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> I don't doubt for a minute that Western media is filled with all kinds of ridiculous apocrypha about Russia. At the same time, I've never encountered this kind of ridiculous sensitivity about a country's perception before.

You won't find many Russian authors vilifying USA habits and culture. Not among popular ones, for sure. Nor the Russian movies. That makes a difference.

When there's a Russian in the US movie, I mentally prepare myself for a cringe. Usually, it would be a unreasonably aggressive person, killer or terrorist, or just a bad person. Drinking vodka like water, beating women, etc, etc.

You'd have hard time finding anything resembling this in Russian books or movies about USA.

Why not?

«Аэрофлот» предупредил пилотов о риске выкатывания за пределы ВПП на самолетах с деактивированным тормозом», — говорится в сообщении, разошедшемся по Telegram-каналам. Правда, даже после внимательного прочтения этих постов выясняется, что поводов для паники нет: ближе к концу читателей информируют, что тормозов у самолетов не один, а много, на каждой стойке шасси, и часть из них вполне может быть деактивирована в соответствии с перечнем минимального исправного оборудования (MEL) «Аэрофлота».

It says basically that airplane has several brake pads, so the memo says that the plane can fly for up to 10 days after seeing that some of the brake pads had worn out.

The Moscow Times is a western propaganda source as well. It's main office is in Amsterdam, not in Moscow. The only difference is that it is directed mainly to the English speaking expats living in Russia. So amount of confabulations is probably 10-20% lower than in the Western domestic propaganda, because expats can see with their own eyes that we're not eating hedgehogs, for example.

We have a word for US movies and books portraying Russia: "klukva" (cranberry). Because in every US made movie and US written book amount of lies and confabulations about Russian history and Russian culture is so high, that it deserves a special word.

E.g. I was reading a book recently by John le Carré and had to stop after reading about 50 pages. I simply couldn't continue. E.g. there's a scene where Russian traitor comes to "Chechen" restaurant in the center of St. Petersburg, and orders only a glass of vodka.

Firstly, there are no Chechen restaurants. Especially in the center of St. Petersburg. I don't know why, but anybody living here in Russia wouldn't be able to find any Chechen restaurant in Moscow or St. Petersburg. Russian, Ukranian, Thai, Chinese, Vietnamese, whatever, but not Chechen. Secondly, not all Russians drink vodka, not even majority. Vodka is considered a drink for poor and alcoholics. I don't think it's true, I think that vodka is superior to many other spirits, but that's the typical Russian stereotype. Thirdly, Russian people never order just vodka. We always drink vodka together with substantial food. Not only it is considered a very poor taste to drink vodka without food, it's also absolutely not enjoyable to consume it this way.

And on the cover of the book it was written that the story is very close to the truth, which makes Le Carré special. OMG.

So, this whole story about a shrine in a plane is bullshit.

> Even without the regulations, the level of destruction is hard to understand.

It's not only in Japan. I've seen this in other Asian countries as well. Perfectly good and relatively new building is destroyed to build another building that is not very different in size/structure.

I guess, it's something different in attitude towards environment. E.g. I wouldn't like my city to be rebuilt constantly. I like old buildings, history related to them. In Asia they probably feel different.

> Well not having chromium as a dependency is a start.

Java as a dependency is not much better. It's also huge which is important if you build your diagrams in containers and/or CI/CD. It's also very slow to start. I'm always surprised when benchmarks show that Java is "fast", because it's so huge and has atrocious cold start time, that makes it very unpleasant to use for CLI utilities.

> Uyghur genocode have made China incredibly unpopular

"Uyghur genocide" is a kind of scarecrow that US invents every time when it prepares to destroy an opponent. If a country possesses large deposits of oil (Iraq, Libya) there would be one kind of scarecrow to justify bombing. If the country becomes too influential and threatens US hegemony, there would be another kind of scarecrow.

The only thing that is these libels tell: USA is preparing to attack the country and they need a justification for further bombing.

E.g. I'm 90% sure USA is preparing to start a proxy war with China using Taiwan as pretext and cannon fodder. Just like the war in Ukraine which is actually war between USA and Russia.

How can you compare anything with Singapore. Singapore is a tiny city state which is thriving in large portion due to geographic rent. Remove geographic rent from the equation, and it would quickly wither.

> But due to the ccp baggage, the Chinese influence is much weaker.

Due to the "cpp baggage" China is big, influential and has much higher domestic level of life than India.

Why do you think so many Indians are leaving the country? Have you ever been to India?

Merchants are raising price of goods and services to pay Mastercard/Visa/bank fees. So this can be beneficial for consumers as well.

