soueuls

The EU has never been a democratic entity, As a French, I still remember the so-called "2005 French European Constitution referendum (Do you approve the bill authorising the ratification of the treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe?)

55% of voters voted no despite the constant propaganda on TV nudging people to vote yes.

In 2007, the new French president was elected, he was very pro EU (like the vast majority of French politicians), after several meeting behind closed doors, it was decided to bypass the will of the people though the ratification of a treaty without a referendum. The Lisbon Treaty, was voted by the Parliament.

We can argue that this was decided by the French politicians and not EU politicians but we are now two decades into it and the same playbook have been used over and over.

The EU constantly dilute responsibilities. Our local politicians will claim they can't do much, this is now decided in the EU and the EU politicians will claim that the national governments decided to adopt this on their own terms.

We are now completely deprived of any freedom and I personally made the choice to leave the EU because it gives a bad taste to live in a place where everything is decided behind closed door without any possibility to vote on anything.

I lived in China for a while a decade ago, studied at Tsinghua and did some research as well.

IMHO you have more freedom in China than in Europe. Can you walk on the street and say "Fuck Xi Jinping" like you would in France with Macron? Probably not. But it's a completely useless freedom to have.

At least in China you get relative safety when you walk on the street at night. And when the government decides to restrict some liberties you don't have to pay tens of thousands of politicians and lobbyist to do it.

If you have to choose your poison pill, you might as well pick the cheap one that does bring a semblance of harmony and not complete polarization and chaos.

I found the article interesting yet my thinking is at the opposite spectrum. I also spent a lot of time using LLM, and I am moving away from "no framework" or "library pretending to be a framework".

Not that I was a fan of it, but for work purpose I was using React / Next.js etc.

Now, I am using Laravel. lots of magic, pretty much always one recommended way to do things, excellent code generation using CLI. When you combine it with AI it's following the framework's guideline. The AI does not have to think about whether it should locate business logic with UI, use a hook or not, extract a helper, etc.

It knows how to create route, controller, validator, view, model, migration, whatever.

Sure then I don’t comply, so what?

If the UK wants to go full totalitarian it’s alright, they can even consider me a criminal or ban me from entering the country.

I usually avoid traveling to countries doing non sense or that would arrest me for ideological reasons.

The UK would be no different.

But as far as I know, where I live, I am not under UK’s jurisdiction.

If I was a heavy drinker and smoker I would likely have health problems and shaking hands. I don’t think I need the New York Times to inform me about it or that 88 years old are dying from heart attacks everyday.

But if people starts to behead teachers (as it’s happening in my country : France) for religious reasons, I want to know.

Yea, even if it represents a few deaths here and there.

Because I am willing to consider the possibility that it’s telling of a shift in my society that will have consequences down the road.

Significance of events are not necessarily correlated to how many people die from it.

Also different countries set up different priorities. France for example is talking quite a lot about « feminicide » (how many women are killed because they are women). In France, it was 137 in 2024. Is it a lot? Probably not for a population of 70 millions. Can we significantly decrease the number? Probably not.

But people and media are still talking about it. And even if this specific number do not improve, it does spark debate about related topic, which is sometimes a good thing.

Yes many countries will decide to extradite for actions which are legal in said country.

I am French, and we recently convinced Scotland to extradite a French man who was denying the existence of the Holocaust and gaz chamber, which is something you could do in Scotland if you do it without violence.

So indeed it’s possible.

But I don’t think it’s the same as extraditing for a meme.

I found some interesting bits in this article but overall I think it’s being overly cynical.

In the past ten years, I worked with one guy from Nigeria and a bunch of people from Iran. Bitcoin (or rather cryptocurrencies in general) have been more than just mere gimmicks.

Sending money from one side of the world to another, for such a low fees, even when the central bank of Nigeria is blocking USD transfers, even when bank transfers to Iran are being blocked, has been very useful in itself.

As for AI, yes if you use it as a God, you will be disappointed. Yes it can’t do everything. Yes it will hallucinate.

But it’s been a great learning environment for me, I keep asking questions to get an overview of things.

I used to learn concepts such as « clean architecture » because AI is never tired, it can provide endless variations to the same problems, until you better understand the underlying principles and the recurring patterns.

When I work on a project, 20-30% is creative, cutting edge, never seen before. 70% is CRUD, necessary boilerplate.

I know what I am supposed to be doing, I can verify the result, double check the validity of it.

Why would I waste hours typing letters?

Do I rely on AI for everything? No I don’t.

But pretending it’s completely useless, is nonsensical.

Yes it’s just statistically inferring the next token, but it’s actually a very simple, powerful concept.

Yeah, I did not click on any links and knew the comment was written with AI

I am willing to take pretty much any legal risks, I don’t want to give up on my mother, regardless of how it can backfire.

I flee out of Thailand several months ago, because I was receiving some death threats, so I should be safe on that matter.

I used AI to write press releases in every languages I know there are victims.

I am trying to look for someone who can help me shoot / edit short videos, and I will try to use Heygen to translate them.

Posting on TikTok might be useful, but usually the content can only be seen from the country you are posting.

Do you know of any tools where you can feed a bunch of content / documents / pictures / etc and it generates many pages ranking on their names / brand / company / etc?

