jj4211

He didn't particularly benefit, his trajectory could have been just as productive under the Soviet government. It's not like he was a total outsider. If anything it might have stalled his political career advancement a few years.

Putin is old and generally well hidden. He likely doesn't see that he has that much to lose, when it comes down to it.

Yeah, that doesn't account for his loss in the opening days, when the NATO nations were clearly preparing to write off the conquest of Ukraine as a terrible thing but do nothing substantive about it.

Putin wanted to be cemented in history as bringing back a powerful Russia, and now he has an embarrassment. Dude is 73 and knows he has fewer years ahead than behind and it is now or never for his legacy.

He might not be afraid for his safety or his people, but for his legacy.

Far as I have heard, Ukraine was the industrial and agricultural backbone of USSR.

Beyond that, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics, notably on Ukraine. They see Ukraine as a key political necessity for resurrecting the power structure that they see as having been lost in the early 90s. Read about UK and US and you'll see a lot of familiar material there in terms of what Russia has actively worked toward.

Yeah, in the opening days of the invasion, the western powers were primed to wag their fingers and write sternly worded letters at the presumptive conquest of Ukraine. They weren't happy, but I think they were all too ready to just let it happen.

Only after Ukraine showed that it actually had some capability and will to successfully resist, then it became worthwhile for more substantial, though still indirect support from a lot of NATO nations.

While the US certainly does that broadly, Putin is not the beneficiary of such a ploy. That's one of the few major bad things in global politics that the US did not do.

That second one is familiar. I'm pretty sure that I got pulled just in case I was drunk, but they had to say "speeding" because I was not driving erratically. Country cops on a nearly empty stretch of road with nothing to do...

Pretty similar to my experience in the US.

Generally, a 15km/h speeding won't even get you stopped. Once I got pulled over ostensibly for about that much over, but it was 2 in the morning on a weekend on a country road so I'm pretty sure the officer was just using the speed as a fishing expedition, and came up with nothing worth the paperwork over.

Another time got pulled over for ostensibly speeding, and when the officer asked if we knew how fast we were going, I started tapping on the screen to try to pull up what would have been dashcam footage, and the officer fairly quickly decided to leave us with a "you just be careful now".

Like you said, at no point did I get particularly pissy, on the first I was a teenager who had never been pulled before and was just being super deferential, and even with the dashcam I was genuinely checking if I had such a thing because it was a new car and I wondered if I could access the camera recording (I heard that in a crash it would have recorded something, but evidently without activating or crashing it, it wasn't there). But never said that I doubted him, just that I was going to see if I could see how fast I was going.

If the whole scenario is low stakes and the officer is not stressed, my experience has been like yours. Only time I personally witnessed a pissed off cop was when I got rear ended by someone going about 90kph when I was in a traffic jam and the officer was very pissed at the person ramming a stopped car.

Of course the challenge is that it might be high stakes without your knowledge.

The issue is that the downsides are massive and the upsides pretty mid.

Oh look, I can whip up a pretty generic website or utility from natural language. That's.... something I guess... The more... ambitious applications of CodeGen I've found to be "different" rather than "better", a different huge pain in the ass than the usual huge pain in the ass, and it's a matter of taste which one someone prefers, and I don't think the "All-in Agentic" flow actually is any faster when you get at this "pain in the ass" point.

On the downside, well pretty much his whole post.

Note that this specifically is the GenAI stuff, broader AI like machine vision is arguable more balanced (intrusive surveillance, but also useful for medical imaging, spotting wildfires early, stuff like that).

So I guess the concern is that by saying "if not for all the bad, it could be pretty good" may be fine, but in practice is used to provide cover for a lot of the bad, because they would argue to not risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

I get it, but at the same time, do we always have to let key douchebags be "too big to fail" and endlessly support their choices no matter what?

This time around, I anticipate massive inflation as they just try to print their way out of it. That's the sort of financial disaster that seems to be a bit more on-brand for our current leadership.

Ask a stupid question on no stupid questions.

Hey, it's no stupid questions. Only smart questions allowed.

If you ever want to grow capability of technical contributions, you are welcome but not necessary.

I would much prefer someone that accepts their level of contribution than one who thinks "Claude can make me a valuable contributor even if I have no idea how to".