anticodon

If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.

Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.

And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.

I suppose it's this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6tLCevZjHo

Can't open it now myself to confirm. Here Alfred Koch states that his daughter worked for Google in 2014 and her job was to pick so-called "opposition" media that would be pushed to users with Russian ip addresses or probably with Google account language set to Russian.

But actually you don't even have to listen to interview. If you're Russian you already know how aggressively this propaganda is shoveled down our throats on YouTube. You have to ban channels for months to minimize the amount of the recommended propaganda videos.

And you still get it because there're like millions of NED funded channels of all sorts in all languages. E.g. in the last three days YouTube aggressively pushes to my recommendations some video in English about how "Russian missiles are all hitting Ukrainian toilets instead of military targets" which is even from the title sounds like some nonsense propaganda for low IQ watchers.

> But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.

Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).

If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".

Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.

There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.

I always wonder how western population is so brainwashed that you always explain everything using two mutually exclusive ideas:

1. "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"

2. "Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!"

I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams.

To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.

I'm not saying that it's not catching bugs. Sometimes it does. But most of the rules are nonsense and the number of rules that makes no sense is growing.

Also, mutable default argument is not a bug. It is a bug only if mutable default argument is mutated inside the body of a function/method. Which is almost never the case.

You know how many bugs I've met working on large Python codebases over 20 years, caused by unsorted imports or `except Exception`? Yeah, you've guessed it: exactly 0 bugs.

It's really annoying how many people think that if you enforce stupidly strict rules about formatting, more strict that those of Fortran in 70s, you'll automatically get good code.

I've seen companies that enable 100% of ruff rules, use several other linters, and enforce other rules (like every variable name should be at least 20 characters long to fully describe its purpose). And they have awful buggy unmaintainable code. But it is nicely formatted (although reading code where half of the screen estate is consumed by the variable name is a bit difficult) and has no "dreadful" `except Exception`. Or every mutable class attribute variable is annotated with `typing.ClassVar` (RUF012 - the most idiotic rule I've ever seen). Nevermind that it doesn't really stop anyone from changing value of that attribute. You must annotate it with `ClassVar`!

It's an idiotic cargo-cult.

What? In other words, you're saying: "Russia is losing war with Ukraine, so it wants to start a second front with bigger enemy".

Also, how's Ukraine war is sustainable for Ukraine? It's economy is non-existent (almost 100% dependent on western donations), it has less than 50% of population of 2022 (they don't publish any population stats directly, but if you combine available statistics, there are about 10-15 millions left most of them old retired people or young people that are too young to send them to the front lines), they are losing territory every day.

This is some weird "Ukraine is winning but front is moving in the wrong direction" logic.

West is living in its own bubble of misinformation. Including the government.

On many occasions I've read self-soothing wishful thinking messages about my country. In 2022 it was that Russian army is fleeing, all Russian tanks were burned down, and Russian soldiers are deserting from a front lines with a speed of 100,000 persons a day. Here on HN. Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.

Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.

Or just recently someone wrote to me that we are living in the stone age, whatever that means.

On the other hand, I'm happy that West prefers to live in a bubble with no access to real information. And if you try to convey real information, they'll call you "Kremlin bot" or "North Korean bot" or "Chinese bot". It means that less countries will fall prey to neocolonial practices and wars because you cannot wage wars and govern colonies based entirely on misinformation from propaganda your own media creates out of thin air.

> Would we still get web browsers?

There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.

Crypto was and is inconvenient to use. So many years passed and almost nobody uses crypto daily. It's too inconvenient.

And it's not secure or anonymous at all. At some point you need to buy crypto or sell crypto, or buy some goods with crypto, and at that point you can be easily identified. Happened so many times.

Even here in Russia, under all US sanctions, only a few use crypto. It's so inconvenient that even under pressure of US sanctions it hadn't become more popular.

> Of course, right now nothing can dethrone Visa/MC for international payments

UnionPay can. They are accepted in many parts of the world, and they are free from US restrictions.

Russia had roughly ten years to prepare. First talks about building national payment system started around 2010-2012. And it was meeting notable opposition: "why should we care? MC/Visa are good enough, why spend money on national infrastructure".

But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).

What really do Americans know about Ukraine or Taiwan? E.g. can even 1% of US population show Ukraine on the world map (without using Google Maps)? Could they do it before 2022? Before 2014? Do they know anything about Ukraine or Taiwan history? How many Americans know a single foreign language?

