cpcallen
2yr ago
It was clear to me that this became, very quickly, something that was pure, unadulterated 100% culture war.
This strikes me as a very American perspective—or rather, since it looks that way from here too, a very American phenomenon. Not that there were no disputes about public health measures in Europe—we have our share of anti-vaxers too—but at least here in the UK conflict didn't break down along existing political lines so obviously as it did in the US, and though we did have some of the "do as I say not as I do" shenanigans (cough Castle Barnard cough PartyGate cough) they were more from the right than the left.
cpcallen
2yr ago
Demographics matter over the course of decades. They're pretty much irrelevant to the question at hand in the immediate context.
cpcallen
2yr ago
"Of course Ukraine was not going to fall, the writing was on the wall."
None of this was obvious.
Dunno. Maybe I was just biased and happend to get lucky against the odds, but I believed from the start that things were not going to go well for the Russians and put it in writing as early as March 2nd:
[M]y prior is a conversation I had a few years ago with friend, a young Ukranian woman, about her participation in Euromaidan. The kind of determination and bravery that she described, in the face of harrowing, quasi-military oppression, was utterly astonishing to me. It made me incredibly thankful for having lived my life so far in peaceful countries—and it also made me sure that YOU DO NOT WANT TO MESS WITH THE UKRAINIANS.
Evidently the Ukrainians' grit and resolve wasn't obvious to most until the fighting actually started. Were most westerners typical-minding things? After all, if the UK got invaded I can only imagine that most of us would be trying to flee or at least keep our heads down and not get killed. But that's not what I expected the Ukrainians to do, and they didn't.
cpcallen
2yr ago
For some reason I only have downvote buttons, for both posts and comments. Is this a bug or did I do something wrong? I note that I saw only downvote arrows while not logged in, and logging in did not fix it. (I have tried force-reloading the page, opening a new tab, etc.)
Or maybe we are going to have only non-positive scores going forward? That seems… a bit negative to me. ;-)
cpcallen
2yr ago
Thanks for introducing me to a whole bunch of things I'd not previously been aware of. I hope your won't mind a small correction: if I have understood Wikipedia correctly, it was Cash's private mansion that burned down, while the House of Cash was turned into offices and a cafe.
I think this is disingenuous. Babbage certainly created the first design for a programmable computer as we know it, and clearly would have given considerable thought to combining instructions together. But if Lovelace was the first person to actually spend a significant amount of time constructing lists of instructions to solve particular problems then I don't think it's unreasonable to describe her as the first programmer.
By way of (concrete) analogy: in the fourth year comp eng CPU Design course I took as an undergrad, we all created pipelined RISC CPU designs in VHDL, and used an emulator to test them. To that end I did input several sequences of instruction to ensure that the (emulated) hardware was operating as it should, with the ALU generating the correct results, the pipeline correctly handling various hazards, etc., and while these might technically be "programs" I was not "programming" in any meaningful way. Like Babbage (and thousands of students before me) I created a design for a CPU which will never physically exist. Unlike Babbage, my non-existent CPU would never attract even a single programmer.
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