"One thing that helped me immensely in my career is understanding that my relationship with a company is a business relationship"
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?
My comment is not meant to encourage removing kindness and humanity from the relationship. It's meant as a reminder that the other party in the relationship (the company) does not necessarily bring those values to the table.
I would also like to live in a world where humane values are reflected in personal and business relationships to the point where the line between personal and business relationships blurs.
It always boggles my mind that python is so popular while being so unfriendly and hard to use. Terrible package management. Poor typing system. Useless stack traces. Unintuitive syntax (no ternary operator?!). And yet it has become the default language almost.
I guess the way forward now would be to "make python good". Thank goodness uv is trying.
I personally don't think this "use a dependency for every little thing" npm development style is good for software quality, performance, maintainability, etc. The complaints I see about Python in this regard seem to be coming from that mindset.
Using the included batteries, and just adding a small number of well vetted extras had worked great in my experience.
I like Python of short scripts. Anything over 100 lines and bash is painful. Python works great up to about 50,000 lines of code. Anything larger than that and I need a strongly typed language. A larger number of programs/services/scripts can be done in less than 50,000 lines of code and python is easier than getting those type details right, but as you get bigger than that the effort of getting type details correct becomes well worth it.
The lines of code numbers above are somewhat arbitrary and not a hard block. Instead their are a continuum, the more lines of code you have the harder code is to maintain. Languages offer various things that make it easier to maintain long programs, but they just help, 10k lines of python will always be easier than 10 million lines of Java.
But yeah I can't stop myself from eye-rolling when I'm using python (which honestly is very useful for a lot of data manip that is one-off for my job) and there's just tiny syntax differences for seemingly no reason, like not instead of !, X if Y else Z, len(x) instead of it being a member... it's all very fast to look up, but easy to miss when you're also working in C++ or Rust.
This. In German the word for "video-calling" is "Skyping". Similar to MSN, the strength of the brand and goodwill that it has in some geographies is on-par with Google for search, or Coca Cola for coke. The fact that the software got consistently worse, year on year on year is hard to grasp for me. Microsoft made the right call to cannibalize and use teams. But how was Skype such a pain? Not being able to share screenshots in chat killed it for me.
Coke is a trademark owned by Coca-Cola - the generic word is cola. Their brand is so strong that even though you were thinking about the topic of branding they still got you!
"Yes, in many parts of Europe, people commonly use the word "coke" as a generic term for soda, similar to how it is used in the American South, essentially referring to any type of cola beverage rather than just the Coca-Cola brand; this is because Coca-Cola is so widely recognized across the continent."
--Google's ai thing
I don't know for other European countries, but at least I can say that it is not true in France. "Coke" is reserved for cocaine, and cola is the generic word for Coca-Cola-like beverages.
"Charbon". The French commoner will refer to the rock coke as "charbon de terre", shortened to charbon. Similar to "pomme" is apple, and "pomme de terre" is apple from the earth (potato). Charbon is also the word for charcoal.
So my grandma used charbon (coke) when she was a kid. And my mom uses charbon (charcoal) for her barbecue.
In journals and scientific papers the words coke will be used.
In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca cola flavored soda.
In everyday speech, coke means cocaine. Coca is short form for coca cola. And cola is the generic for a coca cola flavored soda.
I admittedly used a very rare/specialist example homonym. What I'm really wondering is how context plays into it. If you're ordering drinks in France and an English speaker says they'll have a Coke, does anyone really think they are referring to cocaine? Coke is vernacular slang for cocaine in American English too, but no one confuses this with usage of the brand name to refer to soft drinks (specifically Coca-Cola, or to soft drinks in general, which is a regional thing).
"Un coke s'il vous plaît" is not a proper French sentence. It does not sound right. It will be obvious it's a language difference and people will easily guess coca cola. In fact French people will most likely quip back "Un coca vous voulez dire ?".
Fun aside, coca cola/cola is male. Cocaïne is female. A rail (of coke) is male.
If you say the word coke (\kok\) in front of a Frenchman, they will immediately think of cocaine. Most people aren't aware of the other meaning of coke. They will probably say it's coal (charbon), the technical term being coke (but pronounced \kɔk\) or apparently charbon de terre according to the other comments.
In France coca is a bit generic term for coca cola and pepsi
But if you have a brand that sell coke we use cola
Like breizh cola or a <supermarket brand> cola
Interesting, where I lived (NZ), "coke" was the typical term for Coca-Cola (not generic soda, but you may be asked if Pepsi is OK), however in NL where I live now it's pretty universally "cola", and I think that's also not generic. Can't speak to other European countries though, I've never noticed.
