mopsi

There's an additional aspect: whoever ends up reading the messages later might not even be aware that there is more information somewhere else.

That's why I prefer to keep any important information as close as possible, either in the commit message or as a comment in the source code, to make sure it's unmissable to anyone working on it later.

You have no other option, really. If you play chicken, you open yourself up to endless blackmail. If you're going to take a stand eventually, it's better to do it sooner than later, because if your adversary knows that you will eventually draw a line, allowing them to discover that line gradually encourages further pressure on you. Establishing the boundary early makes the threat more credible and reduces the incentive to test it.

It's like standing up to a bully the first time he pushes you, instead of giving in and calming yourself that one day you'll stand up to him. The Putins and Trumps of this world are simple creatures; such middle-school analogies describe them well.

Myth: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49078088

And as always, it deserves to be stressed that Sponsorblock is far more than the name suggests. It can also skip sections like intros, tangents, etc - and it's configurable per channel.

If you're listening to a music playlist on YouTube, this removes interruptions caused by the pointless intro and outro screens added to songs.

  > Now the reality get clear. Russia is winning. 

The Russian war correspondents deserve to be informed of this. They are currently in utter despair over Ukraine's advancements near Lyman.

The fact alone that this "three-day special operation" is in its fifth year with over 1.5 million casualties places it among the worst disasters in the entire Russian military history. There is no credible way to spin it into anything else.

Shortening of copyright would fix many of these issues. Games and movies make almost all of their lifetime earnings in the first few years, and the dribble that's left afterwards is less important than preservation and public access.

It's very hard to justify copyright in 2026 over music used in a 1980s TV show. Shows were aired once or twice (summer reruns), with additional syndication runs for particularly popular shows, and that was it. Nobody expected to make a dime from a show 40 years later. Copyright has grown absurdly out of proportion of the economic reality for which these works were originally produced.

I named a source and provided an analysis of its contents, and all I see in return is sealioning.

Sealioning is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter. It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate", and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.

That overstates their unreliability. Such dynamos used to be universal before modern rechargeable batteries and worked well enough, I don't recall ever having to replace or maintain one. For dirt roads where mud gets everywhere, non-mechanical options are of course better, but simple dynamos perfectly are fine on regular city streets, country roads and dry paths. They're especially good for kids who can't be bothered to keep batteries charged.

There is a well-known scene in a famous Russian comedy about exactly that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3n4LptYWNo&t=2482s

The old-school dynamos cost 10-20 bucks: https://axabikesecurity.com/product/axa-8201-right/

They're just generic AC motors held against the rim, as simple and cheap as it gets. Nowadays I'd add a basic voltage regulation circuitry to get a stable 5V DC out of it.

The habr_bpla Telegram channel, which is run by drone pilots from the Russian 18th separate motorised rifle brigade and often posts videos of their drone attacks on civilians in Kherson, was first shared with you years ago, yet the blood remains lukewarm.

The UN inquiry sums such channels up:

  Russian armed forces have committed murder of civilians as crimes against humanity using drones, concludes the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine in a new report. The Commission examined over 300 publicly available videos of attacks and over 600 text posts on Telegram channels and, where possible, identified victims of these attacks. It interviewed 91 persons from the areas affected by drone attacks, including victims, witnesses, local authorities and medical personnel. 

  From July 2024, Russian forces have recurrently killed and injured civilians in an area stretching over more than 100 kilometres along the right bank of the Dnipro River in Kherson Province. The drone attacks have been widespread, systematic and conducted as part of a coordinated state policy, the report said.

  The drone operators used video feeds transmitted in real time by the cameras embedded in the drones, focused on targets that were visibly civilian, and dropped explosives on them. Hundreds of these video feeds have been regularly disseminated on Russian Telegram channels, some of them with thousands of subscribers, displaying the crimes, as well as text posts announcing further attacks. 

  The scale and intensity of the drone attacks against civilians and civilian objects as well as the destruction of houses and basic infrastructure, the targeting of all means of transport, and attacks against emergency and rescue services, have all rendered the affected areas unliveable and left many residents with no other choice than to flee.

