France being the only sensible one putting Putin back in his place by telling him "we also have nuclear warheads" instead of "we avoid escalation". That's how nuclear deterrent is supposed to work.
That strategy would work if you weren’t trying to reason with a Soviet-era psychopath whose only concern is his own legacy. If he’s on his last legs tomorrow you don’t think his final move will be nuclear revenge? This man has demonstrated that he will kill anyone who gets in his way, even his own citizens, in brutal ways.
That "psychopath" (more exactly - sociopath) values his palaces and riches more than burning in a nuclear war. I.e. he can bluff and blackmail, but he is a coward who is obsessed with money and hedonistic pursuits. That's why the idea conveyed to him that if he makes any nuclear attack he personally will be immediately killed (by conventional weapons) made him tone his idiotic threats down by a lot. Those who see their legacy in palaces with golden toilet brushes aren't going to die as martyrs.
Macron understood it well and basically told him to get lost with his threats, or in simple words - France also has nuclear weapons. That's the only language Putin understands.
Can't enjoy palaces and riches if you're on your death bed. Think about it. You've been a dictator for 20 years and killed anybody who stood in your way. Delusion has set in and you're convinced you've been poisoned by your enemy. Why wouldn't you get revenge while you still can?
It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me. He won't think twice about the lives that will be lost. He's constructed his own alternate historical timeline to justify his assault on Ukraine. He could do the same to justify dropping some nukes.
He'll try to enjoy them until the last moment, or flee to Africa in the style of Nazis fleeing to South America and such. That's his whole mentality - a thug who can only intimidate and blackmail but is an essence a coward.
> It is precisely the fact that dictators like Putin are so pampered and disconnected from the consequences of their actions that worries me.
Which is exactly the reason to make it clear that consequence of his actions like nuclear war would he his immediate death. I.e. the logic goes the other way around and that logic works. You can't use the logic of "let's not escalate" with such people.
Or actually radical: switch from our terrible first-past-the-post voting system to - say - ranked choice (or one of many alternatives; they're almost all better than fptp) and then primaries won't be so important and parties won't have so much power over our kinda-democratic-but-actually-oligarchic political system.
because we cant do that in the next 4 months as it would require a overwhelming enough demand from the electorate that a super majority of representatives in the house and senate along with the president would have to pass a constitutional amendment that is otherwise considered against their own interests, then it would need to be ratified by the states and pass through the inevitable challenges in the supreme court that seem dead set against anything resembleling democracy this year.
California state primaries are top-2, not FPTP turning the general election into essentially a run-off. Parties still dominate. Same with my city elections which use RCV.
I’m not sure why they would reduce party influence either. Features like being robust against spoilers would seem to most benefit major party candidates.
It's a two-round voting system. It is, by definition, not FPTP.
There only functional difference between it and say, the original French two-round system that Maurice Duverger (of Duverger's law) contrasted with FPTP is that someone who wins an outright majority in the first election (an open "primary" in California) is not immediately elected.
The fact the second round is FPTP doesn't change the overall voting system. With only two candidates for a single seat, most voting systems degenerate to FPTP, but none of the issues related to FPTP are present either (there are no clones, no strategic voting, etc.)
There's no reason this couldn't happen. States have great latitude to determine their own election laws, including how they allocate electoral votes or elect federal offices. Nebraska and Maine can split their electoral votes. Georgia requries 50% + 1 for US Senate and Governor instead of a plurality, and will have a runoff election if no candidate gets a majority in the general election. Ranked choice would just be another method. The problem is that the two ruling parties have very little incentive to introduce this.
This sometimes turns out very badly - in the UK it led to "faster than a lettuce goes bad" Liz Truss for example. Conservative party members are an odd bunch.
Labour also picked Jeremy Corbyn an election back. Ultimately the rest of the country didn't want to vote for him.
Notably Corbyn actually got more votes than Starmer in both elections he ran - the change is more to do with the right vote being split between the conservatives and reform, the conservatives losing the centrist vote after the clown show of the last 5 years, and a unofficial pact between Labour/LibDems prevented splitting the centrist/left vote the same way the right vote was split.
the fact that they were able to make that pact is probably because they're not miles apart and Corbyn couldn't get that to happen. e.g. I don't think I could ever have voted for him given his attitude on Ukraine but I could have voted for Starmer if that was what made sense in my area.
Sure, but people like you weren't sufficient to change the fact that Corbyn still got more votes.
The libdems of 2024 have a very different situation in that despite the Tory implosion they are weaker than ever. I'd put my money on them either still making the deal or getting buried if Labour had even more votes.
That's just not true, though. Starmer has only increased Labour's vote share by 1.7%. He didn't significantly outweigh the loss in votes by demotivating opponent vote. Tory voters were more likely to vote for Reform or the Lib Dems than stay home.
Labour's opposition not being united is probably more attribuable to the Conservative party itself not being united. The amount of voters leaving the Tories to go to the Lib Dems and Reform has steadily been increasing.
Besides, a significant part of motivating people to vote against Corbyn came from Starmer's wing of the party itself.
