As a Brit, I struggled to get much interesting out of this considering how many times he mentions "Europe" (in that condescendingly general way that only US folks seem to manage).
He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?
This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.
Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.
Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.
He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.
Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway
It's pretty clear he meant Europe as the continent, which London is a part of.
It's very similar to "Europeans" broadly generalizing the US as one homogenous country, assuming everyone and everything in Chicago is the same as New York or Dallas.
Source: me, a brit, who has lived and worked in UK and US.
There is something very irritating seeing someone dismiss someone else on the internet using condescending therapy speak 'Thats Ok', nevermind the fact that calling him out as some ignorant Chinese guy while China has hundreds of cultures and languages, as if a Chinese person couldn't comprehend... Europe.
The way to respect isn’t through shaming people into it. It’s through demonstration of value, in this case understanding of nuance.
Instead we get an application of external logic and values which can’t be used to properly reason about the entity they’re applied to.
There’s no need for frustration. We take the stoic approach here. It’s OK. You are a product of your environment. Everything you’ve ever experienced told you this is the way to act.
All you’re bringing to the discussion is “my feelings are hurt”. And you’re putting the onus to fix that on me.
You have the power to change your paradigm, but you refuse to. Others have to see things through your lens, you won’t have the flexibility to change yours for a moment.
Meanwhile I’ve started with a plausible explanation of why someone sees things differently.
From the get go, I had more willingness to understand than you did.
Europe and China are quite different, historically and culturally. It would make sense that people from the two regions wouldn't know about each other. The world is full of detail. As someone who's lived in both the west and asia I'm still surprised by little differences I see every week.
China also has many different cultures, languages and so on for the over 1.4 billion people who live there. Why would the “nuance” of Europe be “lost” on a Chinese person?
China mostly has a single national identity, and provincial differences are way too nuanced to be mapped in the same way that country differences in Europe would be. It would be like trying to get Americans to understand that "Henan man" is a meme similar to the "Florida man" meme.
No, guangxi isn’t even technically a province (another weirdness), but having been to guangxi a few times (Guilin, Liuzhou, and Nanning), I don’t think anyone thinks much of it beyond it’s beautiful karst and southern culture. Anyways, there is actually a wiki article on henan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Henan_sentiment
double ironically, your comment precisely answers your question
the two of you operate on different scale of unification - what you see as "many different cultures", chinese and americans see as "a single country". What they see as "Europe pulling in many directions" - you might see as independent national interests
perhaps the best way to recognize the attitude is to think what you feel about subsections of your country - while Scotland/England divide is common, it's rarer to hear in what Yorkshire differs from the Cornwall; and I bet not many people would guess what beef is there between french citizen from Normandy and from Nice
it is this kind of scale that allows China to build transmission lines through the whole country's diameter. It is that kind of scale that made americans scream at each other because of abortion high court decision - while said decision simply said "let states decide"
it's a lot of difference, and there's a lot of nuances "on both sides" - but simply of a different kind
> The nuance of 40 different cultures on a small continent might be lost on him.
I don’t know about the author in particular, but Americans are generally aware of the “nuanced” European history of near constant war between rival nations, states, factions, and religions.
He's a Canadian in America writing about China. He writes about bloc strategic competition. EU+UK is treated as bloc in this context, individual European countries are generally irrelevant alone.
Since I’ve lived in the UK before, I will say that yes it is not the same as continental Europe, but culturally, socially, and economically it is deeply tied into Europe, is European. One could say the same thing about Ireland—except the majority of Ireland is in the EU. Does Europe stop at the border of Northern Ireland?
> Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe").
Nah, Americans aren’t particularly interested in which Europeans are offended by being identified as “Europeans” this week. If we say “Europe” without qualification we’re probably just talking about the continent. (And no, we don’t even use the word “continent” as a distinction within Europe, except when referring to hotel breakfasts.)
Americans don’t really have much of a concept of what European identity is, and we don’t really care (other than being grateful for a few decades of relative peace after 1,000 or so years of near constant war).