As of other benefits, this system is much younger, I hope it'll improve with time. I try to use it more often, although actually it's still faster to use the card compared to unlocking the phone and unlocking the bank application to pay with the QR code.

Yep, but some of the bugs take years to fix. Some are fixed quickly, some are not fixed for years, and it doesn't always depend on bug severity. Long time ago there was an UI bug in the debugger that wasn't fixed for a long time, maybe like a year.

Although I admit that I rarely see serious bugs now. They were more frequent 10 years ago. Still, bugs with docker/docker compose integration remain and they are highly annoying to me since I almost exclusively develop in docker now. And it seems that docker integration has much less priority for evolution and bug fixing than other areas of JetBrains IDEs. In almost all new releases there's no bug fixes and improvements related to docker integration (and I try to browse their release announcements often).

As of git integration, for me there's almost everything I need. I even started to do rebase more often in the IDE rather than in command line.

Well, some bugs are not fixed for many years. E.g. they do not support docker compose option `--project-directory`. It means that your docker compose files must always reside in the root directory of your project, otherwise PyCharm (or other JetBrains IDE) would fail to properly parse them and/or your project.

Sometimes it works, sometimes it breaks, it depends on your exact version of the IDE, but most of the time it doesn't work. And I find keeping all of my docker configuration in the root of the project cluttering the project, I prefer to keep them in the deploy, docker, or compose subdirectory.

The bug for this exists for many years with absolutely nothing being done about it. Maybe it's my personal pain but it is highly annoying.

Sometimes I'm so desperate that I wish to disassemble and patch this part of the IDE myself.

I can say for a Russian system which looks similar to me: banks do not charge additional fee (acquiring fee), so it's beneficial for shops and small businesses. It works instantaneously, you don't have to carry your card with you (people now always have phones with them but sometimes forget wallets or cards, also phones are locked and cards can't be locked).

Small business doesn't have to pay for anything but a piece of paper with QR code printed on it.

In Russia we have SBP (system of fast transfers in Russian). It allows to quickly send money by using a telephone number or QR code. It was quite popular for the last 4 years thanks to absence of additional taxes and commissions on small to medium transactions, but since 2022, when Visa and Mastercard left, it became order of magnitude more popular. Almost every shop, small and big, uses it now, although we also have an alternative card system MIR.

I think "Internet Karma" systems are inherently flawed. I know one technical website with karma, where one type of users eventually gained majority of the karma capital, downvoted all opposition into such deep negative karma, that they can't write anything anymore, and now there's strictly one point of view in all the articles and comments.

Which is aligned with the site owners' point of view, so they have no incentive to change anything. Though everyone notices that quality of articles and comments started to decline once the users with karma majority censored all others out.

I think moderation culture changed for a reason. About 8-10 years ago quality of answers started to decline because HR started to source SO for candidates. This created incentive for posting thousands of answers moments after the question is posted that were simply not right. More often than not those wrong answers were upvoted anyway. And HR won't check the quality of answers, they are concerned only with your total score.

Once I was researching something and found wrong answer on SO from some junior dev from India. The answer was wrong and it was evident that the author of the answer didn't even fully read the question. Out of curiosity I checked the author's profile and found out that it was a deliberate strategy: e.g. when there's a question about working with files, he'd post an answer with a link to the language page on "open".

I politely asked the author in the comments to stop posting wrong or useless answers. Instead, he wrote very aggressive response, opened my profile and downvoted as many of my answers as he could.

And there were many similar cases, probably still are.

I would like if PlantUML would be implemented in some lighter language. JVM size and startup time is atrocious. You can easily notice latency caused by it even on modern hardware when rendering diagrams locally. In CI/CD it takes too much time to install JRE and run PlantUML. Probably, I can optimize it to some extent, but if it were implemented in another language, I wouldn't have to spend my time on it. Everything Java related is a monstrosity in size and consumed resources (CPU, RAM).

Javascript is a constant reinvent of the wheel. Sites had become much bigger and much slower contrary to JS crowd promises. Development is a devilish entanglement of tens of thousands of tiny libraries, and almost every one of them is changing several times a day. I do not do frontend programming now, but I see how slow it became compared to the old good Web 1.0. Monster frameworks that require changing hundreds of files daily, sometimes front development is behind backend development because of this burden and cognitive load.

And one fact which annoys me the most: in all other areas we are free to choose any language to do the job. But in the web we're forever stuck with one language which was quickly concocted in a few days and still to this day many of the original flaws remain.

