twoquestions

People have been screaming about a recession for the last year now, with not a whole lot of hard data to back it up. Inflation aside, the US is doing well, and even on that metric we're doing better than most of Europe right now. Stories of doom grab eyeballs, and a bunch of people really want the US/Europe to have a bad time, so there's also a lot of wishcasting going on.

My dude, Richard Spencer is still on Twitter and can post!

Also, there's been a ton of Truly Harmful stuff the Blue Check brigade has posted over the years that I certainly wouldn't want to be responsible for hosting.

I'd also be careful about banning whole countries at once, Iranians/Russians != the Iranian/Russian state, though apologia/misinformation around atrocities should still eat the banhammer.

Personally, I've seen a lot better communities around smaller places like Discords/forums, so to make money I'd encourage people to group their follows into circles, like "Gamedev" or "Central/Eastern Europe foreign policy" or whatever else you're interested in, so you can be better insulated from the ragebait of the day unless you go looking for it.

> Whereas, I find myself going for almost academic perfection (i.e read all docs first) / mastery. Really procrastinate hard when I hit the wall and just hope for things to click. And then just get sleepy when I do start reading code. This means if I'm in my space I'm super productive, but anytime I come across something I don't have an expert level knowledge I come to complete halt.

I had this problem too. I'm working on getting over it by writing dumbshit stuff that I need at work. Mourn the perfect crystalline structure you have in your head as to How It Should Work, and understand that Good Enough now beats the tar out of Perfect never. Eventually you'll start improving the dumbshit stuff bit by bit, and as you write more stuff you'll get asymptotically closer and closer to the perfect thing you imagined once, but can realistically never be realized.

Good luck!

Ah, good to know, thanks for the heads up.

This is from February of 2022, and we've had significant changes on the ground since then.

For a more detailed look at what's been going on, ISW has some fairly fact-based reporting on the situation.

https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-...

I find it more than a little funny that they're failing to conceal their obvious contempt for Russian incompetence in the last couple months, at the beginning of the war they were as neutral as one can get.

There's a population that has an itch for this kind of hard-core simulation, much like there's a niche for ultra-hard platformers, or people who beat Elden Ring with a chef hat and a soup ladle.

It's one of those games where it's not everyone's jam, but for those who like this sort of thing there's not much else out there that scratches this itch.

I might try to use this the next time I need to do some one-off process at work, getting a single GUI executable with no dependencies on another machine sounds really nice.

So people are generally incapable of governing themselves, and require goals to be imposed on them to make meaningful progress?

I sure as hell hope I'm reading you wrong, because yikes that is a frightening ideology.

I'll be putting this on the proper place as well, but the Windows install instructions don't produce a working install. Whenever I try to do anything with Elixir at all (including ask for the version) it immediately crashes.

Luckily WSL generally works, though the Ubuntu package repositories haven't been updated yet, which isn't surprising with the holiday weekend. Mac works great.

Have you looked at either Raylib or SFML? Both are somewhat high-level graphics abstraction libraries, but neither are anywhere near the weight or functionality of a proper game engine.

https://www.raylib.com/ https://www.sfml-dev.org/

Or is something like this not what you're looking for?

Looks like two Germans, one a Turkish immigrant.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/10/europe/biontech-pfizer-vaccin...

The Pfizer vaccine for one.

> have driven up the cost of fuel (which benefits them, an energy exporter),

Urals crude is trading $20-$30 below Brent, and China and India have Russia over a barrel when negotiating prices. https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/urals-brent-pric...

The war has not been going well for Russia at all, stagnant at best https://understandingwar.org/project/ukraine-project

> is substantially richer

Russia has been putting out very cherry-picked data on their economy, which Western journalists have been taking at face value. They've been unable to make more PGMs, and their civilian sector is getting savaged.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4167193

Perun's Youtube channel has been a great deep-dive source into the war economy in general. If you're at all interested in how governments acquire arms, he's an indispensable watch. TL;DW: The time for Russia to win the war was February, now it's a matter of how many people and how much wrecked steel and how much of Ukraine he wants to make into a wasteland before he says uncle.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCC3ehuUksTyQ7bbjGntmx3Q

EDIT: Because I can't reply, Good Times Bad Times is good too. They're a bit more high-level and wider scope than Perun, and I'd recommend them as well.

Correct, the last POTUS that did something to meaningfully impact gas/oil prices was Bush II when he invaded Iraq, and Obama a little bit when he decreased Iranian oil sanctions.

For better or worse, we don't live in anything resembling a command economy.

