CSTO is dead in the water, Russia has officially denied military aid to member states at war. Kazakhstan is warming up to China and the EU. Russia lost more than 2000 tanks. A sizeable portion of its navy is defunct. It has had to mobilize conscripts. No matter how they put nice numbers out, it does cost Russian society a lot. Even if you don’t count anything else, even by conservative estimates, 50000 Russian men are dead.

Saying that the war barely cost anything to Russia is an affront to their memory. Those are 50000 people with families, dreams, kids who will never see them again because Russia apparently needs a “sphere of influence”.

Also, the EU is not in recession, Germany is by some counts, other states are doing fine. The war is not in the top 3 discussed issues in my EU country right now, it comes right after farmer subsidies, housing prices and whether we can all continue working from home.

Also, just to put it in perspective, Russia’s economy is around the same size as Italy’s. It can grow a lot until it will be a match for Germany, let alone the EU or the US.

Man, China is not even siding with Russia. China is against the West, it’s just looking to gain as much as it can from the situation.

It’s as likely to annex Siberia as help.

the largest military power barring itself

Don’t make me laugh. China easily is a more competent and dangerous military power than Russia. Russia is maybe on par with Iran, though Iran has the fact that they are not embroiled in a war of attrition with a minor neighbour with no way out going for them.

Ironically Russia has shit both for quantity and quality of military production. I mean imported French tank optics? Hand assembled fighter jets? Whatever the fuck the Kuznetsov is?

Russia spends around 9% of its GDP on its military, if the EU did the same, the result would dwarf the US. No point in doing it though as Russia is not a threat to the EU militarily. Maybe as much as Syria is, if they implode and cause a refugee crisis.

Same is true for Russia. Except US corporate ghouls are already lining up to rebuild Ukraine. Who will do that for Russia? China? Don’t make me laugh.

I think the thing is that even if we do (and we will), you can always just move to another community discussing the same thing.

I see all the people wanting “meta-communities” so that they can subscribe to the one thing, but it really seems nice to have a range of small communities covering the same topic. Less chance of your favourite thing being gatekept by a random powertrip.

Better have a smorgasbord of different apps, it’s great if we can get a decent competition going.

uplevel the search-and-discover experience for both brands and our users by tapping into our differentiated value as a hub for actionable conversation

This is peak corporate-speak. Is this real or satire?

The only thing I haven’t seen AI take on successfully yet is liability. Who do you sue if your accountant AI loses a bunch of money?

I have seen huge corps buy stuff and employ a lot of people just to have scapegoats.

I mean every community moderates itself, if you don’t like what one of them does, you cut it out of your feed.

It sounds exciting, imagine if mods would have to compete for shares of a topic instead of a group gatekeeping a big community.

Man, as someone who grew up near a whole bunch of brutalist architecture, there comparison to lifeless corporate art is spot on.

A bit weird since they said they’ll be supporting the current iteration till 2030.

I remember there was a whole saga about the original never making it to 64bit. I guess this is a remake, since the source was lost too IIRC

Have you seen the drama over at r/sysadmin? TBH whether Reddit survives this or not (I’m assuming it will), I’d rather be over here. TBH the smaller user base is actually a plus.

I guess we need open hardware for open drivers to be the norm.

This quite stupidly has some geopolitical implications as well, if “anyone” can manufacture decent GPUs, there goes the Western chip-making monopoly.

You just buy a big slab of meat, put it on a coat hanger on the patio, free smoked meat!

One bad thing I could see is that this info could be sold to insurance companies, not just medical, who could charge and deny coverage based on that.

Or just look at Visa and Mastercard being a faux-moral jackass and not dealing with porn sites. Imagine if they were able to deny you service based on medical history with drugs and such.

In Russia, wrote the embassy, the journalist’s coverage was liable to land him a financial penalty, a prison term, or a period of forced labour.

In Russia holding an empty sign or being the wrong ethnicity, or just the wrong place at the wrong time can get you that.

I once got a gigantic dinosaur storage array from a local university for 50 EUR. Check local stuff, it’s like used furniture if you are in any bigger city.

One DDG search gave me this site, this offer seems reasonable, just check if it works first: https://www.trademe.co.nz/a/marketplace/computers/servers/servers/listing/4170528497

Watch out for noise and power consumption though. If you want to dip your feet in, OrangePi stuff is definitely a good place to start, set up some networking stuff like PiHole, they are nice projects and you are not saddled with a 30kg piece of metal that screams like a jet engine until you’re sure you want to.