qeng-ho

After their acquisition by DigitalOcean in 2022, the biggest question anyone probably had was whether they would continue supporting now-competitors on the platform. We now have the answer. Expected, but disappointing.

Why do people go for pottery classes, watch tv, ride bicycles, run, read books, or otherwise do anything other than work? I don't mean to be antagonistic but I find your question to be flawed in the first place; why do we have to always "generate value"?

Also, what is "the real world"? At this point, considering how massively popular Minecraft is, Minecraft __is__ an extension of the real world at this point. It's very unlikely that we will ever lose Minecraft to history. Commit the worldsave to a repo and that world is as good as the real world.

Sell both properties and realise (perhaps pre-maturely) the capital gains?

As someone who is subbed to TAT, your newsletter has provided me with quite a few interesting reads, especially when some of the articles are years old, yet still relevant. Keep up the good work!

I'm from Singapore, and would fight you on your claim that Starbucks killed the local coffee culture. We have our own coffee culture, historically in the hawker centres, and it's most definitely still striving. Beyond that, there are tons of third wave coffee cafes that arrived in the past decade, mainly because of Australian influence. They're just not located at the shopping malls due to rental, where Starbucks and its ilk dominate.

Sadly, the stranglehold UCI has on organised cycling around the globe is not going to go away anytime soon, pandemic or not. The rise of "gravel" riding and races is proof that we can have more fun when the UCI isn't involved.

I'm curious; are you studying Cantonese or Taishanese or some other variant? Asking simply because Cantonese is pretty mutually intelligible with Mandarin; I'm a native Mandarin and Cantonese speaker and barring some vocabulary (and pronunciation which is often just slightly "off-sounding" Mandarin), they're almost identical.

As someone who's monitoring the situation over in Germany because I have family there, Germany is definitely not doing "something right". There is a lack of direction in handling the situation, as well as information for the citizens.

People are calling 116117 but getting hang up on, and the weaker central government (due to obvious historical reasons) means that the response differs state to state. Much like in the US.

I agree, especially with the uneasy feeling that it wouldn't last much longer; the challenge of the first 50 years of Singapore was economical, and the heavy-handedness of the government was a result of that. The challenge of the next 50, in contrast, is cultural and about her people, and I don't think the government as it is, is capable of shifting gears.

To quote what I replied to another user:

If you disagree, try telling the police that they have no right to infringe on your personal freedom when they stop you for drink-driving. Or theft. Or even jay-walking. To be in a society, any kind of society, involves giving up personal freedoms in exchange for something, usually safety or stability. We just have a different idea of what's an acceptable loss of personal freedom.

I cannot answer for most of the population, but I can hazard a guess — they do not care to think that far. We have our bread and ciruses, and that makes us complacent that our government will at least maintain benevolence.

It is deliberately reductive because I was hoping not to get into a debate about personal freedoms.

If you disagree, try telling the police that they have no right to infringe on your personal freedom when they stop you for drink-driving. Or theft. Or even jay-walking. To be in a society, any kind of society, involves giving up personal freedoms in exchange for something, usually safety or stability. We just have a different idea of what's an acceptable loss of personal freedom.

I agree that it'd be favourable to design the system about personal freedom, but that system comes with its own inefficiencies and disadvantages that by large my country deem unacceptable. Unfortunately, Singapore is still largely a pragmatic and conservative society that min-maxes for economic stability, and it'd be long before this changes.

I'm Singaporean, and completely not surprised to see this appear on HN.

As with many places, the situation in my country is a bit more nuanced than a simple "the ruling party has ruled the country since 1965". Civilisation is the surrender of varying degrees of civil liberty for security and safety, and over here we definitely surrender more degrees of civil liberty for the safety and security of our streets. As another user put it, essentially a benevolent dictatorship, emphasis on the benevolent. For the most part, the ruling party has done a good job with the administration of the government. Things are fast and efficient. Is it worth the trade? It depends on your perspective. Even as a liberal, I agree that the paternalism of the government is not without its merits.

There were quite a lot of push-back on the POFMA (what the fake news law is called) among the people, though our politicians, no doubt because of their same-party membership, barely discussed anything concrete in our parliamentary debates. In the end, the law was passed because of course it would be.

Switch to using numbers for the quick links and you can type the text of the link to narrow down the search for the quick link.