tl;dr: it's for the neighborhood golf cart market
1,232 karma · joined February 3, 2023
Power rarely voluntarily relinquishes power.
> I can't think of an instance where it worked well.
Worked pretty well for most of the ex Warsaw pact.
> The French Revolution, and the Communist revolutions were all disasters.
What came prior was also a disaster, except it was a disaster for regular people and the unelected Monarchs didn't feel the pain.
What exactly were people supposed to do? Wait patiently for their autocratic rulers to stop acting like autocrats?
> The slave revolt in Haiti has produced long-term poor results compared to the Dominican Republic.
This shows a complete ignorance of historical fact. French Haiti was 90% enslaved, Spanish Santo Domingo was majority free people. It simply isn't a comparable situation.
Again, what were Haitians supposed to do? Sit around being beaten, raped, and worked to death hoping that the slaveowners eventually see the error of their ways?
V8 predates strict mode, and handles all the exec/eval, monkey patching and object system abuse you can do in JavaScript just fine. Common Lisp is one of the most dynamic languages in the world and allows you to do ridiculous things in terms of meta-programming and essentially building domain-specific languages into your program, yet it too manages to have ahead-of-time compiled implementations that are very performant. Also PyPy exists.
There are definitely some technical aspects that make it hard to make Python fast, but they are not insurmountable. The reason CPython is slow today is simply because performance has not historically been prioritized by its developers.
V8 made JavaScript fast in 2008, soon that will be 20 years ago.
Perhaps I live in a bubble, but so much of the production Python code I see is fully type-hinted and makes used of an aggressive linter & type checker to the point where it might as well be written in Go/C#/Java/TypeScript so that it can actually take advantage of the performance gains instead of being loaded into a runtime that turns everything into heap-allocated PyObject pointers.
I know that containerization on Unix-like systems didn't begin with Docker, but I definitely think Docker was the first accessible interface for it.
I think app containerization is something that has so many benefits and it's the obvious correct approach for its use cases once you wrap your head around it. This was already understood at big tech companies pre-Docker (e.g. Borg, Tupperware, user app sandboxing on iOS and Android), but I think it really took something like docker to make it mainstream.
As far as I'm concerned, you can probably consider yourself like the Ken Thompson or Dennis Ritchie of your era in terms of the impacts of your contribution.
You either have a government capable of controlling its corporations or you get corporations capable of controlling the government.
I see that they're still the largest streaming service by market share, but the ability to provide a streaming service these days seems very commodified.
Try to get a modern translation if you're not reading in original language.
For better or for worse, I don't think Git is going anywhere. A lot of the recent developments in source control amount to providing a better user experience for git repos.
We might well see companies move away from GitHub as source of truth in favor of alternate forges with better SLAs or self-hosting, but dethroning git itself at this point feels very unlikely.
That being said, Git has two big weaknesses: non-text files and handling massive repositories. This is why you see continued use of centralized version control systems (e.g. Perforce, ClearCase) at organizations that need these things. Git LFS tries to address large non-text files, but in my experience teams tend to prefer VCS systems that handle this natively.
At a few big tech companies that decided to use huge monorepos 20 years ago, they've since hand-rolled custom non-git version control systems tailored to their unique scale. These systems usually work by combining a centralized version control server (similar to SVN or Perforce) with a virtual file system that selectively populates code paths based on the current checkout.
But the vast majority of orgs don't need massive monorepos or large amounts of non-text files checked into their repo.
In case you haven't noticed, all that our current system is able to do with increased efficiency is cutting staff and/or increasing the percentage of money that gets siphoned up to capital holders.
If you try to make some College kid work 10-20 hours of unpaid overtime a week they'll just walk.
The entire point is exploitation and downward wage suppression.
We basically do not have a left wing party in this country. We have a center right party with "progressive" social views that has a few economic left-wingers under its tent, and then we have a reactionary right party.
That's pretty normal upper level senior or staff engineer compensation at a FAANG (or whatever the acronym is now).
Half of the stated total compensation being pre-IPO equity is kind of burying the lede though. I guess if it's Anthropic that equity compensation can be realized pretty soon.
Your culture is what tells you it's acceptable to eat a dog but not a cow. If you lived in Belgium or Kazakhstan you'd feel fine about eating horse. If you lived in parts of India, eating beef would be as unthinkable as eating dog.
Modern C++ has come a long way with typed optionals and variants, but it's very tacked-on and lacks the safety guarantees and ergonomics of a language designed with this paradigm at a fundamental level.
I will always gladly post this. Not because I think it's good advice or because I think Ran is a person to emulate, but because I think it encourages one to think differently about life, wants, needs, and responsibilities.
This works fine from 1980-2020ish when you're fighting limited intensity conflicts against countries you have uncontested air superiority over.
But with cheap drone technology and other innovations of the last decade it's never been easier to be a near-peer adversary. The incumbent powers of the world have vast expensive arsenals of weapons designed to fight the last war.
That being said, I know that the US Military internally has been very well informed of the realities of what a war against Iran would look like for decades. It's been well understood for a long time that decapitation strikes against Iran won't work because their military and paramilitary organizations are deliberately composed of highly autonomous units. You could have asked the janitor at the US Army War College in January 2025 how a war against Iran would go, and he would have told you it would be insanely costly, that Iran holds a indisputable advantage in a defensive conflict and that they have numerous strategic cards to play like blockading Hormuz, attacking the Gulf states, and drawing support from the US's larger geopolitical allies.
Ironically, the US had all of this intelligence within their institutions but ignored it. They ignored it precisely because the US is vulnerable to decapitation strikes.
Big tech companies aren't like a Government job with rigorous pay grades based on role and seniority. You can have people even within the same role and level at big tech with multiple $100k pay discrepancies.
If someone's continued ability to stay in the country where they currently live is contingent on employment then they will accept worse conditions and pay.
That's the entire reason why tech companies use H1B, it's not as though there's a dearth of Java developers or DevOps people who are US citizens.
When you buy a car in the US, there's an entire industry of psuedo-scammers that scrapes the new vehicle registration data and will send you letters soliciting you to buy a "warranty" with horrible terms and pricing, which are intentionally crafted to look like they come from the dealership, manufacturer, or a more reputable insurance company. This is just one example, the only silver lining is that junk mail has existed for long enough that even most senior citizens understand that they need to be skeptical of anything they receive.
SMS and Email is a constant adversarial game where you will be inundated with scams, advertising, political solicitations, and all other manner of noise as you try to combat it with spam filters, blocklists, hidemyemail, burner addresses all the while hoping you don't miss an important communication from someone you actually care about.
As for phones, scam calls and telemarketing has gotten so bad that most people will not answer a call from an unknown number unless they're expecting to hear from someone (e.g. doctor, mechanic). But lots of older people still hold onto the unfortunately outdated cultural norm that you always pick up the phone when it rings, and that's one of the most common attack vectors for scamming the elderly.
I think it's critical that people understand that it does NOT have to be like this. The US has a business regulatory regime that biases towards letting an entity get away with pretty much anything, and alternatives exist even among capitalist countries.