Yes I was also surprised, at least one of those comments looked legit to me, not written with AI or a anything.

I will check the settings

It's something I am considering, not just talking about whether a country is safe or not, but listening to whistleblowers and listing scammers by name / pictures / estimated amount / connections / and publishing personal information (phone / address / school for the children, etc).

Only after collecting enough hard evidences, of course.

If they plan to scam hundreds of people, they might as well take the associated risks of scamming the wrong people who have nothing else to lose.

Ideally yes, I agree, but it's actually not so easy to get in touch with other victims without any help from the press.

Getting the money back would obviously be number 1, I am not crazy enough to enjoy « revenge » above my my mother’s wellbeing.

But I already hired a lawyer, I don’t think there is any way we will win this legally.

The whole thing is rigged when the guy in front of you has been somewhat a fiend of the king when he was young.

We bought during Covid, the building was half-way done, the prices were attractive, and the story telling was that they mostly worked with workers from Burma and Laos, it was a bit slow to get them a working visa during Covid.

Hence, why the construction took a halt during 1 year. They were selling at a discount to break even, the government was indeed talking about opening borders (we were already inside Thailand at that time, not buying from abroad).

We visited the construction site and saw ~10 workers, everything seemed real, like a thing slowly getting back to normal.

I have all the reasons to believe now, that these "workers" were just paid to be here. The company was advertising, getting batches of potential investors, and making a "Potemkin" construction site.

They never had any intention of ever finishing the project.

I have traveled extensively to both the US and China (where I did a master degree) several years ago.

I did not keep the count of many times I crossed each borders, but I can assure you it was pretty much always easier to get into China than it was to get into the US (and that was before Trump).

Chinese authorities are no jokes, but the amount of non sense you need to put up to get into the free land, is very high.

I am French and I have lived in both countries, US and China. The amount of interference we get from the US is much, much higher than from China.

So I am not sure of the pertinence of such an argument.

Maybe because "My new car" does not imply that the car itself has never been used?

Just that it's YOUR new car.

I truly enjoyed the read, my only criticism is about the « internet »

Yes, down to the core it’s indeed just transmitting electrical current from one side to the other.

But I believe Franklin would be amazed by the sheer ingenuity that followed.

The absurd hacky ways we found to make video games.

The protocols. The encryption and all the people that make completely useless stuff, just for the beauty of it.

Like implementing a Turing complete machine inside the game of life, to build a game of life from it

The author makes some good points.

But then he also spends the few paragraphs laughing about executives operating based on beliefs/ideologies instead of facts.

Just to talk about EU letting some countries sliding into fascism.

Fascism : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition

It seems that the author is also reasoning by pure ideology, ignoring simple facts.

Absolutely no countries in the EU are remotely close to being a fascist state.

My plans are to remain curious, to spend many hours exploring/learning.

I am fairly confident about my capacity to adapt, I truly enjoy learning, many people don't.

I don't see any valid reasons why

- a non filmmaker using AI would replace a filmmaker using AI

- a non-programmer using AI would replace a programmer using AI.

So, I am not really worried.

Reviewing 250 includes the one I just straight up discard.

I don’t try to retain anything, if it’s really interesting I will take some notes, or it will inspire me a new piece of content.

In most cases I just skim through it and I’m just glad to know that it « exists » it will later help me build up connection subconsciously.

But I just do this because I’m really curious, it’s an excellent way to kill time during commute or whatnot

I have Feedly premium and I use it to subscribe to newsletters.

So they are part of my daily RSS feed.

I try to review 250 piece of content every single day.

(reviewing includes deleting boring stuff)

I have some filters/priority setup (around China, my favorite technical stack, favorite creators, etc)

So I have a fairly high signal/noise ratio

Sundar should get laid off. He is not a bad CEO per say.

But he is a bad CEO in the current context.

Google is not innovating, they are slowly losing on all front.

I think Sundar is too conventional.

Nobody would care.

In Asia there is a « bakery » brand named « Paris Baguette »

It’s Korean. And it’s kind of disgusting.

Their macarons are terrible.

Do French people care? We could not care less.

The amount of fragility you need to have to be mad towards a company providing web server.

It reminds me of the crazy people trying to change the GitHub’s « master » branch.

Or people trying to erase the « master » / « slave » terminology in distributed system.

The map is not the territory.

The correlation with that and white/Arabic people enslaving black peoples is absolutely 0.

Maybe even negative.

That sounds like a long list of rules just to share a meal with someone.

Are you a software engineer and if/else conditions are bubbling up outside of work?

After reading this article I felt I was almost paying my taxes

We will just change mindset, instead of filtering out crap.

We will filter in genuine content.

You can browse Twitter using only custom lists for example.

I like this guide by Nick Kolenda : https://nickkolenda.com/guides/brand-names I love his other guides as well, by the way.

I would say the TV show : Dark.

In my opinion it’s one of the most complex thing I have ever watched.

I don’t want to tell too much about it to keep the surprise

I don’t like Meta but what is the alternative? Forcing them to provide the service for free?

To me : either you consent to let us make money using your data, or you agree to pay the service with your money or you stop using the service.

Seems pretty fair