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Cake day: December 6th, 2024

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  • Specifically in electronics there are actually milspec versions of some microchips, different from the consumer grade ones (they have a wider range of operating temperatures plus I also believe higher resistence to electromagnetic radiation and mechanical vibration, similar to microchips “for automobile automotive use”), but I suspect that when it comes to actual consumer electronics devices the words “military grade” are not a protected tag (as in, electronic devices said to be “military grade” are not forced by regulation to have certain characteristics) so those words are generally marketing bullshit.



  • Propely done Agile is more to solve the “We have the general idea of what we need but will only know for sure the details of how it will work once the users see it and start playing around with it”.

    You still need to upfront know that a wedding is actually needed, but have a process for figuring out and trying out the details of the various elements of it (say, as part of deciding what kind of food will there be for the reception, actually preparing and trying various options) before the whole things actually gets “delivered”.

    Agile also works well for environments were software is developed to serve the kind of business which is are constantly changing (for example, certain areas of Finance) or is something totally new being created from the ground up (i.e. many if not most Startups) because the business itself is a sort of a neverending “we’ll figure out what we need and if it works well when we get there and try it out” which matches almost perfectly the fast and scope-limited definition->implementation->feedback cycles of the Agile software development process.


  • I once had a customly designed project for an external client of a web-development company were I was technical lead and the sales guy who sold it to the customer without ever consulting us about it had the project management responsability.

    On the very first day the guy got me, the junior developer and the designer together for the project launch meeting and started saying how we would have to work extra to make it fit his (ridiculously short) deadlines and I just said “No, it’s not at all possible to fullfill those deadlines so that’s not going to happen” and when he tried to argue with “what about the client” I replied that “You came up with those estimates and gave them to the client without even talking to us, the experts in that domain, so managing the fallout with the client from that is your problem not ours”.

    I fondly remember all that because of the transition from downtrodden and unhappy to absolute happiness visible on the face of the junior developer when, after the sales guy / project manager gave us the “work extra hard” spiel I (as the tech lead) replied with “No, that’s not going to happen”.

    (Ultimatelly the project took twice as long as the sales guy’s estimates)

    The whole “putting the cart in front of the oxen” (as we say in my country) of this meme reminded me of that one (and that memory invariably puts a smile on my face).


  • I think at least some countries in Europe had a similar system as the US but moved to Restricted Birthright in the 80s because of freeloading - i.e. well off people with no connection to a country just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship in that country.

    With Restricted Birthright the parents have to have been living in that country for a few years - so de facto being members of that society - to earn that right.

    Personally I think it’s fair that those comitted to participating in a Society all deserve the same rights (including local nationality for their children) independently of themselves having or not the local nationality, whilst those who are not comitted to participating in that Society do not, and “being resident in that country for more than X years” seems to me a pretty neutral and reasonably fair way to determine “comitted to participating in that country’s Society”.



  • I think that the Restricted Birthright citizenship which is most common in Europe tries to navigate somewhere between those two extremes - in it basically if you’re a Resident in that country for more than X years (from what I’ve seen usually X years is 2 years) then your children born there get citizenship.

    It filters out freeloading - well-off people who have no personal investment in a country and its future and never contributed to it in any way, just flying over and having their kids there to give them citizenship - whilst still extending the same rights as locals have to those who, whilst not having the local nationality, are participating members of that society.

    I think the fairest way is to give equal treatment (including giving the local nationality to their children and making it available to they themselves after a few years living there) to those who are participating members of a society but not to those who are not members of that society, and that would also mean that the fairest treatment would be that the children of local nationals who have long ago left (and the children themselves never in fact lived there) do not get that nationality automatically for merely their parents having it.

    Ultimately I think nationality should be earned by living as part of a Society and when they’re born children, having not have had a chance to “earn” it, would inherited that from the or parents.

    That said some level of obtaining nationality based on the nationality of one’s parents makes sense to cover the time gaps of people who moved abroad and had children there before they could qualify for the nationality of the country they were born with, since otherwise those children would be stateless.

    As for the decision mechanism being “years legally living in a country” it’s just the simplest and most equal for all (passing no judgment for things like what people do for a living) way of judging “participating in that Society” whilst only excluding people who were neither invited in nor taken in because they’ve truly need help (i.e. it’s only for legal immigrants and refugees).




  • I think the widespread political “unwavering support” for a nation committing Genocide, which is justified by the ethnicity of the people of that nation, kinda shows that some part of Fascism (the whole “people’s race is what matters the most and some races are better than others”) hasn’t at all been stamped out.

    Then there’s AfD which is just taking the “if it’s good to support them because of their race, then it’s good to support us” step closer to Fascism.

    Germany is far closer to a certain philosophy anchored on classifying one’s fellow human being as worthy or unworthy depending on race than one would like to believe (certainly, I liked to believe before the political reaction there to whole Gaza thing made it too obvious to deny) - the symbols were made illegal whilst the spirit lives.



  • When I was finishing of my degree at Uni I actually spent a couple of months as an auxiliary teacher giving professional training in Unix, which included teaching people shell script.

    Nowadays (granted, almost 3 decades later), I remember almost nothing of shell scripting, even though I’ve stayed on the Technical Career Track doing mostly Programming since.

    So that joke is very much me irl.



  • It’s a tax increase which can be (and is being) mis-portrayed as something that the seller pays, when in fact it’s the buyer that pays it.

    In practice what Trump did was institute the equivalent of an additional 25% sales tax for all Americans when they buy goods manufactured in Canada or Mexico, but because this tax is usually payed by companies (which do most of the importing) and most people aren’t at all familiar with how Import/Export works, he seems to be getting away with portraying it as a tax on Canada and Mexico.

    (The concern of those countries is not that they pay more - which they don’t - it’s that a selective “sales tax” that only applies to products they export to the US makes their products less competitive on price when sold in the US, hence they will sell less which is bad for their companies)

    I’ve seen some theories around that the purpose of this significant increase in tax is to pay for the tax cuts for the wealthy that the Republicans are passing.


  • I’ve seen a similar thing happen overtime for Aliexpress shipping to Europe - it used to take 2 months to were I am (Portugal), now it takes a bit over a week.

    I think they set-up some kind of consolidated shipping operation so that the sellers on their site can ship things via Aliexpress’ own system, which is way faster (and invariably involves air-shipping via The Netherlands) and often is listed as Free Shipping.

    I’ve bought once or twice from sellers there that don’t use it and those packages still take 2 months to get here.

    I mention this because it makes sense that Aliexpress has set up a similar system for the US given that it’s a market which is almost as big as the EU.


  • This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.

    They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.