screye
2d ago
He is Israel's face. It could have been a scarecrow with a yamaka and they still would've clapped.
screye
6d ago
Hasina is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the founding father of Bangladesh, who led its freedom movement
It is important to put this in context. All direct and extended members of the Rahman family were murdered in cold blood, children and all. Hasina is the only* living member of her family, that's only because she was in Europe at the time.
This is a muslim majority country that's lived through a major genocide (in 1971), multiple bloody coups and is still attempting to be a democracy. Just the fact that that a muslim country is trying to be democracy is already a tall task.
Under her tenure as prime minister, Bangladesh has experienced democratic backsliding. Human Rights Watch documented widespread enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings under her government
Wikipedia being tone deaf as usual. Practically every non-Hasina Bangladeshi leader has a genocide or dictatorial military coup on their hands. Bangalesh can't experience democratic backlisliding beceause it started at the bottom.
These fledgling countries need time. If you don't want military coups every 3 years, you need to keep them well fed. Yes, that means 100x better perks than civilians. But, it is better than having your head chopped off. Yes, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan are genetically and historically quite similar. But, only India has shown a genuine affinity for democracy. The other 2 are still figuring it out. There are obvious reasons for why, but that's a whole another discussion.
Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.
If you haven't caught up, 100+ million (billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.
Here is how things panned out:
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.- Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
- It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
- On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time),
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage - For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device. - Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
- The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
- That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
- NOPE !
- This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
- Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
- Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
- So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !
This is the Y2k that was promised.
The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.
No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.
Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.
This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.
I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.
End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.
As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.
Some choice photos:
screye
7d ago
I meant dominating in the sense that others in the top 5 did.
Messi was simultaneously the best scorer, free kick taker, dribbler, passer and orchestrator in the footballing world. For a while, fans would confer a MOTMOTM (man of the match other than messi) award, because Messi was always the best. Phelps, Biles and Bolt won 100% of all serious competitions they entered in the prime of their careers.
Serena dominated her sport in the way that the rest of the top 30 did. Not enough for #2.
screye
8d ago
National tournaments have more penalties than usual club football. The worldcup is wnotionally important, but tactically, it is pretty bad football.
In most club competitions, there are very clear guidelines on what qualifies for penalities. In those cases, penalties are only given when a goal is near guaranteed.
National level refereeing is too erratic.
screye
8d ago
Cricket's problem is that the 2000s didn't produce Cricket GOATs. Sachin Tendulkar is still viewed as the modern GOAT, and he's more so a late-90s figure. Then you have Don Bradman, whose records put him so far above every Cricket player, that modern cricketers struggle to stand out.
It's a bad list, and it keeps getting worse as you go on.
It is an American list meant to make American sports and sportspeople look great. Ah yes, 56/100 are American and 17/100 are from Baseball, a sport that is played by Americans and Dominicans, and the 30x smaller country is somehow better.
From a competitiveness perspective, Tennis and Swimming are nowhere close to (real) Football. Messi is by far the greatest player to have every played football, and also the greatest sportsperson of all time. (not just the 21st century). Unlike every other sports person, Messi was the best player in the world when most players start their careers (~20) and stayed the very best for the next 15 years. Messi (not unlike Gretsky) could be 2 players, and they would be the #1 and #2 greatest players of all time.
When one nation uniformly dominates a sport, then you know that it isn't THAT competitive. Swimming is one such example. I can speak about swimming because I personally know family members who were nationally (one of them was in the US) ranked top-10 swimmers for their age. Either my family is uniquely suited for swimming. Or, they have the 1 trait all my family members share, which is ruthless ladder climbing (Tier 0 tiger moms in my family). Swimming as a sport uniquely rewards hard-work. Which tells you that it is not competitive enough. You can't work hard at soccer and get good. You need to be insanely gifted, then work hard, and that gets you into the 4th tier of English football. Now Phelps' dominance of swimming was large enough, that I'd still give him #2. But, Messi is #1. Speaking of swimming, Ledecky deserves as shoutout for the top 20.
Djokovic - Federer & Nadal having close head-to-heads helps none of them. I wouldn't put any of them on the top 10.
Sports I think shouldn't qualify for more than 1 name:
- F1 & Golf - Billionaires sports. It's like when the Ashes (Cricket) used to be played between lords in England and Australia.
- Winter sports - sorry, it doesn't snow in most of the world or most of the year.
tldr:
- Messi is #1
- Ronaldo in top 10
- Brady, Phelps, Bolt in top 5
- Biles in top 10, Serena wasn't anywhere close to dominating her sport
- Magnus Carlsen should be in top 10, and Chess should be counted as a sport
- WNBA is a joke and shouldn't have a single name.
- Andy Murray is a good lad, but he ain't in the top 100 discussion. Come on
- Heavy weight MMA is likely the hardest sport to stay at the top of. Fedor deserves a top 50 just for that.
screye
8d ago
I'm surprised there aren't 24/7 surveillance drones hovering-around a presidential security detail. It seems a lot cheaper and more effective than SS operatives manually scouting out these locations.
screye
14d ago
I've seen a consistent stance on 'open & educational' approach to ML from China.