I don't know if it's a feature of Swig, but Swig C++ modules are also hard to use from Python, because they're missing reflection, docstrings, etc. I don't know if it was a shortcoming of the Swig module I was working with (e.g. author didn't bother to add docstrings) or the Swig itself, but it was pretty uncomfortable working with module that provides zero runtime documentation and incomplete documentation.

Also, structure of the resulting module, classes, methods was kind of unpythonic.

> Well, did they? I know this theory but AFAIK they could trace it back to some people in Ukrainian military. Western secret services (afair from Netherlands) even warned them twice that this was being planned but they didn’t react.

Such operation can't be performed by amateurs from a rented yacht. It requires experience and resources available only to few countries on Earth.

Also, it was just a version published by Western media without any hard evidence.

> Sorry, but those are ALL mistakes made by Germans themselves.

It's not possible to tell if they are unless there's an investigation, but there would be never such an investigation because Germany is an occupied country for 78 years.

It's quite clear from the consequences, that Olaf Sholz, Annalena Baerbock, and other German politics do things that affect German industry and economics negatively at the same time improving US economy and making Germany more dependent on US.

Colossal losses of Disney due to "rethinking" of classical plots in a "new ideology" way. People just don't want to watch it. But for some reason it's not possible for Disney to avoid it and continue making movies in a way that was mainstream maybe 20-30 years ago.

Also, something that is forbidden to talk about in "free societies": by forcefully showing in movies something that contradicts everyday life but is aligned with the woke ideology, you don't make movies interesting, you make them shallow and sometimes even loathsome.

But it's a zugzwang: impossible to avoid woke ideology in movies, because minorities had become such a powerful entity that they have ability to destroy the company or a life of any person if they don't like what you do or say.

Yeah, this kind of article would never fail to mention Russia and Putin. But what is never mentioned:

1. Germany has no energy sources. USA had blown up the pipelines delivering cheap energy from Russia that German industry needs badly (so, German industry has been closing and has declining output since), also in just as brain-dead move Germany closed all its nuclear plants.

2. USA is deliberately suffocating German economy. First, dieselgate. Then, "fine" for Deutsche Bank for "provoking crisis of 2008". Then making Germany loose access to cheap energy and providing money to German industrial companies that want to move their plants from Germany (where they have no future due to lack of energy and other resources that were imported from Russia) to USA.

You can run tests in MySQL in memory almost as easily.

   database-autotests:
       volumes:
          - mysql-autotests-volume:/var/lib/mysql

   volumes:
       mysql-autotests-volume:
       driver_opts:
       type: tmpfs
       o: "size=2G,mode=777"
       device: tmpfs

It's also very fast and allows to test the code on the same database, especially if you have something MySQL-specific.

> Sounds like you have become a perfect specimen of Putinist Russia: trusting no-one, doubting everything, doing nothing.

Yep, this is typical of Westerners. We know you Russians are dumb and don't appreciate our "great democracy". Yeah, we had a taste of it in the 1990s. USA came and destroyed the country, economy, jobs, the future. CIA "advisors" with their "shock therapy" destroyed economy overnight, put dumb drunkard Yeltsin in power, and stole everything valuable they could get a hold of.

People here were dying of hunger, but West was extremely happy with the "democracy" they built here.

> trusting no-one, doubting everything, doing nothing.

I trust myself and trust my country. I have no doubts we'll win. I'm doing my job, care about my family, and do many other things. I guess by "doing nothing" you mean that I'm not staging mutiny against the government in the interest of United States. Why would I? I've already lived through what US is calling "help to other countries". Also I've seen what US had done to Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and many other countries.

Only a dumb person would believe that US is interested in helping any other nation. US is destroying the economy even of its closest allies like Germany, which is especially evident now.

We call this kind of US politics: "you die today, but I die tomorrow", meaning that it would destroy anyone and anything to be able to consume more. Not only I do not support anything coming from the West because of that, but try to dissuade everyone around me if people have doubts.

> Have you tried quantifying it? For example, when someone from that part of political spectrum participated in elections, how well did they do?

How would I quantify it? From what trusted sources? Do you think there was an official neo-Nazi party in Ukraine?

> Did the "very active movement" ever reach even 1% of support?

I don't know how to quantify it, but I know that long before 2014 and 2022, Nazies were drawing crosses on doors of "Russians" in apartment buildings and promising they'll come next night and assassinate "every Russian swine living there". Also, if you'd be able to read and speak Russian and Ukrainian, you'd be shocked how many promises were made on the Internet "to kill all Russians with the knives", "to hang up all Russians". If you'd check apparel of young Ukrainians even before 2022, many of them had t-shirts saying "Kill all Russians with the knives", or Nazi Germany slogans and insignia.