I'd use "cola" in Dutch to refer to the generic type of drink, which is pretty much universal in Dutch AFAIK. But I would use "coke" in English. I'm not sure where I picked that up: I've lived in a combination of England/Ireland/NZ over many years, and to be honest I'm not actually sure how it's used there. Maybe just from US films?
Although what I really wanted was a Pepsi, but she wouldn't give it to me. All I wanted was a Pepsi! AND SHE WOULDN'T GIVE IT TO ME!
That's because teams was offered for fee with m365 which most companies used anyway.
Having said that, Zoom is an absolutely terrible product. The backdoor they installed in Macs for example and then when it was brought to light refused to remove it until Apple was forced to blacklist the application. They're either incompetent or evil.
Zoom was popular with at home schoolkids. Because to use Teams you had to have a Microsoft acccount first. Zoom was a link, a meeting ID, and password. Sometimes just a link.
I've actually never had to put a password in to any zoom call. It was always just the link. Only when calling from a phone did i have to put even the meeting ID in
In the US, I would say roughly everyone uses Zoom outside of companies using Teams or Meet, generally because they're bundled with the office suites they use.
With respect. Go to the map of school attendance percentages by nation.
Once there, compare Senegal's school attendance percentage to the attendance percentages in the rest of West Africa.
And the bad news is that percentages in Senegal are likely juiced and then reported given the way the government works in Senegal. Whereas percentages in places like Ghana are likely reported as lower than they actually are due to the way the government works in Ghana.
Here's a European perspective that is somewhat pro-Trump, surprising as it may sound. I am Dutch and if someone would come along and promise the following:
"We're gonna lower your taxes so you have more money to spend"
"We're gonna take a sledge hammer to bloated policies so everything will run smoothly. Then we will build a million houses per year"
I would very much consider voting for that person. That said, Trump is a madman, he lies all the time, is a danger to institutions etc. At the same time, I am so disgruntled by the current system and by not a single politician tackling or even speaking about relevant issues that I am easily swayed.
And this is the problem we have with democracy, and why it's doomed to, eventually, die. People tend to believe words. I guess it fine when words are the only thing you can rely on, but in this case, we have history and past performance. And as someone who is not that interested in US politics, from my understanding, his past performance is terrible by all measures.
But I guess this is something that will never change. The older I become, the more apparently I see that it does not matter WHAT you do, it only matters how you SPEAK about what you (will) do, whether it be in politics or in a corporate environment. I'm not the kind of person who regrets things in life, but if I could travel back in time and give my younger self one advice, it would be "focus on becoming a great orator", as this opens any door regardless of the level of experience.
Edit: to clarify, in order to not reply to each comment individually, I might have used the word "terrible" harshly. The thing with politics is that as a complete outsider to the US, I don't have a reliable way to know what policies were proposed and what were adopted/rejected, nor the long term effect of them on the country. The only thing I can rely on, is information available online. His track record is not covered in a good light online.
Sure, you can say that information online is skewed in one direction, but this is true to an insider, as some comments have demonstrated. The results of a particular policy and its application are subjective rather than objective. My entire premise was to demonstrate that actions are meaningless in the eye of the public.
Theoretically, this means that you get a "get out of jail" card no matter what you do in life, as longs as you can articulate your words properly.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
Which was partially a good thing, since he failed to dismantle Obamacare or build a wall at the Mexican border, even though those were two very explicit campaign promises.
Who knows what he'll do or not do this time around.
We do know what he will do. It’s pretty much guaranteed he will pick even more Supreme Court justices, making it even more right wing than it currently is. That will have a lasting multi-decades impact. He will nominate more federal judges. He will cancel any investigation in his own crimes.
Remember that Obamacare was saved by a single vote from McCain, who is now dead.
This is what the election is teaching me: people don't care a lot about what you do, they care much more about what you say. You just have to make people feel good.
Abraham accords. Isis. Tax cuts. Booming economy of 2018-2020. Remain in Mexico. Far lower illegal immigration. People remember the actions too.
“From my understanding, his past performance was terrible too”
Depends on what you focus on. If you listen to soundbites it sounds like a circus. There’s a lot of drama displacing and stepping on toes of the entrenched players in the system.
