Kasparov as usually exaggerates. As a Russian, I can think of only 2 cases he may refer to: 2002 riot after world cup match, when a crowd watched Russia team lose to Japan, then went to destroy displays and cars in Moscow center. It was followed by wrenching the mass rallies laws. Some publicists later, in the '10s, suggested it was orchestrated, but the whole theory forgets that Russian team could have won. You don't create a plan where your pretexts may not take place at all.
The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.
Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?
Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.
What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.
Sure. She's very resentful and puts labels on everything and everyone. Her discourse, from what I remember was like "in Russia, there's no this, no that, no life, etc." Just no point to seriously discuss what she says.
I lived in Moscow in the '10s, and was at some meetings of liberal crowd, saw where these political activists were formed. By the time many of them already couldn't be in real politics, i.e. be elected, so many were just in these salon meetings (because youtube wasn't yet the default place to present), competing in cool and juicy takes.
XML was a product of its time, when after almost 20 years of CPUs rapidly getting quicker, we contemplated that the size of data wouldn't matter, and data types won't matter (hence XML doesn't have them, but after that JSON got them back) -- we expected languages with weak type systems to dominate forever, and that we would be working and thinking levels above all this, abstractly, and so on.
I remember XML proponents back then argued that it allows semantics -- although, it was never clear how a non-human would understand it and process.
The funny thing about namespaces is that the prefix, by the XML docs, should be meaningless -- instead you should look at the URL of the namespace. It's like if we read a doc with snake:front-left-paw, and ask how come does a snake have paws? -- Because it's actually a bear -- see the definition of snake in the URL! It feels like mathematical concepts -- coordinate spaces, numeric spaces with different number 1 and base space vectors -- applied to HTML. It may be useful in rare cases. But few can wrap their heads around it, and right from the start, most tools worked only with exactly named prefixes, and everyone had to follow this way.
> data types won't matter (hence XML doesn't have them, but after that JSON got them back)
JSON does not have very much or very good data types either, but (unlike XML) at least JSON has data types. ASN.1 has more data types (although standard ASN.1 lacks one data type that JSON has (key/value list), ASN.1X includes it), and if DER or another BER-related format is used then all types use the same framing, unlike JSON. One thing JSON lacks is octet string type, so instead you must use hex or base64, and must be converted after it has been read rather than during reading because it is not a proper binary data type.
> The funny thing about namespaces is that the prefix, by the XML docs, should be meaningless -- instead you should look at the URL of the namespace. It's like if we read a doc with snake:front-left-paw, and ask how come does a snake have paws? -- Because it's actually a bear -- see the definition of snake in the URL!
This is true of any format that you can import with your own names though, and since the names might otherwise conflict, it can also be necessary. This issue is not only XML (and JSON does not have namespaces at all, although some application formats that use it try to add them in some ways).
Semantic in machine processing is actually very simple: if a machine has an instruction to process an element and we know what it does, then the element is semantic.
So, for example, <b> and <i> have perfect semantic, while <article> not so much. What does the browser do with an <article>? Or maybe it is there for an indexing engine? I myself have no idea (nor that I investigated that, I admit).
But all that was misunderstood, very much like XML itself.
The <article> command in HTML can be useful, even if most implementations do not do much with it. For example, a browser could offer the possibility to print or display only the contents of a single <article> block, or to display marks in the scrollbar for which positions in the scrollbar correspond to the contents of the <article> block. It would also be true of <time>; although many implementations do not do much with it, they could do stuff with it. And, also of <h1>, <h2>, etc; although browsers have built-in styles for them, allowing the end user to customize them is helpful, and so is the possibility of using them to automatically display the table of contents in a separate menu. None of these behaviours should need to be standardized; they can be by the implementation and by the end user configuration etc; only the meaning of the commands will be standardized, not their behaviour.
"Meaning" has a rather vague meaning, but behavior is exact. If I know the behavior, it becomes a tool I can employ. If I only know supposed behavior, I cannot really use that. E.g. why we have so much SEO slop and so little "semantic" HTML? Because the behavior of search engines is real and thus usable, even when it is not documented much.
Android isn't any better, every new version every year, it's becoming a buggier and buggier Tamagotchi that demands attention every half an hour, and has a gazillion contradictory settings that never work. My phone, model 2023, has night mode that turns on automatically. You can turn it off for 30 minutes, or permanently. There are clocks that work independently. I wanted a better one, because this one would reset all its widgets every minute, and no app could play music or radio in the background.
So I got a newer one, from 2025. Fortunately, radio & media do work. But product managers wouldn't have been product managers without spoiling something. Somebody decided the alarm and night mode must work together in unison, and also they dropped the turn-off-for-30-min feature, and they decided to make night mode smart, that it doesn't turn on if the phone was active at the time. So, now you can get spam calls or sms make it ring loudly at night, because night mode didn't turn on, because you used the phone. Next time when you notice night mode should be on, but isn't, you turn it on. But now it's permanent -- till the end of the universe, unless you turn it off. And alarm clock won't ring, because deep in there, a "waking up alarm" box is unchecked, that should have made it work despite the night mode. Did any human actually test it work on themselves?
My pet peeve on Android (and also on iOS) with alarms is that alarms aren't clocks! They are totally separated concepts and bundling them all together makes no sense.