Not just deepseek, the BGE family of embedding models and the YI series of LLMs explain their workflows better than any western counterpart.
I guess you get a lot of time to write good papers, when you have to wait on V100s to do your training.
China has dominated in ML for quite some time now. Open csrankings.org and sort by AI. The top 4/5 universities in the world are all Chinese. These arent bogus papers either. Proper CVPR, ICCV, ICML dominance.
Im surprised China isnt further ahead.
screye
17d ago
'Genius autistic MtF transitions' appears to be an exclusive phenomenon observed among residents of the digital landscape (Esports players, Programmers, Wikipedia editors).
My pet theory is that autistic geniuses blitz down to the bottom of rabbit holes faster than anyone else, and digital rabbit holes always end in Paraphilias. Furries, Wiafus and Trans MtFs are the exact same thing. It could have been something innocuous like trains, tanks or bonsai tree cutting. But on the internet, it always ends up being 'chicks with dicks'.
I'm a degenerate internet dweller, and I have navigated deep into some pretty glarly rabbit holes. Thankfully, my curiosities have been limited to geo-politics & cars. But even there, I've had to develop a strong filter to scroll-past futas, impossibly proportioned waifus, 500 year old loli vampires and furries. They are everywhere ! I can't imagine how bad it would be if I was into a hobby that WAS tangentially to any of those topics.
Now even 'normal' people have a fondness for paraphillias. S&M, Voyeurism, exhibitionism, (name you favorite porn category) are all paraphillias too. If the appeal of sexual-deviation has something to do with the taboo-ness of it, then a no-social-filter having autistic person is more likely to end up 'an expert' by getting to the bottom of it. A trans person might be into niche-and-odd sexual fetishes for the same reason that they install arch-linux and build compilers. Next, austic people are often obsessive (trans OCD seems to be pretty big area of discussion by itself), and you can see how they'd start obsessing over trans / furry / futa-dom.
To me, the final piece is community. Autistic people struggle to fit in or find their own. They find their people deep in sewers of the internet, and some of them are feeling pretty Trans. Now you have a group of people, who think like you do, feel like you do, and can explain the obsessive source of their condition in the exact words that make sense of tanother autstic person. That is a recipe for indoctrination. Now, I don't believe this is malicious or intentional. But, I do believe this phenomenon is an emergent property of 'internet sewers'.
I believe that some base population is trans.
I belive that autistic men are most pre-disposed to gender dysphoria.
I also believe that the social patterns of internet sewers lead to dysphoria, mlp-fandom & furries as a social phenomenon.
These people are the sole reason for the survival of the internet or the tech industry. I wish them a happy life. I hope they continue contributing 100x every FANG engineer.
But, I don't think we should normalize their condition among 'normies'. These people are kinda different, doing their different thing. I don't judge, but it is fine to keep it out of mainstream media.
screye
25d ago
Being rich and having access is amazing. Fame, not so much.
Sometimes, being rich & and having access comes with the fame. Other times, the fame leads you to riches and access. But if you can decouple them, then the the fame by itself is a nasty thing.
You can't walk down a street without being accosted. You can't trust new relationships. You can't find quiet. You hog attention whether you want to or not. Your closest family members get jaded, as they struggle to form an identity that's separate from you. It's bad all around. There is a reason old-money tries to be anonymous.
Ideally, I'd be rich, priviledged an anonymous. But, I'd rather be all of rich, priviledged and famous than none of them.
screye
1mo ago
Haha, 1 and 1.5 were fused until I separated them last minute.
Middle east's best dishes are Tier 1. But, I've docked points for lack of variety. I love their mezze spread, but MENA quickly runs out of ideas once you beyond that.
Italy got docked on a technicality. Gelato and Tiramisu were considered desserts. Foccacia & Pizza went to baked goods. And Italian coffees did not feel exclusively Italian. With all of those included, Italy woud rise back up.
Non-mediterranean western food sucks. That's well known. The French are single handedly keeping the reputation up, but French lunch/dinner doesn't make it to Tier 1. Amazing desserts and baked items though.
Spanish is honestly quite underrated. Maybe I've just been lucky, but all my best meals have been in Spain. Contemporary Spanish blends Northern African & Latin American with existing Spanish food, to give you the best cuisine. The spanish can do preserved foods, meats, rice dishes, spicy food, everything.
(Note: Must be food food. Breakfast (bakery foods) & Dessert do not count. Alcohol only counts if part of the meal itself. )
My personal ranking goes (in order):
Tier 1
- Spanish (Plus colonies which are primarily ethnic Spanish. Ie. If you killed ALL the natives, then you Spanish)
- Thai
- Indian (South Asian generally. I might be underrating because I want to avoid personal bias)
- Chinese (All Ethnic chinese food.)
