Good software engineering, architecting and coding are real skills, and early dividends of good or bad engineering will pay off or consume everything in the long term.

During my work in a F500 company I realized just how many poor and average coders there are, working on all sorts of projects. It seems like companies are not doing even rudimentary ability tests during the hiring process, since most of the people I need to work with I would never have hired myself. You only want to have at the very least "good" coders in your team. You really don't want the bad or even average ones. The long term productivity difference between coders can vary as much as 100x. Bad coders have negative productivity and will send any IT project into a downward spiral of messy, unmantainable, buggy code.

I spend half of my time correcting and refactoring code and API's of my colleagues. In the latest stint I refactored all of the UI code engineers on my team created and reduced lines of code by 75% cleaning a mess of duplicate code that was all over the place, while at the same time fixing bugs and adding consistent behaviour by keeping generic things generic, which will help long term maintanability, bug-fixing, just everything, immensely.
The people I work with will never realize just how lucky they are to have me in the team. Projects like the one mentioned in this article and the parent post are very likely the outcome of such IT projects where only mediocre people where in the loop, and there was no ace programmer to clean up after everyone and bring things into proper order. As work continues, the unstructured mess created by mediocre devs becomes exponentially more complex and unmaintanable until it can no longer be managed.

I feel this circumstance not valued enough, since most of this sort of effort is "transparent" to management. The screens "kinda" worked before, they work now, so what's the big deal? The fact that down the line all modifications, bugfixes and enhancements will be 400% easier thanks to refactoring and good engineering work, is not so apparent.

Yet its hard to understate how important it is for the long-term success of IT projects to have at least one or a few ace coders in the loop. The skill of your lead engineer and other codes is the primary thing that will determine either successful outcome or utter failure due to cost overruns and software quality issues. This is already determined in the hiring process, but I feel that this is not talked about enough.

So interesting you should say that, since I have lately been thinking along similar lines myself.
In many ways, it seems like Russia is the spiritual successor of the Mongol Empire. The territorial extent and tendency towards expansionism is clear. While I didn't think about the points you made, in terms of warfare there are also several parallels: the Mongols would offer cities a chance to surrender and join their empire, and those who opposed where brutally and mercilessly razed to the ground and its population massacred.
This is really no different than the current day Russian military doctrine of using heavy artillery file and bombing to subdue the enemy by flattening entire cities to the ground. They don't even care about their own civilian population or ethnic Russians in the area. So many cities in Chechnya and now in eastern Ukraine have suffered this fate, despite considerable Russian populations, which they typically claim to be "liberating" as pretext for going to war (or "special military operation" - sure).

He's also threatening Canada, which is the friendliest, most peaceful neighbour a country could hope for.

At the same time he's friendly towards Russia, who is the worst, most aggressive neighbour you could possibly get.

As Darth Putin would say, Russia became the biggest country in the world by peacefully defending itself in other people's countries.

Many things wrong and problematic about China.
Food, isn't one of them.

Dopamine depletion through smartphone engagement (social media, notifications) which kills motivation and drive, while numbing the brain, is probably one of the big ones.
The brain that is addicted to scrolling doesn't want to do hard things anymore.
This, with all the nonsense people consume on social media (they will cry about "lying mainstream media" but not hesitate to believe a random social media account causing a ruckus for engagement) are legitimately making humanity dumber.

Too much easy entertainment, too much fear-mongering and disinformation is making brains squishy and soft. Honestly, get out of all antisocial media and switch off all notifications on your phone. We are running this dangerous social experiment getting people hooked on smartphones, and it's ripping societies apart.

This is what I really don't get about Trump voters and MAGA.

Look, plenty of politicians and the media skew the truth, add a certain spin, cherry pick facts and lie by omission. A certain degree of manipulation will probably always exist, since the incentives for this sort of behavior are just too strong.

But Trump is just... off the charts. He doesn't even try to "skew" or to "spin", he just flat out lies almost every single time, and all of it is so well documented and in many cases easily refuted. And Trump voters simply don't care that their admiration and respect for Trump is not reciprocated in the least, since he will constantly lie to their face about almost anything, as long as it advances his interests. It is an astonishing display of ignorance in the face of a patholigical liar who has learned that he can get away with it, because nobody will hold him accountable, and on the contrary, his fans will love him even more for his wild and agitating but also completely false claims.
This is why many people say that MAGA - Trumpism is a cult. It is not rational.

It's true. I code a lot "by instinct", and when I need to explain to my co-workers why the way I suggest is better than the slop they coded, then I actually hesitate and sometimes struggle as my brain needs to first load all the logical reasons why my code is better, as well as putting all that abstract reasoning into words.

If you've done something long enough it becomes an instinct. Like playing an instrument or just walking - if you have to think about it, you will not be really good at it.

Counterfeiting, durability, even more plastic pollution in the environment... yes, plenty of reasons.

Tomorrow: "Intel integrated graphics beat NVidia in portable devices!"

Nvidia: Rock
Intel: Paper
AMD: Scissors

No amount of evidence is going to convince an idiot in an idiot-bubble.
It's all a conspiracy! Trump said so on "Truth Social", which is doublespeak for "Antisocial Misinformation".
What a dystopia we live in.

In case there was ever any doubt: Putin's Russia is a terrorist - mafia state.
Ever wonder why all terrorists and insurgents across the world are armed with AK rifles? Because the Russian government is only interested in making money and will sell their weapons to anyone.
After toppling Syrian dictator and Russian ally Assad, they uncovered his drug-labs and huge stockpiles of Captagon. He was one of the biggest drug dealers in the world.
Other allies of Russia are the worst regimes in the world, interested only in maintaining their hold on power, or terrorist organizations: North Korea, Iran, Hamas.
Russia also funds mercenaries in Africa to exploit resources like golds and diamonds, terrorizing locals, sometimes blackmailing governments.
If the current Russian regime went away and Russia become a normal democratic nation, the conflict level in the world would almost instantly drop by 50%.

PayPal is also a scummy company. They messed up a large payment of mine for airline tickets - they money was subtracted from my account, but not received by the airline, so I didn't get the tickets. I was then able to revert the payment on my bank account.
PayPal sent their lawyers after me, demanding repayment. Fortunately I made screenshots of everything (which I always do with large payments) showing all transactions and emails that no payment was received, sent all evidence to PayPal lawyers and in turn asked them for evidence that they did the payment to the airline.

I never received feedback, and they just silently closed my account.

The claim about windmills in this big-oil propaganda speech that he delivers is completely wrong.
https://www.factcheck.org/2018...

Here's a guy who drank all of Elon's kool-aid.

"Free Speech" is abused as a pretext to mean "don't regulate us, at all". Social media platforms like X thrive on engagement, so the more controversial assholes like Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, racists, bigots and other lunatics you have on the platform, the better. They post sensationalist nonsense, fake news, literal Russian propaganda, anything that will get the double whammy of enagement: words of approval from their fans, as well as the outrage from their detractors.
Social media has become a cancer of disinformation, addiction, and unhappiness. Elon Musks' X is the worst of all.

It's related to the halving and central bank liquidity cycles. Not political parties.
You can research all of that if you're interested.