thow-58d4e8b

There's also nifty Windows application called Ditto - basically a searchable history of the system clipboard. Any time there's any complex command or a snippet, I intuitively just highlight it (in Putty) or CTRL+C it

Log in to our Postgres? that's `psql` something something. CTRL + ALT + V, type psql - there it is

PGPASSWORD=pass1234 psql -h our-database-dev.abcdefg.us-east-1.rds.amazonaws.com -U acme maindb

Press Enter to automatically enter it in currently active window

There's one major annoyance with Sony headphones and earbuds - no way to mute/unmute yourself - you must walk back to your laptop to do it. Why, oh why, Sony?

In a similar vein - US military and industrial complex is without a war, and suddenly, out of the blue, a tiny European country that previously hosted US military bases and secret prisons - decides to irritate the main US geopolitical rival on the other side of the world, for no reason whatsoever, despite sharp majority public disapproval of these actions (Lithuania - China diplomatic spat)

It's shocking how the whole propaganda machine completely avoids Ukraine's conduct in ramping up the tensions:

* reneged on their ceasefire treaty pledge to provide reasonable minority rights to ethnic Russians in Ukraine (17% of the population)

* banned ethnic Russians from holding positions of power

* banned several opposition TV channels

* previous prime minister (democratically elected, ethnic Ukrainian) on trial for treason

* another diplomat, who tried good-faith negotiations with Russia - on trial for treason

* in a minor bureaucratic dispute with Poland about trucking quotas, Ukraine, in all their wisdom, decided to cut ALL RAIL to Poland

* all done by a prime minister with approval rating of below 20%

There are no good guys in this fight. It's either Russia's paranoia driven territory carving, or Ukraine's extreme levels of corruption and toxic nationalism

Venture capital used to be about placing small, diverse bets on a lot promising startups - everybody in the process was trying to make the world a better place

Since about 2018, VC game changed - now it's about brazenly placing massive bets on a small set of startups of increasingly questionable utility, using the funds and clout to ram their way through into monopoly positions. Not a speck of morality involved anymore - and nobody is even trying to pretend otherwise

Public image hasn't yet caught up with this reality

Not just 1600 - it was fairly common knowledge since antiquity. In 300 BCE, we knew not only that the Earth is round, but also roughly its radius. Moon's distance and radius was estimated about 100 years later. Sun-Earth distance was also (incorrectly) estimated about the same time, but with enough precision to know it's much further and bigger than the Moon.

Columbus was being dissuaded from his voyage because people correctly calculated his supplies will run out way before he reaches Indies west-wards

It's also amazing how inflation is treated as some mysterious, unpredictable force of nature that just strikes out of the blue. Recently, I've seen a lecture on inflation from Marxist point of view - and it was a refreshingly intuitive take on the subject that I've never heard expressed anywhere else:

Inflation is an increase in price level. Who sets the prices? Corporations (or landlords). They may increase the prices either because their inputs are more expensive, or to pad their profits. But all the inputs, in the end, derive from someone's labor. There might genuinely be situations when more labor is required to achieve the same output (e.g. drought for agriculture, or mineral extraction got more difficult), but most of the time, the opposite is true - less labor is required to achieve the same output. If wages do not rise at the same pace as prices, somebody is pocketing that extra money

But we never see that inconvenient fact being mentioned...anywhere. Newspapers run headlines like "beef prices up X%", without the corollary - "and the price increase is pocketed by meat packing plant cartel". And it turns out, empirically, that's pretty much what's happening: Corporate profits drive 60% of inflation increases:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/corporate-profits-drive-6...

