I read the title of this and as I could not wrap my head around the idea of "Rubio" here actually meaning Marco Rubio, I assumed this was a font name, but also laughing to myself just how hilariously absurd it would be for the Secretary of State to involved in picking fonts...only to click the link and discover that yes, it is exactly that absurd.
I think this varies quite a lot from one location to another. I grew up in an impoverished town in the US south. When I was a kid if your car broke down, a stranger would stop to at least give you a ride or possibly even try to repair it on the spot. If you so much as threatened a woman in public you could expect to have a number of men immediately step in to confront you.
Many year later in life I lived in Manhattan, where you could literally have a frail old lady being beat up in front of a crowd of grown men and everyone would either pretend they didn't see anything or at most pull out their phones to record it.
I don't know what my old town is like today, but a few years ago I was on a bus in Latin America far from any large cities and a pickpocket robbed someone, the passengers on the bus seized the guy, beat him up, striped him naked, and the bus driver slowed down and opened the door while they shoved him out onto the curb.
Every junior I've brought in over the past 7 years or so with the expectation of training them has immediately left after I've invested not only money but also significant amounts of more experienced developers time to bring them up to speed before I managed to recoup anything useful for that investment. I can already hear people say pay more, but that isn't up to me and besides that if we're going that route why not just hire the experienced person in the first place?
Of course increasingly it's hard even to train at all, I'm getting absolute garbage AI slop from our most junior developers and they don't seem to be learning any more. I sit and try to explain why their solution to some task won't work and they are not engaged with the actual solution they are implementing at all. I've tried to get them to engage more with the AI as a learning and exploration tool, but I'm not having much luck, they're completely focused on inputing the task, really at the mercy of the direction of the tools.
I really hope AI comes through for us in the end because it seems we're at the end-game for human learning.
People in the US believe that if inflation eases, for example from 4% to 3%, that means that prices are going to go back down to what they used to be before inflation started rising. They furthermore believe that if that does not happen it is proof that the media is lying.
Weird that you say that because these life support systems are exactly what I had in mind as evidence to the contrary. Without such an external life support system attached keeping you alive, there's not going to be some drug that holds your body together in a zombified form. Whatever treatment sustains the health of your heart muscle will surely be equally helpful to all the other muscles in your body, as would whatever keeps your circulatory system and all the other tissues in all your other vital organs in working order. The alternative would be to encase the body in ever increasing layers of machinery, which is definitely not what anyone talking about life extension means.
Exactly. It is far more fantastical to imagine such lifespan improvements resulting in a planet of crypt keepers than one of external youth. What magic do you expect would keep such people alive?
When a project is abandoned, when updates are slow, when features people want are not being released, when tracking upstream dependency updates are delayed, sure, you are not entitled to anything and I’ll be the first one to say get off your butt and contribute. In the other hand when you engage with the community for years under an OSS/free context then once the community has invested in your project, learning it, creating learning resources for it, integrating it into their own projects, and you never communicated your intention to “wait until it gets big then then pull the rug” it feels like a disingenuous bait and switch. The reason it feels that way is because it is a disingenuous bait and switch. This is even more so the case when you built your project on top of other projects.
I have no problem using a paid product or service or paying for support on a OSS product, but will never pay one of these bait and switch scams a dime, no matter how much engineering effort it takes.
Covid messed with the math a bit, but it’s amazing how precisely it was designed to run out of money. My entire life since I was a kid people were talking about how it was going to run out of money but none of them did anything. Now that the boomers are retiring, now they will talk about removing the cap, raising rates, lower benefits for future recipients, but they have made damn sure that their own benefits are guaranteed and that they never had to sacrifice anything to pay for them. I remember when Al Gore talked about setting the surplus aside to fund future benefits in 2000 and everyone laughed at him. SNL made fun of him. Instead they voted to cut themselves a check and added more benefits for themselves for their children to pay for.
My experience so far is it's gotten much better at tricking me into believing its hallucinations. I fed it some old code and asked for feedback and it gave me a long, very technical, super convincing explanation of how my approach was misaligned with the intended use of the API I was using which at first was very persuasive. It took me about an hour of investigation to realize that will there was a tiny bit of truth to what it was saying (and I did end up making a small change as a result) it was mostly just full of it, and the feedback was essentially useless gibberish.
We used to have to physically fly out a technician to each of our customers office to install software updates and fixes. Those bugs were very expensive to patch!
I have employed a massive hack for the past two decades--whenever asked to do any random task or assist someone, and in particular where the asker is just lazy trying to get someone else to do their job, eagerly and pleasantly agree, but ask the requestor to write up a sentence or two describing said request and email it to you. It's such a small request that no one can't argue it, but so many people (lazy ones especially) are astonishingly bad at this and 90% of the time that request will never come. The next time you see the person, take the initiative and remind them about the email you never received and ask if they could send it. You've now turned the tables on the asker, they may even start to avoid you.
