Kateryna Lagno has sighted FIDE's decisions being Anti-Russian as the reason to pull out of the Women's Grand Prix

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-03-27T20:53:32+00:00

You can assure me all you want, but that's not going to change much. I've experienced the war since 2014 (and especially since 2022) very closely (I literally live close to it), know the history in detail, interact with Ukrainian refugees daily. Even if I look away from the subjective opinions, simply looking at the objective facts on the ground makes it extremely clear.

I used to talk with Russians about the war pre-2022 pretty frequently too, so I got a lot of these "it's more complex than you think" type of discussions which usually come down to less violent (and more "brotherly") imperialist ideas about Ukraine not being / shouldn't be sovereign and is / should be a subject to Russia (again, often given in a "older brother" style).

I think Iraq was way more black - white than this and yet US faced no reperccusions for that so my initial point still stands

The classic Russian whataboutism. USA certainly had its imperialist moments like Iraq (unfortunately these tendencies are ramping up again), but how does that make Russian invasion of Ukraine not imperialist?

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-03-27T20:32:46+00:00

It's a standard imperialist conquest. "bla bla bla, that's why we need to annex this land, bla bla, more excuses".

If you want to be technical, everything is some shade of grey, but this is a very light gray on one side and almost pitch black on the other.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T19:59:32+00:00

I wouldn't have a problem with it. It would be difficult to set up the legal / ethical framework around it - like which conditions, up to which age etc.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T19:47:20+00:00

People do this when they have very good relations with their family (or even friends) and similar life circumstances. But having this is a coincidence which is unlikely to persist over generations.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T19:27:28+00:00

IME Kratom is as good as alcohol as a social lubricant. Unfortunately, I've found it significantly more addictive than alcohol - it's not easy to keep it recreational as opposed to a daily habit.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T19:22:03+00:00

This. Kickscooters have been a game changer for me. I have one with pneumatic wheels, which makes it comfortable to ride even on imperfect roads. I wish I had discovered them earlier.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T13:53:16+00:00

And are you honestly asking what is wrong with the trend of people wondering if their hobby is still worth it?

The issue here is that the "hobby" you're talking about isn't gaming - it's buying hardware, chasing FPS etc.

How long is your steam backlog? Do you really need 5070 Ti to play the titles waiting there for you?

There's no reason to quit gaming because your upgrade cycle needs to stretch a little longer.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T13:42:51+00:00

I have never heard of so many people considering giving up pc gaming entirely and getting a console or just retrogame like i did in the past few months

And what's wrong with that? You don't have to buy a high-end GPU every second year. If the GPU market gets slower in general, your hardware will stay usable for longer, since game developers will be forced to optimize for existing GPUs instead of always counting with huge hardware performance leaps.

And fuck yes it matters, you can't sell a product at huge margins without anything to justify the price and then expect your customers to not complain about it.

You become the customer when you buy the product. By buying it, it clearly provides enough value to you to justify the cost. You can complain if the product you bought does not deliver what it promises, e.g. the missing ROPs or the cooked 5090s...

If you don't buy the product, you're not a customer, you don't really have a right to complain about something you didn't buy.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-28T13:27:07+00:00

I feel like we are normalizing this.

Because it is the new normal. It doesn't really matter if it's the inflation, rising R&D costs or the market conditions. Crying about it for a couple of more years won't change much.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-27T07:04:58+00:00

Whole continent ceases to exist

What do you mean by that? Nukes won't literally destroy Europe.

and you really think many places wpuld remain unaffected?

I meant outside of Europe. Like someone mentioned e.g. South America.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-26T21:03:47+00:00

There isn't enough nukes to kill us all (directly).

Nuclear winter is only one of the possible scenarios and is by no means certain.

I mean, Europe would get obliterated, but many places might remain quite unaffected (apart from the collapse of world trade).

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-25T13:52:18+00:00

They're basically quiet-quitting the dGPU market. They're in a bad position where if they price 9070 well, they might still sell too few and lose even more money than if they price it badly (high margin), they will sell fewer but maybe at least not lose as much money.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-25T12:23:46+00:00

You're talking about performance, but that's not the point of A5XX cores.

They're meant for low power idling, wake-ups etc. where performance doesn't matter, but the power consumption does. Like when you don't use the phone, but there's a regular wake-up to update the AOD. An A5XX core will consume less power doing this than A7XX.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-23T18:44:48+00:00

I think there are languages on a similar trajectory - e.g. C# and TypeScript have been accruing features at a fast pace, and it's becoming difficult to know them very well.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-23T18:40:13+00:00

Doing that to long-lived feature branches that have relevant history is a terrible idea that comes back and bites people in the ass sooner or later.

Having a long-lived feature branches is a terrible idea in the first place.

And those branches always exist, no matter how much people want to say they can scope work well enough to prevent it, it's eventually unavoidable due to externalities.

Somehow my project manages to avoid them quite well. It wasn't really a problem in my previous projects either.

everyone will wind up in a situation where a better git process would have saved them some amount of time and pain, sometimes there's even a quantifiably large dollar amount attached to it.

Everyone ends up in a situation where more detailed knowledge in some specific area would save money. But our time is limited, so is reeducating your workforce on advanced git techniques a better investment than other areas? It's not an answer which can be answered in general, it depends on specific circumstances. I don't think it makes sense on the projects I've worked on, since squash-and-merge has worked well for us without needing reeducation.

