mopsi

We have seen time and time again how this approach does not work and only invites further aggression. Zelenskyy himself campaigned on, got elected and began pursuing the same things that you suggest: economic development, anti-corruption, and conciliatory approach to the war in Eastern Ukraine. All he got in response was a renewed invasion.

Neutrality is not a serious option anymore. Not for Ukraine, not for anyone else. Sweden and Finland's pivot away from their long-standing neutrality highlights this reality and marks the end of neutrality as a credible security posture in Europe. They were the last holdouts among Russia's European neighbors.

  > That is where we Indians got lucky. Our founding leaders were smart enough to realise that India joining NATO would lead to China and / or Russia becoming our enemy or India forming a military alliance with Russia would make the west our enemy. And thus, we told them both bluntly that we wouldn't join any alliance against both, because we understood that you all are superpowers. So leave us alone.

This is exactly the pursuit of neutrality that Ukraine chose, except that Russia degenerated into a totalitarian dictatorship that became expansionist as it radcalized and began violating Ukraine's sovereign territory. The first notable incident occurred in 2003 over Tuzla island. The "leave us alone" part didn't work out.

The unprovoked nature of Russia's invasion of Ukraine discredited neutrality to such an extent that even Sweden, which had been neutral for over 200 years, abandoned it and made a sharp pivot toward regional cooperation. With an increasingly hostile Russia, neutrality serves only to divide European countries and undermine their cooperation in collective security.

  > My advise to the Ukrainians would be stop fighting a war they cannot win, surrender and get the best deal you can from Russia to have peace. And then rebuild your country.

Russia is not offering any deals other than the wholesale destruction of the Ukrainian state and ethnicity. The choice is between taking a chance on the battlefield or voluntarily exposing oneself to genocide. Thus, support for continuing the war remains high.

Every time I see this site posted, I can't help but think this is what Wikipedia and other online sources could be. I loved Encarta for all the interactive things I could play with. Instead, for most things, we are stuck with Markdown and minimal formatting that is frustratingly neutered, even clickable image maps have become a rarity; can't remember when I last saw one in the wild. Really sad.

Any topic with little coverage in the training data. LLMs will keep circling around the small bits in the training data, unable synthesize new connections.

This is very obvious when trying to use LLMs to modify scripts in vendor-specific languages that have not been widely documented and don't have many examples available. A seasoned programmer will easily recognize common patterns like if-else blocks and loops, but LLMs will get stuck and output gibberish.

  A new monument to Soviet leader Josef Stalin was unveiled in the southern Russian city of Volgograd on Wednesday to mark the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the battle of Stalingrad — as Volgograd was known until 1961 — a key turning point in World War II. The bust of Stalin was installed near the Battle of Stalingrad Museum alongside those of Soviet World War II marshals Georgy Zhukov and Alexander Vasilevsky. All three monuments were designed by sculptor Sergey Shcherbakov, a Volgograd native. This is the second monument to Stalin to have been unveiled in Volgograd in recent years. The first modern memorial, a two-meter concrete bust, was opened near the local Communist Party headquarters in December 2019 to mark the 140th anniversary of Stalin’s birth. According to a law adopted by the Volgograd Duma in 2016, the city reverts to its Soviet-era name Stalingrad on certain public holidays, including Victory Day and the annual anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad.

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2023/02/01/stalin-monument-un...

Volgograd is a city with a population of 1 million.

  Authorities in northwestern Russia’s Vologda region unveiled a statue of Joseph Stalin over the weekend, the latest monument to the Soviet dictator to have sprung up in the country in recent years. At an unveiling ceremony, Vologda region Governor Georgiy Filimonov described the Stalin monument as “a step toward a sober, balanced view” of Russia’s past. Just hours before, Filimonov laid flowers at a local memorial dedicated to victims of political repression. “It’s difficult to overestimate Joseph Stalin’s role in shaping our country’s history,” the governor said. “Of course, there were tragic lows [during his rule], but there were also highs.” Filimonov added that Stalin’s memory should be “cherished” and “passed on to future generations” to keep Russia “powerful.”

https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/12/23/new-stalin-monumen...

Vologda is a city with a population of 310k.

And so forth.

The most WTF of them all is erecting monuments to Stalin in occupied Ukraine.

