I actually made money from NOT putting any of my investment money in NFTs and instead putting it somewhere else.

Then again, from the very start the NFT mania looked like a more obvious and dumb version of the Tulip Bulb mania, so I can hardly claim great wisdom from not having put a cent in it.

Exactly.

The best way to learn is to have done the work yourself with all the mistakes that come from not knowing certain things, having wrong expectations or forgetting to account for certain situations, and then get feedback on your mistakes, especially if those giving the feedback know enough to understand the reasons behind the mistakes of the other person.

Another good way to learn is by looking through good quality work from somebody else, though it’s much less effective.

I suspect that getting feedback on work of “somebody” else (the AI) which isn’t even especially good, yields very little learning.

So linking back to my previous post, even though the AI process wastes a lot of time from a more senior person, not only will the AI (which did most of the implementation) not learn at all, but the junior dev that’s supposed to oversee and correct the AI will learn very little thus will improve very little. Meanwhile with the process that did not involve an AI, the same senior dev time expenditure will have taught the junior dev a lot more and since that’s the person doing most of the work yielded a lot more improvement next time around, reducing future expenditure of senior dev time.

Just to add to this:

• When a senior dev reviews code from a more junior dev and gives feedback the more junior person (generally) learns from it.
• When a senior dev reviews code from an AI, the AI does not learn from it.

So beyond the first order effects you pointed out - the using of more time from more experience and hence expensive people - there is a second order effect due of loss of improvement in the making of code which is both persistent and cumulative with time: every review and feedback of the code from a junior dev reduces forever the future need for that, whilst every review and feedback of the code from an AI has no impact at all in need for it in the future.

Given enough time, the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from junior devs is limited - because they eventually learn enough not to do such mistakes - but the total time wasted in reviews and feedback for code from an AI is unlimited - because it will never improve.

Good thing I use the LibRedirect plugin in Firefox to redirect YouTube link to Invidious.

In addition to uBlock, of course.

I can only comment on what I’m most familiar with.

I do hope there are places out there were people have better values than around here.

Most Western (can’t speak for the rest) societies aren’t trully Civilized and were maybe never so - they’re just a bit less uncivilized than early XX century and before.

Further, we seem to have been devolving of in the last decades, moving away from Humanist values and increasingly embracing sociopatic inclinations as “our” values (Greed is good, Might makes right, measuring the worth of a person by their possessions and so on).

I can tell you that, at least for Europe, they’re doing pretty much the same thing as the US, only it’s higher tariffs rather than blocking the Chinese products.

The effect of special protectionist tariffs on the competitiveness of local companies might not be as strong as for outright blocking of the competing foreign products, but it’s in the same direction, which is why recently even Tesla (which are shit at the actual building cars part of the business) were wiping the floor on EVs with massive European car making businesses which had enormous expertise in actually making cars and decades to evolve EV tech and failed to do so.

Corruption is so entrenched in Portugal that unlike pretty much anywhere in the World, Libel is an actual CRIME prosecuted by the local version of the Public Prosecution Office, which in practice means that no actual damage has to be proven (the legislation literally talks about “protecting the honor” of the person targetted by the libelous comments) and only people with the proper political connections to get the Public Prosecution Office to act (i.e. politicians and rich people) get to be “protected” by this Law.

Oh, and in a country infamous by an extremelly slow Court system, they in practice expedite Libel cases where politicians are the “victim”.

So even descriptions of systems to detect Corruption have to be very carefully worded so as to not even imply that anything caught by them is actually Corruption.

I’m Portuguese and, having also lived elsewhere in Europe, firmly believe that in the domains of Politics and Justice, Portugal is basically a chunk of South America that happens to be in Europe. If it wasn’t for the EU - mainly the laws and pressure coming via it, many ultimatelly originating in places like Northern Europe - the country would be an even bigger shit show.

Clearly they think that gaming is the same as working.

