ajuc

I have a friend who doesn't program. He's making websites with AI and selling them to people.

I'm pretty sure it's more "AI-Pilled" than this.

> Europe is economically uncompetitive

Meh. It's competetive enough. Productivity per hour worked is about the same (sometimes higher) than in US. We just work reasonable hours.

> Those places are not liveable from a European perspective.

If the sacrifices these people make were at least for something that was obviously good - I could maybe understand that. But it's mostly making the world worse (either through financial schemes, addictive social media, marketing, AI, or other pointless bullshit).

Imagine wasting your life slaving away at making better ways to get people addicted to nicotine. That's IT now.

Old-school piloted aviation is good for the first 3 months because you have missile stocks that you can launch from further away with basically 0 risk.

If you have to fight longer than that even US runs out of the expansive stuff and then drones win.

> They still promote genocide of slavic nations by mass migration from africa!

That's enough internet for today.

Stalin forcibly moved millions of Poles and decreased Polish territory by 1/7th, that after hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered by Ukrainians and 2 out of top 5 pre-WW2 Polish cities become Ukrainian/Lithuanian capitals.

Poles behaved very responsibly after 1989. Let's remember Poland got independent in 1989 and Ukraine/Belarus/Lithuania in 1991. There was a window of a year or so in which Poland had already organised state and army and the eastern neighbors - didn't.

It could have gone very wrong (think - Yugoslavia like) if not for the 30 years of internal discussions about the imperialism and future reconcilliation among Polish oppositional elites.

Giedroyć doctrine was pursued by all the governments since 1989, even if the society as a whole wasn't always entirely persuaded.

For one example Poland accepted all the borders around it after WW2 the instant any country appeared (it was usually the first or 2nd country in the world recognizing each of these countries as they appeared). And renounced any territorial disputes. That's despite the fact before the war Vilnius and Lviv were top 5 Polish cities with huge cultural impact, and despite the fact that Poland lost 1/7th of it's territory after WW2 (even including the territory we got on the west as "compensation"). I will admit we got better land in exchange for marches and forests. But millions of people who got forcibly relocated after WW2 could be much more unreasonable about it than they were.

I agree German society is more reasonable about it than Polish society, but when it comes to elites - it was the opposite for a long time. German eastern policy was much more imperial than Polish one at least till 2021. They tended to ignore EE countries issues over appeasing Russia, treating all the problematic stuff as "russophobia" and dealing with Russia over the heads of the smaller countries (Nord Stream 1 and 2 is just one example, there were also the issues of Russia hacking Estonian elections, blocking the gas deliveries against the contract on purpose to blackmail EE countries, etc.) Germany was ignoring these for the longest time.

Also - Germans waited with recognizing Polish post-WW2 borders and only did it when they were forced to - to get unification accepted. It was surprisingly realpolitik. Similarly - to this day Germany does not provide most Slavic minorities with minority rights despite Germans enjoying German city names, street names, education in these languages, etc in German-speaking Polish regions. It's very weird when you compare the treatment of minorities in practice with the sentiments of the population and the stereotypes about the countries.

So I wouldn't single out Germany as the most reasonable politically regarding EE. Their political instincts were till the last few years to deal with Russia and ignore the small countries.

> when Poland attacked the Soviet Union in the 1920s

Eh, it was more complicated than that. Basically a gradual build up from 1918 advancement of Polish forces from west and Soviet from east into the territories abandoned by German armies, then "border incidents" then regular army clashes, and eventually a full blown offensive by Poland and counteroffensive by Soviets.

I guess you can interpret it as Poland invading soviet russia (no soviet union yet btw, and Poland was supporting one of the 3 Ukrainian states that existed at the time).

But yeah Poland wasn't innocent anyway. For example it did the Putin's Crimean trick on Lithuania back in interwar. That was much more clear-cut.

> In any case, Eastern Europe is deeply plagued and poisoned by all of this past violence. No one is able to have a mea culpa moment, no one is able to admit their own guys were bloody murders often killing thousands of people like cattle. No one can admit their ancestors crap.

That's just false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giedroyc_Doctrine

Poland did mea culpa after WW2. The whole thing is based on recognizing that Poland has been imperialist and did bad things and that it's in the end bad for Poland to continue trying to control these territories because it pushes us into conflict against Russia without the support of the other countries.

On the other hand admiting guilt and renouncing imperialism makes us clearly the lesser evil for the countries in between and gives us buffer zone in case Russia turns evil again (which we predicted, and which did happened).

It was the basis for Polish eastern foreign policy for last 37 years and still is (it's another question for how long it stays that way if far-right wins the next elections tho).

I highly recommend anybody interested in Eastern Europe after WW2 to read Giedroyc and Mieroszewski. They were visionaires. They predicted back in 1950s that USSR will fall and that the independent nationstates that will appear will have 2 choices - go back to chaotic ethnic wars or drop the territorial and historical disputes. And they developed the doctrine in 70s and slowly persuaded opposition in communist Poland so when Poland regained independence in 1989 - almost all the elites bought into it. It was a big bet and it worked very well for Poland.

Sadly nowadays half of Polish political scene starts to move away from that, but that's another subject. Mostly just unchecked far-right propaganda.

