I visited a friend in Sarajevo in 2014. Lovely small walkable city in a little valley, enjoyed the food and did some of the tours of old war sites inside the city and on the edge of the city. It boggled my mind then that the locals warned me not to go hiking through the pretty forest out of town because of land mines; it was hard to believe a country in Europe would have that problem in the 21st century!
European wars now all feel like a throwback to the 19th century. Even the maximally horrific wars of the 20th century feel outdated in light of trade being so much more efficient.
Economic aggression is a whole new kind of warfare and plenty destructive, but just saying "you stand on some dirt and we will kill you over it" is a pure waste.
People keep comparing the war in Ukraine to World War II, but they seem to imagine themselves to be Napoleon. Maybe France could have gotten richer by winning, but today that kind of attack is just lose-lose.
From America, the Yugoslavian war felt like re-fighting some Medieval grudge. I'm sure it made some kind of sense to them at the time.
I had never heard of the Zone Rouge, so thanks for sharing! I grew up in the USA in the 80s, and as a child, the first time I remember hearing of the problem of lingering landmines was in reference to countries such as Cambodia. Later I lived in Africa and eventually visited other continents. Of course I remember hearing of the war in Yugoslavia when growing up, but a dozen years ago when I visited Sarajevo, I certainly felt sad when the Bosnians told me about the ongoing problem because it felt like something I would have expected to be cleaned up by now in a developed country. Definitely a strong lesson on the long-term costs of war.
I'm very curious if they're going to ditch Google by providing on-device search. A monthly Open Crawl is under 100 terabytes, and if you clean that down to raw text and deduplicate and maybe pick out what you don't care about, the dataset might already fit onto my iPhone. They could do a lot without making a network call and reach out to a server for anything the device doesn't have, but a lot of user queries might never need to leave the phone. In another couple years, storage will be even higher.
I was hopeful for on-device AI too but any AI processing so far sucks up the battery, heats up the phone and most importantly isn't even nearly good enough. Without a breakthrough in battery, chips or the models and algorithms the way forward is thin clients that connect to some servers close to a solar farm or nuclear energy plant.
A couple months ago things were different. Try their stronger models. Gemini recently saved me from a needle in a haystack problem with buildpacks and Linux dependencies for a 14-year-old B2B SaaS app that I was solving a major problem for, and Gemini figured out the solution quickly after I worked on it for hours with Claude Code. I know it's just one story where Gemini won, and I have really enjoyed using Claude Code, but Google is having some success with the serious effort they're putting into this fight.
You can certainly do that in Houston. Food from anywhere is something we have more of than most American cities, and you don’t have to wonder if you’ll be able to get a table in the restaurant tonight. But if you like living in densely populated London, you might not prefer how spread out Houston is. I do love visiting London to experience a totally different world from my usual daily life.
Hello fellow Houstonian! As someone who has used Stimulus and Hotwire since the early days of Rails 7, I don't really agree that it's 10-30x, because I wouldn't compare it to some $30 theme. Having Rails-ified components (and themes) saves a lot of time so this would more than pay for itself within a few hours of consulting work on a project in the USA. I've worked on projects that had talented designers, but I also know the feeling of being a solo dev who doesn't want to figure out how to make it look and behave nicely, so for someone like that it's extra awesome!
I have purchased Tailwind UI in the past, but for Rails developers, Rails UI goes the extra mile as this sentence on the JavaScript page explains:
Rails defaults use Stimulus.js and Turbo from the Hotwire ecosystem. Rails UI follows these conventions and includes pre-built Stimulus controllers for common UI patterns.
In 2024, I launched for a client a Rails platform powered by Hotwire that has thousands of users. Thanks to Jumpstart Rails working out of the box with Jumpstart iOS and Android, the web app views were reused in native iOS and Android apps which drastically sped up initial launch and reduces ongoing maintenance. In other words, much less effort than if I had used Rails as an API with React or something similar.
And I've kept my eyes on Rails UI since it was in beta, and I was poking around with it a couple weeks ago and the cool thing is it could be used on a project like the one above without clashing with anything.
Indeed. It's because of the fashion preferences of American SUV and pickup buyers.
I can attest to the fact that minivans are much more comfortable. I picked up my Pacifica hybrid minivan in early 2021 before the price hike and it was a steal compared to SUVs and pickups. When I was doing paperwork for the vehicle at the Chrysler dealership, I was chatting with some sales guys and discovered the shocking fact they had recently sold a luxuriously loaded-down pickup for over $100K. I was fortunate to easily haggle with them over my minivan because they don't make much money on minivans so they focus on pickups, Jeeps, etc.
A couple decades ago, I had started looking to replace an old hand-me-down car from my grandma, and had been mulling over whether I could ever justify spending $30K on an Infiniti at that time. My boss at work got a new pickup, and he was rather proud of it, and I innocently asked if it cost $25K because plenty of my Texan relatives had driven them over the years and I assumed they were a no-frills working man's practical vehicle. After a brief pause, he answered, "It was a little over 40 thousand." That was over 20 years ago.
When I was at Rice University around the turn of the century, I remember playing with a large expensive monitor running a Windows computer. It was so futuristically fantastical that you could touch the screen to do things. Extremely clunky, but cool. Just a bit too tedious to do anything more than play with it, because trying to get actual work done on it all the time would have been a chore.
Many years later, I was working for a startup called kWhOURS in a little old house in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Our target users were engineers used to paying thousands for the rugged and expensive Windows laptops we needed to deploy our Adobe AIR tablet app onto since they had a touchscreen. Still a clunky UI, but our software was usable. Then the iPad was released, and it was literally worlds apart, something people have long taken for granted. All of us, including Adobe, were taken by surprise, because all attempts at tablets prior to that were so far inferior to Apple's version, and competitors spent many years trying to catch up.
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