juanito_the_great

I'm talking about Europe though, again, re-read my comment.

In other words, denying the Dark Ages is denying historical evidence, most of the times with a political or religious revisionist agenda behind.

Bryan Ward-Perkins, The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization (Oxford University Press 2005), pp. 87, 183

[T]he post-Roman centuries saw a dramatic decline in economic sophistication and prosperity, with an impact on the whole of society, from agricultural production to high culture, and from peasants to kings. It is very likely that the population fell dramatically, and certain that the widespread diffusion of well-made goods ceased. Sophisticated cultural tools, like the use of writing, disappeared altogether in some regions, and became very restricted in all others.

...

It is currently deeply unfashionable to state that anything like a ‘crisis’ or a ‘decline’ occurred at the end of the Roman empire, let alone that a ‘civilization’ collapsed and a ‘dark age’ ensued. The new orthodoxy is that the Roman world, in both East and West, was slowly, and essentially painlessly, ‘transformed’ into a medieval form. However, there is an insuperable problem with this new view: it does not fit the mass of archaeological evidence now available, which shows a startling decline in western standards of living during the fifth to seventh centuries…[which] was no mere transformation, [but] a decline on a scale that can reasonably be described as ‘the end of a civilization’.

…

[T]here is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline [like this]. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times.

Someone dear to me is heartbroken and perennially conflicted because she absolutely loved Harry Potter growing up, and is also keenly aware of how shitty JK Rowling is. Now as an adult the Harry Potter franchise is one of the things that gives her joy in an otherwise very hard life she has had.

I'm not giving any more details about her. All I'm asking is, give these people a break, please. Not everyone is in a position in life to be an activist on everything, and while it might sound silly, things like HP are a big part of some people's childhoods and taking those away from them can be devastating.

They were dark for Europe though, that is undeniable.

Anthrax will integrate HIV into the mix.

It's kind of the opposite in my mind, WSL is (was) Microsoft capitulating to the fact that Linux is not going away, same with Azure. WSL is mostly for companies. Some companies have a huge contract with Microsoft and manage all laptops with it. Then they grow big enough that they can't ignore Linux because they have people who need to work on Linux. WSL is the way Microsoft keeps their clients, because otherwise they move to Apple based IT.

EEE would have been investing in PowerShell, PuTTY, or similar.

This one is a perfect example of something relatively simple that genAI models really suck at replicating. Well done!

Very few times some images on the internet make me cry.

I know he is a sociopath, I understand that. But as a father, I cannot understand how Putin sleeps at night after being responsible for this horror and so many others. So many dead children, grieving parents. He is a father too. I know he lacks empathy, the rational part of my brain knows this, but I'm unable to imagine seeing the world through his eyes.

What a disgusting monster.

I seriously considered it at some point, as in my (former) field many top researchers lived in Philly, New York, Boston + Toronto. Becoming a top researcher means travelling where other top researchers are. It was definitely not about money, pay is often equivalent between the EU and the US.

Eventually decided it was not worth it for me (had other priorities in life), but this is a sacrifice many EU researchers make (or should I say, made) to become top researchers.

I'm not an apologist for any US company, particularly Google. But they are not the same as Musk. They didn't campaign for this. Yes, they've "bent the knee" if you will, donated, and attended the innaguration. Can you imagine the alternative? The threats they got? Suddenly all these top tech companies donated exactly 1 million and their CEOs showed up there. Pretty sure they were told this was the bare minimum donation and that if they didn't show up, you know...

Plus, they are not throwing nazi salutes, promoting nazis online and offline, or actively dismantling the US democracy. If anything, them not standing out and keeping as low a profile as possible is a good thing because they still hold significant power (for now) and the alternative is the US admin criminalizing them.

It's corporate owned, yes, but there are levels of shithole-ness. We should celebrate small victories against fascism.