As evidence supporting the "bright side" outcome of this conflict, two separate people I know here is Australia have fast-tracked a decision to replace their ICE vehicles with an EV. It only took a week's sticker shock at the fuel bowser to take them from "Eh, sometime next year" and "comparing a hybrid with ICE" to "Buying a BYD car ASAP". I'd be curious to know if there has been any significant effect of the market for electric scooters and bikes, also.

I didn't quite clock what they meant in that paragraph. I'm pretty sure that a 1.8 degree drop in body temp is approaching hypothermia.

"New account". Meanwhile, the account is 4.5 years old with 2600 karma and has hundreds of thoughtful comments.

It gets across just how ridiculously energy-dense liquid petroleum fuels are.

Alternative story: they take these still-perfectly-functional finished products and find other markets for them. This isn't second-hand, damaged clothing, it's unsold new product.

I have a colleague who (inexplicably) doesn't trust Postgres for "high performance" applications. He needed a database of shared state for a variable number of running containers to manage a queue, so he decided to implement his own bespoke file-based database, using shared disk. Lo and behold, during the first big (well-anticipated) high-demand event, that system absolutely crawled. It ran, but it was a total bottleneck during two days of high demand. I, who has made a New Years resolution to no longer spend political capital on things that I can't change, looked on with a keen degree of schadenfreude.

Just. Use. Postgres.

Trump has done/is doing generational harm to the perception of the US worldwide, to say nothing of US soft-power influence. It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone, and we still have a couple of years of his term to run yet.

Rebuild? Never Failing empires rarely peak twice...

> It's going to take decades to rebuild that trust after he's gone

I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it. But it would be difficult in 10 years to say cause and effect.

People have short term memories unless harmed very specifically / directly. Not indirectly affected.

> I see this over and over again, wish there was some way to bet on it.

One can play with bond markets and various ETFs or other derivatives, depending on what you envision. But even if your bet is qualitatively correct (that trust in the US ebbs for decades), it's hard to get the timing right to make an actual bet.

Given that a sizeable percentage of U.S. people seem to still support Trump, I don't think trust is going to be rebuilt. There's also the massive issue of the U.S. political system that has been shown to have a fatal flaw - that would have to be fixed along with the broken two party system.

I liken it to Germany rebuilding trust after WWII.

Trump is just your latest excuse, American, but its not working.

The rest of the world saw what Americans did to Iraq, and it has been downhill since then. You don't get to be the #1 funder of terror around the world and keep demanding glory and respect from the lackey nations you push around with those terror networks...

Everyone here throwing shade at Stack Overflow is clearly too young to remember the horror of Experts Exchange and every other technical help site prior to SO. For nearly a decade, it was absolutely transformative as a technical help resource. It certainly had its faults, but it was so far ahead of the other options as to be game-changing.

I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered. There was an enormous existing corpus of accepted answers around fundamental topics, and technology just doesn't change fast enough to sustain the site. Then the LLMs digested the site's (beautifully machine-readable) corpus along with the rest of the internet and now the AIs can give users that info directly, resulting in a downward spiral of traffic to SO, fewer new questions, etc.

Vale, Stack Overflow. You helped me solve many tricky problems.

SO was great for a while, then went down the toilet, not because 'eveything had been answered', but because it became a playground of power hungry mods vs resume grinding freshmen patronizing and shutting down 90% of 'normal' users.

Even current AI is a 100x better experience than SO ever was.

We can all see how post knowledge scarecity and automated contextual niche adaptation reduces exploitation potential for knowledge production (often itself mere regurgitation), but the 'cures' proposed in the article feel very much worse than the disease.

The issue with SO is also that the quality of the answers degrades over time. Asking similar questions will get closed as dupes while the referenced 2011 answer is basically useless nowadays.

I didn't help that SO had some very quirky expectations of how it should run, and failed to communicate those well, causing a constant friction between moderators and users. Also, there was often friction between the site admins and moderators, causing them to lose a lot of moderators over time as well.

Prior to SO we had Usenet, mailing lists, and IRC. They weren't so bad before spammers found them.

Funny enough, you think that irc is dead, like most people, and the spammers... but let me tell you a little secret here:

Stack Overflow should pivot to be an AI agents/local LLM information board and advertise the non-stack overflow stack exchange sites. There is a lot they could do.

> I believe that the main reason for SO's decline starting around 2018 was that most of the core technical questions had been answered

I believe that the rise of SO was mostly a miracle. A once-in-an-era thing. The evidence is all the other Stack Exchange sites. They all have the same UI and the same moderation model. If SO has some secret sauce they have it too. But most of them were pretty dead and never became an enormous corpus.

If China does invade Taiwan, I feel like most people are going to have bigger problems than the Nvidia stock price.

It seems obvious to me this quickly escalates to a US nuclear first strike with the B2-Spirit on China manufacturing infrastructure.

It is economic MAD.

Or China can wait 20-30 years and the US will no longer care about Taiwan or have the resources to have much presence in the eastern hemisphere.

I think the saber rattling over Taiwan is just to get the US to spend themselves further into oblivion in the short term. We are in the war already and the saber rattling is an incredibly effective, asymmetric financial weapon. It builds up the Chinese military kinetic capacity long term while weakening the US military kinetic capacity long term by forcing the US to prepare for something that is never going to happen.

When China takes Taiwan it will be without firing a shot. I would bet the house on that because it kind of has to be that way to win the war and not just a self destructive battle.

China is achieving its objectives brilliantly. The US is increasingly isolated and this is the process of retreating into the western hemisphere. NATO is being destroyed without firing a shot.

From my perspective, the US is foot-gunning itself into geopolitical irrelevance through the destruction of its soft power and undermining the NATO alliance. For all its many, many faults, the CCP's actions around establishing itself as the Asian regional superpower are patient, strategic and consistent over the long term. They're playing it far too smart to get into a shooting war with the US, and I'm in agreement that they'll probably end up consolidating Taiwan peacefully in a decade or so.