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This reminds me of my experience. I've worked for one company based in SEA that had almost identical portals in several countries in the region. Portals were developed by an Australian company and I was hired to maintain existing/develop new portals.

Source code for each portal was stored in a separate Git repository. I've asked the original authors how am I supposed to fix bugs that affect all the portals or develop new functionality for all the portals. The answer was to backport all fixes manually to all copies of the source code.

Then I've asked: isn't it possible to use a single source repository and use feature flags to customize appearance and features of each portals. Original authors said that it is impossible.

In 2-3 months I've merged the code of 4-5 portals into one repository, added feature flags, upgraded the framework version, release went flawlessly, and it was possible to fix a bug simultaneously for all the portals or develop a new functionality available across all the countries where the company operated. It was a huge relief for me as copying bugfixes manually was tedious and error-prone process.

Every command can be manipulated as text and repeated as many times as you wish. Every command is also stored in the history, can be saved to any notepad for future, shared with the community.

Every GUI automation is highly non-standard, ad hoc, finicky (usually, depends on exact pixel positions), possibly Turing complete, but even if it is, it's harder to use compared to writing a script.

> As someone that was happy that I could finally afford owning computers with a graphics display on them, this going back to the terminal doesn't stop surprising me.

GUI is not a superset or complete replacement of TUI. For many reasons, one of the reasons is that GUI is much harder and finicky to automate.

I use fish and neovim, thanks to the thread, created the following alias:

   nvim -q (rg --vimgrep needle --color=never | psub) -c copen

Some of these tasks are required when you run your service in Amazon Cloud as well. It's not all free and not all by default. You'll need someone experienced with Amazon Services to set up many of these things in the Amazon cloud as well.

Also, it's not like you need everything you mention and need it immediately.

NTP clock syncing is a part of any Linux distro for the last 20 years if not more.

I don't remember that Amazon automatically locks down SSH (didn't touch AWS for 7-8 years, don't remember such a feature out of the box 8 years ago).

Rolling web app deploys with rollback can be implemented in multiple ways, depends on your app, can be quite easy in some instances. Also, it's not something that Amazon can do for you for free, you need to spend some effort on the development side anyways, doesn't matter if you deploy on Amazon or somewhere else. There's no magic bullet that makes automatic rollback free and flawless without development effort.

> Whether this fulfills that goal, we will see, but anything that weakens the regime is good for the Iranian people.

Oh, enough to look at Libya, Syria, Iraq, to see what happens next:

1. Lots of infrastructure would be destroyed. It's the first thing NATO does in any invasion: bomb powerplants, water treatment plants, airports, hospitals, business centers (remember, that Iraq invasion started with destroying Baghdad business center, it was shown in all Western media). Infrastructure is super-expensive to rebuild, many countries in the world have no resources to build decent infrastructure.

2. At least several millions of Iranians would die. It's obvious. Somebody's moms and dads, somebody's children. The bombs do not choose. And we all know that West is indifferent to the deaths of non-Western non-white population (remember, e.g. killings and war crimes in Afghanistan).

3. In the end the country will end up in half-feudal anarchistic ruins (like Libya) or with "democratic" puppet government. Any outcome will allow selling Iran oil and gas to the West for the price of water, further lowering living standards of Iran.

I fail to see a single benefit for anyone living in Iran.

It sounds like if you rent a VPS/VDS in any other place than Amazon, you'll have to hire a separate person to babysit it 24/7. It's not true.

> Well I imagine there was a lot less persecution by the Chinese government at that time.

Is feudal society with slavery and human sacrifices better? How can we really be sure about more or less persecution by Chinese government if we don't live in Tibet, do not know Tibetan and Chinese, and all we know about those "persecutions" are somebody else's translated words?

> You're right, the media in China are mostly or exclusively mouthpieces for the state.

You're right, the media are mostly or exclusively mouthpieces for the state. FTFY. There are not exceptions anywhere in the world.

I don't remember all the details. But the triggering point was Amazon RDS: it was complaining every week that our DB consumed all available space and we had to increase the size and pay more with every week. Our DB and flow of data wasn't that big. I've spent some time investigating but haven't found anything: sum of sizes of all tables was quite moderate and much less than the size of the storage we paid Amazon for.

I lacked both expertise and time to find out where the wasted space go. After I've set up Maria DB on a smallest Digital Ocean droplet, mysterious storage growth haven't repeated and the cheapest droplet had enough capacity to serve our needs for years.

Also, there were 7-10 forgotten "test" server instances and other artifacts (buckets, domains, etc) on Amazon (I believe it's also quite common, especially in bigger companies).

