ghostwriter

> It's not based on my feelings > All the smartest people I personally know > I also looked up the top 10 AI researchers at Yandex > in the hottest industry at the (arguably) most innovative company in the country.

All of that is actually based on your feelings that (1) the people you know are smart enough to be qualified and counted among the brightest, (2) the AI software research and the researchers you personally know are more relevant to the points you make, than other research and the researchers you haven't met in other industries that Russia is excelling in.

> Sure thing, let's take two, scientists and entrepreneurs as their accomplishments are the easiest to quantify. The unit of measurement would be the influential papers written for scientists (measured by the number of citations) and for the entrepreneurs the market cap of the companies they started.

I disagree with the market cap metric because it's useless to compare without other constraints on the kind of businesses we're allowed to compare directly. For starters, a hypothetical company involved in the derivatives market may easily be evaluated higher than a profitable energy-producing company purely because of a higher speculative capacity of the former, since the markets allow for derivatives to exist as assets in the books. I disagree with that premise purely on a basis of the 2008 crisis that showed that those had never been assets manifested in reality.

I disagree with the influential papers' citation count too, because that measure would be subject to interpretation of influence. Are AI papers influential? Are all AI papers influential? You could get thousands of meaningless citations for a parroting AI architecture for every single meaningful citation of Perelman's proof of the Poincare conjecture. Which one of those would you value as more influential? I assume no one could seriously suggest that citations for AI software papers would have the same nominal value as citations of the fundamental proofs in mathematics or physics.

> Do you think the million people like the "MIPT, MSU and HSE graduates" that have left the country that the other guys are mentioning will do better on those dimensions versus the ones staying at rosatom/roskosmos/etc?

You are conflating two groups again: the million people left aren't all the kind of "MIPT, MSU and HSE graduates". Not all of them are the Techies in the first place. The right question to ask would be if I think that those who left have better chances to excel at science and business (regardless of their qualifications) than those who stayed. My answer to that question is no, I don't think so, because there's no hard evidence for that. There only is a hint that they might be better off financially if they dedicate their lives to making money in the industries that are known for generating loads of cash, like finance and tech. That's about it. Switch the roles and try comparing artists and less technical folks in their respective places at home and abroad, and the odds are suddenly opposite.

> There are 354,000 people dead already.

Your link says that as many as 354,000 Russian _and_ Ukrainian soldiers have been killed _or_ injured in the Ukraine war, but you present it as a number of people killed in a single country. Why doing that?

> So what? Passing some bills justify full scale military invasion?

It wasn't full scale at first, and there was leeway for a diplomatic resolution of the political crisis, which Kiyv regime decided to ignore and to escalate instead.

> Maybe we need to invade Russia, since they pass freedom stripping bills every week.

Who's "we"?

> Prior to the war maybe slightly under 50% stayed. Now it is under 10%.

Just to clarify your point, are you suggesting that only 10% of MSU gradutes are staying in Russia after receiving their respective degrees, or are these the numbers among specific people with specific degrees you know personally?

What's the ratio of those who left to those who graduated and stayed?

> we are all biased and reality is too complex to argue about without simplifications, so that's not a great argument.

However it's a good argument for distinguishing between simplifications introduced by feelings and the ones introduced by omission while trying impartial judgement, as these simplification premises would have different value to your listeners.

> Do you really think that a loss of that million is insignificant and that the roskosmos/rosatom/rostech/etc will accomplish more than all the people that have left? If so, could you explain why you think that?

We must first establish and agree on the dimension by which you're willing to evaluate that significance. What would be a unit of measurement of the significance that you're mentioning in your comments?

> but if Ukraine was the size of the US with the military of the US, I wouldn't bet on them not being horrible when invading other countries.

It didn’t stop them from taking part in the invasion of Iraq:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/6th_Mechanized_Brigade_(Ukrain...

It’s the second time you’re deliberately avoiding answering where else is your clarity about the second group come from, except from your imagining things.

