Through a modern lenses and with hindsight and memes that follow from napoleons failed attempt we can say flippant things like this and say napoleon wasn’t a genius. But students of history and future generals will obviously investigate the facts and see things through the lenses and circumstances of the time rather than from the seat or the internet commentator.
but they have already, rhetorically, dealt with anyone that might come with some sort of context that does not agree with their conclusion:
>There’s a particular kind of person who can’t accept that story at face value, and you’ve met them. I am absolutely sure of it. They show up in every comment section and reply thread where someone powerful does something that looks, on its face, like a mistake - and their argument always runs the same way: you don’t understand, this is actually part of a larger plan, there’s a strategy here that you and I can’t see because we’re not operating at that annointed and elevated level…
Which is, of course, one of the things you have to do when dealing with shooting some bullshit in order to get to your next level of argument, you have to deploy arguments as to why the people who might show up to say hey that's bullshit are actually the stupid people who talk the bullshit, and not you.
As an example of the genre it's pretty tepid, they manage the "I'm telling you the truth part" and the talking down part of the message, but I personally find the best of this genre always includes a pithy little witticism that is just so bitchy and deliciously mean that nobody wants to make the bullshit accusation. At least that's my recommend!
I give it a C+/B- for effort.
on edit: I of course mean what the original article did, in making its flippant comments, not what Arainach did.
the larger plan people are not the historians, IMHO that's clearly a description of people who spent a bit too much time reading about conspiracy theories (and generally are too partisanal)
The main parts that mattered were the european ones. And usually, capturing the enemies capital equals victory and Napoleon did capture Moscow. The russians just decided to keep the fight going, despite the chance that their capital burns down, which it did (allegedly on purpose to drive Napoleon out).
In general, Napoleon did not think the russians would use scorched earth tactics, meaning burning their own land, villages, food to deny the french army any supplies (and the russian peasants did not agree to this, but they were not asked).
Looking at multiple commits is not a good workflow:
* It amounts to doing N code reviews at once rather than a few small reviews which can be done individually
* Github doesn't have any good UI to move between commits or to look at multiple at once. I have to find them, open them in separate tabs, etc.
* Github's overall UX for reviewing changes, quickly seeing a list of all comments, etc. is just awful. Gerrit is miles ahead. Microsoft's internal tooling was better 16 years ago.
* The more commits you have to read through at once the harder it is to keep track of the state of things.
>It amounts to doing N code reviews at once rather than a few small reviews which can be done individually
I truly do not comprehend this view. How is reviewing N commits different from/having to do less reviews reviewing N separate pull requests? It's the same constant.
Small reviews allow moving faster for both the author and reviewer.
A chain of commits:
* Does not go out for review until the author has written all of them
* Cannot be submitted even in partial form until the reviewer has read all of them
Reviewing a chain of commits, as the reviewer I have to review them all. For 10 commits, this means setting aside an hour or whatever - something I will put off until there's a gap in my schedule.
For stacked commits, they can go out for review when each commit is ready. I can review a small CL very quick and will generally do so almost as soon as I get the notification. The author is immediately unblocked. Any feedback I have can be addressed immediately before the author keeps building on top of it.
Let's compare 2 approaches to delivering commits A, B, C.
Single PR with commits A, B, C: You must merge all commits or no commits. If you don't approve of all the commits, then none of the commits are approved.
3 stacked PRs: I approve PR A and B, and request changes on PR C. The developer of this stack is on vacation. We can incrementally deliver value by merging PRs A and B since those particular changes are blocking some other engineer's work, and we can wait until dev is back to fix PR C.
To be fair, I think echelon was calling out that there are absolutely ads in browser updates now. "Try Firefox VPN!" "Look what's new in Chrome!", etc.
> Sending you an email after you signed up is "unethical"?
I purchase a product from company X. They require an email and will not let me buy without it. I actually do want an email confirmation that the order went through and even that my product shipped.
I do not want emails about "we released a new thing" or "we have a sale" or "it's Tuesday and we want you to remember we exist". Signing me up without an explicit opt-in using information you required me to provide is absolutely unethical.
"X is even worse" does not make Y ethical, good, or acceptable. What your least favorite corporations do isn't relevant.
Other people are inconsiderate monsters who litter in national parks and abandon mattresses on the side of the road. BP and Exxon did more damage to the environment than I ever could. It's still unethical if I drop my garbage on the ground.
Forcing a cloud login for a desktop operating system is arguably a dark pattern.
Defaulting to uploading all locally saved documents to cloud storage is ABSOLUTELY a dark pattern.
The prompts every few months to "change back to recommended defaults" that make it easy to accidentally get into this state even if you made the correct decision previously to turn it off is a hellish black hole of a pattern.
I heard somewhere that Onedrive goes one step further, i.e. deleting local files and keeping them only in cloud. so when people delete file from onedrive, they find local files already deleted
Trying to answer this would fill (and almost certainly has filled) numerous Ph.D dissertations.
There are a multitude of reasons. In no particular order:
* The utterly broken and ruinous US Senate, whose composition would be unconstitutional were it not written into the constitution[1], enabling a tiny minority of the country to block any meaningful federal progress on a host of issues
* The US's strong mythos of the Protestant Work Ethic, which leads many people to believe that people succeed or fall on hard times due to merit rather than luck
* Newt Gingrich, who in the 90s introduced hyperpartisanship to Congress, turning a body where members of different parties were friends and had good working relationships into a zero sum game
* The fact that one of the two major parties campaigns on "government doesn't work" and as soon as they're elected to their best to turn that sentiment into reality
* The impact of greed in the US and its successful capture of the media and significant chunks of regulatory apparatus
* The utilization of that media control to push divisive narratives that pit the lower classes against each other instead of focusing on the real problems and their causes
* The goldfish-like memory of too many US voters who buy into narratives like "they're all the same" or get frustrated when one party can't fix everything in 4 years and elect the other party - paying no heed to the fact that building is much slower than destruction or the obstructionist tactics.
It’s the bifurcation of meaning. We speak unintelligible languages at each other using the exact same vocabulary. I developed the Semiotic-Reflexive Transformer that empirically proves this and provides the solution. No more black box. Computational semiotics is the most underrated technology of 2026.
Whether LLMs can create correct content doesn't matter. We've already seen how they are being used and will be used.
Fake content and lies. To drive outrage. To influence elections. To distract from real crimes. To overload everyone so they're too tired to fight or to understand. To weaken the concept that anything's true so that you can say anything. Because who cares if the world dies as long as you made lots of money on the way.
It's really the whole tech industry as it exists right now and AI is a victim of bad timing. If this AI had been invented 40 years ago there'd have been a lower ceiling on the damage it could do.
Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
> Another way of saying that is that capitalism is the real problem, but I was never anti-capitalist in principle, it's just gotten out of hand in the last 5-10 years. (Not that it hadn't been building to that.)
Capitalism is a tool and it's fine as a tool, to accomplish certain goals while subordinated to other things. Unfortunately it's turned into an ideology (to the point it's worshiped idolatrously by some), and that's where things went off the rails.
Agree. Capitalism is good in limited domains. Applying it generally is ludicrously stupid and will lead to another revolution in the West unless we get it under control
In web browsers, there is only one concept.
There is no concept of "up one level in the heirarchy". If you want that make your own button in your website.
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