Trump raised taxes on the middle class. The economy was substantially worse under Trump - he spoiled the opportunity Obama gave him. He killed a lot of people with his COVID response. Our debt and deficits spiked under Trump as he drained tax dollars into the wealthy’s pockets.
It’s not so much that people remember the actions, it’s that they remember the right’s white washing of those actions.
Isis was already losing in 2017 after they lost Raqqa and Mosul. Trump played no part in it.
> Tax cuts
America is already stacked with an insane deficit and debts. Tax cuts don't see like a good thing in that situation.
> Booming economy
Yes, the economy he inherited from Obama and perpetuated by spending ever more public money and increasing the deficit.
> Remain in Mexico
This only concerns 35k people which is a laughable amount.
> Far lower illegal immigrantion
Not if you compare to the end of Bidens term.
We're also still waiting for that wall to happen. Another lie of course.
Republicans also voted against a bi-partisan bill to reduce immigration.
> If you listen to soundbites it sound like a circus
Fucking a pornstar while you're wife is at home with your newly born kid that might also play a role. But somehow the party of the nuclear family doesn't see a problem with that.
I think you’re right on a lot of details here, but here’s a chart of illegal encounters over the past few years. It has boomed under the current admin.
The bipartisan bill would have allowed in two million people a year. It threw a few scraps to border control. Great bill to look like they’re doing something while intentionally allowing the situation to continue.
> his past performance is terrible by all measures.
What was terrible for you? He didn't start new wars, he did the abraham accords. He put in a policy of -2 regulations for every new regulation. He was much better on spending UP UNTIL COVID than Biden was.
What was so bad? He might speak like a crazy person, but his policies weren't that bad.
His policies were terrible. He broke off several key international treaties. He instituted the family separation policy. He broke down federal institutions that could have helped fight COVID.
In what way was he better on spending? He managed to increase the deficit every single year, even before COVID.
> He might speak like a crazy person.
He does speak like a crazy person. He advocates for crazy policies. People from his administration are crazy people and advocate for crazy policies.
I think this is highly relatable, especially in the Netherlands where the housing situation is beyond bonkers. The protest vote is strong and/or gaining strength in many countries across the world to reflect this fact: the quality of life for the average person has either stagnated or fallen in many places, and that's a very strong rally point on election day.
Yeah but whose fault is that? A vote for the right is a vote for the rich, the very same that hovered up and concentrated all the newly gained wealth because any taxation has been dropped or they found ways to avoid paying taxes altogether, thus preventing the redistribution of generated wealth.
But this is the doublethink that the right-wing is somehow able to pull off. They aren't promising that people will be better off, that wealth will be distributed. Instead they're pointing at even poorer people like immigrants and saying "they're taking your jobs".
Yeah the quality of life for the average person is stagnating, but that's down to politicians and the rich, not to whatever boogeyman they're pushing.
I think this misses the point entirely. It's not about blame, or promises of this or that, it's about hope for change. Whether that will be a positive change or not remains to be seen, but if your life is shit, any change can feel better than no change, because at least there's hope that it might be better.
I do think catering to nimbys was the democrat’s original sin in some respects. Housing unaffordability makes everything else worse and blue areas are especially bad.
Especially in CA where the Reagan Tax Revolt lives on in CA Prop 13, where boomers sitting on $2m+ properties that they bought in 1978 for $40k pay <$1k/year in prop taxes while their new neighbors pay $40k/yr in addition to their 8% mortgage while the boomers vote down any new housing developments or zoning changes.
That's the thing, though. If you hear someone say those things -- attractive as they sound -- and then blindly believe them without asking how they intend to accomplish those things, then you are an irresponsible, ignorant voter.
He actually promised the opposite of this last time, because suburbanites don't want any new housing built. I haven't checked what he said this time around.
“ I wanna do infrastructure. I wanna do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at that, that’s what I do.”
And then his party reminded him that that is specifically NOT what they do. They like to let the private sector handle everything, because that’s who funds them and how they get rich too.
Watch TV, drink diet cokes, eat hamburgers, rage at minorities, foment insurrections, raise taxes, and just generally crap all over the place? Those are the actions I saw.
Turn the supreme court partisan and overturn principles that had been valid for decades.
I remember an interview at a large evangelical event about how they could vote for the decidedly un-Christian liar, fraudster, etc.. Their answer was that a "deal with the devil" is okay as long he delivers on supreme court justices. That was their literal phrasing.