This shit has been in place and in use since the Patriot Act.

It’s also been an open secret that they do it for industrial espionage purposes so never bring company devices or devices configured to access the company network over.

Part of the reason I’ve avoided the US for vacations or even just changing flights since the early 00s - I’ll just go to Canada instead.

“Burning the future of the company for extra personal upsides in the short term” is pretty much MBA-Age management strategy summarized in one sentence.

A loss of overall competitiveness of the local companies is actually a well known and studied problem with using tariffs and import restrictions to protects said local companies.

So any competent government which desires for their local companies to survive and prosper will seek different ways to strengthen then which don’t suffer from that problem. The Chinese government is doing just that, the US government is not.

By all indications, US politicians are spectacularly incompetent and/or are following a strategy of burning the future of US companies for a short term boost in the money they yield for current CxOs and investors.

NEVER, ever, ever host your projects in the site of an American company.

The actual problem isn’t at all making a 4G mini-computer: you can literally buy the necessary parts as modules and wire them together with a a half-way decent microcontroller board and an smallish LED display and then make some code for it in something like Arduino IDE (though I would recommend Platform IO + VS Code instead).

The problem is making it small (especially thin) and capable of running of batteries for days rather than hours.

For example, if you’re trying to actually solve the hard part of the problem you would be better of using a micro-controller with an ARM core rather than the ESP32 as those things are designed to use less power. Also you wouldn’t be able to use boards as those things usually waste power versus designing your own.

That said, it’s a nice hobbyist project.

I do believe there is also the concept of export taxes, though its much rarer than tariffs and generally only used to avoid increases in price of a locally producted product due to high demands from countries which can pay much more for it.

Luke was a late bloomer whilst Anakin was a child genious.

For avoidance of doubt my point is in no way a criticism of mankind:

• A % are always assholes.
• Also a % are always genuinely good people.
• The bulk of people are in the middle and kinda go with the cultural zeitgeist.

As far as I can tell, there are no more of the first kind than the second, though it’s my impression that the third kind, in the middle, are at times in average more pro-social or more anti-social depending on the predominant culture of a place and time.

In the current Greed Is Good environment dominant in the West I would say that the bulk of people who aren’t internally driven towards being a good person or being a selfish asshole tend toward “What’s in it for me” anti-social behavior if only because that attracts more rewards and less social pushback, though as I said and in my experience of living in a couple of countries, local culture also has a big say in that.

Never assume that just because somebody is a member of a minority they’re not prejudiced assholes.

It’s exactly because we’re all humans that assholes are equally distributed across all groups defined by things other than behavior and political beliefs - no such group is inherently composed of better or worse individuals than other groups.

People in groups being oppressed are less likely to behave as assholes simply because the assholes in those groups fear reprisals far more than the assholes in the dominant groups and in my experience plenty of people who behave meekly because of being part of an oppressed group will start behaving as assholes if given power and immunity to reprisals.

This is how you end up with phenomenons like, for example, anti-Transsexual Feminists.

Well that’s a shame.

I’ve been looking around for a replacement to my aged Samsung A6 (which has been given an extended life by replacing the factory ROM with something with less bloatware, but is still pretty limited in terms of memory) which is not a Surveillance Outpost for just who knows how many nations and just about any companies willing to pay the 3 cents of whatever for the data, and all the Linux and degoogled Android makers only have 10"+ ones, which are too big for my use case which carry a tablet on a coat or trousers back pocket when I’m going to be sitting down somewhere and waiting for something so that I can read books and maybe browse the internet on their free WiFi.

Personally I would LOOOVE a small Linux tablet, but I’m OK with some kind of privacy respecting Android which isn’t riddled with backdoors mandated by governments which have Information Courts issuing Secret Bulk Information Collecting Orders, like the US and the UK.

My hope is that the crazy RAM and HDD/SDD prices and hence crazy prices for new PCs will push more people to try Linux.