wewxjfq

The only thing worth discussing here is how a domain with like 10 snapshots on archive.org - half of them nginx errors - has this submission trending on Reddit and HN.

I think Russia did, successfully for quite some time, attempt to direct anger towards the countries supporting Ukraine. Russia would drop a bomb on Ukraine and 90% of the comment section would hate the West for it. The goal was to fuel defeatism and infighting. The latter they encouraged from the start. Reading Reddit, you would have thought Germany had attacked Ukraine from the western flank. In the days and weeks before every major pending Ukraine decision in the US, you could see a noticeable uptick of Russian-friendly talking points. Before the US election, a suspicious amount of Redditors claimed that Trump would give Ukraine more weapons than Biden. These days, they are encouraging the Europe is weak rhetoric. If a toy drone gets spotted somewhere, the only acceptable response is nuking Moscow and EU should disband if they don't dare - that inane take to me is also trolling.

Clean water was a one-time thing and more driven by state action than GDP growth. Fittingly, right now the AI bubble is making access to clean water worse for some, fracking did so too. Nutrition? GDP growth made food harder to access for many people before it got better - city laborers had worse food access than farmers. Still today people are living in food deserts. Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" showed what kind of food unfettered GDP growth actually delivers.

And mere decades ago, life was more or less the same, if not arguably better in many ways.

> Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product - if we judge the United States of America by that - that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.

Robert F. Kennedy, Remarks at the University of Kansas, March 18, 1968

It's wild that every comment section about China these days must paint the picture of these rabid anti-Chinese Westerners who are saying that China is an eternal backwater, yet one never sees actual comments like this, and how all of Western media is pushing anti-China propaganda, when the submitted article is just a neutral bit.

> I still have no idea why westerners assumed "Chinese can't innovate, they can only replicate".

Did they? For how often online comment sections about China need to point this out, I can't remember seeing this claim being made in reality ever. China has been the next big thing for the past 25 years. And if people pointed out that Chinese products were of low quality, well, that was certainly true. Japan and Germany were also at one point known for low quality products.

Is what makes you feel so terrible when you're sick, that's why you don't want to get it involved. Like a car driver would rather not see the seat belt and air bags do their life-saving thing.

Fun fact: Up to the Civil War or WWI, more soldiers died of illness than of battle wounds. So much for the fabled immune system. And if WWI killed more soldiers in battle, the flu still won that round, because the Spanish Flu killed heaps more later. Now we still remember WWI for its bloodiness, but without Covid-19, who would remember the Spanish Flu?

There can't be a blanket consent. You cannot consent to contracts you've never seen. You can't waive your rights away. Browsers could only implement a blanket deny, but that wouldn't stop websites from showing cookie banners, because they want you to click Accept All.

Did JD Vance care about these subtleties in Munich?

There was de facto no investment into nuclear energy across all countries since the early 80s and it's beyond tiring to see online commenters adamantly trying to blame that on a scheming cabal of Green politicians, when Green parties never got beyond 10% of the vote in the elections. Yes, Germany prohibited the ban of new reactors in the earyl 2000s, but the truth is no one wanted to build them anyway and hadn't for a long time. Under the Schröder government, only two or three reactors were shut down and they were the oldest, had a meager output and weren't even profitable anymore. And the only way Russia influenced that was by mishandling Chernobyl. It's laughable to claim a country whose only high-technology export is nuclear technology is pushing others to abandon it.

> They were guessing it contained upwards of 20,000 volumes. By comparison, Ernest Hemingway, considered a voracious book collector, left behind a personal library of 9,000.

Reminds me: I once read a listicle about famous people with large personal libraries. Most were writers and had collections in the lower thousands, a few reached into the tens of thousands. The person with by far the most books was Karl Lagerfeld, who owned 300,000 books.

A sunburn is what you want to avoid and it's easier to get when you stayed indoors the whole year and only go outside when the sun is out full blast. I personally think this modern lifestyle is one of the reasons people get more skin cancer despite being outside less. There are studies that show that chronic sun exposure isn't that bad.

The way I see it: If you live where your ancestors lived for thousands of years and if you make sure your skin gets gradually attuned to the sun each year, you probably get more health benefits. But beware if you're of Northern European ancestry living in Southern USA or Australia or if you work an office job and only seek the summer sun with pale skin.

I have no horse in the AI race or in the US-China rivalry, but at the time the hype felt weird. There was so much gloating that rubbed me the wrong way, and frankly, I notice that in plenty of China-related discussions. I always wonder: Why would Westerners, whom I suspect frequent the sites I visit the most, frolic so much that China is #1? Last time I was befuddled was during the India-Pakistan scramble. The comments were only focusing on how a Chinese jet downed a French jet and I thought to myself: There are two nuclear powers going at it and all they talk about is China? The French, too, later claimed that this was a concerted effort by bots.

They ran a TV channel without broadcasting license. Which country allows this?