We also saw Ukrainian history books published by Western funds that promoted absolute nonsense, some confabulated stories like Russians were killing Ukrainians by millions all the history. And on back of all the books something like: "Printed by Freedom Press" or smth. like that.

For me that is more than enough to get a feeling of what is going on in Ukraine.

> Why would you expect to see much positive coverage? When you google Nazi Germany, the first results aren't innovations in TV transmission nor advancements in wildlife protection either. Should they be? Is that the main contribution of Germany to the world between 1933 and 1945?

Yeah, this is also a weapon of Western propaganda: instead of facts and thinking, just compare ~Stalin~ Putin to Hitler, and Russia to Nazi Germany. It's all the same!

Very good emotional argument. US propaganda is indeed the most advanced in the world. It's very hard to resist. But one thing gives me hope: it became so strong, that West started to believe in its wishful thinking. Like for example in February 2022 here on HN many commenters wrote something along the lines: "Russia is running out of ammo!", "Tens of thousands Russians are surrendering every day", "Russia has enough rockets only for the next three days!". Likewise, now, when Ukrainian counteroffensive failed miserably, they say: "It's not a counteroffensive but recon missions, counteroffensive will start later".

That is a good thing that you believe your own lies.

> You can use trusted sources

What is a trusted source? How can I find one? I think this is close to impossible. Of course, everyone reads what one consider "trusted" source, but I have doubt any of them is.

> So, for example I followed a Ukrainian youtuber who said he was leaving because of the invasion, that added considerably to my confidence. Also, meeting refugees arrive in the UK displaced from the Russian invasion made for near 100% confidence that it was actually happening (a video of a couple of tanks on a highway just looks like propaganda however, but the tanks were probably there, something happened [it wasn't impressive enough to be AI generated!]).

But does this prove anything at all? E.g. half of my family lives in Ukraine. You wouldn't believe and it's never mentioned in Western media, but large percent of Ukraine population is Russian. Actually, it's almost impossible to distinguish who's Russian and who's Ukrainian. What is the difference? My family is originally from Ukraine, but I consider myself Russian.

So, my relatives from Ukraine were always telling me completely different stories from official Western stories. E.g. about neo-nazi movement in Ukraine which became very active since 1991 according to my relatives.

> What is an example of a large lie that you see in Western media today, that you confirm to be untrue from direct personal experience?

I do not collect such stories (what would be the point?), but meanwhile I'm looking for some examples, I'll tell you that for several years I've browsed Western media and specifically searched for news from Russia on CNN, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and other prominent Western media websites.

One thing that is impossible to ignore is that all news from Russia are strictly negative. Even if they're true, this is clearly one sided presentation of situation to demonstrate to Western readers that "Everything is bad in Russia". I couldn't read anything positive about Russia in English for many years. It's always the same bingo bullshit composed out of "dictatorship", "bad Putin", "bad Russians", "Russian hackers", yadda, yadda.

I've just did a search `russia site:https://www.washingtonpost.com/`. While I cannot pinpoint an outright lie, because there're tons of results and I don't have much time now, you can easily see that there's a common theme in all the news articles: "Russia is bad", "Situation in Russia is awful", "Some unnamed source confirms that Putin is bad/afraid/eats babies for breakfast". Whatever year you put in the search: 2023, 2022, 2020, 2018, etc.

It is impossible or next to impossible to investigate most of the facts. For example, if somebody would say that "People in Bhutan eat stones", how would you find if it is true or not? You don't know the language. You probably don't know where to find local Bhutan news, forums, social networks.

Or if someone would say that "Celebrity X visited a factory of company Y in China". Even if you find a Chinese search engine and use online translator, you can easily waste days. E.g. how do you find out how Western names are spelled in Chinese text? There's no single answer, especially if a person is not worldwide popular.

From my personal experience: I live in Russia. When I read what is published in Western media about life in Russia, I'm flabbergasted every time at the blatant lies and exaggerations. Though I guess it's roughly similar to what I read in our media about Western countries. But if I'd try to dispel some myths on social networks or in comments, I'll be banned or at best called "Kremlin troll", so I no longer even try to do it.

> but filthy foreigners corrupted Mother India.

Isn't this part actually true, because Britain pillaged India for centuries?

Without USA there would be no division of Korea. Also, before US sanctions, North Korea was more successful than South Korea.

How people seriously can blame North Korea for poverty if it is deliberately being suffocated by USA for decades?