This is correct. There is a social context to this matter. The advocates of 'almost right is most cases is ok no harm done' are ignoring the (likely) operational and utility context of these tools.
Back in late 80s we were building automated Fortran to C converters. Client was in the aerospace field.
> What is the value if is done automatically, nobody learns anything and the code is just a transcript of the old one?
You may be shocked to learn that businesses using software have a different metric for the value of "code" than educating their (transient) code wranglers. The actual value of software is computational work. If a new language affords better tooling and availability of human resources, that is a win.
Yes, I was at a company that moved an application from Cobol to Java for exactly that purpose - having a mission critical application written in cobol is way harder to maintain than having that exact same application in Java.
In the longer perspective, you'll lose most good developers if you don't allow them to evolve and have some fun along the way. And without the developers, the source code is pretty much useless.
I think this is an interesting line of argument but its sort of reached its shallow depth on its 3rd exposition: it's not very complicated if I'm reading it correctly:
"Theoretically, developers could eschew jobs that don't allow them to creatively reinterpret code as they translate it."
It's a weak argument, because if you're translating even manually, it's not exactly the peak of creative self-expression.
There's plenty of rote code that we'd all be happy to automate translation of --- I used this technique with GPT 3.0 to get math code translated across languages for Google's color library.
> you'll lose most good developers if you don't allow them to evolve and have some fun along the way
That's actually something I really like about tools like GH Copilot! It gives me an excuse to try out something using a new language, but with less of the productivity dip that comes from chasing syntax or stdlib calls. It doesn't produce code that is as good as an expert in that language, but it's a really convenient set of training wheels
So it becomes easier justify, at least with my current organization
My personal view is that military adventures were generally a drag on economic growth that never paid for themselves.
People at the time argued slavery, resource exploitation and trade were economically important and could only happen through imperial strength.
But I’d argue that 1) those things generally happened anyway post independence 2) labour / resource costs aren’t that important for long run economic growth.
It’s possible to loot and burn a country without creating much net economic value.
William Jardine’s subjugation of China made him a lot of personal profit, but it’s dubious his enterprise ever paid enough tax to cover the cost of the opium war. Sending navies across the world is expensive.
Aside from wealth transfer capitalism is good for raising money for new ventures. Some of that kicked off around then eg.
>The Muscovy Company was the first major chartered joint stock English trading company. It was established in 1555
and profitable ventures eg. by Sir Francis Drake
>Drake returned to England in 1580 and became a hero; his circumnavigation raised an enormous amount of money for England's coffers, and investors received a return of some 5,000 per cent.
which may be increased enthusiasm for ventures.
That maybe incentivized people to get rich starting steam engine companies, somewhat like how SV works today, but not like that in ancient Rome?
Guessing a bit here. I'm not a historian. Quotes from Wikipedia.
I did to a visit to Lincolnshire a while back to research some family history of relatives who were there in the 1800s and while the place is a backwater now, it was very SV like back in 1850 with people getting rich quick and building huge houses based on the then tech boom with was railway engines.
We have not. Look at the economic history of the latter half of the 19th century in the US. We haven't experienced those levels and frequency of market swings since the creation of the Federal Reserve. Also, the Great Depression was a world-wide event. That was our first clue that isolationist policy was misguided.
> So CrowdStrike is deployed as third party software into the critical path of mission critical systems and then left to update itself.
TIL that US government has pressured foreign nations to install a mystery blob in the kernel of machines that run critical software "for compliance".
If this wasn't a providential goof on the part of Crowdstrike -- the entire planet is now aware of this little known fact -- then some helpful soul in Crowdstrike has given us a heads-up.
and related results that show there is not a procedure which can prove all true statements in logic + arithmetic, arithmetic matters of course because we need to handle dimensions, money, etc. This doesn't mean you can't solve the problem in front of you much of the time but it's not like a SQL server which has a definite algorithm to return all the answers all the time in a finite time.
covers a wide range of practical problems that turn up such as reasoning about other people's beliefs, about things that were true in the past or will be true in the future, things that are possible, things that are necessary, etc. People build modal logics that can handle one of these things but there is no "standard" that handles all of them.
Logical negation is tricky. You might know P or you might know ¬P but maybe you don't know anything about P. For some cases you want to query for "There is no evidence for P", other times you want to query for a solid "P". You definitely don't want a system that spends a lot of time enumerating all the things it can't prove though because that's endless
Reasoning over probability is essential in our imperfect world. You might think the system could store
P 80% probability
¬P 20% probability
but probabilities in the real world are conditional so it is maybe
P Q 10%
¬P Q 35%
P ¬Q 25%
¬P ¬Q 30%
which is not so bad but if you have hundreds of predicates the problem gets intractable but it's essential if you want to make a medical diagnosis, disambiguate the sense of a word, etc. (Note this problem relates to machine learning where it is all about learning a probability distribution, you can't get enough samples to measure every "cell" of the joint probability distribution, practical machine learning algorithms make good guesses)
There also is the problem of keeping the database consistent over time as it changes, see
There are a lot of answers to these problems that will please some people some of the time but there's nothing like the C programming language or Linux that anybody can pick up and start working with.
+France