The number of people who know anything of history at all, even history of their own peoples, their own country, their own family, is "very low". Absent of course the "history" that Hollywood and other popular media pumps out.
We have this sickness in the UK too. I think it may be terminal. It is some combination of regulation, not trusting anyone's initiative, mindless rule-following, "safetyism", never empowering front-line staff to make decisions, managerial tier expansion, and a few other things besides like infrastructure neglect, "financialisation", and general ignorance of the world of things, of the real, and over-reliance on the world of words, of laws, of construct on paper and not in steel and stone.
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.
Another crucial factor that's part of the CCP's victory in HK is that China inherited a police force essentially structured as a colonial occupying force. Police staff get benefits that include segregated housing (such as the West Kowoon Disciplined Services Quarters), which maintains morale in the ranks and allows those so inclined to live quite separately from the rest of the populace.
If anything it's the opposite. Many in HK in the 60s and 70s were much in favor of uniting with China, there were protests and movements about that. Took lots of British propaganda and a lot of clampdown to change the minds of the younger more inexperienced generations.
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.
There was one guy who fell down a high rise garage and there was a street cleaner who was killed by the protesters.
Compare that to when the British were taking over Hong Kong, and hundreds of protesters were killed.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the pandemic didn’t occur soon after.
What’s crazy is the trigger was a Hong Kong national who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. Taiwan wanted to extradite him but there was no law in place to do so. Apparently the killer is still free today.
Chan yin-lam case is one that always sticks in my head.
I can well believe correlation is sometimes the answer but the odds of an award winning swimmer doing a midnight dip and washing up naked the next day, with a rushed police investigation and extremely expedited cremation is a fair bit to accept as coincidence
I checked Chan Yi Lam’s Wikipedia page. It was ruled a suicide. The conspiracy theories surrounding this case are absurd and out of control. People even challenged her mother’s identity, forcing a DNA test to be done, and yet the crowd still continued to harass her mother.
Minor blip? First one million people marching. Then a week later nearly two. Street battles between police and protesters supported by many thousands of people. I saw a video of a guy being shoved out of a high-rise window. No doubt that was ruled "suicide" too, but it never broke out as a news story. A protester was shot but not killed by police. It's a miracle more lives weren't lost. To say it was a "blip" betrays a profound lack of understanding and knowledge about the events.
Not being able to control the endpoint, like an operator can with a mobile phone, infuriates the police and politicians here. I don't want to go "full Stallman" here but although they do not use exactly these words... the idea of a general purpose computer you own and can program bothers them. Ironically at the same time they want a tech industry and tech jobs and young people entering the workforce with "tech skills". Keep in mind though that until relatively recently they though "tech skills" was being able to us MS Word. Thankfully the RPI helped a bit with that.
I won't add much, but if this happens you must leave. Raise the risk. Document it. Document your recommendation and their decision, even if not replying or not making a decision was their decision. Tie it up with a bow on it, keep a copy, and leave.
I’ve always found the hard numbers on performance improvement hilarious. It’s just mimicking what people say on the internet when they get performance gains
While you’re making unstructured requests and expecting results, why don’t you ask your barista to make you a “better coffee” with no instructions. Then, when they make a coffee with their own brand of creativity, complain that it tastes worse and you want your money back.
Both "better coffee" and "faster code" are measurable targets. Somewhat vaguely defined, but nobody is stopping the Barista or Claude from asking clarifying questions.
If I gave a human this task I would expect them to transform the vague goal into measurable metrics, confirm that the metrics match customer (==my) expectations then measure their improvements on these metrics.
This kind of stuff is a major topic for MBAs, but it's really not beyond what you could expect from a programmer or a barista. If I ask you for a better coffee, what you deliver should be better on some metric you can name, otherwise it's simply not better. Bonus points if it's better in a way I care about
"Optimize this code for performance" is not an unstructured or vague request.
Any "performance" axis could have been used: Number of db hits, memory pressure, cpu usage, whatever.
The LLM chose (or whatever) to use CPU performance, claimed a specific figure, and that figure was demonstrably not real.
If you ask a barista to make you a better coffee, and the barista says "this coffee is hotter" and it just isn't, the problem is not underspecified requirements, the problem is that it just doesn't make any attempt to say things that are only correct. Technically it can't make any attempt.
If I tell an intern "Optimize this app for performance" and they come back having reduced the memory footprint by half, but that didn't actually matter because the app was never memory constrained, I could hem and haw about not giving clear instructions, but I could also use that as a teachable moment to help the budding engineer learn how to figure out what matters when given that kind of leeway, to still have impact.
If they instead come back and say "I cut memory usage in half" and then you have them run the app and it has the exact same memory usage, you don't think about not giving clear enough instructions, because you should be asking the intern "Why are you lying to my face?" and "Why are you confidently telling me something you did not verify?".
I was experimenting with Claude Code and requested something more CPU efficient in a very small project, there were a few avenues to explore, I was interested to see what path it would take. It turned out that it seized upon something which wasn't consuming much CPU anyway and was difficult to optimise further. I learned that I'd have to be more explicit in future and direct an analysis phase and probably kick-in a few strategies for performance optimisation which it could then explore. The refund request was an amusement. It was $15 well spent on my own learning.
I could also argue if a barista gets multiple complaints about their coffee it's very much their and their employer's job to go away and figure out to make good coffee.
It's very much not the customers job to learn about coffee and to direct them how to make a quality basic coffee
But also if they get multiple complaints about the coffee being not to the customers liking when the customer provided no details or preferences as to what they like, those would be unfounded complaints.
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