I'm an Engineering Manager. I print out certificates for people on (and beyond) my teams, referencing something they accomplished (big or small), add one of the "boy scout badges" I bought in bulk from AliExpress (and then retroactively created & reference a set of values based on the iconography) and mail out "Engineering Merit Badges" to our remote employees. Maybe a few think it's dumb but the vast majority love it. The collector-types try to earn the entire set (I made one of the badges really hard to get because of this), while physically getting mail really seems to resonate with anyone under 35. A few people more distant from my teams (i.e. different departments) DID seems supsicious at first when I asked for their home address, and my boss wondered how I spent several hundred dollars in postage last year, but I try and send out at least a dozen a month while still keeping them meaningful. It's actually a bit of work (of course I wrote software to help manage and create everything) but I love it too.
In my eyes it's more so that we don't care in that sense. My friend group is mostly just keeping in mind that they might have to dip to another country/continent at some point, maybe, unlikely though.
I'm pretty sure everyone I know would rather get imprisoned than go die in the mud to protect property they don't own, on the orders of a government that doesn't care about the same things they care about.
When we talk about it, it always boils down to a discussion on how to best desert/escape at different stages.
If the relationship with America deteriorates, which countries do you think will accept European refugees? Your friends may have to stay and fight not out of patriotism, but necessity. In a total-war scenario, even prisoners will find themselves contributing to thr war effort.
Since europeans are quite wealthy, many will be happy to accept them (as long as they still have money and qualifications).
But leaving all moral questions aside, where to go?
South america might turn into a war zone as well. Africa partly is already. Asia similar.
New Zealand sounds good, but even Peter Thiel found out, that money will get you only so far in buying a safe haven.
So personally I would opt for fixing the problems in europe. And am on it within my abilities. But .. with limits. I do not trust my politicians either and I am multilingual and traveled the world a lot. So in the end I would also rather take my family and leave, then being ordered to go fight in a war with half working equipment, because corruption and proud incompetence prevented preparation. (Many in the german military for instance hold the opinion, that they don't need to learn from the incompetent ukrainians, because they are all fighting wrong)
Luckily for whole Europe russia is very incompetent at doing anything serious, and complex projects like war are as serious as it gets. They routinely fail at logistics even now, corruption and nepotism is how puttin' built his whole empire, you don't suddenly get competent people at key positions of power just because it would make sense.
So whatever happens (apart from nuclear holocaust everywhere around the world) will be so slow we will have time to react. Already biggest arming of whole european continent since WWII is happening, and any bad news is pushing more money and focus into building more and more.
I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians.
"I know it sounds gloomy, but only if you have your head too close to the screens daily. Worse had come and gone than incompetent russians."
Depends where you live I suppose. The baltic states are rightfully worried and take it a bit more serious.
And yes, russia on its own is not that dangerous to whole Europe. But russia in combination with north korean soldiers and supported by china .. and some european states that switch sides (Hungary, Serbia, Bosnia, ..), that would be dangerous. Lot's of things can happen. Also the EU can transform into an evil empire if we don't watch out. So no, I am not too worried about immediate war, but the traction right now is bad.
Italy has already a Mussolini (who invented fascism) admiring government. Biggest opposition in france is pretty right wing. The german right wing opposition is pretty strong, ... etc.
Was your point that europe is immune to fascism and imperialism somehow?
We all have relatives all over the place, many have multiple passports/citizenships, most are well educated and/or make good money, most speak 3+ languages.. It'll work out. Countries take in refugees with much different cultures and lower education in the hopes of adding to their workforce. Someone will gladly take us.
I'm guessing in the worst case South America/AU/NZ/JP/UAE/Canada would be the goals.
The only real risk I see is essentially waiting too long and getting detained right as they begin to close off the borders for people of fighting age.
We are not at war. No bombs are falling in our cities. Our children are not being drafted and coming back in coffins. No one is bombing our ships and railways, so we have plenty of food on the table. If you think we are at war you have no idea what you’re talking about.
So literally just like Cuba? The distance between US and Cuba is like 150km, if you're in Donetsk you can't even leave Donetsk Oblast if you travel 150km, and the shortest distance you can take from Ukraine<>Russia to closest EU/NATO member would be something like 600km if you don't take shortcuts via Belarus.
For all intents and purposes, Ukraine's border with Russia is way further away (like magnitude) from EU/NATO than US<>Russia (who are neighbors) or US<>Cuba (who are also neighbors).
Indeed, and how far would you wager it is between the border of Ukraine<>Romania and Ukraine<>Russia, at the shortest point? I'd wager around a lot longer than US<>Cuba.
I imagine the shortest path Russia->Ukraine->EU Members Romania/Hungary/Slovakia/Poland is far shorter than the shortest path Russia->Cuba->Any US State or territory.
Both Cuba and Russia are literal neighbors to the US, it doesn't get closer than that. Cuba is like 150km from the coast of Florida, and Russia is even closer than that to the US!
You're just randomly creating new positions to argue about because why? There is no factual way in which whatever point you are trying to make holds true re. Russia/Cuba to the US is less than Russia/Ukraine to the EU & NATO.
