"As a female war correspondent, Martha Gellhorn was not allowed to accompany the Allied invasion force .... and so, the night before the invasion, she finagled a spot on a hospital ship by telling military police she was there to interview nurses. Once aboard, Gellhorn found a bathroom, locked the door and hid until the ship was on its way to France on June 6, 1944."
"I had been sent to Europe to do my job, which was not to report the rear areas or the 'woman’s' angle.”
There is a war going on right now, look at injury to death ratios. It would be nice to have some nurses around, maybe so many soldiers would not bleed to death!
And 20 years old woman is more physically capable than 60 years old male!
Take 50% less, until you get a better offer. The job market will pick up again.
There is no guarantee that your current stable job will not suddenly come to an end for many reasons. Outside of a few rare companies, there is absolutely no reason to stay, if they are not paying you market rate.
I guess it depends on the region. Recently, I have quit a job to get a 15% increase (I know, it’s not a huge increase but I am already hitting this glass ceiling around here in Europe for senior developers)
I got a 20% increase the other year. But only because I threatened to quit aggressively and got promoted in the same year and was valuable to my small team of ~4 engineers.
And than your network stops working for couple of days, and you are @#£#&. Or your backups did not work for couple of months, and you find out the hard way!
I have some hardware for fun and learning, but it is well isolated. Using K8s for home infrastructure is bad idea.
With K8s on bunch of Pis I have dozens of layers, machines, network connections to monitor.
With single server, complexity is much much lower. I installed my server years ago, once a month I check logs and do updates (10 minutes of work). Some time next year I will upgrade to Ubuntu 24.04 and replace SSD (just in case), about 1 hour of work.
K8s is really horrible when it comes to time efficiency!
I save pages into PDF files. Low tech, but works since 2001.
I print with zero page margins, so in viewer it seems like continuous page. I found Firefox produced smallest pdfs. Chrome embeds fonts and other stuff. I also use UBlock rules to hide some elements.
Pretty useful for archiving discussions on Reddit.
> Pretty useful for archiving discussions on Reddit.
What I do now is save the comments within the discussions (on HN, Reddit, Twitter etc) as text which is indexable and searchable with additional metadata which helps for filtering (author is the main one I use), while automatically archiving the entire URLs associated with them.[1]
For me, this is the best of both worlds - quick access via fault-tolerant search and filtering to the most interesting stuff while having a snapshot archive for the full context.
[1]: https://notado.app - I've been working on this for a few years now and have posted a lot in my HN comment history and technical blogs about how I have iterated on and evolved this workflow to the point where it is now
I get you, but I still find it sad there's so little trust left in the web stack that even a PDF is preferable. Technically, a PDF can contain anything (bitmaps, text/glyphs without semantic ordering, even JavaScript).
I often save things as PDF. The 'export as PDF' option in Safari creates a long PDF that I find much better for reference on screen than 'printing' to PDF.
But the big flaw in this, especially for saving programming related pages, is that it loses the parts of scrollable content which is not currently in view, e.g. the ends of lines in a code block.
> Pretty useful for archiving discussions on Reddit.
I use SingleFile for that, saves pages as a single self-contained html file. That way you can still interact with collapse comment buttons and outlinks.
China around 1AD had iron production comparable to England at start of industrial revolution. They were also starting to use mechanization (quote from wiki bellow).
> The effectiveness of the Chinese human and horse powered blast furnaces was enhanced during this period by the engineer Du Shi (c. AD 31), who applied the power of waterwheels to piston-bellows in forging cast iron.
I've heard the argument before that China being very large without serious, nearby rivals created less drive for innovation than Europe with its smaller countries and frequent struggles. There was also more ability to move to a different country if people in your country didn't like what you had to say. Many European thinkers took advantage of this.
"than Europe with its smaller countries and frequent struggles"
I think old china had actually lots in common with old europe: lots of small kingdoms and warlords battling over their villages. China wasn't really one united nation either, for most of its time.
> China wasn't really one united nation either, for most of its time.
China had some small periods were it was splintered, Europe had some small periods were it was unified after Rome. It is very different. China is more like Rome never fell, it might have lost half some time etc, some rebellion splintering it, but always pulling itself together after a century or two.
China was splintered for a thousand years after the Eastern Han dynasty except for the Tang dynasty and wasn't really unified again until the Qing dyansty [1]. I wouldn't call those "small periods", it's been splintered for the majority of the common era.
