Expansionist? No.

Putin literally started an imperialist land war to expand the territory and capture resources (and stay in power for a while longer).

You’re confusing the Soviet regimes of the past with the current country.

No, you have it backwards.

The Soviet government at least had some noble goals for their expansion, and measurable improvements to the lives of people on the captured territories.

Russia is an oligarchy and the only goals are territorial gains, resource exploitation and enriching the richest at the expense of the poor under the pretext of wartime nationalism. Same as the US, really, but with less power and resources.

Look at where progressive policies have gotten the west thus far!

You seriously think that the current state of the west is due to “progressive policies” and not capitalism and nationalism? If anything, progressive policies (women’s rights, LGBT inclusion, secularization, education for all, universal medical care (in places where it exist), and some limited labor rights) are one of rare good things that’s been happening in the west.

the people seem to overwhelmingly support the government despite these serious shortcomings

BTW, few people actually support the government. The best way to confirm this is to look at the public reaction to the attempted coup by Prigozhin in summer 2023. It ranged from apathy to amusement, the same kind you would have if you were watching Fast&Furious 21 (or whatever number they’re up to). However most people don’t oppose the government either and just go about their daily lives. It’s similar to what most Americans are doing right now despite their country turning to mask-off fascism, dismantling all their all social safety nets and flaunting a world war.

Not if you’re simply parroting western propaganda, which you are!

I was born and grew up in semi-provincial Russia. I had two neighbors who went through the prison system and told me about their experiences.

Russia isn’t some backward country. Like most western countries, they have various types of prisons or gulags.

Semi-agreed.

Central, more well-developed parts of Russia are not backwards (in fact I really liked the soviet heritage of microdistricts, well-developed public transit, socialized medical care and the remains of the education system); the “provinces” (in which I grew up) absolutely are, compared to the even the worst bumfuck nowhere in Europe.

Russian jails (СИЗО) and low-security prisons (колония общего режима) are OK relatively speaking. However if you are in for a “political” crime you’re most likely going to end up in a high-security prison (колония строгого режима or тюрьма) in which conditions are seriously worse, including forced labor, denial of medical care, regular isolation, beatings by prison guards and other inmates.

And then there is the heavily prevalent “prisoner culture” which ensures that people who’ve been in for more than 3-5 years come out with completely destroyed psyche and lack of any real-world social skills. One of my neighbors who spent 5 years in a low-security prison for drug use in the 2000s came out a broken man and was in and out of the system for as long as I knew him.

I agree that the US prison system absolutely sucks ass and must be abolished entirely. Russian (high-security) prisons are still worse (except maybe for Gitmo and the El Salvador thing, which are a fucking disgrace to humanity).

Gulag is just Russian for prison

No it fucking isn’t, how hard is that to check? ГУЛАГ (GULAG) stands for Главное Управление ЛАГерей (Main Administration of [labor] Camps), a controversial system of labor camps in 1930s-50s (colloquially up to the 80s). Back in Russia I’ve almost never heard anyone use it to refer to the modern prison system. It is sometimes used in a set phrase “Digital Gulag” to refer to the government’s attempts to censor the internet, but that’s about it. Funnily enough the word is used in the general sense of “brutal prison” in the West only - and that is indeed western propaganda.

Have you tried the “new” OpenGL renderer? It fares much better for me. (Actually, maybe it’s the default now?)

Yay! Now to wait while it trickles down to F-Droid…

For further context, opposing the war can and does lead to 10-15 years imprisonment in Russia, and Russian prisons are even worse than ones in the US.

The sad/scary part is that the missile research did indeed work pretty damn well.

What the hell is Trump admin trying to achieve here? China was already overtaking the US in scientific research. Randomly detaining researchers just because they’re foreigners (among other things like defunding universities) ensures that in 5-10 years US will be hopelessly behind on everything from social sciences to medicine to physics, the list goes on really, and not just behind China but likely behind EU too. This really does seem like an empire in decay, however I’m willing to bet that people working on missiles to kill brown children will continue to be well-paid until the bitter end.

Anything more complicated than business logic in JS/Python sends LLMs into a guessing game that can take you those 3 hours to get out of. Try asking it to write embedded software in C, hardware-interfacing code in Rust, or any non-trivial TemplateHaskell.

That’s not what I want though. I really enjoy jumping around the actual syntax tree of the code, e.g. “select the entire function body” or “select the next list element”, stuff like this. It becomes the natural way of traversing the code after a short while. Also, Emacs is still single-threaded and thus quite laggy and slow at times; however I do like it a lot and have used it for a number of years (with evil-mode), before finally jumping to my own editor and then helix.

Nah. I was so annoyed by how primitive editors are that I started writing my own one, that would allow me to seamlessly traverse the AST of the code, rather than being stuck on the low abstraction levels of characters, words and paragraphs. After a bunch of misery making tree-sitter work with Haskell, and using it for a while, I stumbled upon Helix. It is pretty much my idea but faster and working well.

I guess it depends on the definition, but I’d say they absolutely are errors; if some function produces a result that is both unexpected for the user and outside the design criteria it should be considered an error.

I hate that I understood the joke immediately…

TBH this finally pushed me over the edge. It was surprisingly easy - just s/firefox/librewolf/ in my browser config file, and then privacy.clearOnShutdown_v2.cookiesAndStorage = false (I don’t want to log in to all my work accounts every time I restart the browser). I didn’t even notice the switch TBH.

We made a (so far internal) tool at work that takes your activity from Github, your calendar, and the issue tracker, feeds that to a local LLM, which spits out a report of what you have been doing for the week. It messes up sometimes, but speeds up the process of writing the report dramatically. This is one of those cases where an LLM actually fits.