  The recurrent drone attacks, the widely disseminated videos showing them, and numerous posts explicitly exhorting the population to leave suggest a coordinated state policy, on the part of the Russian authorities, to force the population of Kherson Province to leave the area. The Commission therefore concludes that Russian armed forces may have committed the crime against humanity of forcible transfer of population.

https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/05/un-commissio...

That's an European thing. Anything bought remotely (mail, phone or the internet) can be returned up to 14 days for a full refund.

Some minor exclusions apply, eg hygiene products can't be returned after they've been opened.

  > The most interesting thing about the apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios is that they show the fundamental irresponsibility and recklessness of many very important AI leaders. 

To me at least, it looks like a very cheap and transparent way of bragging and elevating one's self-importance. If we take a practical approach, then AI is just another tool that makes some jobs easier and more automated, which sounds about as sexy as inventing the mass-production of interchangable screws. An astonishing improvement for people who used to mill everything by hand, and absolutely critical technology for the modern world, but barely anyone has even heard of the people who made it possible.

Another aspect is the world that people like the Altmans and Musks come from. The wealthier someone is, the more detached they tend to be from the manual labor that runs the world. When your goods simply appear at your door after a few taps on an app, it's easy to forget that someone made them with their hands (especially true for high-end products), someone packed them, someone drove them to a warehouse, someone photographed and edited them, someone wrote the listing, someone packed them again, and someone eventually brought them to your door.

The entire physical world gets compressed into an app. From that perspective, it can start to seem as if the app is the world itself, and that if someone can hack the app, they can destroy the world.

  > What does Russia hope to gain from this?

Tie up European military resources and thus reduce the weaponry available to Ukraine.

This also highlights why the US/European strategy of playing chicken and focusing on "de-escalation" is fundamentally flawed: it gives adversaries the initiative and the lever for controlling the temperature. Whenever it gets too hot for them, they can dial it down, whereas the "de-escalation" camp has to dance to the tune of their adversaries.

It's the very same mistake that was made with Hitler.

You forgot to add something about midwifing.

The number of buttons on N95 is a hint to why it didn't see as wide adoption as the iPhone. My elderly relatives would be intimidated by that alone, afraid to press the wrong one and break something. A single-button iPhone with a touch screen that showed applications in a simple grid format fit them much better.

Jobs' genius was in understanding that the customer needed a rope that they couldn't accidentally hang themselves with, not a construction crane with a 800-page manual. He spoke about designing devices that his friends and family could use, and you can very clearly see that reflected in the products of that era.

Despite all the Apple copycats nowadays, few copy that focus on the customer.

I found the debate with Sikorski very illuminating. Sikorski is the foreign minister of Poland, with a long and distinguished career in the US (scholar) and EU (MEP) in addition to Poland. He's been in the dirt too, covered the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan as an on-location reporter in the 1980s. During the debate, Mearsheimer tried to lecture him about things that went on at diplomatic gatherings where Sikorski was present (and led a delegation) and Mearsheimer was not.

He's a total hack and his brand of "realism" has nothing to do with reality. Dude can't even read Russian, yet thinks he's an expert on Russia. The only reason we're discussing him here right now is because Russian troll army has been promoting him hard; like most charlatans, he has the appearance of someone who knows what they're talking about.

Mearsheimer says that there's no evidence Putin had imperial ambitions before 24 Feb 2022; that the war has forced him into this. Some of the closest people to Putin say that he told them fucking 20 years ago what he was going to do with Ukraine.

  > I think we have to distinguish between people who outright post Russian propaganda like Scott Ritter and people like Greenwald and Mearsheimer who say the Ukraine war is a US proxy war and was provoked.

The Russian government literally finances Mearsheimer's books. It's written on the title page. Doesn't get any closer to government propaganda than that.

It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.

If Russia does not have "an infinite capacity for pain", then it does not sound like an unwinnable war. Ukraine estimates that they need to inflict at least 50 000 casualties a month to break the backbone of Russian military. The latest surge has brought it to 42 000 a month, up from 30 000 earlier this year. This already exceeds recruitment and training capacity.

