Andromeda Strain makes a good story, but viruses and bacteria tend to evolve with their hosts and environment. It is unlikely that any virus or bacteria brought from mars would have a serious impact on humans or our environment. We probably aren't good hosts to something that's been evolving in martian conditions.
All those countries were devastated by the "democratization". I would like to see one example where that went good for the local population in general and where that brought progress and prosperity.
> All those countries were devastated by the "democratization".
I'm not sure what you mean by "devastated". Software development jobs market is flourishing and my friends from other industries are not doing that bad either. Are you watching/reading Russian news sources by any chance?
Software development market in Ukraine is flourishing because its completely decoupled from local economy with most people working in outsourcing companies. Hardly definition of success.
Country is in the middle of frozen civil war. GDP per person in Ukraine is still below 2013 and is half of GDP per person in Belarus.
Change in government need to come from within - not imposed by outsiders. Very few cases when revolution/regime change led to even ok outcome.
Besides problem with living in middle income soft authoritarian countries is mostly middle income and not authoritarian part. That’s the reason there is so much focus on corruption in protests - people just want more benefits/free money and assume that all money are stolen by corrupt government when in reality there is just not that much money in the country. Obviously regime change does not reduce corruption nor expand size of economy so all recent revolutions just made situation worse for common people.
> Software development market in Ukraine is flourishing because its completely decoupled from local economy with most people working in outsourcing companies. Hardly definition of success.
I'm not working for outsourcing company.
> Country is in the middle of frozen civil war. GDP per person in Ukraine is still below 2013 and is half of GDP per person in Belarus.
So why do you think people have not elected some pro-Russian politician? Or asked Yanukovich to come back so we could all go back to glorious-high-GDP-2013 times? In fact, it seems that significant part of population of Belarus (with their high GDP and all) are starting to see drawbacks in that arrangement instead. Really makes you think, huh?
> Change in government need to come from within - not imposed by outsiders. Very few cases when revolution/regime change led to even ok outcome.
This is very presumptuous from your side. I remember a lot of people going each evening after day of coding in cushy software company office to participate in revolution in 2014, risking their freedom and life. In fact, "People in internet say revolution is sponsored by CIA, but I'm still waiting for my paycheck!" was a common joke back at those days, so please spare me your condescension.
>Besides problem with living in middle income soft authoritarian countries is mostly middle income and not authoritarian part. That’s the reason there is so much focus on corruption in protests - people just want more benefits/free money and assume that all money are stolen by corrupt government when in reality there is just not that much money in the country. Obviously regime change does not reduce corruption nor expand size of economy so all recent revolutions just made situation worse for common people.
Revolution of Dignity started as a reaction to Yanukovich backpedaling on association agreement with the European Union under Russian pressure. You might want to educate yourself on the subject before patronizing us stupid poor people from "soft authoritarian countries".
It's amazing how every time Ukraine is mentioned in a thread, a poster (from Mukhosransk or some such place) suddenly appears to tell everyone about the virtues of living in an authoritarian petrostate.
Mine has 900 and this is my 3rd or 4th. I'm as western european as possible (literally living in the most western country in europe). My last 5 or so years, most of my social circle has been Ukranian, Belarussian and Russian people. My neighbour here in Portugal is Ukrainian and my family knows her for over 20 or so years.
95%+ of shit I hear about these countries is from US/Western europeans that know little more than what they learned in CoD and some Holliwood movies and making these ideological thoughts. They have good and bad things, good and bad people, but the view from '1st world countries' towards them is silly and it would be even funny if some of these countries and people weren't going through these difficulties
@odshoifsdhfs: Well, I hate to quibble, but it's actually 'Belarusian' (just one 's', you see). I've lived in Western Europe (UK) nearly all my life and I'm afraid I disagree with you fundamentally: '95%' of the people in 'the West' are quite indifferent to the broader region of Eastern Europe, but never in my life have I encountered the kinds of chauvinistic attitudes even approaching those I encountered from Russians. To give you an example: 'govori po-chelovecheski' (in Russian - literally 'speak like a human being') -- can you believe this s**t? Also 'US/Western Europeans' aren't living in tinpot dictatorships with aspirations to annex territories from their neighbours -- a slight, but important difference, which to my mind excuses any ignorance of the region and its politics.
