That is what we are supposed to do at work.

Most of the world doesn’t need that whole setup because:

- Our cultural baseline around firearms is completely different. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Austria, and the Czech Republic have plenty of guns at home - and historically, a lot of them were actual assault rifles, not “looks-spicy” semiautos.

- We treat guns like weapons. They live in safes, not nightstands, and kids get taught safety early, the same way you’d teach them not to put a fork in a power supply.

Waste from modern nuclear power plants seems to be a giant nothingburger. And yes, I came from the other side but flipped as I learned more about the technicalities, how Finland has solved it and how near you need to get hurt.

I used to think the same. Around here I feel until a few years ago most people I knew with secret phones were people I would prefer to have fewer interactions with: people who frequently got into trouble, tried to scam others etc.

These days I’m more in the camp of layered security. Whatever I can do to make it harder for an attacker, the better.

> I have used https://www.fastpeoplesearch.com/ a couple of times to search for people's addresses and it really works.

Tangential:

Sorry, you have been blocked You are unable to access fastpeoplesearch.com

(Safari on a stock iPhone, mobile broadband from the biggest and most well known telecom company in my country, ipv6 address.)

I guess a lawyer can argue against this, but I'd say that losing access to a lifetime if mails is absolutely up there with "legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her."

And from my own experience building software for government services, I can tell you this: In my experience in those systems it is not acceptable to just have a list where someone clicks “deny” all day. Or allow for that matter. We tried with a system were the rule is that the citizen gets whenever all relevant demands are met. Legal was very clear: No automated decisions either way unless the relevant laws or regulations explicitly allow it, every case has to be reviewed independently — even when the outcome seems completely obvious to anyone who knows the field.

I can recognize my wife easily now, but the first few months as we dated I was always scared that I wouldn't see her because I don't know what she looks like, I just recognize her and everyone else when I see them.

To the degree I have any day to day mental imagery it only works as a very very brief "overlay" when my eyes are open and I only see certain pictures:

a passport image of my Mom that I have in a photo book

a picture of my wife before we married that is my phone background and that I therefore have seen many times

the wedding photo of my parents from the hallway as a kid (even though I meet them a few times a year and often see other pictures of them)

And these images are faint, overlayed on other images and disappear in milliseconds.

People who see images don’t just imagine them or "know apples are red" - they actually see them. I think a couple of comments in this discussion described it as controlled hallucinations. Not scary, rather something useful they can summon on demand.

You can deny it all you want, but there are people who once had a rich, vivid imagination, lost it, and can describe what changed.

I’m a weird edge case myself - I sometimes experience it briefly, right before falling asleep or just after waking up.

I was asked to close my eyes and think about an apple.

if you do it now, close your eyes for about 10 - 20 seconds and think very hard about an apple on a table.

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then immediately after opening your eyes tell me what color the apple was.

For me and many others it is an absurd question. We only thought about the thing apple on the thing table, absolutely no visual representation.

For some of my siblings they saw the apple and could of course tell me the color and also the color of the table.

I'm affected by it, and I know it isn't like you describe because I have experienced and sometimes still experience seeing actual images with my eyes closed but most of the time it is absolutely impossible.

There's also IIRC the fact that the reason someone started researching this topic was because a person who had very clear visual imagery with closed eyes lost it after surgery and his description got this thing started.

This is an ongoing problem in Norway now and I think it has been in Sweden for some time.

If you want to read more, search for the foxtrot network.

Russia has nationalised a number of Western companies since 2022, even McDonalds.

Nothing happened.

Why? Because if you don’t explain how to actually use something, all the fine-grained details are pointless.

Classic example: try looking up the Java docs around 2003–2005 to figure out how to display an image in a Swing application. Endless pages about Graphics2D and Image and double buffering and what not but not a single mention of the real solution:

Just put it in a JLabel.

But we must stop somewhere, else we end up like the people arguing that the most democratic country in the middle east is somehow the apartheid one.

It only works if one looks away from the fact that there are so many more things that need to be declared terrorism first.

And it directly misleads people.

Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".

When did Ukrainians terror bomb Russia for decades on end?

When did Ukrainian authorities pay people to kill Russian civilians?

When did Ukrainians cross the border to massacre Russians, rape and take hundreds of hostages and take bragging videos of it to share on WhatsApp and Telegram?

Gazans have done all this and those who do it have - until recently - been universally seen as heroes in Gaza although that is finally changing. Gazas official position is still that October 7th was a fantastic day but simultaneously just a small taste of what is to come.

Even those that acknowledge that 07th of October was a mistake seems to be more concerned about what it means for them than the fact that they killed over thousand innocent civilians, documented their own extreme sexual violence and bragged openly about it and took hundreds of hostages.

Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.

I used to really want to learn Russian language. I thought of it as an investment in my career as I expected to work a lot more with Russians and Russian companies because I assumed Russia like the Baltics and Poland would become part of Europe.

I have also had some really nice and smart colleagues from Russia over the years.

Then came 2014 and 2022 and now sadly I think Russians will go through what Germans experienced from 1946 and the next few decades.

Hopefully you'll not go through what Germans suffered in 1945.

If you are working against the regime we are still friends.

And I look forward to visit Russia again in a decade or two.

But remember (and everyone should remember this): a people is responsible for the government they choose. Those who cheer when their militaries are successfully attacking peaceful neighbors and taking civilians including kids as hostages and talk about erasing their neighbors can't expect much sympathy when the war returns home.

My first encounter with Scrum (or whatever it was) was good. It felt good to work in cycles and reprioritize twice a month.

Since then I have seen various versions of working systems and various versions of broken systems.

The two last projects have been extremely agile, the current project has exactly 5 mandatory meetings in an average week:

- 3 x stand ups that typically take <10 minutes and never more than 15.

- 1 stand up plus planning (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 20 minutes)

- 1 stand up plus voluntary demo + retro (scheduled 1 hour, typically takes 30 minutes)

The previous project had a lot more structure but also worked well.

Common themes:

- Communication is 2 way

- Both teams are friendly and competent

- Customer care about results and leave programming to us

- Clear communication about what they hope, but without stress. Especially the first project were the stakes were serious: if we manage to hit the deadline we knew we would save the organization millions, but if not, nobody was in trouble. It was an actual challenge, not a scary thing.

Have I seen dysfunctional Scrum and Agile as well? Yes!

Some examples:

- endless estimation meetings which not only eats programmer hours but also mean that everyone feel they have to match the estimates

- one way communication (in a loop from customer - ux - programmer - tester - customer). Doesn't help if there are 14 days sprints when every sprint is a mini waterfall

- taking time of the project to do agile workshop after agile workshop while continuing to be absolutely rigid

- "release" after "release" but no actual customer

- "finish one thing" taken to mean that styling has to be perfect even on placeholder pages