I visited the Biltmore Estate years ago, the home of the Vanderbilt family. It occurred to me during the tour that all the end result of all this wealth was approximately equivalent to having a 5 bedroom McMansion. A huge percentage of the sprawling property was dedicated to housing servants who performed tasks like laundry, changing the water in the (pre-chlorine) pool, taking care of the horses and carriages of visitors, or preparing meals that today are mostly completely automated or unnecessary. The end result was housing the owners and a few guests in conditions substantially worse than the average modern suburban home.
I went to a protest. I was anxious about being photographed and added to some biometric database to be used for who knows what purposes. My wife and I had a serious discussion about whether to go, the possible risks, the possibility of violence, but I ultimately convinced her to go as our civic responsibility. I left our phones at home as a precaution so as to avoid being geolocated to the site.
What I found upon arriving was an unserious mob of hippies laughing and taking selfies to post on social media. I'd made signs supporting the rule of law. The signs of the other participants were an unfocused smattering of various political goals from "tax the rich" to banning Teslas. They included what I thought was an excessive about of profanity and crude insults. I think these are unserious people and what they're doing is performative and utterly pointless.
I do not see any viable action for individual citizens to take. Everyone out there clamoring for people to do something is just pushing their own political agenda. We had an election, one side won, that's how things go, ok. What's happened since however is a clear violation of the US Constitution in more ways than one can count, but it seems there is basically no one aware of or concerned about this. I feel like I'm at a football game where one side just took out a gun and shot the referee and while he lies on the floor bleeding to death both sides are still arguing over whether there was a foul or not.
This comes across as more than a little bit fanciful, nevertheless I agree with the sentiment. There's an awful lot of people on the sidelines with their eyes on gaining control over software with intentions that are not at all reflected by what they state publicly. We do not need some political body to come "help", they have no understanding of what makes this work in the first place and nothing of value to contribute.
I think that while the trait itself is fairly common the ability to bully and pressure everyone around you to give in to this level of petty and demeaning deference is quite rare. You only see it in powerful people because they're the only ones who can actually make people do this.
I have an aunt like this and she's super annoying and largely ostracized and in constant conflict with people around her, but if she had $175 billion she could probably surround herself with people who would indulge her.
If we put half the effort into shoring up our institutions and reinforcing our shared norms and cooperative values as we are into "de-risking" everything, right now, and all at once, we'd all be in a much better place. Overnight we all just accepted that this new transactional, mercantile, hostile mentality was the way of things and the only way it can be. This is a self-fulfilling fatalistic prophecy and is going to move us backwards into a much worse, less prosperous world, empowering the bullies and the tyrants even more.
Greed got us here. There's a rules based world possible where Russia sells gas to Germany. Russia did not transform from an free and democratic society with respect for human rights and the international community into an authoritarian dictatorship overnight; we turned a blind eye to this when it suited our short term economic needs and that is how we allow ourselves to sleepwalk into the situation we are now. Had we held first to our principles we'd have either had the impact the neoliberal trade focused policies were supposed to eventually deliver or at the very least not ended up with dependencies that gave such governments leverage and eventually blow up in our faces. Had we instead put human rights first and foremost we would not have created and empowered these monsters.
Same thing with Trump's reelection in the US. By all rights in a functioning democracy Trump should be sitting in jail right now along with the January 6th insurrectionists. The Biden administration had 4 years to prosecute, but felt it was not politically expedient to do so. Likewise what is left of the GOP within the republican caucus right now faces a similar choice between short term benefits and upholding the principles which nearly everyone in congress and even the Trump administration has previously claimed they would uphold.
-> Treasuries are considered safe during such crisis.
Is that truly still the case? Does the world consider the US stable right now?
I am astonished at how effectively the administration has blown up every pillar upholding the US economy, short, medium, and long term. The damage done here is incalculable. In all of human history never has so much wealth been destroyed so quickly.
True, but I think this misses the deeper dynamic nature of such things. Trump is the symptom, but these voters were also reacting in their turn. It is highly unlikely that this exact sequence of triggers will immediately repeat themselves.
I’ve been thinking that the emergence of drone warfare may have a similar impact as the start of the Iron Age, when suddenly instead of needing complex networks of trade to acquire tin and copper to make expensive bronze weapons, cheaper and superior iron weapons became widely available to many groups that previously could not have afforded to arm themselves. There’s a compelling theory that this is what lead to the Bronze Age collapse.
I’ve seen this happen many times during the RFI/RFP process for large projects, the largest players put boots on the ground early and try to get into the ears of the decision makers and their consultants and “helpfully” educate them. On multiple occasions I’ve seen requests actually using a specific vendor’s product name as a generic term without realizing it, when their competitors’ products worked in a completely different way and didn’t have a corresponding component in their offering.