> It's not about safety, it's about agency. Because action > inaction. Staying put does not require anything, just making excuses why nothing can be done to either change things or move.

When a person has an option to leave but decides otherwise, they exercise their agency and the action is described as a conscious decision based on an act of volition. You are free to attribute it to - as you said - “making excuses” or “actually lacking agency”, but that would be the same biased simplification of reality that you’ve already done a few times in other comments.

> As a MSU CS alumni I can tell you, it is pretty clear the brighter, the more likely to leave.

How does your alumni status’ anecdotal evidence bring clarity on the matter of the predominant intellectual capacity of those who’re leaving Russia? Aren’t there any other MSU graduates who consider themselves as bright as your CS peers and yourself, and who are staying in? What’s the respective left/stayed ratio among them?

> but there is an obvious filter that the ones left behind are on average less risk taking

Where’s that clarity come from? The opposite could be argued as well: those who’ve left are seeking safety and safety isn’t associated with risk taking. There are fewer risks in leaving Russia than in staying in.

> breakthrough is much more likely to come out of the young risk taking ones now living in a functional country and not from the aging engineers living in a dictatorship and working at a bureaucratic rosatom making "up to $720 a month" (actual number, I looked up their open engineering vacancies).

Here, you did it again: “those who work at <this company> are less likely to make a breakthrough, because I don’t align with them, and therefore I assume that only aging engineers uncapable of breakthroughs would consider staying and working there. Look, even salaries prove that they are less likely to have it.”

That’s a fair point. I was trying to exemplify the conflation point between two groups with the assigned traits (“the brightest” vs “rest of them”) with bringing my own selection of people everyone would clearly disagree with to be a valid representation.

Software engineers were a simple example of the conflation point. Those who left and those who’re the brightest aren’t the same group.

Political activists and journalists are hardly the brightest group of people either, so you’re just assigning the opposition group that you prefer to align with, with a token of “the brightest” because it makes you feel good about it. How about you look at the rest of the society who couldn’t or weren’t willing to leave the country and who still run projects in Russia despite the sanctions. Are they not the brightest because they work and associate their career within - let’s say for the sake of the argument - Rosatom? That’s just one hard science sector of the vast energy industry of the country, for starters.

You’re conflating a group of pro-western enterprise software developers - with little to no adulthood responsibilities aside their work, due to their age - with a group of the brightest folks.

> No, they did the same for all languages.

are you negating "prohibited official use of minority languages" with "they did the same for all languages" as a means to show that the bill was even-headed?

> But what you're saying is fair because they should only have prohibited Russian since they are the people who genocided Ukrainians so they have no right to occupy Ukraine.

Right, the Russian language had to be prohibited because Russia would react to Ukraine's prohibiting the use of the Russian language for russian-speaking Ukrainians, presumably as a punitive measure for their alignment with Russia due to their geographical & cultural proximity and generational ties. And that's because Romanians living in Northern Bucovina couldn't care less about it..... My take is that you deserve a Nobel prize for being the most consistent person on Earth. Thanks for showing your stance clearly in the open.

It's counter productive to get into debates with people who call one side of the conflict as "orcs", it just shows that you've got skin in the game to object to everything that doesn't align with "Ukraine's right and is winning" narrative. But just to show your bias once again here's a few points:

> What history does Russia have in Romania (it still occupies Transnistria)?

It has the same common history with Carpathian Ruthenia land that Ukraine isn't willing to return to Hungary and Romania.

> Whenever someone points out what Russia is doing, they immediately praise the US for doing a lesser version of the same thing.

That's to show you that double-standards exist and that nobody seems to care as long as it serves their agenda.

No it didn't, you're referring to an article on Wikipedia explaining how a battle was lost. I was saying how the war was won. Eventually every single insurgency leader and their field commanders were eliminated and nowadays Chechnya is part of Russia, and Chechen military forces are fighting on the side of Russia. If that's your definition of Russia's losing then I don't envy Ukrainian military command leaders.

