Russia signed a treaty to defend Venezuela just two months ago

To be fair I'm betting Venezuela put as much faith in that as Ukraine places in Trumps promises of defending them against Russia, should they accept the peace deal.

At this point it would be easier to simply list legitimate legal ones.

That's more or less the same set of countries as the rich ones. The USA a very recent outlier, but that's because full effect will take a while to hit. And the USA has a long way to fall I'd expect all hell to break loose before it gets too far down the pole.

The driver of birthrates is really quite simple: when people are given a choice, most choose to have fewer (or no) babies.

I don't think it's quite that simple, most due to the evidence provided by TSMC. Children born to TSMC employees in Taiwan accounted for approximately 1.8% of all babies born nationwide in 2023, even though TSMC employees make up only about 0.3% of Taiwan's population. The usual reasons why women in OECD countries have low birth rates are turned on their head here. TSMC employees are highly educated, and well paid. So while the women in Chad probably no choice if the wanted to be sexually active, these TSMC employees could make any choice they wanted, and they chose to have children.

What stands out is TSMC spends a lot of money in supporting it's mothers. For example, creches are located right beside the workspaces, they provide child care and social structures. This corporate culture that is very supportive of women and motherhood does not come cheap, and it's difficult to see large direct benefits to the bottom line. I've never seen it in Western companies, that are drive purely by the bottom line. It's amazing to see it in TSMC.

In contrast, the highly patriarchal Japanese society is well known for the reverse. Japan consistently ranks near the bottom of the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Index (118th out of 148 in 2025). The gender pay gap in Japan is approximately 22%, the worst in the G7. Women are frequently pushed into "non-regular" (part-time or contract) work after having children, making it difficult to return to a career track. It's not entirely a surprise that a society that does not support women had a chronic birth rate issue.

But the light has finally switched on. The government is almost in panic mode now about the demographic time bomb. In 2023 (or so?) the government significantly increased the Childbirth Lump-Sum Allowance to ¥500,000 to cover delivery costs. They also expanded monthly child allowances and eliminated income caps to ensure more families receive help. I'd be surprised if this effort stops until it sees some success, but they are trying manufacture societal change and that will take a decade or two.

Yes, Australia has a good weather bureau. As do most countries. The corporate sites people love to quote get their data and forecasts from the national bureau's, and dress it up with slightly better eye candy. Only the national weather bureau's have weather monitoring stations distributed around the country, and the supercomputers needed to make the forecasts.

Australia is unusual in one way: most people do get their data from the Australia's BOM (Bureau of Meteorology). The web old site was rock solid, and not too badly organised. I had no trouble finding local creek levels during floods for instance. But it was very old. So old it didn't support https.

So now they have a shiny new one, that does support https. And they took the opportunity to re-organise it, in a way most professional weather people say is in improvement (with some exceptions, but it's mostly better). But that means all existing users no longer know how to find their way around it. And did I mention it's very popular? So that meant a lot of existing uses are pissed off because their world changed. Hence, this story hitting slashdot.

We have a company in Australia taking a different approach. They recondition truck diesel trucks due for a rebuild. The range is about 500km, which is doesn't work in Australia as we have about 1000km between major cities. So instead of recharging they replace the battery with a forklift, which takes a few minutes. They have built replacement stations along the east coast of Australia, which is a road about 4,000km long.

You can read what they say about the comparative cost of diesel and EV trucks on their web site.

I'll agree with that, especially if you're younger / less experienced and don't have a lot of code you've written banked from which you can pull. Cleaning up, or at least heavily reviewing, the vibe code for production may be a good way to hone your skills.

It's been a long while since I beginner programmer. I don't remember much how I earned senior engineer spurs, only that it took a very long time - decades. I remember when a I was a beginner math student better. Its started enforced playing with coloured blocks illustrating numbers adding and subtracting them, then learning to write those same steps down as expressions, then putting an X into the expression and solving it, then solving 2 variable linear equations, then 3, then 4, then matrices of any size, determinants, and linear transformations and eigenvectors, along with calculus, trig identities, eventually ending with differential equations. I was never good at that last one. Each step required mastery of the previous one. The only way I found get attaining that mastery was the same whether I sailing, swimming, programming, fishing or at school: do it over and over again, until I didn't have to think about it any more. If you're a beginner programmer and your goal is mastery of the craft, I don't think vide coding is going to helpful in achieving that mastery.

From what I've seen vide coding is a great fit for a project for you throw over the wall, and walk away with the money. Like a web shop font that will be replaced in a few years anyway. The AI's have seen millions of them, so they can absolutely churn out something that mostly works much faster than any human, and after it's delivered it becomes someone else's problem. And the best part is that someone might be you, who is again paid by the hour to fix something that's several times the size it could have been, had you spent a little more time on it.

There's that, and there the fact that is you spend another $4,000 on top of the $40,000, you can buy a solar system to keep it charged for the life of the car. And if you have V2G, the car can keep the lights on and fridges running when your local power drops out, as it probably does every few days.

In a country without reliable infrastructure or cheap petroleum, it's a very attractive deal.

Take long for them to start exporting the surplus?? It's already started.

But unless it's something with a large legal risk, (Wine for example), you can typically get away with contributing under a pseudonym.

Not really. You can post whatever source you like on the internet, but if you want to get it into a distro like Debian or Fedora you are going to need proper copyright attribution. If you want to become a member of Debian and contribute by packaging you will need government ID. If you want to see what happens to a large project that doesn't protect themselves in that way, look no further than NPM. Today's headline: NPM flooded with malicious packages download 86,000 times.

Google is actively trying to block third party app installations regardless of source.