  The Communist Party of Russia unveiled a monument to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in occupied Melitopol, Zaporizhzhia Oblast, on May 8 to commemorate Victory Day in World War II, the party announced. The statue carries a plaque that reads: "To the organizer and inspirer of the victory of the Soviet people over the Nazi invaders, Generalissimo of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin, from grateful descendants." The ceremony was attended by Russian-installed officials and local school students who laid flowers at the site. Melitopol has been under Russian occupation since March 2022. Stalin's legacy in Ukraine is marked by profound suffering. Under his rule, millions of Ukrainians died during the Holodomor, a man-made famine in 1932–1933. The dictator also oversaw mass deportations, purges of Ukrainian intellectuals and leaders, and the suppression of the Ukrainian language and culture.

https://kyivindependent.com/russia-erects-stalin-monument-in...

Polite rejection letters often end with an upbeat, noncommittal note about the possibility of things being different in an undefined future. Saying that this opened the door for Georgia and Ukraine into NATO is incorrect; the allies decided on the opposite at the summit.

Georgia and Ukraine hoped to receive an invitation to NATO and begin membership negotiations. Today, almost two decades later, they still haven't received an invitation nor started negotiations.

There was no such thing as 2008 Bucharest Memorandum, you are probably confusing it with the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. But NATO did hold a summit in Bucharest in 2008. Ukraine and Georgia hoped to get invitations to join NATO. Under Russian pressure, they were denied entry, and that was the end of it. This left Georgia and Ukraine outside NATO's protective umbrella and enabled Russia to invade both without triggering a response from the entire alliance.

The "eventually" you are referring to was nothing more than a polite "no", issued in the final statement of the summit as a consolation (one day we will invite you), after allies had made their negative decision.

The former commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces recently gave an interview in which he said that everyone expected Ukraine to fall within three days, due to severe intelligence mistakes regarding Ukraine that reinforced the belief that 70% of Ukrainians would welcome Russian invaders with open arms. Except: https://bsky.app/profile/wartranslated.bsky.social/post/3m7a...

Sony is perhaps a good example. Most of the product categories that they became known for, like radios, cassette players, analog TVs and VCRs, are gone, replaced by PCs, smartphones, Playstation and their media empire and industrial products like CMOS sensors that are everywhere. They've seen multiple times a major business segment sink beneath their feet, and survived.

It is always a good idea to have at least a rough understanding of how much operations in your code cost, but sometimes very expensive mistakes end up in non-obvious places.

If I have only plain Python installed and a .py file that I want to test, then what's the easiest way to get a visualization of the call tree (or something similar) and the computational cost of each item?

Rejection of fashion has always seemed like a fear of failure to me. Trying to dress well means exposing yourself to evaluation, comparison and the possibility of getting it wrong. The traditions and standards of fashion have accumulated over centuries and are fairly resistant to being redefined (especially by rookies), which makes success depend on external criteria and not on personal rules. Rejecting fashion altogether removes the risk of failure.

I think this is reflected in how techies are drawn to the safety of techwear, where fit and color matter less and clothing can be chosen and justified through objective criteria like weather resistance parameters.

The largest buyer is Hungary, which is not representative of the EU in general to put it mildly, but a darling of the American far-right. Hungary has also been blocking many of EU's support initiatives: https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-ministers-outrageous-hung...

It has more to do with Mafia traditions. Attack dogs like Medvedev and Rogozin[1] threaten to burn everything down if you don't pay up, and Putin plays the more dignified philosopher who sits on a high chair in a mansion and speaks in vague terms about the importance of fire safety. It would be unbecoming for the big boss to openly and directly demand money and obedience. The top dog asks nothing from anyone; he wills things into being.

[1] The same who decades ago suggested Musk build a trampoline if he wanted to reach space.

If I recall correctly, Vladimir Chirkin (commander-in-chief of Russian ground forces 2012-2013) said that in the 27 November 2025 interview with Yuri Tamantsev on RBC. I went back to verify it, but the entire interview is now missing from both RBC's website and Tamantsev's YouTube channel as well. Only a reupload of the first segment can be found on another YouTube channel.

  > Since when is it OK for governments to sanction people when they are lawfully expressing disagreement with Govt policies or views?

When it stops being a disagreement over policy and becomes a paid job for a foreign government to spread as much malicious FUD as possible.

The former commander of Russian ground forces recently gave a long interview in which he said that the Russian army was on the verge of total collapse in the fall of 2022, when Ukrainian forces were pushing them back during the highly successful Kharkiv counteroffensive. Mearsheimer, Sachs, et al played a vital role in spreading FUD and unfounded fears that led to less military support for Ukraine than was needed. As a result, hundreds of thousands more people are dead than might have been had Ukraine been supported properly.

