I see where you’re coming from, but would like to add some nuance (not everywhere is like the US).

As a general rule, I think penalising malicious fraud (i.e. fraud not committed out of dire necessity, but in order to scrape an extra buck) is worth it on a societal level, even if the economic benefits aren’t a net positive. It’s about sending the message that we live in a society where people need to treat each other fairly, and where we can trust the system to protect us. Even if society as a whole loses money going after some of this fraud, it can mean an enormous amount to the individuals that have been exposed to fraud to know that society has their back.

On the second level, there’s welfare fraud. First of all, we definitely have a more generous welfare system where I’m from than what’s found in the US, and I think that’s a good thing. We also have some issues with people that are capable of working, or who do work under the table, who still claim benefits they aren’t qualified for. The major issue I see with it is this: By gaming the system, these people in the long term threaten to make the system unsustainable, thus stealing resources and putting pressure on the people the system is actually designed to help.

In a way I see actual welfare fraud (i.e. people with more than enough resources gaming the system to pull government money they don’t need) as worse, because they’re violating the trust of a system society has put in place to help the most exposed among us. This kind of fraud indirectly impacts the least resourceful (possibly a poor translation) people in our society.

In either case, I think the social element of fighting fraud is worth it, even if it is a net negative economically. Fraud in general is a severe violation of the social contract we live under, and “letting it slide” contributes to eroding peoples trust in both each other, and the social system as a whole. It’s worth spending some money to prevent that.

I’m going to be honest here: I approve of your proposal. At the same time, I live in a European country with conscription that borders russia. I don’t think you understand how reliant Europe has become on the US MIC. Even in Norway, where we have Nammo and Kongsberg, we are nowhere near being able to supply a significant force with arms.

In the 90’s, Norway could mobilise and arm ≈500 000 soldiers within a couple of days. Today that number is probably < 50 000. Building production lines takes time.

In the next election (this autumn) my vote is going to the party that takes up-arming the most seriously.

China would have to do a whole lot more than just “not support russia”. As a starter, they’d need to start being transparent, honest, and not censor the ever loving shit out of all information from their country. Then they could stop genociding minorities.

I can see the first 8 being counted as just “letter with an accent”, but what about the last one? How can that not be its own letter? It’s a whole new symbol not found in the “base” alphabet ffs. You should definitely count at least that one - because size matters

We all agree regarding where Danish sits: https://youtu.be/ykj3Kpm3O0g?feature=shared

All my guys love the Ø! We Even have the Ååhh. Jut let me know if that makes you Æææh!

Relevant: https://youtu.be/f488uJAQgmw?feature=shared

I seem to remember that what the EU did to good effect last time this asshat was president was to place extremely directed tariffs/taxes on specific goods from Trump-friendly areas. Essentially saying “we’re going to toll oranges from this specific county in that specific swing state in order to drive a couple specific producers out of business”, and then did that across the country. The advantage being that WTO agreements allow you to answer tariffs dollar-for-dollar, so you can respond to wide-reaching tolls that amount to X USD (e.g. tolls on the entire European aluminium industry) with extremely hard-hitting tolls on very specific producers.

We should be doing that again. Don’t touch the wider American population, but put all our weight into hitting hard against cornerstone businesses in pro-trump counties. Make them regret voting this guy in thinking it would better their economy.

set -e

I actually enjoy this part, where I’ve written some intricate code of sorts and get to spend some time writing a memo that explains how it works.

I usually don’t even end up reading them, because the process of writing a good memo will make me remember it.

I’m impressed by how many good forklift-stories there are here, I never would have guessed how much crazy shit you guys go through! But this one wins the prize- that sounds sketchy as fuuuck…

Don’t worry, referring to yourself in third person leaves enough of an impression that what you answer probably doesn’t matter all that much.

I wholeheartedly agree: In my job, I develop mathematical models which are implemented in Fortran/C/C++, but all the models have a Python interface. In practice, we use Python as a “front end”. That is: when running the models to generate plots or tables, or whatever, that is done through Python, because plotting and file handling is quick and easy in Python.

I also do quite a bit of prototyping in Python, where I quickly want to throw something together to check if the general concept works.

We had one model that was actually implemented in Python, and it took less than a year before it was re-implemented in C++, because nobody other than the original dev could really use it or maintain it. It became painfully clear how much of a burden python can be once you have a code base over a certain size.

I have next to no experience with TypeScript, but want to make a case in defence of Python: Python does not pretend to have any kind of type safety, and more or less actively encourages duck typing.

Now, you can like or dislike duck typing, but for the kind of quick and dirty scripting or proof of concept prototyping that I think Python excels at, duck typing can help you get the job done much more efficiently.

In my opinion, it’s much more frustrating to work with a language that pretends to be type safe while not being so.

Because of this, I regularly turn off the type checking on my python linter, because it’s throwing warnings about “invalid types”, due to incomplete or outdated docs, when I know for a fact that the function in question works with whatever type I’m giving it. There is really no such thing as an “invalid type” in Python, because it’s a language that does not intend to be type-safe.

True, I did a quick calculation and the probability of knowing someone killed or severely injured is

• 12.5% if you know 10 people
• 23.5% if you know 20 people
• 33.5% if you know 30 people
• 41.5% if you know 40 people
• 49% if you know 50 people

So around ⅓ Russians know at least one person that’s been killed or wounded, and around 10-20% of Russians have someone in their inner circle of friends and family (10-20 closest) that have been killed for wounded.

For this last number to reach 50%, the number of killed+wounded needs to reach about 5% of the fighting age population (≈2.5 million).

Of course, the above assumes that casualties are randomly distributed in the population. In reality it’s likely that fewer people know someone killed or wounded, and that those that know someone likely know more, because of the casualties being disproportionately effecting more rural regions of the country.

Something Something “as long as it takes”.

There may not be a formal treaty, but there have been plenty of promises. In diplomacy, you’re not just judged based on whether you uphold formal treaties, but also on whether you keep your word in general. By cutting support overnight, the US would be going back on a promise they’ve made. That’s typically not the way you make other countries trust you in future negotiations.

Holy shit, I haven’t looked at the numbers in a while, but

• Russian population: 140 000 000
• Male population: 70 000 000
• Male fighting age population (18 - 60 years): Very approximately 50 000 000 (I honestly just made up a number a bit smaller than 70)
• Documented KIA: 85 000
• Projected actual KIA: 170 000 (Note: Prigozin claimed 120 000 KIA in June 2023)
• Projected number of severely wounded: Roughly 500 000

Result:

• Roughly 0.34 % fighting age men killed
• Roughly 1 % of fighting age men severely wounded

This has to be getting close to a point where most Russians know someone personally that has been killed or severely wounded in the war…

I see you’ve chosen confidence over accuracy again

This is honestly a great way of calling someone stupid, but you do realise that it can be very offensive to people with narcissistic personality disorder, right?

Joke aside, what is really stupid about this is the idea of “insulting someone without hurting there feelings”, or as you wrote

insulting someone’s actions or reasoning can sometimes carry ableist implications if we’re not careful.

When honestly insulting someone, there is typically an intent to be hurtful, the idea that you should be careful to “not use language that can offend X group” when doing so, kind of overlooks the whole situation of “insulting” going on

It makes sense when you think about it too: It’s a language model, so it should be expected to do a decent job as a glorified dictionary

I use GPT in the sense of “I need to solve X problem, are there established algorithms for this?” which usually gives me a good starting point for actual searching.

Most recent use-case was judging the similarity of two strings: I had never heard of “Levenschtein distance” before, but once I had that keyword it was easy to work from there.

Also: cmake and bash boilerplate

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