Kaliningrad literally shares borders with Poland and Lithuania. 0 km is the smallest distance possible. Russia and Ukraine both border EU and NATO countries.
What argument did I even make? Are you saying it's absurd that Russia's border to Ukraine is further away to the closest EU/NATO member than Cuba is to the US? Because if so, I think you need to open up a world map.
The idea that the size of Ukraine and the distance to Russia’s border through Ukraine diminishes the Russian threat. For two reasons:
1. Russia aims to either capture Ukraine outright or exert influence over it, which puts eastern EU states at grave risk. Note that Belarus, a Russian vassal, already borders the EU and was used by the Russians to launch the Ukraine invasion.
2. Russia already borders — and menaces - the EU in the Baltics.
I have my own war stories from working at Qualcomm. Gather together, children.
Ahem. One upon a time I was the tech lead for one of the many software components in Qualcomm's GPU software stack. At one point there was customer interest in caching certain blobs of data that were relatively costly to compute, in order to reduce the startup times of a wide range of apps.
Since the caching needed to happen across different processes over time, we needed some sort of persistent storage with some metadata to track stuff like usage stats, limit storage requirements, etc. Simple stuff, right? I decided that we didn't need to reinvent the wheel, and thus suggested to the team's most recent hire to use SQLite.
Oh, Dear Lord. That was a mistake. SQLite worked great, no, no. That wasn't the issue. The problem was obtaining approval from Legal to use SQLite in our little project.
"Does SQLite have one of those viral licenses that require you to open-source your own code?" -- you may ask. No, it doesn't. It is the most lax OSS license that you could ask for. Super friendly to commercial closed-source projects.
No, the obstacle was that Legal wanted to audit SQLite line by line, down to the books and research that was mentioned in the comments, searching for anything from copyright infringement within SQLite itself, to patents that may be associated with any of its features. IIRC, it was going to take months and would require approval by my management chain. And any time we wanted to upgrade the version of SQLite we shipped with would require another extensive review.
I used to explain Qualcomm as a navy of lawyers and a dinghy of developers.
I spent SO MUCH TIME getting legal review to publish code.
One of my favorite battles was someone out there in the wild took the Microsoft boilerplate MIDL (MIT 2.0) and stripped the headers, licensing them as GPL. So our boilerplate MIDL files suddenly got ducked and we couldn't ship them any more.
Ah so the Oracle syndrome, where the engineering is a sidekick in the lawyer business?
In all seriousness, this is just appalling. This would make a good poison pill to prevent an opensource project from being used in such a corporation /s
Thanks for sharing! The sad part is, it's the qualcomm customers that pay for the end result.
Eh. I used to work for a large corporation that had multiple development sites worldwide. I remember telling someone at another site that I was considering using an OSS library. His jaw dropped, "You can use Open-Source? At our location using OSS is a fireable offence."
One of my friends, Matt, owned Seattle's Metrix Create:Space. He had a pick and place and a problem: Qualcomm had nice chips, but he couldn't buy them on tape, and he couldn't get data sheets.
The CEO of QCA? QCE? Don't remember. Was coming up to Seattle to rub elbows; there was to be a Q&A session afterwards. I told my friend Joe that if none of the employees would ask any hard questions, I would. They didn't and I did: you talk about open source, you talk about how important getting hardware into the world is, but my pal Matt can't get open data sheets or parts on tape. WHO DO I TALK TO?
He gave me someone, after many weeks of going around, they pointed me to the multi-thousand dollar IoT dev kits as the best option. Minimum order was like 1000 units.
As we have in France: Père castor, raconte-nous une histoire !
For the rest of the world: it's a children cartoon with a grandpa beaver telling stories to his grandchildren, and has been immensely popular for decades.
We were working on Windows on ARM for the Surface tablets (funny story: I worked in the office of the CTO of Microsoft in 2008? 2009? and we had a couple of the original Surfaces. Cool machines to demo) and we had a couple of the tablets. We needed like 20 to do testing. We were able to get a couple more. I think the chargeback was on the order of $50k each.
None of them were the same. One of the best engineers I ever worked with, who I'll call Bill, had to reverse-engineer how to JTAG each one to re-flash them, since each tablet was slightly different and undocumented.
Bill was one of the guys in the late 90s, early 2000s that was cracking satellite cards for fun. He also reverse engineered a bunch of CANBUS stuff for another product group. Good times.
> What does it mean to work "in the office of the CTO"?
Many companies have a small research division directly reporting to the CTO. It usually has the implication of "experimental research at the discretion of the CTO, may become something production later in which case it'll move elsewhere".
1: This one isn't about open source, but: the guy that said this and that about how 64 bit ARM was never going to happen? We were working on exactly that at the time.
OK. One OEM (I don't remember who, they make TVs and the like) took our BSP and just... sent it out. To millions of devices. Tens of millions of devices. However many TVs there are.
We had just added a TURN implementation to AllJoyn and set up a dev server. Not literally a small machine under someone's desk, but basically that. Maybe a two vCPU VM.
The DDoS was _very_ distributed. The DNS requests knocked Qualcomm off the air.
So we made that an opt-in compile-time feature for all BSPs going forward.
https://findingfavorites.podbean.com/e/ry-jones-postcards/
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