I am talking about the past 1500 years. Also to me half of China being under one banner isn't "splintered", that is still an empire with a few belligerents, so your link there doesn't provide an accurate picture.
And if you compare like to like, Europe has never ever been unified since there were always many splinters regardless which period you look at. Some parts splitting off isn't the same thing as the empire not existing.
No matter how you slice it China has been far more unified than Europe, if you made a similar map of European dynasties for the same period it would be orders of magnitude larger.
If you look at the biggest empire on earth for different periods a part of the Chinese empire is almost always among the top, Europe was only there during Rome at its peak and after colonization. China is much closer to a single European country, for example it wasn't as splintered as the German states used to be but its much closer than comparing it to Europe.
'Germany' was under the banner of the Holy Roman Empire for 1000 years, but still deeply splintered. So much so that proper industrialization only happened after unification under the 2nd Reich 1871.
Yeah, as I said I'd argue Germany was more splintered than China, but its closer than comparing the soup of splinters that is Europe to China.
Point is that saying that China wasn't always unified so it is similar to Europe is wrong, Europe was so splintered that typically traveling 60 miles meant you would be in another country, that means it was very easy to flee to another country if your views weren't accepted were you are now, very different from larger countries/empires like China and its splintered factions.
"Point is that saying that China wasn't always unified so it is similar to Europe is wrong"
Good point, I agree. That is why I initially said "lot's in common". But I believe the concept of "flee to another country if your views weren't accepted were you are now" is also quite present in chinese folklore.
So yes, there was the one person you could not flee from in china, which was the emperor and his court. But I would argue that your views also could not really go against the catholic church and the pope in europe for a long time and in most parts of it. (In a point more on topic, I would argue, that the disempowerment of the Inquisition, was the main ingredient in the industrial revolution, see Galilei and co.)
Reformation was most popular in the northern countries of the Hanse trade union.
Freeing themselves from Catholicism also meant freeing themselves from the emperor and the tribute payed to him.
When the Protestant stronghold Magdeburg refused to pay, it was entirely obliterated during the 30 year war, to set an example for other 'rebel' cities
This is true and doesn't apply after 12th century from when on it was unified and which is the period during which the jump to industrialization probably would have been more likely. On top of that it was run by the well-organized Mandarin bureaucracy.
I find myself being cautious when it comes to reading characterizations of China's historical dis/unity, knowing the current government has some rather strong opinions about what narrative it would like to see in the history books.
It made no sense to burn expensive coal to power an engine until you run into the problem of needing to drain coal mines, because you already have so much demand for coal that you have started to need to do that.
Also lack of calculus and newtons equations, almost all useful engineering equations depend on those so without them you can't make the necessary calculations for engines. Without engine calculations it takes way too much trial and error to get things to work well.
The industrial revolution happened pretty soon after those were discovered, I don't think that is a coincidence.
> they also would have been invented a 3. time if necessary
Not sure what you mean? Romans would have had great use of Newtonian physics, they made a ton of machines, but they didn't manage to invent the math/physics to do those calculations at the time. What do you suggest would replace this for making calculations for machines?
Well, they have been invented 2 times, roughly at the same time largely independent from each other. But it needed a general high level of math. The romans lacked many of the more sophisticated math tools I think.
No they weren't invented two times, Newtons physics equations were invented one time, then Leibniz reconstructed calculus after reading Newtons work on physics. Leibniz almost surely wouldn't have invented calculus without having read Newtons work on motion, so they aren't comparable.
The only thing that event proves is that inventing calculus if you have the the formulas of motion is easy, both Newton and Leibniz did that, but it was Newton who invented the formulas of motion that was required to invent calculus.
So I think Newtons equations of motions was a requirement for the industrial revolution, that is a key that unlocks the ability to understand machines on a whole new level.
Also Newtons motion equations are simply just
F = ma
They don't require a lot of mathematical pre work etc. But, nobody solved that properly for a really long time, and that is the basis for classical physics so basically every single thing we did during the industrial revolution. It was the key to modern engineering where we use math to calculate machine properties. I don't think it is just random chance that the industrial revolution happened just a few decades after classical physics was invented.
It is such a ridiculous coincidence otherwise, that the formulas and concepts that are the foundation to all of engineering was invented just before engineering took off for real.