Why should Ferrari move on to something other than clay and carving knives? I really can't see a render on a computer screen of any size giving you the same visceral understanding of how a car looks walking up to it and moving around it, which is absolutely critical for a premium product like that. Maybe a VR rig might be useful in prototyping, I don't know.

That comment makes him look even more like a short-sighted asshat.

Took me a minute to set up a test meeting, but it looks like you can!

Can you still share your screen with this version?

I was going to say Elixir, thanks for mentioning it.

I'll also add that Haskell, Clojure, and other functional languages will help you think in an entirely new way to program. Python or Ruby are also less mind-expanding, but was a nice change of pace for me at least from my C# day job.

Learning window functions and more advanced bits of SQL that an ORM doesn't give you for free can also be a fun time, along with getting deeper into what indexes can really do.

Not a complete picture, but please make sure you have enough contrast. Even this very site is a bit guilty, but Apple's stuff is especially bad about having gray text on a slightly darker background, making it hard as hell to read. Please put enough contrast! https://www.contrastrebellion.com/

Also look at more modern government websites, from both the US and UK. They aren't pretty in the conventional sense, but they work!

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/government-design-principles

https://designsystem.digital.gov/

Good examples:

https://www.healthcare.gov/

https://bmv.ohio.gov/

True facts, this. My spouse never had to wonder where the electric or gas money was coming from, even though their family is really frugal despite making really good money, and I'm still surprised at their decisions that I irrationally describe as extravagant even though they're better decisions all told.

Even though I have a great job now and have for years, I still find myself shying away from good things that I really can afford, or buying cheap shoes when dropping a Benjamin is better even in the immediate term.

A tad offtopic, but this article is really clearly written and looks really good, same with healthcare.gov and the Ohio BMV's site https://bmv.ohio.gov/ .

Am I strange for enjoying modern government website design?

HN plays really nice with Dark Reader, I've been using it for years.

https://darkreader.org/

Thank you for posting the actual quantitative data. All the sound and fury in the world pales in comparison to the awesome and terrifying power of Microsoft Excel!

It's probably much simpler than that. If Putin's going to keep invading other countries for little or no reason, what's that nutbar going to do to your property? There's a $20 term for this but I forget what it is.

In addition to the reasons others here have said, of course.

There's never been a war that he didn't like, the excitement in his voice when he describes the Chechen or Georgian conflicts or the Chinese annexation of Tibet or Iraq's annexation of Kuwait really skeeves me out.

Good info, but keep is frankly weird perspective in mind.

This guy's insight has been enlightening, and highlights how alien Russian Authoritarian thought is compared to Western Individualist thought.

One thing that's been especially shocking is the relatively low status the military has, which seems insane to us here in the West. Here, it's "Thank you for your service!", there it's a very low-status thing. It makes more sense once you realize the military represents a coup risk for a dictator, and has to be kept politically weak to preserve the State. Our military's undying loyalty to our civilian governments is something we here in the West take for granted, and is severely underrated.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1502673952572854278.html

Thank you for the tldr.

What I've done to combat this is helped lead a local historical organization, that way I get human interaction every week at least.

What might work for you is to set up a meetup/casual thing where someone gives a presentation on a technology people are mildly interested in, like Tailwind or somesuch. If there's demand for that kind of casual interaction (and I don't doubt there is), people will be falling over themselves to help you.

Personally I really like the work/casual divide in my socialization, where my social interaction and work aren't welded together, where work issues can't pollute your friendships and vice versa. This is especially good if you work at a place that appreciates your work but is very different culturally than you. I worked at an oil/gas company for several years, and while I liked some of the formal processes they had, I'm of a profoundly different culture than they are, despite looking like them.

With your social network and work network split off like this, you'll be much more flexible in both.

Good luck!

Toledo's pretty good too, and there's a bunch of smaller cities around that have already shrunk as much as they're going to. Roads are decent too, even though everyone complains about the construction (until they take a trip through Michigan).

Be careful going too cheap, as the rural parts have utterly terrible Internet service. A buddy of mine can't even play Deep Rock Galactic with us and his Discord calls sound robotic.

To be honest I haven't the slightest idea. If forced to guess, I'd say it was the quasi-realistic wargame simulation of a potential conflict within living memory awakens violent nationalist rhetoric in people? Either way, it's very much not the same as the "your mother" type insults you see in a stereotypical Call of Duty match, it's a whole different dimension of shitposting.

Paradox grand strategy games also have this effect, but that community is better about shutting down their edgelords.