> It's a fucking war there, people are sent to war to kill and to get killed.
For me it is "here". The fact that for you it is "there" makes me think that you should talk more to actual people that are living in the countries you mentioned in previous post instead of lecturing them over internet with copy/paste of Russian propaganda "news" pieces.
Besides, it might be a novel concept for you, but here we have an actual elections. People can always vote for some Russian puppet (Medvedchuk, for example) and "join" Russia. I guess majority thinks that "fucking war" is better alternative in this situation.
> GDP in Ukraine is ~3,5k$ per year.
Your point being? It is not like Ukraine was some rich local Eastern European Switzerland until sneaky CIA/Soros sponsored NGOs "destabilized" it.
> Your software developer friends are just outliers there.
I envy your tenacity fighting against ill-intentioned HNers.
I was born in one of those countries mentioned by @levosmetalo above and the common running joke was too "People in internet say revolution is sponsored by CIA, but I'm still waiting for my paycheck!" and that was coming from people that were _truly_ putting themselves out there.
Anyway, I don't care (sadly) for having an identity on HN anymore, several times I created a user in good faith only to be downvoted to oblivion discussing these matters. Yes, I know, I shouldn't be commenting on those threads. I can't help it, I grew up in a place awfully destroyed by communist.
There is no independent TV in Russian Federation for 20 years. State controlled media spreads all possible lies. Everything to distract from internal problems. Right now state breaks down peaceful protests, 1600 detained, each is fined by about $200, that's almost half of the average wage ($500). Opposition leader in jail by fabricated claim, requires medical help, poisoned previous year. Income is falling, retirement age increased. State leaders are corrupt beyond possible.
> Sure, and I know some people for whom it was also "here" and now it's "there" because they can't live any more in their hometown because of war.
I also hope that Russia withdraws their military and financial support for terrorists who prevent your friend from going home. However, it seems Russia wants further confrontation and is now amassing significant military presence in that region, so we won't have much choice in that matter.
> For you guys "here" in Kiev Donbas is also "there".
Not really. For most of the people in other parts of Ukraine who are under constant risk of being conscripted the Donbas is very much "here".
> And that's why Ukraine will never be a prosperous country, as long as you consider a "fucking war" a better alternative to anything.
Commendable sentiment. I would also prefer a peaceful world for all of us.
> The majority has been brainwashed by "western" propaganda to hate everything Russian
I'm a Russian speaker with some Russian ancestry. Please tell me more how I "hate everything Russian".
> to the point it would rather have "fucking war" against their ex citizen in Donbas and Crimea instead of letting them choose where and how they want to live.
There is no Iron Curtain anymore. People who want to live in any other country (including Russia) are obviously free to do so.
> Those guys in Donbas and Crimea also had elections and referendums, not worse than those in Ukraine
They are not recognized intentionally and and were conducted by occupying military personnel. Overall, we both know that "our town votes to join another country" is not how it works anywhere. Just ask Chechen people how it went for them, if you would like to know how Russia deals with such issues.
> they decided they don't want to live with someone who is denying them basic human rights based on the wrong ethnicity
This is just old Russian propaganda trope "Bloodthirsty Ukrainian Nazis want to genocide Russian-speaking people". Overall, I never felt that my rights were denied to me due to language of choice or my obviously Russian surname.
> Would you rather kill them all than let them go?
Have you stopped beating your wife?
> And since you want to kill all the ethnic Russians why are you surprised that Russia won't let you do it?
So you started your message with incredibly pacifist statement "will never be a prosperous country, as long as you consider a "fucking war" a better alternative to anything" and end it with approving of Russian aggression under flimsy pretext that they are preventing some imagined genocide of ethnic Russians? I sense double standards here.
