• 3 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 9th, 2023

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  • China might have a 2 year window coming up where it’s even possible to invade Taiwan. Their military has modernized a lot, but they probably aren’t quite to the point of being able to pull it off. At the same time, they are looking at a demographic cliff from the long term implications of the One Child policy.

    It’s possible this window as already closed. That said, authoritarian regimes have started wars before that were terrible ideas.


  • Eeeeehhh, if you just look at numbers of boats, yes. The US Navy has far, far more experience, though. Drones are also going to change the game in ways we’re only starting to see with the Ukraine War. With that, the answer might be “everyone’s boats are sunk now”.

    China probably couldn’t gain air superiority over Taiwan, and without that, an invasion will fail. That will be true even if the US ends up losing more boats.




  • Not necessarily a nepo hire, but they are scraping the barrel.

    Project 2025’s playbook was to fire all the existing people in the federal government and replace them with Trump loyalists. To that end, they created a list of pre-vetted replacements.

    Problem is, those people are vetted for loyalty first, and competence a distant second. Also, a lot of them likely have jobs already that are more lucrative than a federal position. In other cases, their circumstances change in the months in between vetting and the offer becoming concrete. So even though they may have a few thousand people on the list, a big chunk of them aren’t going to accept when the time comes. Those that do aren’t necessarily going to be qualified in any way.

    What may be surprising here is that they’re scraping the bottom so quickly. You’d think out of several thousand possibilities, they could find someone more qualified than this guy.

    This tends to be destructive in the short term, because incompetent people are making important decisions. In the long term, it’s one of the self-defeating factors of fascism. A system just can’t work this way, but it can destroy the rest of society before it implodes on itself.



  • Yeah, those are mostly showing off. They’re not really what I’m getting at, either. I more want to challenge people to make useful things simply.

    And yes, there are ways that JavaScript can be used to give users a faster and more streamlined experience. The web as it stands is so far past that justification. I swear there’s lots of “full stack” devs that haven’t a clue how to make a site without React.


  • Ukraine had nukes and gave them up. They were invaded.

    Iraq gave up their WMD program after the first Gulf War. They were invaded again.

    Iran definitely had a nuclear program, but doesn’t appear to be pursuing it anymore. They’re getting attacked and quite possibly will get invaded.

    South Africa had a nuclear program and gave it up. Left alone.

    The Great Powers, particularly the United States but also Russia, have shown that your country should just keep going once you start. Chances are, you’ll get invaded, anyway.

    This is not the way towards anti-proliferation.


  • I’d like full stack developers to try something. Next time you have an itch for a personal project, see if you can make it with no frontend JavaScript. Just some CSS and HTML forms. All templating handled on the backend. Just try it and see how far you get. Don’t worry if it looks like a GeoCities page.

    Then try finding places where JavaScript would make it more responsive or better UX in some way. Does the back button still work? Is it actually faster? Does it provide any benefit at all?

    Maybe it does, but just try.



  • AWS has a multitude of different offerings with confusing pricing structures. They have zero incentive to make them understandable.

    That said, chances are your new company has people who understand this already and know how to manage it. Hopefully, they’ll put up some guardrails that prevent you and others from running up a big bill. I wouldn’t expect a junior programmer to know how to do this, but that’s ok as long as the company is managed right. Granted, that can be a big if sometimes.








  • Always have to remind myself of this when managers ask me if something could be done. If it’s easy, I naturally get a little annoyed that they’re even asking. But knowing that is my job, not theirs, and it’s good that they ask. There’s lots of places where they assume and things go badly.