to the effort.

Do you pay VAT on almost anything? It affects how much your actual disposable income is and thus literally how much you can purchase.

Nobody said its going to be trivial to calculate, reality doesn't care about that.

photos

... and life moved a bit further in those months. Experiences that could be had, meeting people that could have happened.

If its really relaxing to you, I rest my case. It wouldn't be to me, in same way no computer game or general computer activity ever could. Physical movement, ideally in the nature, the wilder the better. If you live too far reconsider permanently improving QoL by moving closer. Recharges batteries like nothing else.

There is still tomorrow to be more active, right, to catch up. But not with the same mindset that wasted today or yesterday.

Well from what I've heard folks in US frequently revert credit card transactions, something almost impossible to do with same companies in Europe for example (tried it once, got automated feedback email in 2 weeks and nothing happened).

Just life frequent insurance accidents, this raises overall costs. May be some other forces too of course

Sure if you work in anthropic / openai or several connected / similar places future is exciting. And that's about it for the list, over-represented on HN but not really out there in real world.

Literally everybody else, all white collars including, feels they could be replaced in 5-10 years. Just talk to people ffs, its not that hard. Literally everybody is worried, doctors (know plenty from all parts of medical care), lawyers, bankers, tons of various bureaucrats, ALL are afraid in one way or another. Its also sort of helpless worry you have 0 control of, not very nice place to be 24/7 in the back of one's mind. Double that for parents with non-teen kids.

I use nature to relax and recharge and it works wonders. But reality is as it is and I have 2 small kids, I don't expect to hold the job I have in next 5 years, maybe due to llms maybe not. But I will have big issues finding another job on over-saturated market at that point, thats completely on llms. Thus as any sane person, hating the tool destroying my/our future while using it from time to time (in minimal fashion, code churning is really not a bottleneck in any decently large company and certainly not mine but I can imagine code sweatshops doing various cruds and eshops all day can be much faster now).

Evolution doesn't care at all, its just environment pressures and whatever organisms do within it. It can very well lead to some dead ends and sub-optimal long term choices.

There will come time when we will grok all this 100% and then can setup whatever we want (its just a bunch of molecules acting predictably), but we are very far from there and there is no point discussing this even for our grandchildren. We will have cyberpunk implants way sooner.

> Most characters are Chinese, but even those who are not continue to mostly think and act in this similarly alien style.

No, most good characters in those books are chinese. I liked technical aspects of the book a lot, but on societal level there was quite a bit xenophobia up to including racism against white people.

Still interesting, maybe something akin to picking up some pulp novel from 1920s that had other races in stereotypical cartoon evil roles. Not something pleasant to read in 21st century for anybody with more modern values (where average typical Chinese stand on this I leave to them here, no idea).

I 'oppose' Ai for exactly the reasons parent mentions, seems like most common folks over long term will lose much more than they could ever gain from it. Societal loss by definition, on massive scale.

Don't reduce opposition to something you like to some primitive irrational luddites, thats cheap and doesn't represent reality.

Man you sure like russian propaganda from A to Z, the logic is simply not there as russia doesn't operate on logic but oligarchic mafia power pyramids with their own selfish goals.

Most of things you write are bullshit to be polite, lies and more lies directly from petrohrad's GRU troll farms. Its aimed for folks with below-average IQ and it works surprisingly well (given it uses psychology us-vs-them to split given population into similar silos for further processing and attack on negative emotions which is not rocket science).

Just an example of your bullshit - if Germany's half of industry is directly depending on that gas, there is no way they can turn it off just like that. It took them significant amount of time to find other sources and increased their final prices, and part of current industry decline making them less competitive. So much for who owns that leash, but those are facts, so just secondary topic for such folks.

You know, lies can be put out eloquently so they work at least a bit. Definitely not what you put here.

Petrol prices mean nothing for standards of living or overall desirability of given country. If that would be true, then I have 2 random samples which have supposedly way higher standard than US - Venezuela and russia.

US folks have more money on average, but are forced to spend them in ways ie europeans don't have to - top notch education and healthcare costs are huge in US for large part of population and compose big part of expected savings of parents and older folks, while an afterthought in Europe. How do you compare that.

Plus places in Europe like Switzerland have long term way higher living standards by any measure than even good places in US. Europe is big and diverse in ways US simply never was, it would do you good to travel the world a bit and see and experience it with your own eyes.

They are massively increasing their medium sized drone capacities (ie Geran) while improving on those drones too. Faster, harder to detect and shoot down, no GPS/Glonass navigation necessary so jamming won't do much.

A country that is rained on by 500 drones daily delivering 125KG explosives (so like a proper standard bomb dropped from airplanes) can overwhelm local military defense capacities quickly, leave infrastructure in crumbles (as in no water, electricity, gas, heating, gas stations working and so on) and at least in dictator's mind local population may crumble in weeks. You don't need to put a single foot in the country to reduce critical infra to rubble.

I can't imagine Polish folks would ever bow to russians after horrible things they repeatedly done to them, but ie in Slovakia it would be a very quick victory even if country wouldn't be ruled by ultra corrupt folks who would just give whole country to russians for some more corruption promises for later.

