It's a translation of famous Lithuanian writer Vytautė Žiliskaite compilation of fairy tales which consists a tale about a preprogrammed robot interaction with a moth.
The reason I posted this tale is it taught me as a child to be kind to a machinery that behaves human-like. That's why I usually start my conversations with LLMs with "Would you please" while rationally understanding that they are most likely are not sentient beings.
What are your fiction stories that gave you similar effect?
The Culture series, or at least the first four books. I haven't finished Excession yet. And yeah, I usually say things like "Take your time, there's no rush", also because I remember reading that taking this approach can actually improve the quality of the output. It's not like I tested, though. Haha
I don't understand business model of the company behind Penpot (Kaleidos). Their products doesn't offer anything paid but I see a button "Invest in us". For me this tells that their products will eventually become non-free and only open-source in a way that it can export SVG.
I think that most of those railroads have nothing to do with children operation - it was just a narrow gouge standard railway for less intensive commuting, some specific industrial purposes (like bringing fresh cut wood from forest or clay from careers) or even military (railroad system build around Vilnius during Polish rule in 1930's to provide ammunition to underground forts) and some was built way before soviet union occupied Baltics.
In Lithuania this narrow gouge standard is called "Siaurukas" (eng. "narrowy") and some parts are still being operated as a tourist attraction [1][2]
I will never trust Adobe on their development platforms after they were lying to developers about bright Flash future while silently killing it and wasting number of years of their careers on dead horse.
Flash was a Macromedia product that Adobe acquired. I don't think the team that worked on it foresaw the rapid shift to touchscreen mobile devices. Even so, there's no way Adobe could have competed with Apple and Google's push towards Javascript and HTML5 during those two companies early WebKit collaboration.
I wouldn't fault Adobe for at least trying to find a future for the technology they spent a lot of R&D on. I certainly wouldn't call them liars. If you missed the very public industry shift towards Javascript and HTML5, that's on you.
To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do? If Adobe came out and said “flash is dead” too early, it would be the nail in the coffin. By waiting decade(s) past its peak usefulness to kill it, they probably kept more people in flash jobs for longer than they would have otherwise. And if you as a developer couldn’t see flash’s demise on the horizon, isn’t that at least partially on you?
> To be a devils advocate for a second, what did you expect them to do?
Open source the Flash Player code and work towards properly defining the SWF format. They could have kept their shiny IDE that a ton of people knew how to use and work with but also made it possible for Flash to become part of the open web - since it was actually useful.
This is something that they were repeatedly asked to do, but never ended up doing because Adobe wanted to have full control over it - and ended up having full control of something dead.
This sounds easy, but it isn't. Major commercial closed-source projects often include third-party software which itself isn't under OSS licenses, and publishing the project without violating those licenses means removing them from the code base before open sourcing it (which may result in a completely non-functional project), negotiating with the provider of the third-party software to allow for their code to be open-sourced (probably impossible), or replacing the licensed code with free alternatives (which may not exist, most likely have a different API if they do exist, and would take developer resources to develop from scratch).
All this preparation for OSSing the code base takes work, and where's the bottom line? How would Adobe, a public company with shareholders and all that nonsense, profit from OSSing Flash? It wouldn't make them business sense to do so.
That's not to say this sort of thing never happens (see Netscape and Mozilla), but it's just never as simple as "they should just release the source."
The major reason I don't use Adobe is lack of trust in Adobe. I want my files to work next year, and in 10 years. That's also why I don't use anything B2B from Google, and avoid Oracle (who doesn't break products the same way as Adobe and Google, but tends to milk cash cows in unpleasant ways).
The payback on open-sourcing something like Flash is maintaining trust. I trust open-source. I trust a few commercial companies who invest like crazy in maintaining trust (e.g. Microsoft or AWS). That leads to business on unrelated product lines down-the-line.
I don't know how easy it'd be, though it would certainly be possible for Adobe. And something not being easy is not really a reason for it to not happen, especially when the alternative is complete death of the product.
But that isn't the point though since the question was what was expected them to do, not how easy that would be.
And yet there exist open source Flash renderers [0] to this day which can render much of that old Flash content with little to no issues. Kinda sad that multiple other folks could each independently accomplish what Adobe themselves could not.
It’s also not like they killed the flash devs when the project ended. I’m pretty sure most of them were fine and able to learn new work somewhere else or in another dept.
Of all the places I expected to see a top comment attacking Adobe for killing flash… yea actually nevermind, it’s backwards enough to make sense here ;)
Is the market for flash devs really that different than similar software? I highly doubt those Flash devs ended up on the street.
Aside from that, Adobe has like 100 other pieces of software that creators have trusted going back to the early 80s. They have sustained millions and millions of successful careers.
If you're tea leaf reading skills were so underdeveloped to not see that Flash was doomed, then that's kind of on you to get better. Flash was being berated everywhere about its problems, yet it was still being pushed because it was the thing.