If tomorrow there would be a war or protests in, say, Burundi. Will Americans stay with Burundi or against it? Or with the country the media will tell them is "good" because their interests align with US interests?

I think answers to all these questions are obvious.

In 2023 there was record harvest of potatoes in Russia. Prices dropped, so farmers stopped planting potatoes in 2024 and 2025. Wouldn't be surprised if they plant more this year due to high price.

shell_plus is still superior because it also imports other useful stuff and allows adding custom list of additional imports.

Also, shell_plus has --print-sql option for easy construction and debugging of ORM queries.

I was 2000 km from home (1242 miles) and I was in panic because it was pretty uninhabited place. My bike is 12 years old but I used it in very harsh conditions (dirt, mountains).

Probably should replace the lock but it is so expensive.

EU is a colony of USA. If it would be necessary, US can simply force EU to buy US technology.

If you check the EU politics, they never do or say anything that can be interpreted negatively by US or damage US interests.

In 2025, EU and US signed an agreement that obliges EU to buy energy resources from US at ridiculously high prices, despite that EU is already struggling with the high price of energy.

Had the same problem with my moto (key not turning the lock). Fortunately, there was a car nearby and owner had a spare jug of oil. I put some oil on the key, put it in the ignition lock, waited for 5 minutes, and it started to turn again.

Although I must admin WD-40 helped me in the past opening an old door lock.

I've used Redpanda for local development and testing stands. It is super easy to setup in docker, starts really fast and consumes less resources than Java version. Haven't really compared it to anything, but I remember using Java version of Kafka before and it was a resource hog. It is important when you develop on laptop with constrained resources.

I have information from the first hands because half of my family lives in Ukraine.

Where do you get your information? From CNN? Can you show an Ukrainian law that allows men to freely cross the border?

I don't follow Ukrainian laws closely. I remember they allowed young men of ages 18-22 to cross the border in August 2025 (!). That caused enormous lines on the borders as the first day after this law 11,000 young men fled the country.

But that only about men of age 18-22. Men of age 22-60 still cannot leave the country. And 18-22 couldn't leave the country for three years.

Very unlikely. Men of ages 18-60 are forbidden to leave Ukraine since February 27 or 28 of 2022. Women cannot cross the border since 2023.

Of course, there should be some exceptions. For example, some people need to go abroad to bring Western supplied munitions, officials can leave to visit other countries, etc.

But almost 100% of the population cannot leave Ukraine under any circumstances.

Which exactly weapons are supplied by China? Even ever lying news sources like Bloomberg and CNN never made such unfounded accusations.

Also, how and why some "spy" would work both for China and Russia? Two very different countries from every point of view: culturally, economically, and in every other way also.

The only thing in common is that USA wants to destroy both Russia and China and that because of that reason US controlled media (like 90% of media in the world) publish scary fakes about both countries.

What Russia and China has in common? Why would somebody work for both countries?

Do you know, for example, that China willingly sells huge amounts of drones to Ukraine?

Russia is anti-west because traitors Gorbachev and Yeltsin (who was indeed an alcoholic) sold the country to the West for nothing, for promises that we would be treated as equals that were never kept. As you can see in many comments here (and on other sites such as Reddit this is more prominent), West consider Russian people subhumans. Something that Hitler and others said openly before, and this wave of Nazism is becoming stronger now again.

Country was destroyed, markets were destroyed, industries were destroyed. Hundreds of thousands died in ethnical conflicts, hundreds of thousands died from hunger. It was all a huge mistake and I hope we'll never repeat it.

Crimea is a Russian territory that was given to Ukraine by totalitarian non-elected leader Nikita Khrushev. It was a crime done by totalitarian government and Russia restored historical justice.

People living in Ukraine now clearly don't like that Zelenskiy cancelled the elections and don't want to sign peace agreement. Why they don't go to the streets and protest?

Why would we want to join the EU?

It's a government comprised of people that weren't elected that destroys countries it supposed to govern by forcing non-rational choices that people hate but too afraid to openly criticize.

The level of life in EU is declining, while rising in Russia.

What EU can offer us? Nothing.

He crossed the border illegally and was carrying a firearm with him. Maybe it's ok in the USA to cross the border illegally carrying a firearm with you, but I assure you it's not legal in all the other countries in the world and penalty would be very severe.