Is there a single proof? Like some Russian citizen was caught ruinining infrastructure project and it was proved that a) he is a citizen of Russia or was paid by Russian authorities, b) that the person in question had indeed done some damage to the infrastructure project.

I don't remember a single such case. I remember reading a lot of speculations like "it's highly likely that it was done by Russians" every single time without a trace of evidence.

I'm not surprised about 90% of savings. I remember that initially AWS was promoted everywhere as being "cheaper" than your own hardware, colocation or VPS/VDS hosting.

Once I was working in a quite small company (around 100 employees) that hosted everything on AWS. Due to high bills (it's a small company that resided in Asia) and other problems, I migrated everything to DigitalOcean (we still used AWS for things like SES), and the monthly bill for hosting became like 10 times lower. With no other consequences (in other words, it haven't become less reliable).

I still wonder who calculated that AWS is cheaper than everything else. It's definitely one of the most expensive providers.

Was situation in Tibet really good before China came?

I've recently learned that movie "7 years in Tibet" is full of lies, starting with the fact that the main character was hardcore Nazi follower in real life.

There are a lot of things that we don't know because media are not interested in enlightening people. They are interested in pushing the current agenda.

E.g. Tibet was a poor feudal state with slavery, but you won't easily find this information, because all you can find now if you search for it is: "China is bad, bad, and Tibet is very good, enlightened people, very warm and kind". It is not like that.

There were evidence of leaks of soldiers' messages from WhatsApp.

I do not know for sure if there are leaks from Telegram, but I think that Durov was pressed for enabling backdoors for CIA when he was arrested in France.

It's not like there's a registry of compromised apps in Russia that is available to public. When there were WhatsApp leaks it was widely published on Russian news channels, that's why I know about it and tell everyone to not trust WhatsApp.

But I don't closely follow every news item from the front, I know that some other apps are also considered compromised (mainly some navigation apps), but I don't know the whole list or if Telegram is being used on the front.

I guess the safest option is to not use telephone at all at war, since there are probably backdoors everywhere starting from cell modem firmware. I guess that since about middle-end of 2022 all military personnel has the same opinion and stopped using smartphones altogether or use them in flight mode with communications disabled.

After arrest of Durov in France I think the same. Doesn't change the fact that any single Russian soldier is not using WhatsApp. It's considered compromised with very convincing evidence, along with some other apps (I don't remember all the names, possible to find in military news channels if you know Russian).

Russian soldiers participating in SMO reported multiple times that after they exchange texts and photos with their relatives in WhatsApp, that information ends up in Ukrainian military HQs next day. With photos. And later used, for example, to harass the relatives of the soldier.

Could be some other mechanism (e.g. Google Drive or some other kind of malware), hard to be sure in the world, where since 2011 Snowden's revelations, bugs are placed my NSA and CIA everywhere, starting from hardware and firmware.

My only and biggest pain point with Git is that it requires a lot of manual merging even in a small project. You have several branches that are several weeks/months old and they touch the same set of files. Eventually, when they'll be approved for merging, you'll have to manually resolve lots of conflicts in all of them, and do that repeatedly. rerere is supposed to at least save you from repeating repeating same merges in every branch you rebase, but in my experience it never helps.

Unfortunately, as far as I understand, jj won't help with issue of unnecessary manual merges either.

What about more complex and expensive infrastructure required for balancing uneven electricity output?

I had the same experience as the OP in the beginning of the century. I've built a lot of RPM packages back then and it was clear that system of dependencies built into RPM format itself (not apt or dnf, this is dpkg level in terms of Debian) was poorly thought out and clearly insufficient for any complex system.

I've also migrated to Debian and it felt like a huge step forward.

I'm on Arch now, BTW.

Today is 2025. Rail Baltica started in 2013.

Yes, I understand very well that "research" is a pipe, where you put billions of euros in one end, and get stack of papers on the other end. And somebody becomes rich in the process. Sapienti sat.

I've read your link. Where's the actual progress?

But billions of euros has already been spent.

> Was there a comparable large scale rail infrastructure change in some other country?

Baltic states attempted this (project Rail Baltica). Lots of EU money were spent with no visible result. I guess, several people in Baltic states became super rich, but in terms of rail infrastructure nothing was done.

I've bought almost the same model but a few years later. I also enjoy how effortless is connecting this printer to Linux. I have to install brlaser driver manually though.

But I did some research before buying (including here on HN) and Brother printers were praised for being reliable and having no problems with Linux drivers.

