This is an uncomfortable truth on this site, because many of us work for a FAANG company or FAANG partner. If the cloud hadn't grown that much in the last decade or so, the software industry would be relatively unpretentious.
That's just it: bullying the rest of the world typically doesn't have drastic negative consequences for an economy.
China's claimed the South China Sea as its sovereign waters and has been using force against fishermen from the nations that actually have control over the water. They're continuing to threaten Taiwan in a purely ideological push. Chinese secret police have set up stations abroad to kidnap dissidents. Border skirmishes with India are not uncommon. The agreement for a democratic Hong Kong was torn up and now they're under the thumb of the CCP, same as the mainland.
Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, Crimea in 2014, and of course Eastern Ukraine in 2022. They haven't had a "real" election in decades. Dissidents die suspiciously with regularity.
Both nations have supported the efforts of North Korea to further its nuclear arsenal in blatant violation of UN resolutions.
With the exception of the invasion of Ukraine, there have been zero negative consequences for any of this behavior.
Both nations have hosted at least one major international sporting event in the last 20 years. China is signing trade deals with Canada and the EU nations because, for some reason, those parties see a totalitarian single-party state as a viable alternative to the US that will never produce a "mad king", when in fact, it's almost tailor-made to do so. Construction on Nordstream 2 started after the invasion of Georgia, specifically because Europeans wanted Russian natural gas. Russian oligarchs continue to hold major interests in European nations and are free to move about the continent. Sanctions against the Russian economy over the invasion of Ukraine are dodged by dealing with intermediate parties so that many nations, including those in Europe, can do business as usual.
If you're a narcissistic psychopath - like the majority of world politicians and Donald Trump are - and you see this sort of thing happening, you're going to ask, "Why can't America play by those rules too?"
> This is in response to new US tariffs and threats, not the other way around. Our previous diplomacy was cold with China.
But it doesn't endeavor to ask exactly why the US is behaving this way.
The answer is simple: a mad king. You have a man who thinks the government should be run as his own personal enterprise and is being given license to do so by one of the country's two main political parties. The other half of the country is making it rather clear that they don't approve of this behavior, along with other things happening in the country. There are pictures from the last few days of people protesting while armed in Minnesota.
Tyranny is a problem, obviously, and it's one that has existed as long as power structures have existed in human societies. I can see why Canadians are angry at Trump and the US as a whole. I don't blame you, but if you want to solve the problem of the mad king, you don't sign trade deals that enrich a single-party totalitarian state. You can almost guarantee that come the next international dust-up over something - Oh, just spitballing, maybe freedom of navigation in the South China Sea - the PRC will use that new trade deal as leverage on Canada. It will happen. They will get a return on their investment. That's how authoritarians work.
A deal with literally anyone else would have been better.
But it is not just mad king. If republicans as a party did not supported it, they would vote in cogress to block and stop him. It would need just a few republican votes.
They dont. Republican party supports all of that, fully. Project 2025 came from heretage fund. Supreme court is result of them strategically getting people who support this on it.
Conservatives all like what trump does. Evangelical Christians still support him too.
The stability of the entire country seems to be suspect.
The US just had its longest government shutdown, where the government was non-functional. Yet no politicians appear to have suffered any consequences, and there are rumors of another.
The "checks and balances" of the government seem to be non-functional, as one branch of government claims to have veto power over all other branches.
The populace appears to have no power over their elected representatives, or possibly supports the current turn of events.
> But it is not just mad king. If republicans as a party did not supported it, they would vote in cogress to block and stop him. It would need just a few republican votes.
That's directly due to the mad king. Trump's the head of the party, and he's used to running an organization where no one questions him, because that's what he did at the Trump Organization for decades. If you vote against him - and some GOP senators did recently - you "receive pressure" to change your mind. What does "receive pressure" mean? I'm not in DC and not in politics, so I can't say for sure, but my guess is it can include things like backing primary/caucus candidates that will be a reliable vote for Trump's agenda come the next election cycle, public disparagement on Truth Social, and tacit threats to derail the representatives' personal agendas for their constituents.
Could it be even more direct, like threats of violence or blackmail? Maybe. It wouldn't surprise me with Trump.
This has existed throughout history in a number of systems of government, but it seems especially bad now in the US because you have someone who came from a system where he never had to encounter any sort of resistance who is now running the executive. Prior to Trump, all modern presidents had at least some experience in government, and it was understood that there was bargaining involved in the system.
I've maintained since the 2015 primaries that you simply cannot have someone from the private world be in such a high office, and this is exactly why.
I like to spend a lot of time at the World Happiness Report because it gives me a better sense of economic well-being. You can't just look at GDP, you need a sense of which countries are burning human capital to fuel GDP and generate billionaires. That's a very common short-term tactic, so the WHR gives you a better sense of long-term political stability. Unhappy populations tend to vote for strongmen.
