Were you banned or shadow banned?

I was only shadow banned once, however never banned normally.

Dang I haven’t played Noita in like a week

Thinking about it, it’s weird that it has no native Linux version

Better than me getting shadow banned from reddit for using one, I appealed back then

I agree. The issue is not the fact that a police exists. The issue is that often, there’s no body in charge of investigating it proper, sure you have Internal Affairs (it you don’t, as here in Germany), but it can’t be part of the police itself. It needs to be an autonomous body that isn’t part of police itself and does nothing but investigate them.

Ukraine was under the Russian orbit since the 1700s. It was a fifth of the economic output of the USSR. In the Russian nation-state mythology Kiev is the mother city of all Russians. They share one of the largest borders in the world of mostly plains.

There’s a lot of reasons. Russia views Ukraine as theirs. Neither Finland or Alaska hold a fraction of the ideological, historic, and strategic importance to the Russians

Right, what I was getting at was that all the other claims are bullshit, this is a war because winning it would grant Russia strategic advantages, and they thought they’d win the conflict, probably not even expecting a full war; just a three day special operation.

go and re-read the 1994 agreement. it does not promise any help at all beyond promising to “seek immediate [UN] Security Council action”.

That’s why I wrote “granted”, I know this is more of a political intentions paper, my point was that nobody can act surprised when a signatory actually follows through later.

One could ask the question why states are choosing to align with countries other than Russia. The answer is that most of Russia’s allies get screwed. Look at Armenia’s situation with the CSTO.

Russia and Ukraine may have agreed on a tentative deal to end the war in April, according to a recent piece in Foreign Affairs.

“Russian and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines of a negotiated interim settlement,” wrote Fiona Hill and Angela Stent. “Russia would withdraw to its position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership and instead receive security guarantees from a number of countries.”

Calls it peace plan, then I’m the next paragraph refers to it as “negotiated interim settlement” where Russia gets to hold all of Crimea and the Donbas… and the word peace doesn’t even appear in the linked article. Nor any reference to an end of the conflict, and even the word “deal” only about the grain export.

The “Zelensky is a badass” narrative in 2024 is hilarious.

And yet, you’re the only one calling it that. I was just stating that was offered and that Ukraine’s government declined, asking if you’re saying that this wasn’t their own decision - which you dodged answering.

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Sheesh gramps get with the times

No, I’m saying the documents do not sustain the claims. The documents go into supporting Ukraine, e.g. to help them defeat Russian fleet and gain maritime supremacy. However, there’s no indication on what I’ve seen there akin to the claims that they want to “drag out the war as long as possible” and “prepare their own people to live in poverty” (not exact quotes because I’m on phone and I’m afraid to lose this text). These are the authors one-sided and tendentious interpretations of continued support, which by the structure of the article and the way he presents it he makes seem as if they were part of the documents. But they aren’t.

UK supports Ukraine. That’s a known fact. It’d be insane to believe there’d be no briefings on strategy (whether these came into effect isn’t clear either).

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Military deployments aren’t “meat grinders” for your own troops if they’re well-equipped and trained. That’s the whole point of western militaries.

War is shit. But as an ex-soldier: you know what you sign up for. I also expected it during my service, though it never happened.

It’s like saying calling firefighters to rescue someone from a burning house is only acceptable if you ran into it first. It makes no sense.

The fact that this wasn’t a three day operation is in large part sure to the US. But your portrayal of the facts makes no sense. Nobody is forcing Ukraine to ask the US for help (except Russia). The US obliges because it does align with their interest. But in the end, all international help at scale is motivated by national interest.

Testing out new battlefield technology before the next Great War.

Should a nation only fight with pre-agreed equipment that is at least of a certain age?

Unfortunately for the people of Ukraine the geopolitical motives and interests of the US don’t necessarily align with their interests.

Well, they for sure don’t align with Russia’s.

Like Chomsky says “we will fight them to the last Ukrainian”

Or was it North Korean?

How was Ukraine “destabilized” compared to other comparable ex-USSR states until 2014?

And it worked. Which is why Russia invaded in 2014

If a country being in US orbit is a reason for Russia to attack it, why didn’t they attack Finland? Or the US directly in Alaska? What’s the significance with Ukraine?

There’s none other that Russia thought it was an easy target, breaking the Budapest Memorandum (and later other agreements). The same memorandum btw granted Ukraine non-military aid from the US and France, so the argument that this was somehow a dirty play makes no sense.

I don’t know, but probably higher than doing the right thing for the right reasons.

Snaps both predate flatpak and do things that Flatpaks are not designed to do.

By less than a year judging by the article… and for individual applications, there was AppImage.

Snaps can do things flatpaks can’t do. Which is true but also kind of irrelevant if we’re talking about a means to distribute applications in a cross-distribution manner as opposed to a base system A/B partition solution.

Or am I misunderstanding?

Everyone should use what suits them best. My negative opinion on snaps doesn’t mean Ubuntu shouldn’t ship it or that users shouldn’t use it. It’s Canonical’s distribution, they can put into it whatever they want for all I care, and if users are happy with it, good for them. But I can still criticize it for perceived issues. (Edit: kind of a straw man since nobody said I couldn’t, I just wanted to stress that I’m not authoritative on the matter)

But I understand that Ubuntu isn’t for you if you want to avoid snaps.

I used Ubuntu in the past, from I think 2004 or maybe 2005 to 2008, but switched away because of other issues that I don’t remember anymore, but I do remember upgrades between major versions were always pain with an Nvidia card (this was before AMD or in the beginning even ATI cards were well-usable under Linux) and I honestly just prefer rolling release nowadays. But snaps are just not at all compelling anyways.

I don’t like snaps because it’s just another Canonical NIH thing. Everyone else agreed on flatpak which seems to have a good design with portals and all and being fully open.

On the other hand, you have snaps, which is being controlled by Canonical as the server component is l non-public. The packages sometimes work worse than normal debs and the flatpak version (steam being a notable example IIRC).

There is 0 motivation for me as a user to look into that. They have solved the problem in one of the worst ways possible. Even Mint, which is Ubuntu’s biggest downstream, has opted against including it by default.

In addition to all of that, Canonical also installs applications as snap when using the apt\£* command line tools.

So you have a system that is

• proprietary
• worse than the alternatives
• pushed on users even through unexpected channels

Ubuntu’s mission was always to build bridges between the user and tech and businesses that the gnu side of Linux wouldn’t.

Which bridge did they build with snaps?

It’s a good just works distro that has spawned a ton of just works distros

Which in turn have removed snaps by default and replaced the affected packages with native ones because it often didn’t “just work”

And people say this election was all bad /s

It’s like every generation loses the ability to do something in computer technology that was just abstracted away somehow. I as a millennial have never soldered a PC mainboard (modding an Xbox doesn’t count), but I’d say that otherwise, my understanding is pretty good. And I think all of my friends understand the concepts of files.

I recently asked someone about 10 years older if he knew what partitioning and formatting means in the context, and he knew, despite initially saying he has no clue about computers, to show someone 10 years younger (who didn’t know) that such knowledge was just basically required back in the day. And it’s not like these terms are obsolete, the concepts are still the same, even though we went from MBR to GPT and from FAT32 or whatever to better filesystems. It’s no different for phones, but not required and even hidden.

I’d say generally, the technology userbase broadened while average knowledge in the group declined, however I’m not sure whether the absolute numbers of people with a certain knowledge level actually went down.

They won’t because this would require a trial where rich people wouldn’t benefit, which is a waste of government resources, which goes against the Department of Government Efficiency’s goals. More efficient to throw these poor souls’ families under the bus.