Yeah but you're speaking as someone who actually pays taxes (I presume) and feels like you're not getting any benefits from it. But when you (or I) were growing up and enjoying an education paid for by the government, or when you lose your job, or when you retire, or when you need a doctor / the hospital, etc, you'll be grateful that there is a system in place to keep it affordable.
But this is another example of a string of selfishness in modern politics; it's a "got mine, fuck you" line of thinking. Whereas post-WW2 there was much more of a cooperative mindset, collective national or european-wide trauma, and a drive to cooperate to help each other out, regardless of their employment status. But WW2 has been forgotten and both Europe and the US are shifting back to the right-wing, because there's immigrants after your jobs, benefits and women apparently.
This is cool. I don't watch so many movies anymore, so there must be many good ones i've missed. Is there a functioning natural language query somewhere?
"I want to watch a science fiction movie that is not a super hero movie. Movies I love are Dark City and Daybreakers. Prioritize movies of short length, nothing more than 2h30. Filter out movies I've already rated, here's my Watchlist"
The movie has countless things we know from much later productions and countless things not seen elsewhere.
It takes place in the distant future, 1980, a place where everyone has a flying car, people have numbers in stead of names, the government decides who you can marry and babies come out of vending machines.
One IMDB comment described it as: I sat on the tip of my chair wondering if it could get any stranger and then it did!
It'd be trivial to ask LLM to generate the query; but since it's a client-side app there's nowhere to store the api key - so each user would have to supply one, which is a bit of an awkward experience.
I really wanted windows phone to be a success and am still sad it wasn't. I loved the interface. The native integration between my desktop/laptop and phone would have been great. Nowadays with so many apps being PWAs and built with nativescript or ionic, maybe windowsphone has a chance again? I have no idea tbh.
At home I have a book telling stories of Dutch WW2 survivors still living today. One of them was an eye witness account of the Hiroshima bomb. He was a POW and worked in a quarry or mine on the outskirts of town. He saw a single plane fly over. A bomb dropped with a parachute attached. Moments later he was flung to the back of the quarry and the city was gone. I would never have guessed there were eyewitnesses like this, let alone coutrymen of mine.
My opa was also a Dutch POW and I believe he was working in that same mine on the same day. When it happened, he was deep in the mine, which was evacuated because people inside initially thought the blast was an earthquake. Being a POW was without question extremely hard, but it was the bombing of Hiroshima that resulted in PTSD lasting many years after the war. He survived, retiring in Florida, and passed away in the late 80s. Some US government scientists asked if they could study his body, believing radiation exposure affected his long term health. It seems they were correct because his bones were found to have a slightly blue tint to them.
The book Hiroshima by John Hersey has many accounts like this. It’s a short read and follows six people and covers the first year after the bombing. I’d highly recommend reading it if such accounts are interesting to you.
My opa was also a Dutch POW, and his story is one for the books. He was assigned to work at a sake distillery just outside of Hiroshima. When the bomb hit, he was in the middle of taste-testing a new batch—he always claimed he was more of a quality control expert than a prisoner. The explosion sent him flying into a stack of sake barrels, and he ended up with a head full of rice wine and a newfound appreciation for the finer things in life.
The distillery, being built like a fortress to withstand earthquakes, somehow remained standing. Opa used to say that if he ever got nuked again, he'd want to be surrounded by sake barrels—apparently, they make for excellent shock absorbers.
Every New Year, he'd tell us about "the time I survived a nuclear blast with nothing but a sake buzz." He'd chuckle, pour himself a small glass of the weakest beer he could find, and toast to "the power of fermented rice."
Also POW Dutch grandfather here. He was in a giant concrete factory machining parts for airplanes. Bomb destroyed the whole city but the factory (being thick concrete) somewhat shielded the people inside. He had scars on his legs from pieces of a door blasting through the factory
That is just a culture thing. Most prominently in the US. In many cultures there is no clear boundary between personal relationships and business relationships. And why would there be? I would like to live in a world where kindness, dependability, punctuality, warmness, openness and forgiveness are values upheld both by natural and legal persons. And I have worked with many companies that have! As you can read in the comments, for every bad example you can find companies lead by empathic people that treat their employees humanely.
Google always pretended to be that company. And maybe they were for a long time. Now they've shifted. They really didn't have to but they did. The excuse of "it's just a business relationship" really is just that: an excuse. The symptom of a culture with values so bankrupt that it accepts citizens being treated poorly and then blames the victims for expecting to be treated humanely.
And yes, it saves you a lot of personal pain if you expect the worst from your employer from the outset. But is the world really better off if we all expect to treat each other like criminals?