It's why elephants have thick legs and are barely able to move themselves, not to mention jumping. And spiders and ants have needle-like legs and can lift stuff many times their weight or jump many times their length.

It's also why there's no gigantic walking robots and anything large moves on wheels or tracks.

It's also why so many insects fly and flying drones and RC planes are easy. You can make a pizza box fly if you glue engine with a propeller to it. No engineering required. But big aeroplanes are hard.

Aren't the hanging lines a problem with double-deckers?

In Poland you have the right to return stuff bought by internet for 14 day without providing a reason, no matter how you paid.

And in stationary shops it depends on the shop network - I usually pay with Blik and I had to return stuff in Lidl once and they did it no problem.

On the other hand if you have trolleybuses (like in my city) the double-deckers are a problem and articulated buses aren't.

Sure, same here, but you cannot sell anything without recording it on the cash register anyway because of tax evasion.

So there's no electricity. But you were prepared, you have cash. You go to the shop to buy something with cash, and their cash register doesn't work, they can't record your purchase or calculate taxes, so you cannot buy anything anyway.

It is helping a little bit, but the benefits of this kind of preparedness are overstated.

Yeah Poland had national electronic direct transfers system across all banks since 90s. In 1989 we had to build the banking sector from scratch after communism so we had a chance to design it right.

Most EU countries have widely used alternatives. In Poland you can pay with Blik in basically every card terminal and use it intead of your card at ATM, and for online payments it serves 70% of transactions.

And before Blik most people used online direct transfers for online payments, not cards anyway. It is funny how the leapfrogging works.

The only reason I need a debit card is paying subscription to American companies. I really wish they integrated better.

Sure, just not the same human that launched from Earth.

The Cologne Cathedral in Germany was started in 1248 and finished in 1880. That's 632 years.

The comments and commit messages AI writes is often worse than useless, it's misleading, because it spreads the (very likely to get outdated) implementation details from one place to another.

I'll ask AI to write integration between 3 services, and it'll write the class names from the service A in comments in service B and C if I'm not careful.

Finding life in our solar system that we couldn't detect from Earth won't say anything new about life we don't see in other solar systems, never mind other galaxies.

You can have stalking behaviour based on simple ingrained unconscious if-then rules (don't be seen basically).

Showing yourself on purpose to change what you think the other animal thinks your capabilities are is more complicated and harder to evolve as a hardcoded reflex IMO.

Dogs weren't evolving in backyards with periodically opening see-through enclosures.

But yes, I'd assume most stealth predators with sophisticated brains (for example mammals) have some kind of theory of mind. It's just too useful not to have it. Same goes for animals living in complex social groups.

A dog knows that the cat won't enter the backyard if he thinks the dog is free to roam, but will enter the backyard if it thinks the dog is restricted to the enclosure.

I call that theory of mind, because the dog needs to distinguish what it knows and what the cat knows.

PTSD and other results of trauma do not require a memory of the thing happening to you. In fact often people don't remember the thing that caused the trauma.

It's enough that your nervous system adapts to the unsafe environment. It doesn't have to know why.

I've heard several people say fish don't feel pain. Makes hobby fishing seem less cruel I guess.

I've heard scientists say dogs don't have theory of mind and making a big deal out of some animals that do have some traces of it, when any dog owner can confirm they do. I've seen my dog bury a bone in one place while the other dog watches, then rebury it in a different place when the other dog went home.

I've also seen my parents' previous dog pretend he's closed in the enclosure with the doghouse when neighbors cat approached even when he wasn't. Then when the cat came to their backyard the dog would run after the cat.

It's so obvious, it's baffling to me how science could ever miss it.

The line is usually "do I agree with it".

That's why old political writing is good - because the politics has been settled by now, most people won't argue 1984 was unfairly criticizing totalitarianism or Starship Troopers are too hard on fascism.

But new political writing is outrageous for half the people, because they disagree with it.

Sci-fi was political from the start, usually far more political than people realize.

It's just that the way it was political back then agrees with your biases so you don't see it as being political :)

WW2 ended with Yalta conference where Roosevelt agreed to Stalin's proposition of giving Poland to USSR's sphere of influence, making Poland (and rest of EE) their puppet state.

Churchil wanted to pressure Stalin to leave Poland (and at least parts of EE) independent and even considered "Operation Unthinkable".

At least that's what I think the guy above referenced.

Polish export to US is about 3% of its total export and import - about 5% of Poland's total import. Not much to lose, honestly. We trade more with Czech Republic.

Polish export to EU is 74% of its total export and import is about 60% of its total import.

Economically - whatever's good for EU is good for Poland and US barely matters.

> as long as we don't need to be involved in their regulatory or legal regimes

The only reason the trade is easy in EU (and with it non-EU partners) is these regulations. Countries that choose to stay outside but wanted access to our market (like Norway, Switzerland, etc.) - had to accept the regulations. So I highly doubt you'll get your wish.

Cleaning my house is hopeless because it will get dirty again.

Maintenance of democracy takes effort, yes. We knew that from the start.

> See most retail workers, and anyone behind a cash register.

Why would people behind cash register have to stand?