This is a fundamental issue with the ad business - the ads are selected from those who bid, not from those that are relevant. For example - if I'm listening to a podcast with a captivating guest, the relevant links would point to their books or blogs. But since they didn't bid for ads, I'm shown some crypto drivel or date-Thai girls scams

In a small nation with limited cultural outreach, the only way to make a return on the investment is to target the largest demographic group - 50-70 year olds, high-school educated - with low-brow, casual, anodyne content. Trying to fill any other niche is a commercial suicide. If you're not a part of that demographic group - tough luck, there's nothing on the domestic market for you. To make matters worse, the talent pool is really shallow, leading to the same clique of ~20 actors in literally every single film or TV show

> My experience with clusters is that the clustering itself causes more problems than it solves.

There's also a whole slew of failure modes that are capable of bringing down entire clusters if a single machine misbehaves. Usually to do with situations where the nodes are reachable, but some resource (I/O, latency, bandwidth) is uncharacteristically slow on one of the machines. I'm yet to encounter a distributed system that handles that situation well

To add to that - putting aside the present state of Sino-US relations, our prior beliefs should reflect what academic work on lying in politics tells us (1):

* lying in official diplomatic relationships between countries is rather rare

* within countries, democratic leaders are much more likely to lie to their population than autocrats

* countries with imperial ambitions and long-distance ventures lie more often than others

* within great powers, the depiction of the rival great powers is especially lie-ridden

In other words, for a person living in the US - it's likely that whatever US news sources tell you about China (or Russia) is mostly lies or exaggerations

(1) https://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/international-deceit/

Taiwan is not a shining beacon of democracy either. Since the creation of the country in 1949, the total number of parties holding power is: two. For important issues like the geopolitical orientation and the business model of the country - the choice between KMT and DPP is like a choice between Pepsi and Coca-cola

Unfortunately, the fact that us-east-1 is roughly 10% cheaper than other regions usually overrides any other concerns

No, this rags to riches story is just a myth that Finland (the same goes for Norway) tell to themselves.

In reality, in the early 1900s, Finland was poorer than Western Europe and some British colonies, but richer than just about any other place in the world. Richer than Japan, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Poland - and about as rich as Austria or Italy.

Fast-forward to 2021 - Finland is poorer than Western Europe and some British colonies, but richer than just about any other place in the world. Not much of a change, really. This is an unfortunate, but repeated finding of development economics - policy, unless intentionally malevolent, matters very little to the long-run wealth

The FED has tools to affect monetary base (physical currency + bank reserves). But inflation is mostly a function of money supply (physical currency + deposits), not monetary base. All tools at FED's disposal are very indirect, leading to frequent "pushing on a string" situations

FED actually has three mandates, one of them almost never mentioned:

* employment

* price level

* moderate long term interest rates

There's one more reason - the one I use to rationalize my idleness to myself: in addition to our work output, the corporations are also paying us to be a part of their "reserve army". We might work 3-4 hours a day, but when things escalate, the company taps into its reserves to get stuff done. Having doldrums about that is like soldiers worrying they only spend 3 hours a day in combat

To put things in perspective

We've already warmed up the planet by about 1C from pre-industrial times, and...well, pretty much nothing consequential happened

Based on the most likely temperature impacts of the most realistic emission scenarios, we're looking at an additional 0.8C (optimistic) to 1.5C (pessimistic) on top of that by the end of the century, with the temperatures plateauing shortly afterwards. No, Earth will not become the next Venus, nor will Greenland and Antarctic melt (it's -30C there right now)

Somewhat gruesome, because this is exactly how a lot of these vulnerabilities are "handled"

The chance of seeing Eurobonds and EU-wide unemployment fund is significantly higher than any breakup of Eurozone

Very simple

They count on the following set of assumptions:

* The inflation we're seeing is transitory, and almost all of it has already materialized

* FED will give in to the political pressure and increase interest rates

* ECB is more isolated from politics and will not

While this is a good argument, people's revealed preferences point in the other direction

The countries that are closest to that margin, like Saudi Arabia, Qatar or Iran, are actually perfectly happy with pumping more fossil fuels. Bin Salman was actively trying to sabotage COP26 talks. Brazil continues the deforestation, with Bolsonaro being perfectly happy with it

Florida beach front properties are not dropping in value. Migration towards Sun Belt in the US is a real thing. At the peak of summer heat, significant chunk of Europe's population temporarily moves to the hottest parts of the continent. Despite the global warming prospects and economic disparities, Greeks, Italians and Spaniards aren't flocking to Scandinavia. etc., etc.