> that actually changed the functionality under test - that's all an argument for doing exactly the opposite of what you recommend.

It was an old functionality. Someone wrote a super class that for the need of testing filesystem functionality created extremely large images. Not only there was no need to test with such large images, other developers eventually inherited more testcases from that setup code (because there were other utility methods), and now setUp code was needlessly creating images that no test used.

Generating a huge 4k image takes a significant time using Pillow.

I profiled a huge legacy tests collection using cProfile, and found lots of low hanging fruits. Like some tests were creating 4000x3000 Pillow image in memory just to test how image saving code works (checkign that filename and extension are correct). And hundreds of tests had created this huge image for every test (in the setUp method) because of unittest reliance on inheritance. Reducing size image to 10x5 made the test suite faster for like 5-7% (it was long time ago, so I don't remember exact statistics).

So, I'd run the tests under cProfile first.

So, what is my mistake? When and where existed "Ukraine" before 1991?

> Putin had already attacked multiple countries before. Georgia, Chechnya

As always, westerners leave in an information bubble. Chechnya was always a part of Russia. It was a civil war. Ukraine was always a part of Russia until 1991, btw, there was never a separate country called "Ukraine" before 1991 - you can easily find that even in Western history books, although I'm sure they'll be rewritten in some way soon, if not already.

Georgia launched attack in 2008, it is easily confirmed by:

1. News from that time (there was a several days delay between Georgia attack and when Medvedev decided to respond, during that time Putin called a press conference and said: "Georgia has started an attack and is bombing civilians, but Western press is silent about it". You can still find recordings of that press conference on video hosting sites, I believe.

2. There was an independent EU investigation that also confirmed that Georgia started the attack in 2008.

3. Last year Georgian government itself confirmed that they were attacking first.

It never cease to amaze me in what distorted information reality people live.

BTW, it's for the best, because it was the reason why West could coerce Georgia into starting a war in 2008. All the population, including the top politics lived in an alternative reality, so they basically said to Georgia: "Russia is weak and corrupt, they have no army, no weapons, they have only shovels, and even their shovels are rusty. So you'll easily get what you want without any resistance."

Actually, more or less the same repeated in 2022. Just read HN comments from 2022: "Russians are surrendering by tens of thousands a day, they don't want to fight with warm and welcoming and kind Ukrainian soldiers", "Ukraine burns thousands of Russian tanks and armored vehicles a day: here's a photo proof", etc, etc.

So this distortion of reality works the other way round, when West bases its actions on it. There are lies from top to bottom, and then everyone makes all kinds of decisions based on those lies.

Rusofobia started in middle ages, long before Putin was born. And it never ended.

> Some of it is also caused by the pervasive hostility to the values important to most humans,

USA started with a genocide of a whole continent. Started more wars than any other nation/state in the human history. Probably killed more civilians than any other nation in history (Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, just to name a few countries with huge losses among civilians, not even counting those who died from hunger or illnesses caused by US wars and deliberate destruction of agriculture and infrastructure).

So what? Do you read every day that it is the most belligerent and aggressive state on Earth, although it really is?

> pervasive disinformation efforts

I've already wrote in the original message, how Russia is portrayed by the media and Hollywoold. Is it a really true information? Not propaganda and disinformation?

As a Russian I will explain my vision: one of the oldest Western traditions is to demonize Russia and Russian people. You can find plenty of examples in the Western literature from 100 years ago, from 400 years ago, and right now on CNN or Bloomberg or in any Hollywood movie.

E.g. movie Tenet starts from depicting a scene from "Russian life": under a low sun, in freezing cold, dirty hungry Russians are crawling in the dirt gathering "pieces of Uranium" with their bare hands.

Or you can open just about any publication/movie about Russia/Soviet Union from just about any period of time: there would be not a single good word. Western Media almost never publishes something like: "There's a new school/hospital/stadium/factory opened in Russia". Instead all you can see is "Russian corrupt government officials set a record of eating 100500 babies alive today.", "Weak Russian economy means that Russians will survive on a diet of two rotten potatoes a day in 2026", etc. etc.

It's just that Soviet period is demonized the most.

Still possible to ride steam train in Russia: https://naparovoze.ru/ (from Moscow or St. Petersburg to Karelia).

I believe there's also a steam train router around lake Baikal.

> And note that for most people, a week to few weeks of the exercise give stronger orgasms and ability to delay the ejaculation.

I've experienced all those benefits when I started walking two times a day, 8-10 thousands of steps a day continuously for several weeks. I haven't performed any other exercises.

But it's really boring and you need to do it every day. I do it only because I need to walk a dog.