Their entire leadership, navy, airforce, petrochemical and steel industries as well as the entire supply chain for the ballistic and drones industries which is also a lucrative export to Russia.
I am not sure they "lost a little else". When looking at what the US lost, it's pretty small in comparison
Russia and China would likely disagree as they count their gains:
- yet another massive blow to their trust and reputation among allies
- again massively undermining NATO thereby fostering global instability
- weakened credibility vis a vis defending Taiwan
It's not a complete US success, but what the OP said was a huge understatement. Iran situation had gotten much worse during this war.
Regarding NATO, this is a European effort of undermining the alliance no more than it is the US.
Europe is rightfully saying that Ukraine is our, the entire western world, war.
However, when the US bombs the very factories that manufacture these drones used in Ukraine, and the nation that quite frequently kidnaps european citizens as political chips, the europeans say "this is not our war".
Thats not how most of the manpower gets there, without even knowing the Ukraine example, I venture to guess based on the superior morale of Ukrainian forces, that most are drafted willingly.
This still does not prove the very general statement GP made, which doesn't align with draft reality in historical wars
Millions of people enjoy great lives today because at least one of their ancestors were smart enough to not go to the meat grinder. While millions of young men became genetic dead ends dead in a ditch for no reason at all. Even their names forgotten forever.
Millions of people were not burned to death due to not living under Nazi rule you mean.
Most of our ancestors did join a draft, as it was universal, be it the Napoleon wars, WW1 or WW2. This interpretation of history is highly creative I will give you that
Name 10 common soldiers who liberated a concentration camp , from the top of your head. If you care so much about that as you give the impression of doing.
Are you implying that the fact there are no common soldiers famous for liberating concentration camps, means that saving further millions that would be killed by the eventual Nazi occupation of Europe, is in vain?
You - who ask for people to sacrifice their lives in the most horrific ways - don't even care to know the names of any of those who have done that before.
To most people, these soldiers are just part of a nameless and faceless mass of flesh and meat to be utilized and expended.
Who would want that to be his destiny? Certainly not you, because you are here on HN typing and not putting your life on the line to defend innocent people in Ukraine, in Haiti, in Africa, and so on.
I don't know, I served in my country's army so I have no issue saying that.
You don't have to be the famous astronaut to be an anonymous part of the space program and participate in doing something worthwhile like getting a man to the moon.
I am having trouble understanding your all-or-nothing argument, and apparently your need for worldwide recognition for an action to have meaning.
Then I wish you good luck when you're drafted to fight a war, or decide on your own volition to go fight. But I couldn't ask you or anybody else to make that kind of sacrifice. As most soldiers in history died for nothing - and killed for nothing.
Every man who refused to go to war and has progeny living today did something more worthwhile than those young soldiers - many of them true heroes - who died in the mud or the snow without having any kids of their own.
But I'm not anti-military, rather the contrary. But it should be for those who want to fight from their own free will - like many of the most successful armies through history.
Silicon valley privileged mindset in Europe, what are you talking about?! You mean Piotr, Ivan, and Andrei working remotely for American company for equivalent of 60k USD annually?
Most armies in Europe, especially in post-Communist part of it, are nepotist corrupted structures. People go there for tax and housing benefits and early retirement. They are not even particularly fit, skilled, or trained to fight with an invader. Especially in these countries men aged 18-45 have absolutely nothing to fight for.
That's true for Azure, where contracts are signed due to free credits given over Office and Windows usage.
However, there is a reason why everyone uses Office and Windows.
Office is the only suite that has the complete feature set (Ask any accountant to move to Google Sheets). Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware (PnP) and have been that way for decades.
This is due to superior software on the aspects that matter to customers
People use Windows because Office runs on Windows, and Windows ran in any shitty cheap beige box. This is the whole story since the 1990's.
On hardware: it's because Windows has a stable kernel ABI and makes it very simple for hardware vendors to write proprietary drivers. Linux kind of forces everybody to upstream their device drivers, which is good and bad at the same time - DKMS is something relatively new.
But yeah, the NT kernel is very nice, the problem with Windows is the userland.
But if you really look at it the "comfort zone" problem isn't too big of an issue in itself that a few training workshops and brief acclimatization periods for other tool suites can't solve. Making accountants move to Google Sheets is actually doable given enough incentive; there really isn't a lack of features in Sheets against Excel so much as there is a difference of implementation. In fact, for many purposes Sheets and GSuite could even be the "superior software" if only one bothers to make good use of it.
