levosmetalo

I’m more concerned what happens when we bring some microbes from Mars.

It's a fucking war there, people are sent to war to kill and to get killed. GDP in Ukraine is ~3,5k$ per year.

Your software developer friends are just outliers there.

List of countries where "the West" organized a coup against a "corrupt murderer dictator" to establish "democratic elected government":

- Ukraine - Syria - Libya - Georgia - Iraq - Iran - Afghanistan - Yugoslavia - Venezuela - Cuba - ex-Yugoslavia - Chile - ...

All those countries were devastated by the "democratization". I would like to see one example where that went good for the local population in general and where that brought progress and prosperity.

You don't need any of that, but not because Windows is somehow "better" but because it's Windows "culture" to package almost all dependencies with the application, while on Linux application use a bunch of libraries that are part of the distribution.

> It does appear as if this government really does not want freelancing to be a viable option.

This is the key. Freelancers earning their living on the internet are not inherently dependent on government and are much more likely to support opposition and fight back against the corrupt government.

It's easy to control people working in overblown administration or public/government sector, or in companies working for them, but controlling free financially independent people not afraid of dying of hunger if they oppose is not that easy.

Sorry but Signal is just not a "better app". Yes, it has privacy and such, but the app itself is worse. I'm not even talking about missing features like not having chat backups, but the UI itself is slow and unpolished.

- scrolling contact list is slow and stutters - opening Signal displays empty frame far too long - it's not possible to add/invite a person during the call, you need to define groups for group calls - forwarding message from chat to chat is not working - messages in a chat take too much space. If a person sent three consecutive messages, don't display his name on all of them, just on first one.

And the worst thing is those polish fixes don't have to do anything with crypto and privacy. It's purely client side issue, but Moxie & Co. decided their priority is adding MobileCoint inside a chat app instead of polishing existing clients.

Sorry, but maven is an order of magnitude better than gradle. In most cases it just works and is blazing fast compared with the alternatives.

Depends on what you consider "real work". I would say 99% of business analysts in any enterprise level company do real work 1% of the time. The rest is filled with bulshitting, talking, harassing others or actively looking through the office windows while waiting for someone to do something.

I hope this never takes off.

This whole machine learning, optimization etc, story, but the end goal is that Google can easily transcribe your voice calls and store it as text. Then it can apply all shady practices that it previously was too expensive to do because storing voice and extracting information from it required huge storage costs and actual human labour.

Or worst, just imagine what some government you don't trust could do with all those voice call transcripts.

The reason cultural difference was an issue is one dominant culture enforced by presence culture. Without presence culture there would be no dominant company culture, it would be more distributed around the world. Also, timezones don't make it hard to have meetings, it's the same culture preventing it to happen. In my current company I sit in Europe, and it's easier for me to find a time slot for a meeting with my US and India-based colleagues than with people sitting in the same building with me.

> Absolutely - in knowledge economy, insisting on physical presence is darn damn stupid.

Insisting on presence is the only reason knowledge workers in western countries can claim income they have right now. Because in knowledge economy without insisting on presence, there is absolutely no reason to pay a westerner more for the same job that can be done by someone in India, China, East Europe or Africa.

Unless you can claim with a straight face that westerners are more knowledgable.

> I can understand in the abstract that of course you could rap in German, but it's quite another to encounter evidence of this in the wild so to speak.

Depending on what you consider "in the wild" but German rap is very popular in Germany and other German-speaking countries. People from Germany usually don't rap in English or French. Smudo is an old school, but are quite a bit of rapper that are popular right now, like Capital Bra, Apache 207, Samra, Lea, Mero, Loredana, Bushido, Sido, Olexesh, Kollegah, Farid Bang, RAF Camora, ... just on top of my head.