It's basically impossible to get to Finland-levels without bringing everyone along. Not just internally like getting rid of 996, but also including neighbors like Taiwan/Ukraine cause corruption tends to leak back in. Imagine if Bush had spent the Iraq war trillions on high speed rail/free college/ housing. Instead we got ICE.
> If you're a narcissistic psychopath - like the majority of world politicians and Donald Trump are - and you see this sort of thing happening, you're going to ask, "Why can't America play by those rules too?"
Such a person (or the people willing to trust them) would be seen as naïve, though, because any sane person would tell you that's exactly what's been happening since you were born.
C is like a classic car. It's cool and you might have fun with it, but if something goes wrong out there, there's a significant chance you'll end up in a very bad shape.
What! Classic cars are preferred. I'd trust an old muscle car more than a shiny new one ANY DAY OF THE WEEK. Ah gosh. New cars are trash. Never in my life had a good experience with a new car besides the smell.
I've had many new cars and the car I drive today is a classic, I love it. Takes me everywhere, replace the parts and still goes. No rust. Can't say the same for a new car. I had a brand new truck a few years ago and I sold it. I had way too many problems. Doors being not aligned, electrical problems. Just shit all around. I had a Ford Focus ST as well for a for awhile too and I hated it. I couldn't even go in a car wash without it leaking through the roof, new car as well. Crazy!!!
It looks like the company's owners didn't give a simple heads up to their providers before dissolving it. In my eyes, that's way worse than what this particular provider has done. If the sums aren't large, they might lose money by going to court.
The company owner didn't dissolve it, the registrar did as a penalty for not filing accounts within about 4 months of the due date. The owner might not even know it's dissolved yet.
Could a company other than Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company manufacture the chips that Nvidia products are made of, and could that happen in America? The answer is yes to both. But if Nvidia attempted it today, it would be doomed. Jensen knows that sometimes it's more convenient to be Jen-Hsun.
Ruby is an insular language by design. It's intended to be easy to use and "make programmers happy". Whereas popular languages are usually adopted for falsifiable reasons such as performance, type safety, memory safety, etc.
When it comes to languages that don't take themselves that seriously, the tragedy of Ruby is that Python is easier to get into with its much bigger community and ecosystem. Python is more likely to make the average programmer happy.
>>Python is more likely to make the average programmer happy.
Its a weird place to be. I was making ChatGPT write lots of Python code to do some analysis on the Stock market, and it was crazy how much code I was able to write in a day. I'm talking like a million+ lines of code. In a day.
To that end, it also means the cost of Python code today is $0 given how much can be generated so quickly.
Its a useful language, but pretty much anything you do with it today doesn't have as much value.
The Lighthouse report is telling. It scores 100% for Best practices and SEO, but 54% for Performance. Pages like these used to be caricatures of the modern web, but are now acceptable. DHH's statement doesn't help either.
Honestly, the synthetic Lighthouse tests would be great but for the fact that they're using Google Fonts. It's like the only major thing in their critical path.
Ruby is one of the most fun programming languages out of the 6+ languages I've worked with, and I was very productive with it. Unfortunately, due to my experience working at a Ruby shop where Rails misuse and abuse crippled the company, I don't enjoy using Ruby anymore, and will never recommend using Rails for production-grade software. Hopefully you've had a better experience with Ruby and still enjoy writing beautiful software with it - hopefully not with Rails.
It's one thing for J.K. Rowling to write Harry Potter outlines on cocktail napkins. A pen and a cocktail napkin can be quite the foundation for expression, indeed. But the same flexibility lets other people doodle, and still others blow their nose.
The capacity to enable greatness is neither the same as the encouragement to enable greatness, nor the guarantee to enable greatness, and there's a lot of survivor's bias at the top of the Ruby and Rails communities.
This is exactly what I've done. I don't enjoy Rails very much but I love working with Ruby and Sinatra. The community has done a great job to keep Rails separated from Ruby when they release tools, so that they don't depend on or require Rails.
A lot of the aversion towards ruby I've gotten from people that have worked with it before mainly stems from complaints I share with the philosophy of Rails (making big changes to it when needed is like driving a freight ship instead of a small boat) and the complexity that can go with that, or with horror stories around poorly implemented metaprogramming, which are both valid points to me because I honestly share them. But Rails is not Ruby, and the community in general has been a lot more responsible with using metaprogramming carefully than it was in the early days.
Ruby becoming successful through Rails was a boon for it in the short term but I think also detracted from it's future growth at the same time as it became hard to untether developers' bad experiences with huge Rails apps with their experience using Ruby itself.
Personally, I love using Ruby so much for my own needs that if it ever was to fall into obscurity to the point of being unusable for modern tasks, I have decided that will be the point that I probably retire from programming and move on to other things in my life. It's not that I can't learn a new language for my daily driving, it's that I... don't really want to at this point.
The language I thought was pretty cool and similar was Crystal, but I've never run into the use case to try it, because I've never had something I couldn't handle with Ruby itself. Performance in my world is rarely a bottleneck, and I would not want to build a very large web app with a lot of complex business logic with it.
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