Average age of Ukranian Army 42.

Average age of the 1st Galician Grenadier Grandpa Battalion: 55.

Zelenskyy trying so hard not to draft anyone under 25 so that the war support doesn’t crater and he doesn’t cause a demographic crisis for Ukraine’s labor mix.

Russia’s “Peace Plan” is to actually take over Ukraine, and then the Baltics, and then Poland, and then Germany and the rest of the Central Europe, and then France and the UK, and rest of Western Europe, and then they’ll take over the Atlantic Ocean and Iceland and Greenland, and then they’ll come and take over the United States, state by state starting from the East Coast going to the West Coast, and then Hawaii, and then Japan, and then they’ll autocoup themselves oblast by oblast starting with Vladivostok where they’ll be dug in for months trying to make roads that connect to the rest of Russia but then they’ll keep marching West and when they finally loop all the way back around to Lviv the whole West will be defeated and we’ll all be speaking Russian and saying Hail Putler and the brave Galician racists will be rolling in their graves saying I told you so.

And that’s why at least 4 generations of Ukrainian men need to be eradicated for American interests in Eastern Europe.

Yeah every Western analyst has been saying: You’re stupid and propagandized to think that the meat grinder war can be won by the country with the most meat.

Doubt he’s “from” Odesa. The country side around Odesa spawns Ukrainian Nationalists like crazy.

The language wars have been the funniest shit to me since I was a kid in Odesa. Especially with what happened now, half the country goes on Duo Lingo overnight. Having grown up with this stupid shit, it was really funny to immigrate to the US and learn about like the slave trade and Jim Crow, and be like “damn Ukrainians really do love to complain”.

Which is heavily ironic because my dad immediately went the other way and just became mildly racist about how “black people be demanding things”. Shit’s hilarious because it was always like “in 1876 we were forced to cut out our tongues with the Ems decree, and we couldn’t celebrate the Taras Sevchenko centennial, and the evil Soviets made Russian the academic lingua franca”. But the people who literally couldn’t vote until 1964 and couldn’t live in certain neighborhoods (even to this day) are entitled.

It’s such a silly fucking position because of it’s wishy washy historicity once you start to “collect evidence” and ultimately it’s like if all complaints of oppression in America by black people were summed up with “they wouldn’t let us talk jive”.

It’s also really funny because if Ukraine fulfills it’s wildest EU/NATO/US FREEDOM dreams, in 10 years there will be less Russian and Ukranian than there is now. It will be like Iceland or Ireland where it’s fully colonized by capitalist English due to the economic realities, and there will be a large language divide between the younger and older generations in the country. Ukrainians only cling tightly to their traditions for their traditional enemies. They’ll gleefully shed all that for Westernization because it’s “the way of the world”. Sure they’ll be the classic holdouts of Galicia, but practically the country will erase its own language and culture much like Iceland and other countries suffering from success under neocolonialism.

This is hilariously silly from a developer perspective because Safari exists. Safari is literally the bane of my existence in WebDev because it’s usually the browser that does something weird and not according to standards (which is classically the IE problem). Apple WebKit has significantly deviated from KHTML/Blink in ways that are worse for developers. Chrome does inject defaults to standard interfaces to make websites “work better” where Firefox is much more strict about the standard.

To pretend that Chromium/Blink/V8 is worse than Firefox or any other competitor is just burying your head in the sand. Blink and V8 are extremely highly optimized and standards driven, there’s a reason Node didn’t choose SpiderMonkey. Dev Tools have significant difference in speed and usability, and I’m a Firefox daily driver and use it for development.

What Google is doing that’s ridiculous and stupid is using it’s weight to influence the design of Chromium such as the deprecation and removal of Manifest V2 to prevent adblockers under the guise of “safety” or whatever, as well as driving more telemetry and anti-features into the Chromium core product.