If puttin' will try anything in eastern Europe now is the best time. But I would expect more something along Moldova or baltics, Poland is far from russia and any extra force concentration in Kaliningrad would be easy to see.

I don't think its realistic to expect things will revert, ever. This is new era that will continue, things could improve a bit in best case scenario but damage is permanent and hard lessons are being learned. What good is a peer that has roughly the same values and approach to freedom/democracy/capitalism if it keeps stabbing you in the back randomly on morning whims or plain old corruption.

US shot itself in both feet with sawed-off 2 barrel shotgun, in times when it needs allies the most. I keep saying it and only half joking - trump is a China asset way more than russian 'krasnov' agent, at this point its way too much self-damage to be accidental.

People decided this is acceptable. Not you, certainly nor me, but societies and mankind overall, with their spending and behavior and/or lack thereof.

CEO of UnitedHealthcare was shot dead by person who deemed company's behavior is unacceptable. Horrible case, I am in no way defending it, but I believe everybody understands the motivation behind. If system cannot protect its citizens from predators then some folks tend to protect or avenge themselves or closed ones.

This was by far the most extreme case I've heard in long time. If similar things, maybe less drastic but very personal would be happening to many of those sociopathic greedy folks at helm responsible for vast damages, they would take note. But yeah if nothing really happens, once you have no morals and eternal greed who is there to stop you.

Thats why OPEC exists, no? To manipulate markets for biggest possible profit for oil owners. They are not even hiding it in any way. While everybody else is on the paying side.

I do frequent evening walks once kids are sleeping in vineyards nearby. Glow of stars, and from nearby villages (2-3km far away) is enough to see path clearly even on moonless nights and path is light gray concrete 3-4m wide, never any potholes or unexpected obstacles. Clears my mind like nothing else.

Milky way is not extremely clear there, but visible and its sort of mentally healing experience. When camping up in the mountains, this is way clearer. Clearest I've seen it was high on Aconcagua in South America, around 5500m high, with constellations unfamiliar to an european. That was almost over the top in terms of clarity and the amount of stars visible (including very clear Magellan cloud). Remote himalayan valleys are also good for this, as long as humidity is low (its either glow from other light sources or high humidity which makes stars less visible, in cities pollution adds to this).

Can't not love astronomy after such encounters. Its our home, this crazy universe, everybody should look up from daily crap and experience such awe from time to time, I've never met a person who doesn't enjoy this.

Weed massively increases creativity in everybody I asked, sure as hell does for me. Its not very controllable, ideas comes semi-randomly and works with topic processed previously, but damn so many results are actually good and stand test of time (I mean decades, like apartment interior design).

Alcohol? Social lubricant for sure, but creativity is contained only in the mind of a drunken fool who thinks better of his ideas than he should. That I never experienced, nor have witnessed and I certainly didn't avoid such situations.

Don't touch the code for 10 years and even the brightest will experience serious dip in skill. Most probably much earlier, our minds are lazy by default since creative thinking is energetically draining. Then try to debug some harder problem llm created in its own code. Look at what its doing to students.

Its like saying you can keep fluent level of French as a foreign language to you by just reading it. Nope you won't - do it for 2 years solidly and you will have problems forming basic sentences correctly if you don't use language actively, forming foreign language constructs in your mind.

Those few of us who are largely apart from current llm craze (due to my mega corporation and its obscure rules and procedures) are not missing much I see. I still happily code changes by hand and at most consult basic available llms via prompt, its beautiful process to create fix to a problem which seems cryptic at the beginning, and knowing it all came just from my mind. By far the best part of my corporate job, will keep hanging to it for as long as possible.

Maybe 80% of Monaco residents are millionaires / billionaires from other countries, be it Europe or rest of the world, mostly for tax evasion purposes. This includes many many professional sport persons who launder their sponsor income thus helping then getting millionaires surprisingly quickly, while public funds in their countries where they actually live and represent ie on olympics crumble.

#1 reason why I shy away from all professional sports with serious money involved, it just turns into typical ugly business with skewed incentives, while actual sport ends up being just a necessary afterthought.

Better apartments there cost often 10-20 million euros, there are special controls in laws (ie employment) ensuring better treatment of those few Monaco citizens that are there. Most tax avoiding folks like those sportsmen rent just po box to get some sort of special residence. Most people you can actually meet there live in France and commute daily.

That place is a special bubble even within bubbles, nothing that applies there should be expected to apply elsewhere, apart from similar places (of which I am not that aware of maybe apart from San Marino, ie Singapore is more like a real tiny country with actual serious business in trading and transportation).

No big red buttons please, think about those sweet sweet dollars coming. Who cares about the rest, the world, the mankind? Sweet, sweet dollars, for me and me only, fuck the rest, very american, true patriot I swear.

Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with these people, once some money enters the equation folks throw away any morals like yesterday underwear.

Ah I know, if not us others will do it, I am basically defenseless here. Beyond pathetic