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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • I’m not sure of that really working, hasn’t been tested after all. Shootouts on the streets don’t lead to everyone getting shot. So, say, US warns “everybody big” that they are nuking someplace, but don’t want to nuke anyone else. If “everybody big” are kinda fine with it, they won’t launch nukes in response. That means there’s a place nuked and no MAD.




  • The idea of the US dropping all support for Ukraine is pretty damn scary to me.

    Only it seems that support for Ukraine is slowly drying out anyway. So whether electing Biden will help that is questionable.

    One can’t blame them for not trusting anything signed by Russia, though. But maybe they should have conceded on some of the occupied territories, when Russia wasn’t demanding anything they didn’t hold, which is as close to “begging for peace” as you can expect from an adversary 3 times stronger.

    Dunno, I think no matter what the outcome of that election, for Ukraine it’d be best to sign some treaty by September. Same for Armenia, only unless somebody forces Aliyev, it may not get such an opportunity.



  • I’m not sure it makes sense to talk of them as of separate figures. The US state policy, internal and foreign, under both is eerily similar and continuous, with Trump it looked like “dumpster fire of the day”, with Biden (and Obama before Trump) it looked like “another careful calculated decision”, but they are all in the same general direction.

    Biden cleaned up Trump’s mess and avoided a complete imminent global financial collapse.

    Was it really Biden, though? Global economy is self-organizing and kinda reliable, like the Internet (by design, not by its real topology and those big underwater cables with no backup connecting whole continents).


  • Well, you’re in the US, so it’s not your problem if they decide to nuke someone outside it or, say, greenlight an invasion. While I have some of my family and myself in a place theoretically attractive to nukes, and half of my other family in a country likely to be invaded. Fortunately the rest is distributed between USA and a country which, despite all the cries, is in no significant danger.



  • When I switched to Linux (year 2011), jumping through hoops reduced significantly, because:

    running games on builtin Intel cards etc, that is, kinda second-class citizen hardware, was anyways PITA ;

    it made my stuff run terribly faster ;

    those hoops are not too different in complexity from installing mods for games under Windows ;

    for trying to learn programming Linux is much less problematic (have ADHD, so didn’t learn much back then, but) ;

    the main issue of uninstalling McAffee went away for free ;

    I was at school, so didn’t have any problems with office suites’ incompatibilities and such ;

    and also Linux in 2011 was in general easier, don’t believe RedHat fanboys and such, it was very nice before PulseAudio, systemd and widespread adoption of GTK3, say, to change colors you just needed a 20-line .gtkrc-2.0 and .Xresources, and your WM’s config file, it’s 20 minutes from fresh install to feel normal ;

    the community was friendlier, somehow back then RTFM was considered acceptable, but people rarely used it, now everybody behaves as if RTFM was very bad, but also too many people use it, sometimes to avoid admitting that they are wrong and a certain thing is absent in TFM.



  • It’s actually simple.

    HIG, UX, ergonomics, all that - it doesn’t build up. Acceptable complexity of a pretty mechanical normal 80s’ UI\UX is the same as of a modern one. Humans don’t evolve over decades, they evolve over spans of time which are as good as eternity. They still need the same kind of complexity in tools they use.

    A control panel for a loader that a factory worker should be able to use is as complex as a workflow on a computer can be. And that’s very explicitly accounting for the fact that loader’s or lift’s control panel doesn’t change every fucking day and the user remembers it, so computer UIs should be simpler than those of lifts and loaders!

    You just don’t make UI\UX more complex than that. There are things humans can learn to do, and there are things they often can’t and they shouldn’t.

    The issue is that this creates a bottleneck for clueless project managers, UI designers and such. They can’t throw together some shit in 30 minutes. They have to choose. They have to test. They don’t want that. And no regulation makes them do that, because if a loader has an unclear UI\UX, you might kill someone, while if an email program has that, you’ll just get very nervous.