Was it the case that nobody solve the problem, or was it solved many times but since there was no value in the solution at the time we don't remember those solutions? Or maybe it was the industrial revolution getting underway finally made it worth studying at all.
I recently learned, that the pythagorans were more of a cult (who liked secrecy?). I totally can believe that some ancient math nerds solved lots of things already, but with the people around them not understanding. One war could have been enough, to eradicate lots of (semi) isolated thinkers.
My physic courses have been a while, but I would argue with "F = ma" alone, you won't get far, when you want to build high pressure machines and model them before. You do need calculus for that. And quite a bit more I would think.
F = ma leads to calculus was my point, and that is the starting point if you want to think about pressure etc. Once you have F = ma the rest of physics happened pretty fast, getting to F = ma took millennia, getting from there to exploring most of classical physics took a century.
I got a degree in engineering physics, I have a fairly good idea what kind of physics and math is used for machines and structures. Without the concept of force that Newton invented basically all useful calculations are beyond you, so all machines before then were made via rules of thumb as the math wasn't useful. But when you have the concept of force many of the easy things like how to calculate structural integrity or treating pressure as a field of force isn't that far away.
Then you can start designing machines where you know the components will hold without testing, since you have done the calculations. That is what enables complex machines with many parts.
One factor is that Northern Europeans made much more intensive use of animal power than the Chinese (or the Greeks of antiquity) ever did. If you are already using oxen or horses to pump water out of your coal mine, it is less of a leap to start using machinery to do it (because you will probably be able to re-use some of your laws, legal precedents and business practices for using the oxen and horses).
The Northern European's close relationship with the cow goes back about 7,000 years. Other cultures relied on cows for a large fraction of their calories, too, but the Northern Europeans were the first farmers to do it. I.e., they weren't nomads.
Once a farming culture gets good at keeping cows for calories, it is a short leap to using male cows (oxen) to help plow fields. And once you are doing that, it is a short leap to using them for transportation.
But more straightforwardly, the Industrial Revolution started when the Scientific Revolution was well underway. The first generation of European steam engines were inefficient, then they used the new science of thermodynamics to design steam engines that were twice as efficient.
Sailing and its associated warfare drove technology. China started on that path at roughly the same time as everybody else and then pulled back for various reasons.
Note that a lot of the industrial revolution was using clockmakers. Why do you need super accurate clocks? Navigation and ... that's pretty much it. And why do you need navigation? Naval warfare.
The Han Dynasty peaked around 1AD and fell into decline as there were weak Emperors (usually extremely young) and eventually collapsed in terrible internal conflict.
Too many wars, sort of. History book I read explained that as a wrong division of power. Increased iron production failed to increase military strength.
Class that valued industrial production, looked down on warfare as something beneath them.
And warlords preferred feudal society of peasants to squeeze. Industry would threaten them.
Dealing with leap seconds is very expensive. What happens if countries like China, Russia or Iran just decide to ignore leap seconds? We will have a clusterfuck of time zones divergent by a few seconds!
I am really into astronomy. But dealing with this, just so stars pass local meridian exactly at 00:00:00.000 is simply not worth it!
And one funny note, astronomers still use use Julian calendar (one made by Ceasar without Gregorian corrections in 16th century) to avoid similar issues. They avoid their own inventions!
I think the terminology is pretty confusing, but as I understand it, astronomers use Julian Day numbers [1], which is not really using the Julian calendar - it's really no calendar at all, just a continuous count of days, so you don't need to think at all about the definition of leap days or leap years (until you want to convert back to a human-understandable form). "Julian" coming from how they choose the reference point in the Julian Calendar.
There are also variants, for some science cases it is preferrable to get out of the Earth referential and move to e.g the barycentric reference frame and use the Barycentric Julian Date [1], which can itself be expressed in different standards (UTC, TAI (atomic time), TDB etc ...)
There’s an easy solution nobody seems to be considering. We put rockets on the moon to continually adjust its orbit in order to preserve perfect adherence to a 24-hour solar day.
Hell, once we’ve perfected this technique we could even use it to gradually pull us into a perfect 365-day year! Or better, 364 days, which is evenly divisible by 12 (edit: oops, 13) months.
Leap seconds are in the process of being abolished. The ITU-R confirmed their part of the agreement at the world radiocommunication conference last year (the ITU-R’s triennial treaty update); the next stage is the CGPM in 2026 (the BIPM’s triennial treaty update).
