Skip to content

2021

Stalin believed he was a social scientist

Gradually their loyalty to the ideas became more and more instrumental, more and more a matter of what the ideas would let them grip in their two hands…

Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khruschev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist. But the moment was drawing irresistibly closer when the idealism would rot away by one more degree, and the Soviet Union would be governed by gangsters who were only pretending to be social scientists.

societal confidence

I'm sure having every mistake catalogued doesn't help. But I see a lot of this coming from the culture. In part by removing the literature of the past. We spend a lot of time worried that our reading lists are too European. We worry that our history courses celebrate our achievements too much or without being sure to tell students that the people doing this were bad in some way. We can't talk about industrialization -- a process that ultimately raised humanity to wealth, health and endless luxury on a scale unimaginable beforehand -- without being sure to mention the environmental devastation, or the wealth inequality, or something else.

China has the same Internet we have, and do a lot less self flag elation over their past misdeeds. They don't remove Chinese literature in favor of French or Indian literature. They don't talk about whatever Confucius did wrong. And it seems to give them the self confidence to do amazing things. The Chinese absolutely believe in progress, and that they can and should go for it. They could build a fully functional hospital in a week. They're building highways in Africa.

F-35 was a success

The reason the F-35 was 'worth' the trouble is that it got over a dozen first-world militaries using the same combat system, rather than every nation trying to create less effective national champions. Aside from raising the standard, the distributed industrial base and procurement means that everyone involved- which is to say- American allies- can cross-train, cross-supply, and even loan/borrow/otherwise support eachother's air operations with minimal trouble, greatly increasing the self-reinforcing nature of the American alliance network. While- at the same time- ensuring that all participants are tied to the American logistic chain, meaning that anyone who wants to keep a world-leading aircraft operational won't go rogue against American interests.

The F35 is a political and logistical success as much as a technological success, and those are far harder to arrange at scale.

is there a paradox of tolerance

The solution to intolerant ideologies is to speak up, debate, make them look foolish, exhort people to stand up for what they believe is right.. This is done all the time, the far-right British National Party, which had built up some momentum througout the 2000s crashed and burned when their leader Nick Griffin was given a platform on the BBC's Question Time which he used to make a fool of himself. A healthy liberal society should be able to rebuff attacks without giving up on its own principles to do so, if a society is healthy there should be no shortage of enthusiastic, charismatic and intelligent supporters ready to be called to its defence.

The reality behind the paradox of intolerance is this: that if you are at the point where you think an open debate will lead to the loss of the liberal side to the openly intolerant, then your society is no longer a liberal one and nothing you can do, no law you can pass, is going to change that. The Nazis didn't take power because the liberals were too hesitant to clamp down on them, they took power because faith in liberalism had already collapsed. "

chinese debt trap

Theoretically but from a different perspective, I'd argue that the countries don't really have an incentive to push back. I'm going to just paraphrase from Prof. Brautigam's book The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa (Oxford Press, 2010) here. Essentially, the 'debt trap' meme is drastically overplayed here and the lending program has been largely received positively by the governments that take on China's loans. Brautigam is rare among Western academics with her research as she has conducted a fair amount of field research, so a lot of what she cites comes from government documents and on-the-ground analysis. From that, Brautigam argues that China's lending diplomacy seems to in actuality be much more about sharing China's development experiences with countries that might not traditionally attract a lot of outside investment and countries that participate seem to be rather receptive of these lending tactics in part because they have no where else to turn to. One prime example here is the whole development cycle of an Indonesian port; she writes about it here.

Brautigam's research also highlighted some economic issues that Chinese lending seems to have alleviated somewhat, issues that governments might be keen on eliminating for future development. Contrary to popular belief, China is not using its lending programs to price out indigenous businesses and replace them with Chinese conglomerates/workers. Instead, Brautigam states that supply constraints might be a much larger limiting factor constraining how a lot of countries develop and having Chinese money/economic advisors can help open up economies (for example, providing capital when it might not otherwise be available). To a certain extent, China's experiences now are also shaped by their own development experiences in decades past when they received loans and infrastructure deals with Japan and the West. That too includes the methods by which loans are given and repaid. Brautigam has shown that China is largely rather lenient with loans, providing flexibility with restructuring and forgiveness. So basically, there isn't really much of an incentive for these countries to discard this additional investment opportunity especially since a lot of Chinese loans don't come with the various political and social strings attached to, for instance, IMF loans."

  • in society
  • 2 min read

VN - English as a global language

Nguồn

Tiếng Anh với tư cách là ngôn ngữ toàn cầu

  • Tác giả: Dan Dascalescu
  • Đăng: 09/2008
  • Sửa lần cuối: 12/2019
  • Dịch bởi: TĐHV

Mục tiêu:

Không phải sẽ thật hay nếu tất cả mọi người trên thế giới hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ?

Nếu bạn trả lời "Không" với câu hỏi trên, bài này không dành cho bạn, và thực ra sẽ khá vô nghĩa để thuyết phục được bạn là, mọi thứ sẽ rất hay, từ nhiều quan điểm khác nhau, nếu tất cả mọi người hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ mự đẻ. Bạn cũng có khi nên tìm trợ giúp tâm lý chuyên nghiệp.

Thế nên tôi sẽ giả định là chúng ta đồng ý rằng,

"Sẽ thật hay nếu tất cả mọi người trên thế giới bằng cách nào đó hiểu nhau, bất kể ngôn ngữ mẹ đẻ"

Làm thế nào để việc này khả thi?

  1. Với sự trợ giúp của AI và phần mềm dịch, chúng hoạt động khá là tốt, ngay cả đối với các ngôn ngữ khó, so với từ khi tôi bắt đầu viết bài này năm 2008.

  2. Nếu tất cả mọi người học Tiếng Anh mức cơ bản và dùng nó để giao tiếp với những người khác mà tiếng mẹ đẻ của họ không phải tiếng Anh.

Tại sao dùng Tiếng Anh? Sao không phải Tiếng Trung Quốc hay một thứ tiếng nhân tạo như Quốc tế ngữ Esperanto? Mọi người có nên dừng học thứ tiếng của đất nước họ?

Hãy đọc tiếp.

Giới thiệu:

Tôi là người bản địa nói tiếng Romania, và Tiếng Anh là thứ tiếng thứ hai của tôi.

  • in tech
  • 1 min read

thank you old coworker

I had a coworker who left, sad. But the good news is that means his now defunct account (on Teams) can be used so I can transfer links/reading I did on the work computer to outside.

I think these are all tech stuff.

Will write these up later on their owns posts. So thanks Taesan!

  1. https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2011/06/01/megaraid/

  2. https://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-solvers.html

  3. http://norvig.com/21-days.html

  4. https://www.biteinteractive.com/picturing-git-conceptions-and-misconceptions/

  5. https://mangadex.dev/mangadex-v5-infrastructure-overview/

  6. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28440742

  7. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28443625

  8. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28446761

  • in tech
  • 1 min read

redundant data

A clever extension of this idea was introduced in C-Store and adopted in the commercial data warehouse Vertica. Different queries benefit from different sort orders, so why not store the same data sorted in several different ways? Data needs to be replicated to multiple machines anyway, so that you don’t lose data if one machine fails. You might as well store that redundant data sorted in different ways so that when you’re processing a query, you can use the version that best fits the query pattern. - Martin Klepmann, Design Data-Intensive Applications

PS: also TiKV has a very good summary of B-Tree vs LSM-Tree