Tier 1.5
- Mexican
- Japanese
- Korean
Tier 2
- French
- Vietnamese
- Brazil
- Peru
- Levant / North African
- Ethiopian
- Italy
Tier dunno much but probably good
- Indonesian / Malay (These are probably tier 1.5)
- Iranian (Too similar to Levant / Parsi-Indian to differentiate. Same for Afghani)
- West African (Maafe and Jollof is good)
- Greek / Turkish (I don't like octopus that much. Turkish breakfast is great, but rest is alright)
Tier bad
- British
- Scandinavian
Everything else is mid.
screye
1mo ago
Might not be the best place top post this, but is anyone going to do an effort post on the Indian election ? The most electrifying 'nothing happened' that I've seen in a long time.
For those who are from the outside looking in, I strongly recommend checking out Shekhar Gupta's segments on ThePrint - 'https://youtube.com/watch?v=7wdKaM3ePz8' . He sits squarely in the center (American Center, would be considered Libertarian/ lib-right in India), but is old enough to stop giving fucks. I have been reading his work since about 10 years old, and I can vouch for his credibility.
The most interesting tl,drs for me are :
- The Congress commands incredible default votes, and had been losing millions of votes each time Rahul Gandhi spoke. This time he shut up, and the Congress recovered
- The Indian elections are intact. We've called it the world's biggest and fairest elections. And the results have maintained the sanctity of that claim
- Modi wins but is weaker = dependent on coalition partners
- Modi sidelined Yogi and lost huge ground in UP - Modi/Shah narcissism hurt them. We might see some ugly internal Shah vs Yogi dogfighting in the last few years.
- Modi destroyed the party structure in Maharashtra, and lost huge ground there - Modi/Shah narcisissm hurt them
- Chandra babu Naidu will have insane leverage. Similar to the NDP in Canada.
- Indian voters cannot be permanently polarized. Caste, Regionalism, Religion & Economics will continue to be active threads and Modi's attempts to use Religion as the main exclusive polarizer ran out of steam this time.
screye
2mo ago
While we are at it, can we also have a 'are you sure you want to leave' pop-up if we have an incomplete comment ? I have lost one too many drafts to a suspended tab or accidental closure.
screye
2mo ago
Anchor babies, birthright citizenship, all of that must go.
This shows a shallow understanding of the US immigration system.
Here are the common ways you can get a visa -> green card -> citizenship:
- Illegal immigration -> anchor baby -> wait 25 years -> Green card (400k? closest thing to stats)
- Refugees (150k/yr) (relatively low by historic standards)
- Lottery (50k/yr) (constant number since 1995.)
- High skilled visas -> green card (Green card sponsorship is rare unless you're making 6 figures) (300k/year)
- Marriage and minor dependents (600k/yr)
So which of these do you disapprove of, how much lower should each of them be ?
No one likes illegal immigration, so that's a moot point. The rest seem to be more so about identifying legitimate cause (actual marraige, real refugees, real need for immigrant labor) than the nature of the visa itself.
screye
2mo ago
Perfect description of ADHD medication. I havent had the headaches, but the positives effects are very similar.
screye
2mo ago
Yep. I got prescribed vyvanse (the slow release stuff) and that too a small-ish? dose (20mg)..... and the difference was life changing.
The first day, I cried simply because I could stop speaking, an elementary school level skill that I'd never developed.
My working memory didnt get flooded with surrounding distractions. Instead I could listen, and maintain a response in my head for the right moment.
I can do work now !! Thats instead of sitting at the table hoping 'attention comes', which inevitably didnt happen till 11pm at night.
Every person close to me has noticed a difference.
1 year in, I havent noticed any side effects. I am careful enough not to take it on meeting days or holidays. So vacation serves as a good refresh.
To be fair, i lived most my life without the meds, and have managed to be moderately successful by abusing sleep and and being in a cycle of constant exploit-burnout-vacation. So maybe my lack of dependence is a result of knowing how to be normal when not on it.
screye
2mo ago
Tesla model 3 supply is piling up, so discounts should start coming through anytime now. If you're in a state/county with credits, then a Tesla model 3/Y ends up being pretty cheap for the car you're getting.
Is maintenance a nightmare
There is no maintenence unless you get into a lot of accidents. (I don't mean this passive aggressively, just a numbers thing. You know your stats). If you get into accdeints, then fixes are admittedly expensive.
How do they hold up to wear and tear?
Well enough. Teslas are known to have wierd manufacturing defects, but they're more often cosmetic than something that degrades over time.
If you are set on buying an EV, then I would recommend a Tesla purely for the charging network and the ease of availing credits. Every other EV is a pain in the ass to charge.
The model Y seems to strike the best balane of space, price, credits and convienence - https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/hybrids-evs/electric-cars-plug-in-hybrids-that-qualify-for-tax-credits-a7820795671/ . I am personally a small car guy and would buy a Mazda 3 turbo hatchback, but that's just me.
I saw the recorded videos, and they sounded amazing. I got goosebumps.
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