One of the mistakes in viewing Russia/USSR is applying similar social/cultural patterns typical for the Western civilization. But they are a very different culture and mentality.
Their space achievements are an impressive proof of how far one can go in faking progress at scale by massive technology theft, enslavement, and violence. You can really achieve a lot this way! Rockets and nuclear devices have been designed by captured Nazi scientists and imprisoned engineers (later designs by home-grown engineers have been largely based on those designs). Key technologies were not invented but stolen, copied, and reverse-engineered. Factories designed and built by US design bureaus (before WW2). Cheap labour provided by enslaved peasants who didn't even have the freedom to move to a big city. Borders closed to prevent brain outflow. And lots lots of violence against their own people just for the sake of "looking like a global power".
And since it was always fake, no major technology went out of the USSR and became widespread globally such as computers, networks, internet, software stacks, protocols, etc. Nothing major and widely useful came out of the USSR or post-USSR Russia.
So what you see with Russia happening now, is just the bubble popping. Long due.
I think it makes sense. The EU is possible because the founding countries are of more or less similar size. You can't really make a fair balanced partnership with a country 10 times bigger, we've just learned that. So Canada joining the EU makes sense from a political perspective. Carney had a point when talked about "middle powers" in Davos.
From an economical perspective, it makes less sense because of, well, the Atlantic ocean. Nevertheless, Canada has what Europe needs - oil, LNG, minerals. To a certain extent, things can work out.
We were burned by Wise as well when they suddenly moved our business account to another partner bank in the US and that of course changed our account number. The account was registered in dozens of procurement systems of our enterprise customers and it took us several months and a lot of pain to resume receiving payments from those customers who kept sending them to the now wrong account. I can never imagine a "traditional" bank doing that.
After that, we transferred the bulk of our funds back to a "traditional" bank and now never use Wise as the main business account. We now use it mostly for operational expenses.
Wise still has something to learn about banking business.
Yeah the Montreal area transport system uses the opus system (the disposable cards are part of that) for everything. Sadly, it's now bizarrely more complicated with the weird zones that they recently added after half a decade of consultations that were meant to... stream line intercity travel! for example, if you take the metro in Montreal, then ride it until Laval, you have to buy a specific type of ticket with the two zones.
Meaning that if you just buy the normal ticket in any Montreal station and make the mistake of going to Laval, you can be fined and they do tons of ticket traps because they know that people make that mistake pretty ogten. It's not even a separate line or something. And the same card wouldn't let you take a bus in Laval because again, it's another ticket (but not the same as the one for the dual zone metro that I was talking about earlier...). Just a huge mess when it used to be much simpler before they "streamlined" it.
If the audience of HN were writers, singers, and artists, people who know what it's like when the fruits of your work are stolen and you barely make any money (I have friends like that), the sentiment would've been quite different. But software developers can't relate to this and that's why they are so pro-piracy. They get a paycheck every month or bi-weekly and never face a situation when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free.
I'm not saying the current situation with content consumption is ideal. Big corps have no shame in many ways. But sometimes both sides can be wrong. And this is exactly what I'm seeing here.
The question is always: how much money would those individuals make if their work wouldn't be pirated. It's much more likely that they would just barely survive like they do now instead of raking in the big moneyz. Sometimes it's not piracy that's the problem, but simply that the art/content is unpopular, or a bad business model was chosen.
> when their intellectual work is stolen against their will and offered to their employer for free and the employer now cuts the paycheck in half because why pay if you can get it for free
Your friends should get a lawyer. This is a different case than people "pirating" content because the content is locked exclusively behind yet another service subscription.
It's not really stolen when nobody is deprived of it by the act, digital content is infinitely duplicable, but sure whatever. If it's stealing I'm perfectly alright with being a thief. I'm also perfectly alright with other people "stealing" my work (I'm a musician). I think the free proliferation of art is a better ethos than the garbage system we have now. IP just lets corporations gather up all the valuable stuff and toss the artists some crumbs for their work. Artists were still starving well before internet piracy. I think we need a model of fans crowdfunding their favorite artists, which could work if it became more common. Artists could, for example, set a donation goal after which they'd release a new album. It would be a large social transition but it's the only real way out. Since that's never going to happen legally, I want to see technology render the law meaningless, hence why I like piracy.
I agree. It's always very curious to see the way these internet forums (HN, Reddit, Twitter, etc) justify piracy. Every thread about Spotify for instance is full of people upset that they don't pay artists "enough", as if everyone wasn't pirating music en masse in the days before streaming. Give me a break. And I'm not even throwing stones. I remember filling my MP3 player with pirated music 20 years ago.
If you're pirating content, you're stealing it. I'd 100% prefer that people just own up to it than try to contrive these elaborate arguments about how the social contract has been completely rearranged and why ackshually they are not only justified but practically obligated to do it. Beyond ridiculous. Get over yourselves.
You're so right. As an aside, it really is a shame that every song, movie, television show, video game, piece of artwork, etc. has vanished because some pirate stole the original and deprived everyone else of it instead of just making a copy.
In both of those cases the problem is not problem with floating point arithmetic but the parsing of floating point literals, or rather how systems take input and then substitute it with something different quietly behind the scenes. None of 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 are true (binary) fp values. Nobody would be surprised that
Somebody pointed me at "Towards an API for the Real Numbers" which explains why these calculations work how you expect in the Android default Calculator.
It's really nice, as they explain you can't drop this in instead of the floating point arithmetic in a serious language because the performance isn't what you want. However in human terms, for a product like the calculator - it's easily fine.
Do you have the same sentiment about self-driving cars?
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