Go was a breath of fresh air and pretty usable right from the start. It felt like a neat little language with - finally - a modern standard library. Fifteen years ago, that was a welcome change. I think it's no surprise that Go and Node.js both got started and took off around the same time. People were looking something modern, lightweight, and simple and both projects delivered that.

Good things for the Internet? I stop visiting sites that nag me with their verification friction. They are the only reason I replaced Stack Exchange with LLMs.

It's surreal and dismaying to see such a bogus comment at the top, especially since the BBC video about the North Korean phone is free of judgement, while they (and many other Western news) do report on Western surveillance critically, e.g. they called the Microsoft screenshots a "privacy nightmare" right in the headline...

I don't mind captchas to protect forms and such, but given that so many sites want captchas solved for the first GET request, I really wonder how much more CO2 this is going to produce. And when I see "invisible mode", I'd really like to ask the authors if they think their work is a net-positive for the world.

I think German poetry can be very elegant and English poems feel dull in comparison. At the same time, the plainness of English makes it much better suited for songs. Lyrical German quickly sounds pretentious.

I think they should cast a wider net. Toxicity might discover trolls in the original sense, i.e. individuals seeking a dopamine rush. The trolls I have in mind try to steer the narrative on certain topics with comments that aren't rude or inflammatory per se and, like I said, even seem elaborate on the surface.* But if it's done for spin, it's still toxic nonetheless.

What the researchers say about disengagement also applies to these type of trolls. I mentioned persistence, it's what ultimately makes countering these users futile. Anyone who realizes that tomorrow there will be a new thread with the same narrative eventually disengages.

*) More often I see accounts posting long comments in such a short amount of time that I doubt a human was naturally engaging in an online conversation. I would be ashamed to admit how long it took me to write my two comments in this thread and then I see accounts posting much longer comments back-to-back in under two minutes.

I'm a disagreer and I have to disagree with the authors: disagreeing is not trolling, it's countering trolls. Trolls usually flood the zone with comments that seem elaborate but are ultimately low effort. They know persistence is key, so they don't bother much with replies that counter their claims; rather, they focus on those in agreement to manufacture consent.

It might look sinister if someone drops a reply and leaves, but that alone tells you nothing. In my experience, there is always Brandolini's law at play:

> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

If a reply takes a lot of effort and if you suspect the other side isn't arguing in good faith, one reply already feels like a waste of time and there's no reason to go for round two.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Germany does not receive Russian pipeline gas and has banned Russian LNG from its ports. It receives a tiny share of Russian gas from Dutch and Belgian ports, but to my knowledge Germany has no control over this. France on the other hand is the top destination for Russian LNG in the EU, sharing the lead only with countries that refuse to support Ukraine.

Germany became a net importer of electricity in 2023, but it took the vast majority of its nuclear power plants offline long before that, when Germany still was a net exporter of electricity. Even in 2022, during the gas crisis with barely any nuclear power left, Germany net exported records amounts of electricity to other European countries, with France at the top of the receiving end because half of their nuclear reactor fleet was offline.

Lastly, Germany has one of the most stable grids in the world, while France does issue blackout warnings when demand peaks.

It seems to have a bus factor of 1.

This still stings: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6747373

Rust is no panacea and rewriting a web application in Rust should not lead to any performance gains per se, unless your web application is doing number crunching in the mouse move handler. In most cases, you should be lucky to see no performance hits after a rewrite, because pleasing the borrow checker makes things unnecessarily more complicated.

A valid reason to switch to Rust should be a better developer experience, but it will require lots of upfront effort to realize the benefits. I doubt that it's worth it for small to medium-sized web applications.

Also, React itself is very much lightweight and fast, it's the developers who use it to program slow websites.

Contributed what? Their nuclear exit caused two nuclear power plants to shut down, which were the oldest and smallest in Germany. They had a combined capacity of a just 1 GW - utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

Even when the conservatives pulled the plug on nuclear power plants in 2011, Germany just stopped decreasing emissions of its electricity production for a year or two. And this was at a time of higher gas prices, so it's even up for debate how much the nuclear exit contributed to that short stagnation.

Given that Russia had troubles supplying gas via pipeline (remember the five NS1 pumps that failed and the sixth pump that had to be shut down?) and given that Baltic infrastructure is constantly being damaged, the more expensive LNG should be considered a risk premium. It's harder to attack and can be diverted in times of need, one of the reasons Europe got so unscathed through the gas crisis.

And if pipeline gas is cheaper is also up for debate, because gas is gas to the markets and the long-running supply contracts (which turned out to be worthless because Russia was suffering a conveniently-timed force majeure) had indexed prices.

There's climate reanalysis, which combines historical observations with weather models to get clean data of past weather conditions, which is then used by researchers for various purposes. Most notably is ERA5 by ECMWF.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECMWF_re-analysis

The problem with printer recommendations is that many vocal supporters are running older models that work like charm, so when a good company becomes enshittified, there will be some timelag until consensus shifts. I mean I could still praise Samsung printers despite Samsung having left the printer business years ago.