Will there be another solution for the desynchronization of SI days and solar days? It looks like there’s been about 25 seconds difference in the past 30 years or so.
An option if it gets way off would be to just express it as TZ shift. Current rate seems to be about a second every two years, so we have some hundreds of years before we need to even shift by 15 minutes. An amount of divergence that I suspect would not really be even noticeable, especially as it develops over hundreds of years. The TZ code is used widely and regularly and systems tend to know how to handle it. Leap seconds are always a bit of an adventure from what I understand. (I'm not a sysadmin, so I don't know the details.)
Like -- I don't know, but is it actually important that the solar day is tied to "wall clock day" so snugly? So what if it's a couple minutes off...?
> Like -- I don't know, but is it actually important that the solar day is tied to "wall clock day" so snugly? So what if it's a couple minutes off...?
Even when you're assigned a correct hour-aligned time zone, you'll be off by an average of 15 minutes! Wall clock time just fundamentally has never been precise enough for leap seconds to solve a problem, by two orders of magnitude.
A 15 minute shift once every hundred years would wreak havoc on all of the software built when the shift was too far away to worry about.
Better to design in the requirement for all software to support these shifts, like a random 10 minute shift every day. That way nobody will write software that doesn’t support the shift.
Yep. Timezone definitions already change regularly due to governments messing around with time; so software is already set up to handle this case.
Though I wonder what happens with the international dateline -- would it shift around the world, or would the UTC offsets get larger and larger? I imagine the latter would eventually also result in software issues when the UTC offset starts exceeding 24h.
There are moves to abolish DST and I suspect that after that happens timezones will ossify, which will make it difficult to use them to compensate for a large DUT1. And after 1000 years of gradually shifting daylight, people will probably be used to noon being a bit late and may well prefer it.
In a thousand years it is quiet possible there will be sizable enough population off of earth that trying to align time with the variable rotation of the earth will be seen as pointless Terracentrism
Which leads to another interesting question: are we going to sync up UTC and TAI, or do we just have to live with a completely arbitrary several-second offset for all eternity?
Astronomers use "Julian Days" and "Julian Dates", but they are not at all based on the Julian calendar. They are just a linear count of days which is easier to plug in to algorithms. It is quite similar to the Unix Timestamp, and it is quite easy to convert between the two: jd =(unixT / 86400) + 2440587.5; [1].
But astronomers have to deal with the non-uniform, unpredictable rotation of the Earth in some way. Leap seconds only help a little, and predictions can only be made a few months into the future, so it is necessary to download the latest Earth Orientation data from the International Earth Rotation Service [2].
E.g. For the Apr 8 2024 solar eclipse, some popular camera control software packages had old predicted values for the Earth's rotation. Some due to the authors not updating them, some due to old installations that didn't update the data automatically. That caused people who didn't notice the discrepancy to miss their shots.
There was never a negative leap second, so most systems are not ready for it. It is not just a question of time metadata.
And cooperation could be a problem. I can not imagine Microsoft providing updates for illegal Windows 7 in North Korea, and NK government just taking them.
Electricity exchange grid needs to be phased within 60Hz, that is a delay of a few milliseconds. Baltic states hate Russia, but they are still connected this way for example.
Maybe you do not care, but this stuff is extremely important. Airplanes could crash over a few seconds difference!
> Electricity exchange grid needs to be phased within 60Hz
Electric grids also make use of DC interconnects that obliviate the need for that synchronization. The contiguous 48 US states have at least 3 separate grids that are interconnected. Roughly east/west/Texas. There may be more, but I'm out of touch with it.
Though I wasn't really thinking about phase sync when I was talking about time and cross-border electricity (indeed, hadn't occurred to me!)
Just scheduling, switching, co-ordination etc. It is likely to me that other international things, both physical and logical) rely at least as much on time being accurate to the second.
> new criminal offence of sharing, without consent, sexually explicit images that have been digitally created using artificial intelligence or other forms of technology.
It will be interesting to see how precisely the law is written. If the definition is too broad, it may limit use of soft pornography in advertisement and popular culture.
I do not want to see yet another digitally enhanced six pack in movie. On actor that looks like me... Sharing this stuff makes me deeply uncomfortable. (sarcasm, but not really)
Even her treatment by military police after arrest was different.