Visited China recently and it's pretty astonishing what can be achieved if you just ignore the whiners, complainers, environmentalists, and local governments. NIMBYs? Get lost. Have unique local culture? Funny but no. There's a special kind of beetle living there? Tough shit. It's ugly? So is your face. Etc. This is how the West built its infrastructure back in the day - nobody consulted NIMBYs or the native Americans on railway construction - but now we're too good for this, and we reap the consequences.
I'm still on team democracy, and we'll see how long it takes before China regresses to the norm of dictatorships. Xi has already broken the term limits. Nothing suggests he won't slowly lose his grip on reality like most dictators. But for now China has its charms.
In big enough projects this is the job of a civil engineer. The architect vs engineer fight that ensues is widely memed. This is of course mostly an issue in one-off projects with ambitious architects.
I learned this early in a conservative org. Preventing things is risky. Just keep the solution ready for when things go wrong because then you'll get approval.
Criminal gangs specifically recruit legal minors because they are able to do things legal adults can't: Repeatedly and with impunity violate the law. Whether it's smuggling or assassinations, using legal minors make it all a lot less risky.
Would it stop stupid kids from doing stupid kid stuff? No. Would it make minors less attractive to organized crime? Yes.
That sounds like a lot, but your music player probably costs that much in RAM anyway.
Seriously, with the current RAM prices we as an industry have to figure out a way to use less of it. Laptops with 4GB of RAM are still common and are going to remain so for the rest of the decade. Spotify using more than 1GB of RAM is obscene.
I've been in an acquisition where code quality was important. But it was probably an edge case since the buyer just wanted to turn the company into a feature, and ease of integration into the buyer was important.
You cannot possibly with a straight face claim that Scaleway is a VPS provider. Hetzner, sure, but Scaleway offers compute and database services in the same way that AWS does - just fewer.
If packaging and marketing stopped mattering so much Coca-cola would go out of business immediately. Sugar water is cheap and simple to make. The off-brands taste just as good if not better in blind testing. The only defense they have is their brand and the amount of money they spend on marketing. Same with Red Bull.
It's a bit strange, but a huge handout from the EU/France and a huge AI lab investment round are different orders of magnitude. The necessary sums are just not politically possible. How do you sell spending the equivalent of ten USS Gerald Fords on a start-up? You don't.
It's not like the US has that many either. It's not the kind of winner-takes-all network effects industry that attracts venture capital outside of the Musk reality distortion field.
Yeah, this is just the difference between the "cash cow" and "question mark" companies on the BCG growth-share matrix. The Chinese companies will sooner or later turn into stodgy cash cows themselves.
I have to disagree. The low resolution of the screen is my biggest issue. Many UI elements and such are just genuinely difficult to read. Modern games are designed for 1080p or more. Rendering them at 800p gives quite poor results. I mostly use my Deck hooked up to the TV now.
This is a key observation and I also remember those dumb discussions. The top end of the fine scale is more or less theoretical if you demonstrate any willingness to improve. Looks like Temu has engaged in really bad practices, and they still only get what's (to them) a gentle reminder that there are rules.
It's the opposite, if anything. The US has the best conditions for running a company. It is only natural that the highest margin sectors of the day (whatever that may be) is located there. Anything else would be evidence of market distortion.
Why would anyone build that when you get curb stomped by the three US providers if you try? There's a reason EU providers don't attack that market directly.
Now, if there was a market that were prohibited from using US cloud providers that would give EU providers an actual way to move upmarket.
The meaning has drifted, appropriately enough. Betäubungsmittel originally meant painkillers, as you can tell from the word. It's just that now every recreational drug is labeled as such.
Not every drug is an opioid. We have prohibition laws designed for opioids blindly applied to any (in the western context) nontraditional drug. The German law on drugs is literally called "the painkiller law", for instance.
> Well said: why does a tax break bother people so much?
Several reasons. It distorts the market for one. One tax rate for me, another for thee. That's government picking favorites. Generally regarded as a bad thing.
The government decides who is owed what material goods. This is known as property rights. The destruction in this case would be equivalent to transferring the ownership of some factories to the government, exchanging those factories for something flammable on the open market and then setting fire to said flammable things. It's obviously wasteful, but definitely possible, and it won't directly and measurably impact anyone's quality of life. Investor confidence in your country will nosedive, though.
I don't particularly care about LLM use per se, but when I see LLM text it makes me think I'm about to read something devoid of content - just word vomit. The equivalent of yesteryear's listicle. This instinct usually serves me well. A good text is a good text. If an LLM wrote all of it that'd be fine with me, but that's usually not how things go.