> NATO is happy to have war against Russia or Russian allies to the last Ukrainian solder and civilian.
This is factually incorrect. Obama repeatedly denied lethal weapon sales to Ukraine during active phase of the conflict [1]. The main objective for European politicians also seems to be some fake outrage about Russia's actions to put a show for their electorate while continuing business as usual behind closed doors [2]. If anything, "NATO" would happily give whole Ukrainian territory to Russia in order to end costly sanctions, if they could somehow manage to do so without war, refugees and overall humanitarian disaster (with obvious exception of Poland and Baltic states who are fully aware that they could be next).
Ukraine is a big country. When you look at the part close to Russia, yes, that is a warzone. When you look at places like Lviv... warzone??? Yeah right, you can just travel there buddy.
Then you also get which country is doing the destabilization, and it sure as hell isn't the EU.
> Then you also get which country is doing the destabilization, and it sure as hell isn't the EU.
That's a pretty simplistic view of how international politics and geostrategy is played.
ATO expansion is undesirable to Russia and counter to agreements made between Russia and NATO. Russia has also been testing Western responses to its salami incursions beginning with Abkhazia and now Ukraine. The most it has gotten so far are sanctions (probably better than a full scale war at this point, but longer term this tactic may not succeed as Russia keeps chewing away). American meddling and financing of Euromaidan to topple Yanukovych and shake up Ukrainian politics is what opened the door to Russian pretexts to invade a country whose borders are not only an unstable Soviet construct (culturally speaking), but which plays an important territorial role in Russian security (control of Crimea allows control of the Sea of Azoz).
You can probably add NordStream II to the mix, but that's more about gaining the upper hand over Central Europe in cooperation with Germany, hence the farce of EU unity, and in this case, where energy security and its geopolitical consequences are concerned.
Thus the need for a Central European bloc that can withstand the grind of American/Western and Russian cultural and geopolitical tectonics. The Three Seas Initiative is ostensibly supposed to accomplish this, exploiting American backing, at least in the beginning. Belarus had historically been oriented toward this center of gravity until the 19th century. The Belarusian opposition certainly leans in the historical direction and the only other alternative is Russian vassalage. This Central European bloc incidentally would function like a buffer that would also serve the security interests of Europe in general.
> Ukraine democratically decides to prefer EU over Russia, maybe all parties need to live with that.
Russia has been opposing the expansion of NATO for decades, and Ukrainian politicians at different moments were aiming to join NATO (rather than signing memorandums not to join NATO). I suppose, we Ukrainians can be upset at how unfair it is that our sovereignty is not respected, but that won't earn us any more agency. Russians are the ones with the nukes, overwhelmingly stronger military and with opinions on the matter, so maybe we've got to be smarter about how we navigate through challenges ahead of us.
> That's a pretty simplistic view of how international politics and geostrategy is played.
I see how profound is your sophisticated understanding of high art of geopolitics...
> counter to agreements made between Russia and NATO.
Do you see Russia keeping to any agreement it had with NATO now?
What I see is politicians of NATO member countries running around Putin like headless chicken, trying to decipher some "tough geopolitical riddle," while the later laughs, and keeps sending them his KGB agents.
I don’t know what to make of this comment; it’s certainly wrong by a wide margin. The entire country’s GDP cannot be less than I take home per paycheck. I thought maybe it was per-capita GDP, but the 2021 IMF estimate is $13k—almost 4x your figure. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PP...
That's value of GDP (nominal) per capita, year 2019. 2021 estimate is $3,984 [1]. Not much, yes, but that's in post USSR country that's fighting eighth year Russia agression.
And i'm pretty sure that Donbas (separatist region) is receiving weapons not from the west. So in Ukrainian scenario i'm nor sure who has destabilised that region. By the way if you look at Ukrainian GDP over time it shows growth over past years.