Who are those who would love not to send their kids to die, sell resources and travel the world? Putin? His children already live a pampered life in palaces and he himself is probably the richest man in the world, currently on a trip to India. The rest don't matter. Even the head of security services Patrushev, historically the second most powerful man in the country, is scared of Putin like a schoolboy and fumbles words before him. That has been one of the most shocking revelations since the war began: that oligarchs, security services, nor anyone else can put out even the slightest opposition. The whole country dances to Putin's whims. His only real opponent is time.

And Putin doesn't give a shit about Donbas. The aim is to restore the world that birthed him, the USSR at its peak. Russia has not backed one one inch from the 2021 ultimatum to return to the European political order of the 1980s. Any concession only confirms that attacking Ukraine was a viable strategy, that piece by piece he can claw his way closer to that goal.

Military specialists from Northern Europe estimate that Russia would be in position to attack the Baltics and Poland (and have a reasonable chance of succeeding, especially if "realists" are at the helm in Western Europe and the USA) no more than 6 months after the war with Ukraine ends.

  > to make for this thing to end

Why should it end after concessions? You've just validated their strategy.

There is surprisingly little realism among the crowd calling themselves realists.

You resolve it the same way you handle in-store cash purchases of products that turn out to be faulty.

There is no reason why fraud and contract violation must be handled by unelected and unaccountable payment processor, when the government has already set up a consumer protection system for disputes related to cash payments. The payment processor is best left as a dumb pipe that does what parties and (in case of disputes) courts tell it to do.

Unfortunately my proposal to set up a K8s cluster to host 5 HTML pages and a dozen jpegs was not approved, so I had to make some compromises this time.

It's free hosting. Push to github and changes to the website appear in 30 seconds. Even the build step for the static site is handled by Cloudflare.

And I'm satisfied with Cloudflare's explanation to the free hosting: the more sites are on Cloudflare, the more are ISPs interested in having good connections to Cloudflare. Makes sense.

  > The hidden cost, of course, is that the NSA learns everything there is to know about you and your customers.

That depends heavily on the kind of site you're hosting there.

I have a small site on Cloudflare that lists a brief introduction of a sawmill, its operating hours and contacts, and a map that advises which roads to take to reach it. Everything's public already. There's some very modest value in tracking who visits the site, but with popular operating systems leaking like a sieve on the client side, that fight was lost a long time ago.

That basically exists, but runs on external hardware: https://kodi.tv/

There's no need for the TV to be anything but a dumb screen that has only "power on", "power off", "volume up", "volume down" and "mute" functions. Most are probably too underpowered anyway to be useful.

And not only that, but also has settings (configurable per channel) to skip intros/outros, tangents, etc.

It's the superior Youtube experience that, funnily enough, is not available on paid platforms like Apple TV.

  > How about this: Consider our loss of support for Ukraine as an abandonment of aspirations of hegemony in Eastern Europe. 

But you are not abandoning those aspirations, that's the problem. The US has spent decades embedding itself into the security and foreign policy structures of other countries, effectively giving itself veto power over the decisions of tens of countries. Now it unwilling to use that power responsibly, but at the same time it is unwilling to give it up too.

There is a strange assumption in the US establishment that their current position in the world is the natural order of things and not the result of decades of Cold War era cooperation. Despite all the complaints about allies freeloading, the establishment seems utterly shocked and confused when those allies start reducing their dependence on the US, for example, by pivoting investments into their own weapons production instead of buying American.

You want the benefits of having allies dependent on the US, while treating any attempt by allies to become more self-reliant as a problem. Talk about entitlement!

Indeed. The interpretation that served as a justification for US interventionism came almost a century later (the Roosevelt Corollary in 1904).

In its original form, the Monroe doctrine declared attempts by European monarchies to reconquer the newly independent Spanish states to be an unfriendly act toward the US. It did not declare US domination over them, as it's commonly misunderstood nowadays.

In English, impeachment is often used loosely to mean parliamentary removal from office, which happened there. You're the one spreading misinformation with cope about foreign coups when Ukrainians simply kicked your clown out of their house.