Either you don't have a clue about what they are actually doing, or you're bullsitting. Side loading will continue to be allowed, and third party app stores like F-Droid are still allowed. They are not blocking anything that wasn't blocked before, because every app had to be signed. What they are effectively banning is anonymous signatures.

for your own personal use on your own device without signing up and paying a fee to google

You do have to sign up. There is no fee for personal use.

Yes, you might hold the "title" to the physical property, but you're not allowed to change the locks on the property you supposedly own and that Google just so happened to "forget" about giving you a key for.

For now this is FUD. Google is happy to ship android on phones that let you unlock the bootloader. Whether you can is up to the manufacturer, and many don't. But that isn't Google's doing.

Let's see if you can wrap your head around this: all Google is doing here is insisting apps can only be installed if they are signed with a key registered with them. That's it, for now at least. Nothing else changes. It's not even clear what the ID you will have to provide. They did say in some cases government ID might be required. But it might not either. I would not be surprised if it was just a mobile phone number for most of us.

The complaints from open source about this policy are a little puzzling. The problem is right in the name: open source development is generally done in the open, and with attribution. Debian for example has a fairly strong copyright policy. They insist on knowing who has the copyright to every line of code, and what that copyright is. Anyone who contributes code to a project on github leaves an audit trail that's hard to deny. The Linux kernel is even stronger - effectively requires cropographically signed submissions from individuals.

Open sources motivations for wanting this are very different of course. They aren't trying to set up an audit trail so you can sue someone is something goes wrong. It's mostly about avoiding a repeat of the SCO saga. But nonetheless you could use it for to pursue a developer, and audit trail open source gives you is far tighter that what Google is asking for.

I get that people suspect Google's motivations. But given given open source already gives them far more than they are asking for, do those motivations matter?

people donâ(TM)t have time to wait 30 minutes or an hour to charge their car.

Maybe that's a problem in the USA, given how you seem determined not to import Chinese technology. But the rest of us are able to buy Chinese cars that charge in 5 minutes.

We are so fucked.

Who is this "we"? I just sold my house and build one 40m above the surrounding flood plain. The old one was on the river. Beautiful place, tranquil water views, several meters above to 100 year flood level. But floods have grown noticeably more frequent and higher in the 20 years I owned the place. The writing was on the wall, so I decide it was time to move on. Despite the new house needing far more $ coverage, the insurance is around 1/2.

I for one there are still people out there who believe climate change is crap. Without them I would not have been able to see my old house for price I got. Without people like them, my I would not have recently got the excellent price I did for my Tesla shares. I'm sure the good lord provided such people so I can have a comfortable lifestyle until I pass from this world into the next, and I am very grateful to him for it.

I see these sorts of comments repeatedly, yet they are so far from my experience it's like they are from a different world. The code generated by AI's is so wrong for me, it's not worth my time to review it. Why review something you are 9 times out of 10 going to throw away? Since I've never personally seen AI work well, all I have is youtube videos of people using it successfully. Mostly, there people are developing web apps. Sometimes they are developing in Python. Neither are languages I use a lot of now, but nonetheless there is a recognisable pattern.

The AI's seem to memorise code snippets they've seen on the web. They combine that with a remarkable ability to recognise and process the English to adapt those snippets to the context you've supplied. It's sort of like using Stack Overflow, but you don't have spend 15 minutes googling, you don't have to copy and paste, and you don't have to adapt the code mung the code to your organisations style. It's an intelligent templating engine if you like, and watching it work (when it does work) on youtube is pretty memorising. On the downside, it's wrong far more often than the Stack Overflow answer google finds, and all the context and background that tends to accompany the Stack Overflow answers (ie, the bit you learn from) is gone.

The other downside is it only works if it has seen a lot of examples of the sort of code you are say you are after. If it hasn't it will still give you an answer, but it will be so wrong you would have saved time if you hadn't seen it. So it works well if you are doing something very similar to something that's been done 1000's of times before, and posted to the web. But that's not something I do - it would bore me silly. Talking to my peers (all senior software engineers), that's not something any of them does.

Nonetheless, you 10 person shop spends their day writing your typical web app that throws up forms, collects the data, and displays it in various ways I can well imagine it works well for you.

Ahh, finally. We have a believable origin sort for The Matrix. It wouldn't surprise me if it was Zuck who sold humanities sole to the machines, given how careless he is.

This appears in the story: 37signals spent $1.5 million on 18 petabytes worth of Pure Storage kit that Hansson wrote will cost less than $200,000 a year to operate. It's the only thing they mention they are moving "in-house".

18 petabytes will take maybe 200 drives plus (around USD$130k) plus other bits and bobs like SSD caches and an InfiniBand, network so at $1.5M it doesn't sound like they are scrimping. They also don't specify what "in-house" means, but given they are moving from S3 it might might co-lo. It's only 4 racks after all. That means all the power and cooling issues are taken care of.

What does that leave? Maybe installation, but usually remote hands do that. Certainly not maintenance. If a Dell server fails within it's warranty period (5..7 years), Dell handles it - it's included in the price. What's left in the way of ongoing maintenance is a very part time job for one engineer.

overstated marketing claims

I'm not sure what marketing claims you are referring to, but if it's AWS's claims it's possible to connect your first server to a Postgres database, and start serving your Route 53 hosted domain in under a day it's largely correct. It's also a damned sight cheaper than buying hardware and putting it in a co-lo. But if you look around, it's not difficult to find a lot of mature successful companies that started like that, but now suffer from boiled frog syndrome. And every time one of then wakes up and smells the roses, you get a small army of people claiming "but setting your own infrastructure so hard the staffing costs will send you broke". No it's not hard, and no there really isn't much in the way of engineering costs. I never seen marketing that says otherwise, but it must exist and it sure must be good, because it has a awful lot of people convinced.