It was really poorly written in hindsight. I didn't mean for it to come across as bitter/accusatory as it does and you don't deserve to read people talking random jabs at you when browsing HN comments, I'm sorry
He’s writing about China and US. Sure, you can call Europe more diverse, but still it makes sense to draw some generalizations, and I don’t think he’s far from the mark (having myself lived in EU, UK and US).
Just like San Francisco and Dallas/Texas (from his article) are very different in the US, we should expect lot of differences in Europe (as others mentioned, he clubs UK with EU). Housing is a general problem for all major cities though, not sure why you think it is unique to London in the whole continent. Stockholm, Paris, Dublin, Lisbon to name a few, are pretty bad for housing in their own unique ways. Certainly shouldn't be "breaking your brain".
> Just like San Francisco and Dallas/Texas (from his article) are very different in the US, we should expect lot of differences in Europe
Dallas and San Francisco are both English speaking cities with a shared recent history of being part of the same nation. Most cities in Europe are as close as New York and Mexico City - Dallas and San Francisco is probably more analogous to Milan and Naples (different cultures, different histories, but now speak the same language and are part of the same nation).
Did a quick test, since before this I also used some very ad-heavy p2p solution, and I see similar issues there. Not sure if you're looking for feedback, but these were all issues I considered before settling on a server-based HTMX long-interrupted-polling approach, which if you think about having server + client + realtime-ish features in the context of "just htmx" + tiny LoC is pretty cool (well I think it's pretty cool :D)
In the WebRTC p2p approach, without some sort of sync protocol that validates the state of data:
- the host must be online / already there to join a room; the host leaving the room means everyone gets kicked!
- if you rejoin a room and don't receive updates, you get a partial view of the data
- if you have data connectivity issues, you get a partial view of the data
- you must have a WebRTC capable browser and Internet connection
Yeah I set out to build something with WebRTC rather than to build a planning poker app if that makes sense. Just wanted to test out the tech.
Having said that, I do still use this off and on and personally the limitations don't bug me too much. Would be a nightmare for more mission-critical software though
A one-off software license (or even a subscription) is completely different. The issue is metered billing for something you are paying for already which costs the company nothing. The equivalent is not only paying a flat monthly fee to Adobe for access to Photoshop, but also an additional charge for how long you have it open on your machine every month.
I’d like to introduce you to Oracle and many software companies pre-SaaS that were charging per core.
If I recall correctly, Atlassian’s CI product also charged you for parallel jobs back in the day. And businesses were paying it because they felt it gave them value for money.
A few days ago I was predicting to some colleagues a revival of ideas around "server-driven UI" (which never really seemed to catch on) in order to facilitate agentic UIs.
Feels good to have been on the money, but I'm also glad I didn't start a project only to be harpooned by Google straight away
Server Driven UI has absolutely caught on. Not including all the Electron apps out there, things like Instagram's native mobile apps have about half of their screens being SDUI at this point because Meta needs to be able to change them instantly, not with a 3 week release cycle.
Basically the same story here for me. I have a trove of audiobooks I've carted around with me from house to house since I left home which my kids now eagerly pick from each night to listen to at bedtime. I've even supplemented my collection considerably since from eBay and the like.
It's just such a great medium. Fairly resilient, incredibly easy to use, compact, cheap ish.
And of course there's the heady dose of nostalgia for us old gits :)
If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them. Top one from me has to be the BBC dramatised Lord of the Rings adaptation which I myself have been listening to off and on since I was around 5 or 6
> If anyone has any recommendations I'd love to hear them
For kids: Just William (read by Martin Jarvis) and PG Wodehouse Wooster books (don't recall who read that).
Early Eddie Izzard shows were also memorably good as audio. Very quotable.
There's a gigantic, not always unofficial, archive of Just a Minute online, which is excellent car journey material. This is the first 5 series, but there's 80-plus series of it in total https://archive.org/details/Just-A-Minute
I absolutely loved those just william cassettes as a kid! Completely forgot they existed, must have been lost or broken. Will definitely be repurchasing
Snap. My mates kids have this modern player and I thought it was really cool. You get these cards for it and slot them in to play the different stories and music. You can even get a special card that you can make recordings with. We almost got one for our kid until we realised, wait a min, it’s a tape recorder!