You are so wrong about Ukraine. We live in a democratic country since 1991. Russian puppet used force to break down peaceful protests, this started escalation. He made attempt than to criminalize meetings [1], laws described as "draconian", "dictatorship", and was overthrown.
There were democratic elections next month. And another since than. Different parties, different leaders. There is no civil war here, that's proxy war by Russia and everyone knows it. Russian leaders, Russian mercenaries, Russian weapon, Russian money, sometimes even Russian army. That's openly stated by Russian mercenary leaders.
There is no reason for civil war. Everyone understands both Ukrainian and Russian. My native tongue is Russian, I live in Russian speaking city, and I am grateful to our army that protects us from Russian mercenaries. Occupied territories even by founders described as fascist states. Life is rough there. Population greatly decreased, a lot of refugees scattered around Ukraine, Russian speaking refugees, and everywhere they were welcomed.
What about Poland, the Baltic States, Czechia and Slovakia, Hungary? Also devastated? I’m sure we’d do much better with our friends in Moscow calling the shots.
Calling the Revolutions of 1989 a "Western coup" seems wrong. And blindly stating it's better to be a puppet of the West than Russia is not really backed up by history and ignores the turmoil of any transition period.
Poland is currently circling the drain in toilet. The regime that gained power in 2015 did so with the help of Russia* and is covertly pro-Russian (watch their actions, not their words). It's no longer a democracy but an informational autocracy - like Venezuela, Russia, Ecuador, Peru, Malaysia, Hungary.
* Marek Falenta imported coal from Russia and owes A LOT of money to Russian raw resource companies. The restaurants where the illegal wiretapping took place were set up by Russian raw resource companies.
* "Obcym Alfabetem - Jak ludzie Kremla i PiS zagrali podsłuchami" (Grzegorz Rzeczkowski)
* "Macierewicz i jego tajemnice" (Tomasz Piątek)
* "Rydzyk i Przyjaciele" (Tomasz Piątek)
* https://oko.press/pis-wciaz-rzadzi-bo-zyjemy-w-informacyjnej-autokracji/ (Anna Mierzyńska)
I don’t know about all these other countries, but I am Belarusian (though living abroad now) and it’s not some mysterious forces that are forcing us to change leadership. I don’t personally know anyone in my circle of Belarusian acquaintances who doesn’t think it should’ve been over for Lukashenko decades ago, and that he is a corrupt, self-dealing, mini-despot.
Former Yugoslavia countries are doing pretty well actually. Genocides has been stopped, nations were able to establish their own countries, none of them returned to a dictatorship, all have democratically elected governments. Definitely better than before.
You have things backwards. It was an economic decline that helped to motivate the collapse of Yugoslavia. If things in Yugoslavia had stayed as nice as in the 1960s and early 1970s -- the era of the vikendica and middle-class holidays in Bali, -- nationalist grievances might not have gained ground.
That's a bold claim. It was a communist dictatorship first - not sure if there is a reasonable way to compare GDP of a communist country with a normal country. Then there was an endless civil war - that's hardly good for economy too.
Today these are quite comparable to other Eastern European countries. Croatia has a larger GDP per capita than Romania, Montenegro is somewhere in Turkey's league, Serbia is pretty poor, but still much better than Belarus and Ukraine.
The US propped up murderous dictators in both, more explicitly in South Korea but they also helped a war criminal entrench the LDP in Japan. Their shift to democracy happened much later and was not the result of a Western coup.
I can speak for Venezuela, and the corrupt murderer dictator party has been in power for just over 20 years. The country was completely ruined by the "corrupt murderer dictator" without any input from "the West".
The sanctions started 2-3 years ago. 5 years ago I had to buy milk and diapers for my newborn girl in the black market because the govt destroyed the economy. So don't try to "explain" the situation to me, since I'm living it in the flesh.
Not only that, they have been in power for over 20 years, with the highest oil prices ever. They've consistenly stolen all of the country's resources and destroyed the economy during all these years. The sanctions started 2-3 years ago.