To underscore how ridiculously rich the rich are in developing countries, one can take a look at country sheets in World Inequality Report 2022 (1)

Adjusted for price level, excluding the top 1%, and focusing on the 90-99% percentile: income in the UK is $117k. That's less than in Chile ($130k), Turkey ($149k), and comparable to Mexico ($99k) or South Africa ($82k). Meanwhile, the bottom 50% in the UK earn 3-10x of what their peers in the aforementioned countries do. And UK is hardly a paragon of equality to begin with

Another sobering fact from the linked report - of the countries where the 90-99th percentile earns surprisingly good bucks - all have a large impoverished underclass: Israel, Chile, South Africa, Mexico, USA, Korea, Russia, Brazil

(1) https://wir2022.wid.world/download/

And it's not like they're just coasting on their past glory. As an exaple: the country is now criss-crossed by high-speed rail (Frecciarossa), 300km/h, so good that it is out-competing local flights. Most of it built within the last decade

There's also a lot of confusion due to the overloaded use of the term 'drone'

Drone could mean remotely piloted $4M Predator firing $140,000 a piece Hellfire missiles

But drone could also mean mass-produced, battery operated quadcopters delivering small scale explosives over the distance of a few kilometers or less (or perform recon). Sometimes deployed in swarms, flying low. Not necessarily remote controlled

Those are two very different military capabilities. The important impact of the kamikaze-drones is that it strongly favors the side with the stronger and more vertically integrated manufacturing base

With Tether - it's best to follow "fraud until proven otherwise" principle

That "commercial paper" could very well be IOUs from themselves to themselves

Not to forget - there are more choices than big-cloud and host-everything-yourself.

One can rent VMs from Hetzner at 1/3 the price of AWS (and 1/10 the data transfer fees). No managed services, like Dynamo or S3, but will full convenience of on-demand scale-up

Or, for mid-sized corporations - buying a rack of computers, wiring them together, and installing OpenStack to make an internal cloud - that isn't some black magic wizardry either

More underappreciated aspect is variety. US tends to be very copy-paste - once you solve someone's problem well, it's quite likely your solution is universally applicable to large swaths of the market. EU varies not only country-to-country, but often even between departments of the same company in the same building. It's not just technology, even markets for beer or coffee are likely more varied in your average EU country than in the entire US

The fundamental problem is the same as with business and management research - any useful signal is completely drowned in an ocean of noise. Success of a project depends on the characters of the people involved, connections of the project lead, market timing, sources of funding, luck, current phase of the business cycle, past project experience, marketing and hype, sales teams, relatedness of icons and animations, etc. - more so than on any technical or organizational factor. I've yet to work on a project where technical reasons were at the root cause of the lack of success

Some Windows 10 updates add Edge into the taskbar if you move it out of it. Hilariously, if you install multiple Windows updates in a batch, you might end up with multiple Edge launchers in the taskbar. I think at least once, it changed the default browser back to Edge, too

The main difference is that in the 90s, the US still had real physical activity underlying its economy, and pretty impressive at that. You smack Microsoft, but who cares - there's still a wide industrial base, hundreds of thousands of small to medium enterprises, global monopoly on entertainment, semiconductor supremacy, high-end aircraft and car manufacturing, etc.

That's gone - industry got outsourced, the gap between Intel and TSMC is growing every year, Boeing's reputation will unlikely to ever recover, Hollywood is a joke, oil and gas extraction is perceived as villains, journalism in terminal decline, finance and pharma pure rent seeking. Software is the only thing left where Americans can say with a straight face that they're proud of it - hence the unwillingness to taint the crown jewels