The problem is more that companies hesitate to take the dive because they can't be sure any of the alternatives will stay stable in the long run. Google is infamous for abruptly shutting down applications and none of the other competitors have built enough of a repute yet to ensure longterm reliability.
Microsoft has been (and continues) riding on its first-mover advantage as an unmovable establishment for decades. It has worked out till now, but who knows till when.
The problem is that it encourages people to use excel for things that should never be in a spreadsheet in the first place. I mean if you're reaching for VBA, building complex PowerQuery pipelines, and writing nested LAMBDA functions just to process your data, imho you have outgrown excel. Just because you can build an entire solution in Excel because you already know the interface, doesn't mean you should...
Also, don't get me started on the newer functions such as XLOOKUP and Dynamic... Relational data belongs in a relational database. If you are joining tables and filtering massive arrays, you should be using standard SQL Arrays, it makes it so much easier to troubleshoot long term.
Windows is the only system that can effectively run on any hardware
...as long as that hardware is Intel-based (and a select few ARM-based boards nowaways). And the reason that it runs on all that hardware is because of Microsoft's business contracts with hardware vendors, not because of their software quality -- that's immaterial, as Microsoft generally does not write the drivers.
Compare the experience in Linux or Mac for getting some random no-name device working with Windows.
A lot of it is the fact that the OS has created a very complex yet consistent system of device compatibility that was completely absent from all competitors who are still behind on that aspect or alternatively the choice of kernel design architecture
It's been like two decades since I used windows on a computer I own, but I always had a way harder time getting hardware to work with windows than I have with linux. I still shudder when I remember trying to track down drivers from different vendors, while avoiding the malware they shipped with it versus letting it just work.
edit:
I just remembered when I first used CUPS to configure a printer in 2003. It blew my mind with how easy it was, and I think that was the moment when I decided to start using linux as my primary desktop. Pre-Novell Suse at the time if im remembering correctly.
I highly sympathize with the author and as a former user of Azure I agree it's a terrible mess.
However, the author has committed magnificent career suicide. If you are in a dysfunctional environment you don't go from issue to issue and escalate each one, proactively finding problematic issues.
You rather find the underlying issues (e.g. crashes not assigned) prioritize them and fix them.
By constantly whistle blowing on separate issues to as high as the board, he is not trying to improve by evolution but by revolution and in revolutions heads roll
Team has been extremely open how it has been vibe coded from day 1. Given the insane amount of releases, I don’t think it would be possible without it.
It’s not a particularly sophisticated tool. I’d put my money on one experienced engineer being able to achieve the same functionality in 3-6 months (even without the vibe coding).
The same functionality can be copied over in a week most likely. The moat is experimentation and new feature releases with the underlying model. An engineer would not be able to experiment with the same speed.
I don't really care about the code being an unmaintainable mess, but as a user there are some odd choices in the flow which feel could benefit from human judgement
Although I didn't enjoy this fiction of "angry man against system" genre, he did touch an important truth about the fax machine, which this story doesn't properly expand on.
A fax is very useful to bureaucracies because it is hard to prove a fax was ever sent or received at all. It might never arrived and wasn't retried, might have been printed as empty pages, maybe someone else picked it up.
This is why it is so useful when someone on the other end wants to delay (the equivalent of closing a bug as can't reproduce). This is why governments like faxes and why this story is so unlikely (no chance anyone will call back in that event)
Yes, breppp is completely incorrect. Faxes are used specifically because they can do transmission verification and document evidence of verified successful transmission.
Online fax services that are used by medical or government offices almost always generate digital logs that track when a document was sent, who sent it, and who received it, for regulatory purposes
I was talking about the receiving end and at least in the context of this story we are talking about a fax machine, not some fancy document server. Point being that a fax has too many failure modes, which is a feature in these places
I think that's entirely dependent on the workload the company is placing on their support staff. If Apple decides the techs should be handling 10 tickets at once, then the techs have a choice:
1. Tell everyone to update their shit, and close tickets if they don't.
2. Waste several hours per day uninstalling and reinstalling 10 versions of the same program.
One of these will allow you to close lots of tickets immediately, and handle the remaining ones as efficiently as possible. Yay! Good job, peon! You get a raise!
The other approach will result in a deep backlog, slow turnaround times, and lower apparent output from management's perspective. Boo! Bad job, peon! You're fired!
I am not sure they "lost a little else". When looking at what the US lost, it's pretty small in comparison
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