The problem is that West is not helping them enough. Try finishing Iraq first before getting into other places. Building Iraq will take more time than bombing Iraq. It will need sending money instead of extracting oil. The problem is that, no, that's not what people want. You only want Sadam to go and don't care about anything else. The media, the NGO, the activists just move on to next target because it is always easy to pointing out a problem than fixing a problem.
You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to package almost all dependencies with the application, while on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part of the distribution.
No. On Linux, the only stable ABI is the kernel. On Windows, the stable ABI and API includes many platform components outside of the kernel (in fact, the syscall interface itself is undocumented and NOT backward compatible on Windows). The Windows platform APIs are very expansive and cover a lot of territory that on Linux is covered by non-ABI-stable dependencies.
> It does appear as if this government really does not want freelancing to be a viable option.
This is the key. Freelancers earning their living on the internet are not inherently dependent on government and are much more likely to support opposition and fight back against the corrupt government.
It's easy to control people working in overblown administration or public/government sector, or in companies working for them, but controlling free financially independent people not afraid of dying of hunger if they oppose is not that easy.
Corruption and incompetence have been the "standard" of the Serbian administration for a long time, regardless of the political party in power.
The current goverment is just milking the ones caught breaking the law because of the economy being cash-strapped and well... because they can!
I still think it should be fair to offer them the best terms under which they could have incorporated (eg. for anyone with under 4.500 EUR a month it'd be self-employment with fixed rate taxation that was available to anyone), but to pretend that protesting freelancers were not breaking the law is dishonest imo.
Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.
- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters
- opening Signal displays empty frame far too long
- it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls
- forwarding message from chat to chat is not working
- messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.
And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.
Depends on what you consider "real work". I would say 99% of business analysts in any enterprise level company do real work 1% of the time. The rest is filled with bulshitting, talking, harassing others or actively looking through the office windows while waiting for someone to do something.
This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text. Then it can apply all shady practices that it previously was too expensive to do because storing voice and extracting information from it required huge storage costs and actual human labour.
Or worst, just imagine what some government you don't trust could do with all those voice call transcripts.
This codec has nothing to do with what you're worried about. There's no current technical limitation preventing what you're describing. Google doesn't do it because it makes no sense for their business and because your phone calls aren't routed through Google's servers. Governments outside the US are already doing it.
It sounds more like a "offline" codec, not a Google service compressing your voice so I don't immediately see how Google would violate our privacy here this time.
This will make voices radically more correlatable, most likely. It's a more effective model for voice, it has run endless regressions & found better patterns to model human sounds upon. That could well make processing & comparing pieces of speech data less computationally expensive.
I don't see much relation to surveillance & transcription issues. This technology does not, would not change the field of battle significantly, if such a battle were about. Which it probably is, in some countries, perhaps even applying to Google-touched, -relayed, or Google-held data.
> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.
Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.
Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.
The big wave of outsourcing in 2000s was a disaster. This is not just about knowledge. It is also about cultural differences that are sometimes more limiting than not having face to face time. It is about timezone differences that make it hard to have calls or meetings.
The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.
I am reminded of my experience working for a German medical equipment company.
We have distributed shared service centres around the world. Policy, best-practices, etc are formulated in the head office. For some reason we have continual problems with colleagues from one South American region who never follow best-practices and cause a lot of additional work for other teams who have to clean-up after them. I believe this is exactly what we talk about when we discuss cultural issues. We also have problems with giving these colleagues additional training and mentorship because they prefer to start a lot later in the morning, so our working hour overlap is very minimal.
> I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak.
Depending on what you consider "in the wild" but German rap is very popular in Germany and other German-speaking countries. People from Germany usually don't rap in English or French. Smudo is an old school, but are quite a bit of rapper that are popular right now, like Capital Bra, Apache 207, Samra, Lea, Mero, Loredana, Bushido, Sido, Olexesh, Kollegah, Farid Bang, RAF Camora, ... just on top of my head.