You lose a bit of sound quality but there’s no internet-cloud-based crap to deal with. You don’t need to worry about the company failing and bricking the toy or the Chinese spying on your kids. Also, they’re mostly just mechanical machines with a simple circuit so actually fixable, you can pick up a 30 year old broken player off eBay and chances are a rubber belt has just perished somewhere.
The Harry Potter audio tapes are good. It’s read by Stephen Fry and he’s great!
My family had a reel-to-reel player, which was definitely not compact. My dad would record tapes from Vietnam and send over the recordings so that our family could hear him. I was afraid to touch it growing up. Instead, I played records on our turntable, and 8-tracks tapes in our car and a couple of 8-track players we had. As a teenager, I played cassettes, which was awesome. Vinyl sounded great and had the best overall experience for things like Christmas records, but cassettes had a warm feel and you could listen to them in your car, a friend’s car, on a boombox, etc. and if you had two tape decks, you could make mix tapes and share them! Or you could just copy a tape for a friend. Those were the days.
My dad had an Akai M8 (7" tapes) that I was not allowed to touch under threat of injury, but then he got heavily into quad vinyl and gave the beast to me: The whole Beatles catalogue on 7" tapes, yay!
I still have the BBC Radio 4 version of His Dark Materials on CD somewhere - I ripped them years ago and listen to the digital version. I've experienced HDM in various forms, including the stage version and of course the books, but I am most fond of the Radio 4 version.
John Le Carre’s “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”and Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose” were constant companions for me on road trips (sadly no English unabridged “Foucault’s Pendulum” exists)
No need to leave, move up north and wait for all the shenanigans to blow over. Hard to be annoyed at the government and the corporations when you're walking through the Yorkshire dales on a sunny day
You're absolutely right! It was an oversight of me to give you the full, unredacted details of every individual who has complained about the new legislation being proposed. I'll correct that now and send you the redacted version!
Everything takes longer than ppl want to wait. But when building a house, ppl are more patient and tolerant about the time taken, because they can physically see the progress, the effort, the sweat. Software is intangible and invisible except maybe for beta-testers and developer liaisons. And the visual parts, like the nonfunctional GUI or web UI, are often taken as "most of the work is done", because that is what people see and interact with.
It's product management's job to bridge that gap. Break down and prioritize complex projects into smaller deliverables that keep the business folks happy.
It's better than houses, IMO - no one moves into the bedroom once it's finished while waiting for the kitchen.
I don’t really see this as universal truth with corporate customers stalling process for up to 2 years or end users being reluctant to change.
We were deploying new changes every 2 weeks and it was too fast. End users need training and communication, pushback was quite a thing.
We also just pushed back aggressive timeline we had for migration to new tech. Much faster interface with shorter paths - but users went all pitchforks and torches just because it was new.
But with AI fortunately we will get rid of those pesky users right?
Different situation. You already had a product that they were quite happy with, and that worked well for them. So they saw change as a problem, not a good thing. They weren't waiting for anything new, or anything to improve, they were happy on their couch and you made them move to redo the upholstery.
Yes I pay for the most expensive Claude sub with my own money and use it at work.
I also have to use it via a proxy server I set up to get around the corporate firewall which explicitly blocks it. The company like the results but wouldn't like how I get them..
He talks about "European" prospects and his trip to Denmark but then cites London as a representative example?
This almost broke my brain it felt so incoherent.
Never mind that (despite my personal wishes) we're not even part of the EU (which I assume is what he means by "Europe"). Surely he knows what an anomaly London is? It's not representative of anything except itself.
Referencing the extreme wage dispersion and severe housing pressure of London in a rant about Europe in general is a completely pointless endeavour.
He did say one thing I agree with. If you like good food, rich culture and great surroundings, "Europe" is indeed a lovely place to be for the most part.
Maybe I'll just keep that as my takeaway. It's too early in the year for doom and gloom anyway
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