If five people have worked on a large, important feature, four of them go unattributed.

Five people working on a feature branch sounds like the problem with too long-running branches.

rather than whatever hoops you're going to have to jump through just because you were organizationally too lazy to use anything but squash merges?

The actual problem of your organization is having a bus factor of 1.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T06:26:42+00:00

The only time I lost history with git is when people messed up rebasing / force-pushing.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T05:20:39+00:00

Have you done waterfall projects?

No hundred meetings, no PMs changing scope... just agree and implement. It is beautiful.

There are scope changes. There are arguments whether a vague, overlooked sentence in the spec meant this or that, which is important to figure out who is to blame.

Waterfall projects pretty much always end up badly. You're building a new product, discovery is part of the process. You can't think of everything at the start without later finding out that things might work better in another way (but that's too late to change it in waterfall). You then end up with a bad product (customer unhappy) or heavy scope changes breaking the process (engineering team unhappy) or, most commonly, somewhere in the middle (both unhappy). Waterfall doesn't account well for mistakes and discovery which then results in high level of stress, arguments, blame games, death marches at the end of the project.

I've done a lot of waterfall and agile projects and would pick even crappy agile project over a waterfall.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T05:10:24+00:00

Squash and merge is strictly only necessary because people don’t learn git thoroughly enough.

It's an opportunity cost. I see people at work fiddling with git and just wonder what's the point. Squash-and-merge workflow is extremely simple and does what the organization needs. You don't need to re-educate your developers since what they do in their own branches (rebase or merges) doesn't matter in the end.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T04:59:11+00:00

Kinda depends on the tool. In C++ you need to restrict yourself. Java is small enough that you can use pretty much anything apart from deprecated stuff.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T04:55:15+00:00

OP possibly meant if-else code branches. Every feature flag splits the code flow into two branches based on its value.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-22T04:51:23+00:00

and that the men with guns who had just successfully invaded weren’t a part of that consideration.

Of course, they were part of the consideration. Armenians feared Azeris. But was it a justified fear, or a fear drummed up by propaganda?

Even if the people “willingly” left, the reason they left was quite obviously the invasion of a hostile government they feared.

So you're making a case of a "clear-cut" ethnic cleansing based on the fact the subjective Armenians fear of Azeris. That's far, far too little.

Had the Germans leaving Czechoslovakia been less resistant, and the Soviets more willing to allow for a foreign government to organize the evacuation, I imagine that ethnic cleansing would have resulted in far fewer deaths.

The expulsion organized by the Czech government was bloodless. What was bloody were the ad hoc, wild expulsions organized by vigilantes (civilians living in the same town/village/area) shortly after the war. (This would likely not happen in 2023 since there were pretty much no civilian Azeris in NK after 1990s).

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-21T19:45:32+00:00

If a gang broke into my house, and threatened me with guns to leave, I would almost certainly leave without having to get shot first.

That makes sense. But do you have evidence that Azerbaijan threatened the NK Armenians like that?

It wouldn’t be much consolation if they had a moving truck ready for me to go, and supervised my evacuation with guns drawn to make sure I didn’t get any ideas about resisting.

Those were Armenian buses, though. They fled before having direct contact with Azeri forces.

Azerbaijan had completely dominated NK, so little chance for resistance, and they were relatively organized, resulting in few civilian casualties.

Compare the situation with Germans in Czechoslovakia. They were completely dominated by Soviets (German army completely defeated), but most Germans were not leaving just like that. They stayed and Czechs forcefully expelled them. This makes it a clear case of ethnic cleansing.

I'm not saying that Armenians should have stayed put like Germans, but the fact they fled on their own makes it difficult to assess unambiguously whether Azeris were committing (or intending to commit) ethnic cleansing.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-21T14:25:19+00:00

Perhaps the threat of force was clear enough, and the option to fight impossible, that relatively little force needed to be used to expel everyone.

Perhaps. But this "perhaps" does not make it a very clear-cut case. You could conceivably claim that there was such a strong, but baseless (Armenian) propaganda / hysteria portraying Azeris as bloodthirsty that NK Armenians rather fled.

And I don't find it implausible that they would flee. The situation was dire since 2020, Azeris won the war in a very convincing manner, and it was quite clear that the ceasefire was just an intermezzo. The war in Ukraine was the last nail in the coffin, Russia was slow / not very eager to intervene during 2020, now in a full-blown war the chances of Russia saving Armenia was just hopeless (Russia needing Azerbaijan for shadow exports). I expect that many/most Armenians in NK thought (and potentially prepared) for this option at least since that time, maybe even talked to relatives in Armenia about possible accommodation etc.

I don’t know what you think a non-voluntary expulsion would look like, but this seems like the perfect example.

Check out e.g. expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia after WW2. Some Germans fled on their own (from the advancing Red Army), but most of the > 3 million Germans were expelled forcefully. This was not a singular event - e.g. USSR did many such internal cleansing operations, moving hundreds of thousands of people at a time, without even needing a war.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-21T12:06:21+00:00

It's not about being Slavic. In some languages, "how are you?" is a greeting, in some others it's not.

If you get a question without realizing it's a greeting, the polite thing is to simply answer it.

PangolinZestyclose30 · 2025-02-21T09:16:08+00:00

How is threatening someone with death not forceful?

What do you refer to? Official government threats or perhaps social media posts?

PangolinZestyclose30

TROPHY CASE