Also of course “MagicLasso” doesn’t say Safari is the IE because it’s a adblocker for Safari. lol

It’s windows host because it has the unique property of leaking to higher levels of abstraction and leaking to lower levels of abstraction, which is a technological feat that can only come from Microsoft.

My brother in Christ we (the US) are the bad actors.

Zelenskyy literally cannot advocate for negotiated peace. The Right wing nationalist elements of Ukraine’s coalition will effectively murder him if that becomes his position. It remains to be seen what will happen to him when he’s forced into it by the reality of the war and the waning of international support by his patron states.

The West is in complete denial that the Houthi movement is one of the most battle hardened and effective factions against US style war tactics in the World. Their ability to procure, build, and strategize and their experience fighting US tactics in sea and air they’re punching heavily above their weight limit. It’s seriously impressive.

Part of this denial is the heavy investment in the military industrial complex which has effectively destroyed war economics from the US point of view, but nobody wants to admit that it’s more expensive field an $11M Aegis launched SM-3 vs the Quds-3/Quds-2. While the Quds-3/Quds-2 has no public dollar amount that I can find, it’s unlikely to cost more than a Iranian produced Zolfaghar or Qadr missile which western analysis peg at $0.5 to $1.5 million dollars.

Oh and you launch multiple interceptors per ballistic target if you want to intercept, so the economic comparison is for perfect interception with no backup.

The US likely loses more money by having war ships in target range of the Houthis than the Houthis spend yearly on their weapons production.

first class languages

So like Racket/Scheme and like maybe Ruby?

Factory factory…n is literally just creating an OOP closure for when your language doesn’t support first class functions, closures and/or currying.

Also metaprogramming and abstraction is literally the only way to actually manage and deal with the capriciousness of your stakeholders.

It’s not simple, because it’s literally not that simple. It’s Conway’s Law. That’s what being a programmer in the industry is. I run a platform team, and I get paid because I can organize and deal with technical risk and contingency better than anyone else at my company. You bet your ass I do metaprogramming.

Also my product itself is a factory factory factory. Users create processes to author content, author content, and that content is delivered to other users. All in the same system. Managing complexity is extremely important if you want to work on interesting things.

“And this is the way everyone is doing it now? Everyone is using a general-purpose tool-building factory factory factory now, whenever they need a hammer?”

I’ve had this exact conversation with a programmer who was retiring. He was complaining that I ask too much because I told him that he needed a more generic way to represent the logic that encodes how our end-users traverse the content that our authoring users create and manage. He literally said something to the effect of the above quote to me, but as complaining contempt.

The business explicitly doesn’t want to spend money crafting individual code bases and products and unique logic. Our system lives and dies by our ability to service our internal clients and meet their needs in a dynamic manner. We need manage each factory layer carefully because very often different clients want two different things at two different times, and so each decision needs to be encoded in a way that allows us to make future platform changes without having to sell the business on refactors.

Sure you’ll run into people who overuse things when it could be simpler from the business perspective. But the reality is that most programmers in the industry have never stepped foot into a well run shop. Most programmers in the industry haven’t actually launched a product tip to tail.

It’s very easy to criticize patterns when you don’t actually have to use them, you’ve never seen them being used properly, and you don’t know how and when to implement them.

You don’t know how many times I’ve had to explain what two phase migration means and how to do them across multiple dependency links in the chain.

Most companies are incapable of actually building something this techical.

After 15 years in the industry, I don’t actually hate cargo cult programming anymore. Cargo cult programing is a useful tool to deal with the industry. Junior devs are going to join a cult, you want them in your cult, and you want your cult to have clear rules. If they want to know why the gods rain cargo, they’ll ask. At one point you don’t have any real control over hiring even as a Lead, EM, etc, because in larger companies saying “no” often doesn’t matter when hiring has been dragging on too long. They need to fill seats for deadlines they decided without you anyway.

As a tech leader with standards, you either need to be in a wonderful company or you need to have a wonderful cult.