Nice thing about Android though is that you have more control to work around this kind of thing if you don't like the default behaviour. I rolled my own night mode with Tasker years ago, before it was built in, and have never looked back.
I took a look at the source code -- well, what if it's a working thing -- and of course, 2 files in, there are instructions that panic (i.e. crash the host process), all over the code, just everywhere, in every API method. That's nowhere near "production ready" as the author's LLM says.
I've seen, 17 year ago, a schoolboy make "his own OS", which was simply Ubuntu with replaced logos. He got on TV with it, IIRC he was promoting it on the internets (forums back then), and kept insisting that this was his own work. He was bullied in response and in a few weeks disappeared from the nets.
What has it to do with me personally, if I'm not the author, nor a bully? Today I learned that I can't trust the new libraries posted in official repos. They can be just wrapper code slop. In 2012, Jack Diedrich in his speech "Stop Writing Classes" said that he'd read every library source code to find if there was anything stinky. I used to think it's a luxury of time and his qualification to read into what you use. Now it became a necessity, at least for new projects.
The author of that show hn post wrote that it's a project that grew to "production ready". Reading her source code, I see a bunch of wrappers that, upon any error, will panic and crash the whole process.
This is equal to projects where guys from high school took Ubuntu, changed the logo in couple of places, and then made statements that they'd make a new OS.
Anybody minimally competent can see the childish exaggeration in both cases.
The most logical request is to grow up and be transparent of what you did, and stop lying.
I live in a completely different city, a post-soviet one, with dense streets, 9-storey apartment buildings. But still it's hard to socialize. It's the same both in the center, and on the fringe with large micro-districts, where the density is the same, but people are less in haste, and there are less strangers. Same way, people are avoidant.
Like in subway you pretend that others don't exist, and it's hard to get closer with people. It can take months or years to start saying hello to a kiosk salesman you recognize. It's hard to get past by hello with the house neighbors. If you make steps forward, people are unease. Sometimes others are too quick with their steps, you get unease.
The most compelling theory I know is that you need to meet people occasionally, without intention, to deepen the relationships. If all your communication with someone is intentional, I guess, this feels awkward for both sides. I can confirm this from experience: living in a 80K town, I'd walk down the main street to the little shopping mall with a local supermarket for groceries, and would meet people I knew, or friends, and sometimes we'd go walking by the streets, with groceries bag in my hand :) or we planned to meet in 15 minutes. Or go to each other's home. This is hard to replicate in a big city, where even if you see a friend, he/she is usually in a hurry.
Near apartment blocks, there's no porch or garden or park, and even where there is one, I don't see locals sitting there regularly. People are very cautious, even suspicious of benches, because if there's a busy street nearby, once in a year there'll be a group of noisy young people sitting late at night, or one drunkard in a year, and everyone will get pissed off and want the bench removed. (If they allow to install it at all.)
Looking at some places, I theorized that maybe there should be a place where you could sit and let's say play board games _near_ those who come in and out. And of course, it should be indoors, because winters are long and cold. But But I'm not sure of a communal place indoors either. It could become a magnet for homeless, it can be a magnet for just the slacker drinking old men, and repel the rest of people. I've seen too many communities become place repulsive for "normies". Maintenance is a big question too.
I had interesting flights in end of june from St. Petersburg to Novosibirsk. It departed at around 23:00, and you saw sunset and still a dawn. As the plane flew mostly at latitude of 60°, the dawn in the north was always there, and 1.5 hours later, the sun rose. The plane arrives after 3h30m of flight at ~7:00 local time, in summer solistice the sun is already high enough.
I think such scaling as the author suggests, can be done in the head. 57g is roughy 3/4 of 80g. It's trivial to take 3/4 of almost anything. 250g -> ~180..185g, 40 -> 30, 50 -> 37g. Unless you do bakery, where proportions are very important, there's no need for 3 digit precision.
And yes, in general a slide ruler is a great tool. I should try it again.
The other case he may think of is May 2012 protest, where a bottleneck created stampede, and a fight with police ensued. Random protesters got persecuted for whatever reasons. But the crackdown was already under way with the new state Duma passing ever tougher law amendments.
Sociologically, it's nonsense to make a pretext by attacking the other side, because you don't know what how they react: maybe the opponents just hide, or go around. To make a crackdown, you stage the attack on yourself, and then react, and crack down. E.g. Hitler staged the opposition putting Reichstag on fire, and then reacted. In Trumps case, brutal attacks are a step too far, because people may react differently -- what if nothing happens? or if republicans change their mind and impeach him?
Putin made a crackdown on media and civic liberties in a soft and gradual way: the media was taken down by stakeholders loyal to him, or maybe by a made-up bankruptcy case. Mass protests were made very hard to do, and needed a permission. But if any happened, the police wouldn't start a street fight, but would instead arrest and charge the organizers next day.
What Kasparov usually writes is a big exaggeration. In 2015 he wrote a comment on social media, that Russia needs a pro-democratic dictatorship to fix it. I think this is exactly what technocrats and oligarchs thought when they supported Putin coming in 1999 -- that he was authoritarian, but would lead Russia away from communistic revenge.
reply