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3 days agoCMAT led a chant of Free Palestine yesterday which was rad, but this got me 
BigBoyKarlLiebknecht [he/him, comrade/them]
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Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: September 3rd, 2023
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The RAF had its flight training privatized, leading to what I think is fair to say is a total collapse of training capability.
The NAO investigation into the UK Military Flying Training System (UKMFTS) contract, which is let to a consortium backed in part by US arms multinational Lockheed Martin, thundered that the RAF was short of 330 pilots, while almost half of students entering the UKMFTS system last year failed to complete their intermediate training.
“In its worst year (2018-19), 49 students completed Phase 2, an 86 per cent shortfall against the [Ministry of Defence’s] current aircrew requirements. In its best year (2015-16), 182 students completed Phase 2, a 21 per cent shortfall,” said the NAO in its latest report.
Damningly, RAF fast jet pilots, the two-winged master race* who fly the service’s Typhoon and F-35 fighters, were taking more than seven years to get from joining the Air Force to being declared ready for frontline duties.
CW: Nazi shit
MI6 distances its new chief from Nazi grandfather
I like how MI6 try to make it sound that having a muderous Nazi grandfather is a good thing and an example of diversity in action, actually:
A spokesperson added: "Blaise’s ancestry is characterised by conflict and division and, as is the case for many with eastern European heritage, only partially understood.
“It is precisely this complex heritage which has contributed to her commitment to prevent conflict and protect the British public from modern threats from today’s hostile states, as the next chief of MI6.”
The Daily Mail, which first revealed the family link, reports that it found hundreds of pages of documents in an archive in Freiburg, Germany, which showed Mr Dobrowolski was known as “The Butcher” or “Agent No 30” by Wehrmacht commanders. He reportedly signed off letters to his Nazi superiors with “Heil Hitler” and said he “personally” took part in “the extermination of the Jews”.
5·5 days ago
No matter whose vision you subscribe to, something big will happen with AI in the next two years
Although I’m always wrong about everything, I’m still open to Ed Zitron’s “something big”, and the bottom falls out of it (although I’m sure it’s too big to fail by now)
It could be a tool with amazing potential. The latest Steve Yegge blog post is one of the most depressing things I’ve read about software engineering in years…This turned out to be the biggest surprise of the new world: agentic coding is addictive. You will hear it more and more often, because it bewitches people once they’ve got the hang of it. Agentic coding is like a slot machine, where each of your requests is a pull of the lever with potentially infinite upside or downside. On any given query, you don’t know if it’s going to one-shot everything you wished for, or delete your repo and send weenie pics to your grandma.
Every time something good happens, which is often, you get rewarded with dopamine. And when something bad happens, also often, you get adrenaline. The intermittent reinforcement of those dopamine and adrenaline hits creates the core addictive pull. It can become near-impossible to tear yourself away. We had to drag several vibe coders off stage at a conference I was at recently. As we escorted them away from the podium, they would still be wailing, “It’ll work on the next try!”
…
How do you know if you’re doing AI right at your company? We’ve noticed that the companies that are winning with AI – the ones happy with their progress – tend to be the ones that encourage token burn. Token spend per developer per unit time is the new health metric that best represents how well your company is doing with AI: an idea proposed by Dr. Matt Beane and playing out in the field as we speak. I see companies saying, “If our devs are spending $100-$300 a day, that’s much less than paying for another human engineer. So if AI makes our devs twice as productive, or in some cases only 50% more, we’re winning.”
…
Amp is also more fun. It takes a different design approach, being intentionally team-centric. Amp gamifies your agentic development by making it public, with leaderboards and friendly competition, as well as liberal thread sharing. It all manages to be low-pressure
1·6 days agoI’ve thought about it a lot as it’s fucking me up a bit tbh, lol….
I possibly interview really fucking badly, there’s internal politics about bringing me in, or they simply don’t know what they’re doing. Or all 3. Working at the level I have been (basically an architect across a dozen teams) means that I haven’t been writing that much code day-to-day for a while. It was a last minute surprise pair programming test framed by the recruiter as a non-assessment….I’m honestly glad to be free of that mess, even though my savings continue to dwindle :yea
A medium sized European startup
They want to hire me, but at 2 levels below my last job, cool stuff
On the 8th round of interview for a staff engineer role (which is a rung below my last job, and a role I’ve been working at the level of for a decade), the hiring manager pair programs with me and says in a follow up “really excited by you as a candidate, but you seem to be operating at a senior level, not a staff level, so we want to down level you if you want to continue for the next 2 rounds of interview”
I’m so fucking tired man
God bless Israel, God bless Iran, God bless the Middle East, God bless the United States of America, and GOD BLESS THE WORLD!
My man starting to sound like Fred Durst on “Show Me What You Got”
Looking forward to Mayo Pete talking about “getting smart in Iran” in the primaries
This is very lib of me to say, but Palmer Luckey is basically a low rent Syndrome from the Incredibles
So assuming this doesn’t immediately spiral into a regional war…and I’m a complete idiot, but I wonder if things stand an approximate chance of the following:
- Some more back and forth. Iran continues to lob a few missiles every day, with some immediate focus on the currently abandoned US bases. Some get through, most don’t. Israel retaliates. The IRGC grinds its teeth, shouts a lot, but mostly holds back.
- Over the next few years, phone calls get made. Reconstruction deals signed. More Belt & Road cash arrives. Russian and Chinese engineers start infrastructure projects. It’s no longer just the Bushehr reactor that has a Russian S-400 protecting it.
- The US keeps floating carriers around the Gulf, seeming more and more like museums against the backdrop of cheap drone warfare.
- Saudi and Turkey more seriously hedge both ways and BRICS expands. The dollar bleeds out slowly, but as long as the stock market stays green, nobody wants to admit it.
- At home, the usual screaming matches over culture war scraps while infrastructure collapses at an accelerating rate.
- Overseas, the west keeps flailing at the same targets, convincing itself it’s still running the show because nobody’s seriously punched back yet.
- Eventually, Israel or the US hits a site they didn’t realize had Russian contractors inside. Maybe they did realize, but figured no one would care. And then the global realisation that the world has slipped permanently beyond reach of the west. This will probably not be peaceful.
Situation room pics dropped. Like every blocked artery in the Midwest got together and said “let’s have a go at being president again”. And there he is, sat in the chair, leaking slowly.
The Jimmy Savile of UNSCOM
I don’t think they’ve even used the A-10 against anyone with something approaching a working air defense system. My understanding is that it was designed to defeat 1970s Soviet armor flooding through the Fulda Gap, with point defense provided by MANPADS and AAA guns - and a such, has basically always been obsolete since its introduction. Their use in Iraq and Serbia was only after air superiority and SEAD was achieved - and still managed to get shot down.
Trump’s justice department issues directive to strip naturalized Americans of citizenship for criminal offenses
The concept of citizenship being anything more than a fancy visa is going away folks