I remember that space is completely unforgiving and we just aren’t up to the task for anything more than a token selfie by the best dozen humans we can possibly produce with great effort and training.

Astronauts aren’t superhumans and there is nothing “special” about their training. They are just pilots with stricter physical requirements. The reason why there aren’t many of them is because there is no need for more. Our technology is not there yet for cheap and “boring” space travel beyond low Earth orbit (and probably won’t be for a century at least). And there isn’t anything worthwhile for humanity out there anyway. At least at the current stage in our “evolution”. So for now manned spaceflight programmes are just vanity projects funded by politicians (for “national pride” or whatever) or some billionaire celebrities like Musk.

Also I don’t think that world peace would be necessary for space colonization. It could be born out of conflict or for economic reasons, like colonization of Americas. It’s simply that it will take centuries for us to reach a point when the prospect of leaving Earth will become attractive for regular people (if we survive that much of course).

They absolutely can implement China-level censorship right now, they have technical capabilities. In fact there have already been tests of complete isolation from foreign internet in remote regions of Russia.

They just don’t use it much, yet. I guess they are afraid of consequences and prefer to let people live pretending that nothing has changed. He will go slow with it. Russia is still tightly integrated with western culture and economy (e.g. they have a strong IT industry and internet isolation will kill it for good). Russian culture has been aligning itself with European culture for centuries. They watch western movies and tv shows, read western books, half of the memes they use are from anglophone internet, etc. They are much closer culturally to Europe than to China, even despite all the politics.

Also legally the initial versions of this thing are from 2005, I think? Rather old. Just nobody cared.

2014 is when it started for real. At first the laws were rather innocuous (protect the children and stuff). But with each year they were “improved” to become more and more oppressive. Putin is smart enough to realize that if you do it incrementally then there will be less protests and he will appear as a good guy, “protecting the people”. It was the same with “foreign agent” laws.

They don’t even need to force it. Every ISP in Russia has government-managed DPI hardware that filters all use traffic performs such blocking. No cooperation from ISPs is necessary.

Utility is for poors. People who don’t count money want something shiny or whatever their peers have. They can easily replace it if it breaks.

we ain’t never gonna have the Year of the Linux Desktop

Yes, but at this point you can’t even blame Microsoft for this. Maybe the issue lies elsewhere?

It looks mostly the same as XML views but some components look and behave wildly different for no apparent reason (tooltips are one of those).

I have given up on the fight a long time ago. On the desktop the only line I draw is that the app must respect system font configuration and use system-provided file dialogs.

JS by itself is very fast (it’s one of the fastest dynamic languages). It’s interop with platforms APIs that is slow, at the fact that each React app spins up its own instance of Chromium also doesn’t help.

Same with Compose even though it’s ironically considered native in the Android dev community.

The easiest way to tell that the app is not native is tooltips (those that appear when you long press on a button in a toolbar). For some reason UI frameworks just can’t agree to display them in the same way, even if they use material design. Compose’s ones are especially bad (some apps like Play store actually have different kinds of tooltips on different screens, meaning they use multiple UI frameworks in the same app).

Yes it’s possible to do this now. However with further advancement of AI or whatever you call it this can be made even more effective and efficient. And any edge over the “enemy” is useful.

There are many uses for AI that governments are interested in. Deepfakes, cheaper and more subtle ways to influence public opinions on the internet (by being able to instantly deploy thousands or millions of fully automated bots that are able to express their “opinions” in a way that is indistinguishable from humans), accurate and automated analysis of public discourse on the large scale, etc. And if you have an edge over other countries then you are able to influence their public opinions and detect (and possible counteract) when they try to influence you.

AI is very good at analysing human-generated data, as well as generating data that looks human-created. Any entity that deals with (and desires to control) a large number of people (of which governments are prime examples) will find many uses for it.

No, he said that he doesn’t sell starlink terminals in Russia. When asked whether Russia uses starlink he declined to answer.

That can be true for self-contained command line tools, but not for complex programs with actively development dependencies (especially anything dealing with networking or encryption). For example hexchat uses GTK2 which is likely to be removed from mainstream distro repos in the coming years because it has been obsolete for a long time. Also openssl which is known to change its API occasionally which means that anything that uses it needs to be updated to stay compatible.

This makes using “swipe to previous app” gesture harder in case app has a list with swipeable elements (such as Gmail) One of the purposes of the gesture bar is to prevent such conflicts.