I don't think government funded projects are any more secure. The political climate changes once in a few years and we had a lot of examples of previous decisions being scrapped. Limux in München was scrapped overnight, usaid was shut down in no time.

You get a little more stability for a lot of headache but nobody guarantees that in a few years political stance won't change drastically and the fund won't be cut or even closed.

> Before AI, both camps were doing the same thing every day. Writing code by hand.

I would argue that the split existed before AI and these camps were not the same.

There were always "Quality first" people and "Get the shit done ASAP" people. Former would go for a better considerations, more careful attitude towards dependencies. Latter would write the dirty POC code and move on, add huge 3rd party libs for one small function and so on.

Both have pros and cons. Former are better in envs like Aerospace or Medtech, latter would thrive in product companies and web. The second cathegory are the people who are happy the most about AI and who would usually delegate the whole thing to the agents from start to finish including the review and deployment.

Indeed. I have a few colleages and they constantly try to push these long convoluted functions which look like

    is_done = False
    while not is_done:
      if pattern1:
        ...
        if pattern2:
          ...
          if matched == "SUCCESS":
             is_done = True
             break
        if pattern3:
          ...

It's usually correct but extremely hard to follow and reminds of the good old asm code with convoluted goto's.

And the colleages tend to do reviews with the help of the agents so they don't even care to read this mess.

Same in Germany. That's why usually Max Mustermann (55) get's a better compensation for doing bare minimum than you for doing more work.

But in case of layoffs you will be kicked out first and he would be kicked out the last and with a far better severance package.

> meaningful measures of economic health

As someone who lived in a handful of countries with GDP per capita ranging from $3k to $70k I must say that GDP is a great proxy of the QoL and median citizen wealth. Not the only one and not the perfectly correlated one, but a very good one.

Indeed. "Science-based" lifting become quite popular in the recent years, but the actual science behind it is quite loose with a lot of methodologically weak studies, small samples etc.

Tcc even supports that with `#!/usr/local/bin/tcc -run`, although I don't understand people who use c or go for "scripting", when python, ruby, TCL or perl have much superior ergonomics.

This was a relatively old project that used a C program as build system / meta generator. All you needed was a working C compiler (and your shell to execute the first line). From there, it built and ran a program that generated various tables and some source code, followed by compiling the actual program. The final program used a runtime reflection system, which was set up by the generated tables and code from the first stage.

The main reason was to do all this without any dependencies beyond a C compiler and some POSIX standard library.

That's ridiculous. DB is not even trying to become profitable, not is there any evidence that it's sole shareholder, aka the government, sets it as a target.

Well apparently they have been somewhat profitable from 2016 to 2019, and they have been paying a dividend to the state more often than not. I don't think their goal is actively loosing money?

> Twenty minutes late is normal in the UK.

My biggest gripe with DB is not that it's late, but that it quite often cancels the trains. If you decided to go by regional trains with 1-2 hops instead of direct (bc you can go much cheaper with Deutschlandticket), there's a high chance that at least one of your trains get cancelled and things will not go according the plan.

> Most of the whining I've heard about DB boils down to inconvenience in situations nobody could have predicted nor helped

Somehow doesn't happen in most other countries I lived. These things are easy to deal with with a bit of redundancy, which as I've heard is lacking in Germany these days.

I've had much better experience with trains in Russia despite much harsher weather conditions, much larger distances and much older cars. This problem is absolutely fixable, just let the trains go around problematic sections with redundant routes.

On the other hand, Russian trains are absurdly slow when conpared to Europe. The flagship "high-speed" service barely does 200 km/h.

That's true, but at this point I would prefer slow but steady over being disembarked at random *dorf or standstill in a middle of nowhere with zero signal and no clue when we'll get back on track.