This is just idiotic equivocation. The difference between Russia and Hitler is that Russia has legitimate national security concerns, for instance, not letting the world's largest military alliance (NATO) which is antogonistic to them, build defense infrastructure along their border, or choke off their ability to have a navy. The Nazis made no attempts to conceal the fact that one of their main national objectives was to invade eastern Europe and create a colonial German empire. Clearly you can see these two things are not the same, right?
I love the example you gave because it is demonstrative of one of the most important distinctions between your moral language and the language of geopolitics. If a Muslim attacks someone in a western country, then they will have violated a law. The recipient of the violence is a victim of an infringement of rights garunteed by the government which has authority through the social contract. On the world stage, there is no higher authority, rights, or laws. What you have are a set of nations, which by definition, are agents seeking to secure prosperity for themselves. Ukraine has certain objectives to secure their prosperity like, procuring a large conventional military or nukes so that they can defend their borders. Russia also has certain objectives that secure their prosperity, like maintaining access to the black sea and building natural gas pipelines into Europe. When these nations have objectives that conflict there are only two options: compromise or war, that's it, that is the reality. In this case neither side wanted to compromise, so there was a war.
It's also important to note that this conflict is not one-sided. Ukraine has dedicedly become a proxy for US and European power projection. This is not a genocide or some other form of needless violence. This is a classic example of powers butting heads and all parties refusing to take de-escalatory actions.
Ukraine didn't just disadvantage their neighbor. In international affairs, red lines are a common tool for expressing acceptable bounds of negotiation. Russia made it very explicit that if Ukraine joined NATO there would be conflict. We live in the real world, and "sovereignty" is not real; nations are not unconstrained agents that can do whatever they please. They have to weigh the effects of their actions and be willing and capable of defending the consequences. This has been true for all of human history, has never changed, and likely never will. You simply deluded yourself into thinking otherwise.
I will also add that in the modern world, peace has largely been maintained because the value of international commerce is much greater than the value derived from conflict. Economic integration is the best recipe for enduring tranquility. However, the US has pursued broad economic sanctions against Russia since the annexation of Crimea, all but ensuring that an invasion of Ukraine would be a profitable (or at least not harmful). In other words, the United States miscalculated, overplayed it's hand in pursuing a containment strategy against Russia and ultimately invited violence.
> everybody knows how to live in peace. Except Russia.
Talk about an extraordinary case of recency bias. Cheap shot, I know, but I had to make it.
Europe currently defends itself because that's all it CAN do. They abandoned their armies because the continent outsourced defense spending/industry to the United States and Russia following WWII.
Except it is literally is just rational geopolitics. The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not just a single whimsical choice by a mad dictator. There has been a decades long encirclement campaign by NATO which ultimately pushed too far. That's not to say that states joining NATO did not do so willingly and of their own accord, but that it played into a larger struggle for influence that disadvantaged Russia on the world stage.
The moral dimension is also completely illusory. Ukraine is fighting a war of attrition that's funding is due to the same cold-hearted power politics that Russia subscribes to. It greatly benefits the US and EU to keep Russia in an expensive, resource-intensive, prolonged military engagement. Put another way, the US is knowingly sacrificing Ukrainian lives and infrastructure because it gives us more power; however, at the end of the day we get to drape our actions in nice sounding rhetoric about supporting national independence even though that is merely accidental. Not to mention that the Ukrainian government has legitimately persecuted Russian-speaking minority populations in the country. Obviously, this has very little to do Russia's actual motivations for the war, but the point is the Russia's actions also have accidental good effects.
I'm not a manager, just a regular SDE. Maybe I'm not a typical AWS employee or in a typical team/org, but I personally don't worry much about making myself stand out. I just try my best at delivering good work (most of time it is just unseen ops) and hopefully earn due respect from the those around me.
That's not to say I think your critique is wrong though. Just not my experience.
Speaking from my experience at Amazon this is not the case. Any customer impact like this would necessitate a COE (correction of errors) report, which means a list of required action items to prevent such issues from happening again, which typically suck up at least man-month of labor. Not to mention the report itself, which has to be written by a manager.
In fact, there are regular AWS-wide meetings where L10 technical staff will randomly pick and review reports from across the organization. Getting picked for one of these is not a fun experience.
COEs are such a huge annoyance for teams that they create a strong incentive to be proactive in preventing issues like this from happening. One of the rules when it comes to writing COEs is that they are not the fault of individuals but processes; but in reality, no one wants to be the cause of one.
"Gothic cathedrals and Doric temples are mathematics in stone. Doubtless Pythagoras was the first in the Classical Culture to conceive number scientifically as the principle of a world-order of comprehensible things—as standard and as magnitude—but even before him it had found expression, as a noble arraying of sensuous-material units, in the strict canon of the statue and the Doric order of columns. The great arts are, one and all, modes of interpretation by means of limits based on number (consider, for example, the problem of space-representation in oil painting). A high mathematical endowment may, without any mathematical science whatsoever, come to fruition and full self-knowledge in technical spheres." ~ Spengler, Decline of the West
> in my experience, a change that stays local in Go ripples through lifetimes and trait bounds in Rust
imo extensive use of generics/trait bounds and explicit lifetimes in Rust is a huge code smell. Large projects should be making liberal use of trait objects and smart pointers to keep everything understandable and modular. Giving an agent a simple coding practice SOP for Rust should be enough to garuntee basically the same localized refactorability that Go has.
Completely agree! The author made a buggy android port of nintype (called keyboard 69) that I used for years. The UX was incredible, and every swipe system I've tried since feels downright clumsy by comparison. Two finger swipe is peak ergonomics, but unfortunately I think it's an innovation that's simply too niche.
I find matplotlib to be clunky and verbose compared to ggplot. When using python, I will often use https://plotnine.org/ because it gives me a nice ggplot like API.
Even taking the author's criticism about large context windows for granted, which in my experience are exaggerated, they are still a huge UX improvement over short windows. That reason alone is enough for me to support them.
Feel free dismiss my option by assuming I'm some ignoramus that doesn't know anything about how databases work.
I'm well aware of the underlying challenges that SQL provides convenient abstractions over, and what I'm saying is that it actually isn't all that helpful for complex use cases unless you know a decent amount about dbs; which at that point, I'd rather program against a thinner
, less abstract persistence API.
The flip-side of what you've stated is that SQL makes doing things that that SHOULD be hard, because they are stupid, stupidly easy. For instance, it's dead simple to make read queries with complex filters that join together an arbitrary number of tables and transactional updates that change values in rows across multiple tables. However, on large datasets or application that need high throughout, relying on those kinds of queries would be a terrible idea.
Furthermore, databases like Postgres use SSI by default which means that complex transactions that mix reads with writes can have subtle and hard to catch bugs that are completely non-obvious to new comers. I could easily forgive a junior developer for thinking they could implement an accurate counter in postgres using a transaction with a select then update to increment a value in a given row.
Scoffing and acting exasperated doesn't actually refute anything I said. I obviously don't disagree with you that SQL has been wildly useful and popular, but that has very little to do with my comment. SQL is an outdated and flawed technology, that is propped up by decades of institutionalization. You can say a similar thing about C++: that's it's one of the most popular and useful languages in existence, yet it's also a total trash fire that owes it's lasting success more to historical trends and institutional adoption then technical merit.