> The occupation of Ukraine signals Russia's intention to do the same with other countries they occupied in the past (Poland, Romania, the Baltic countries, &c) which are now part of NATO.

None of those countries have ever been officially mentioned as the "red line" by Russia, except Ukraine. Article 5 doesn't apply to Ukraine, and it doesn't allow for preventive military measures on non-alliance territories just because "there's a signal" somewhere outside.

The three insurgent groups acted across two campaings (two hot war phases). The first phase was dealing with Dudayev & Maskhadov and their following specifically. The second phase acted on the Kadyrovs group and the Khattab & Basayev group. The former essentially were bought out and negotiated out of the war via rivalry with Maskhadov, financial incetives, and several regional autonomy promises (they have their own militia and army divisions like the 141 Special Motorized Regiment). The latter Khattab group effectively became the most prominent force during the second phase, it had several field commanders from Middle East who organized acts of terror in major Russian cities. [1] The war ended with elimination of all the leaders and field commanders of the two separatist groups.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Khattab

Russia didn't lose in Chechnya, there were two campaigns and three rival military insurgent groups to combat. Eventually, the most prominent one was dealt with, and Khattab and all of his Saudi and Afghani terrorist field commanders were eliminated.

> Because it's evil Russia attacked poor innocent Ukraine in 2014

The poor innocent Ukrainian government did pass a bill to prohibit official use of minority languages on the eastern part of the country (dominated by Russian-speaking population) on a Sunday morning of February 23, 2014. It happened a day after their president had to flee the country. It was clearly a period of political crisis and no one was supposed to work and enact any legislation on that weekend day in the first place. No one was supposed to pass a bill of that significance without extended debates and a referendum specifically. But the coup leaders decided to move forward with it nonetheless. Russian troops legally stationed in Crimea took over the peninsula 4 days after that punitive act of the Ukraine government against its own russian-speaking population of the eastern part of the country. The reinforcement from Russia were only sent 6 days after the event, as the Kiyv regime decided to escalate.

> Should we (by we, I mean the rest of the world) just let them annex whatever land they want

There's no "whatever land". The war is going for a particular land with particular significance to Russia, similarly to Panama's significance to the US [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Pana...

> The US has lost three wars without resorting to nuclear weapons;

None of which was happening anywhere close to US borders. In finance they say that past performance is no guarantee of future results, but you're eager to bet everything you have on this war outcome nonetheless.

> Just because the US (and the UK) was making bad decisions in Iraq 20 years ago doesn't mean they are making bad decisions in support of Ukraine now.

Why wouldn't it mean bad decisions now? What did happen to those who made bad decisions at all levels of the government 20 years ago?

> Imagine I lock you in a room

If you lock a reasoning being in a room, then regardless of your further actions with the French language, you'll be dealing with a reasoning being. Your sequence "you will have had to have gained a significant understanding of French" is deprecated on the fact that "understanding" is attributed to the reasoning being capable of it, not to the fact that they were locked in the room and forced to repeat the words.

Their monthly salary is usually on top of other benefits such as subsidized/free accomodation in their capital, food and travel expenses coverage, and so on. They definitely can allow themselves a new Macbook if they wanted to buy it on their monthly salary. Most of the time they get that for free from extra allowances too.

If you’re in agreement, could you explain absence of sanctions against the US coming from the EU?

You can keep issues within git itself: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug

> gcc and clang are all not ready for production use or rather untested and/or buggy.

Which items from this table are lying about GCC v11 support of C++20? [1] Which of the features are buggy in GCC v11-12?

[1] https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/compiler_support#cpp20

> automagically turning blocking operations into non-blocking is - which has not really been tried before (with erlang and go being the first).

sorry, but Haskell has had it way before Go, with proper STM too. Neither Erlang nor Go are offering the same level of ergonomics for compile-time checked M:N threading.