Flash had so so much against it even thouh it had a lot of things that make it sound like such a perfect solution. Write once, deploy anywhere...except there's a lot of baggage we're not going to tell you about. Eventually, that baggage is well understood and then exploited. The damn player released by the maker was the main vector before even running code written by any 14 year old. This was all before Jobs' little letter.
I will never give Adobe a penny again in my life after going through their abysmal cancellation process littered with dark patterns and manipulation for one of their subscriptions, on top of being charged a fee to cancel.
To a populistic loudmouth like he is, he doesn't need a good argument. Also he is trying to relativise war in Ukraine with a lot of Russian style propaganda. Don’t think he has any say in it though. At the same time he is in open conflict for months with the prime minister who wields real power. So if one says one thing the other will say the opposite and call the other bad names. Unfortunately the prime minister is corrupted through and through, as the whole party which forms the government. So citizens are just between the rock and a hard place since the war ended in 1995.
One of the issues of allowing more and more people into NATO, is that potential for fracturing of the alliance increases.
Especially, the original core alliance was very aligned after WWII, politically. However as NATO expands east, the potential for issues down the road grows.
Look at the Ukraine. Let's imagine that this horrible war never happened, Russia never attacked, and that the Ukraine would join NATO in 2023.
Now fast forward to 2030. Russian political games, and influence, has caused the Ukraine to become more aligned with Russia.
What then? Now, the alliance has a detractor of its goals within!
And what of other geopolitical issues? Who will be China's best friend, in 2030?
With the alliance at its original members, it was more tightly aligned.
Now? NATO is becoming far more political.
Perhaps this is apparent to many, but I feel this is not as apparent as it should be. For as NATO becomes stronger physically, with more members, it becomes less strong politically/actively.
An example. If someone attacked Canada or the UK, the original NATO members would have responded instantly.
What about Croatia? Would the response be the same?
> What about Croatia? Would the response be the same?
Yes, without a doubt. Perhaps a little slow, but ultimately the response would be the “same”[1]. The US and UK have existential interest in maintaining NATO.
Croatia and Hungary would be kicked out of NATO before Sweden and Finland would be prevented from joining. At the point of Finland announcing that they will apply, all of the negotiations and box checking are done beforehand. They don’t leave things like this to chance.
Some say “but there is no mechanism for kicking out a member”. It doesn’t matter. The primary NATO members will just have a vote and say you aren’t part of NATO anymore and that would be that.
[1] I’m using “same” here because an attack on the UK or Canada could never be treated as equivalent to an attack on Croatia given the circumstances needed to be attacking those countries and the kinship of the US with those countries. A better way of phrasing would be if Croatia was legitimately attacked and invoked Article 5 of NATO (the mutual defense clause) the U.S. and others would come to Croatia’s defense. There is absolutely no doubt about this.
Considering that NATO is effectively non functional without the US, the process does not need to be written down. The US president can just make it happen as long as his rationale is supported by 90% of NATO. Defense alliances are a trust thing, not a contract thing.
This tool is perfect for generating useless LinkedIn content. For example this phrase was auto-completed "Yesterday I had an interview with a candidate":
Yesterday I had an interview with a candidate for a mid-level developer role. At the end of the interview, we asked about his background in IT and found out that he'd never used any sort of development tools or language except Visual Basic in the past. He'd just stuck with the IDE that came with his software.
Although I understand the desire to do things the way you're familiar with and comfortable with, this is probably the most dangerous mistake you can make in the context of hiring. I've been thinking about this for a while now, and I want to share what I think is an important lesson with you.
In the past several years, Ruby on Rails has gone from new kid on the block to the dominant application server for most new web applications. Although Ruby is a great language, the community has been known to turn on new developers at times, and it can be a bit overwhelming for a newcomer.
Lithuanian and Latvian are in the Baltic language family which shares a direct ancestor with the Slavic (Balto-Slavic languages). (The Germanic and Italo-Celtic languages are in the closest "sibling" branch to Balto-Slavic). So it's not impossible for an interlanguage to be understood by both Baltic and Slavic speakers.
Lithuanian native speaker here. Reading the examples in the site I couldn't understand anything, and it sounds nothing like Lithuanian or Latvian. Being able to understand Russian to some extent didn't help either.
I find it hard to imagine such a language, as the languages really are far off from each other.
I speak Latvian, russian and a bit of Polish. I could easily imagine a Slavic interlanguage, as knowing russian helped a lot with Polish. Learning russian took a lot of effort, though.
So, besides having a bunch of shared nouns, adding Baltic languages to the mix does not make much sense IMO. Despite having a shared ancestor (in theory), Baltic languages are not very mutually intelligible with Slavic.
Edit:
And also, if it does take on this impossible mission, it should at least be called Balto-Slovio.
Proto-Baltic and Proto-Slavic have separated much, much earlier than various Slavic language families. Balto-Slavic is typically dated to somewhere between 3000-1000 BCE. On the other hand, the Common Slavic period is 600-1000 CE (and mutual intelligibility went on even longer). The degree of similarity between the languages is simply not comparable.