Mearsheimer alone has done more to deny modern weapons to Ukraine than the entire Russian air force could. In terms of ROI, he has been a spectacularly cost-effective propaganda asset. He has the blood of countless people on his hands and deserves to be hanged. But instead, he will kick the bucket due to natural causes in old age, a luxury not afforded to the children who died in their bedrooms under Russian missile attacks that Mearsheimer twisted himself into a pretzel to enable and justify.

  > Loners would be taken care of by the state. They don't wither.

How? Where does the state take scarves and tomatoes from if we only produce as much as we need within our own circle and exchange them solely among friends?

This is not as trivial question as it may sound. In the USSR, where I grew up, this was classified as a crime of "speculation". People were jailed and their property confiscated to intimidate others to work for the state without bypassing the forced redistribution.

The question of gifting a scarf to a friend, when someone else might need it more, is in disguise, the central question of communism. There is no way to preserve my freedom to give the scarf or other fruits of my labor to whomever I please (or keep it for myself) while simultaneously satisfying the needs of those whose needs are unmet. There simply aren't enough scarves to make everyone happy. If you try to coerce me, I won't knit any scarves at all, or they'll be of very poor quality.

This is essentially how and why the USSR stagnated for decades until it collapsed under its own weight. By the end, despite coercion, productivity had fallen so low that people with physical access to goods (like truck drivers) resorted to bartering, while others (like university professors) starved. The all-powerful state that was supposed to "take care of everything" was nowhere to be seen; they were busy bartering tanks for chicken.

Lived in the USSR; it is best explored through small business and personal ownership instead of large words and manifestos. The thing is, work is hard. People need an incentive to put in the hours.

If the state requisitions everything above a certain threshold to prevent wealth disparities, as the communists did in the USSR with grain beyond what farmers needed for sustenance, people will not work beyond the threshold out of the goodness of their hearts. Why work extra hours on the fields if you get nothing out of it? Instead, production will drop to exactly meet that threshold. This is how famines were created.

To maintain production while still requisitioning, you will have to force people to work for free.

  > USSR before the destruction of socialism - typically have 80%+ rates of home ownership

Actually, less than 10%. Homes were owned by a government housing department. When you finished school, you were assigned a workplace and given an apartment. Often it was just a room in a shared apartment (kommunalka). You could live there as long as you kept the job. If you were transferred elsewhere, you had to pack your things and move. The quality of housing was comparable to the homes of methheads in West Virginia. The temporary and impersonal nature of the arrangement bred crime and other social problems. In short, the USSR was one huge "company town" that you could never leave.

  > You are free to knit or whittle gifts for friends. What you wouldn't be free to do is setup "mopsi's scarf business" without working through the state. You wouldn't be allowed to take the earning from "mopsi's scarf business" and use them to become a landlord.

If my scarves become so popular that even strangers begin offering money for them, I won't be interested in working for the state for basic necessities while the state takes the rest.

I'd rather barter with others for the useful things they produce. My friend, for example, grows excellent tomatoes.

Over time, if we have many friends, we will live comfortable lives, while loners will wither away. Is this an acceptable outcome for you as the dictator of the Bestest Communist Paradise on Planet Earth (BCPPE), or will you do something about it?

Go ahead, plan my Christmas Eve. What time I wake up, what time I leave the house, which routes I take, what things I buy. Assign the kWhs of electricity and liters of water and fuel that I'll use up, plan ingredients for my meals of the day.

The belief that a central "digital planning engine" could plan the lives of an entire society is an incredibly naive idea from early cybernetics. This doesn't work even in small thought experiments because of information limits. No central system can access all the local knowledge and constantly changing circumstances.

  > I'd argue that communism is the only system of government that guarantees property for all. That's somewhat a core tenant that every member in a communist society collectively owns everything.

This year, I knit a scarf for a friend as a Christmas gift. He already owns several scarves, unlike some other people who own none, but might need one more than he does. How is that collective ownership supposed to work here? Are you going to take that scarf away from me and "assign" it to someone you deem more deserving? I'll resist and you'll have to take it from me by force. And if you do, I'll stop knitting altogether, because why bother if I never get the chance to gift it to my friend. What are you going to do when you need the next scarf, force me to work?

If the answer is "yes", you've just reinvented a communist dictatorship. If it's a "no", then such society will run out of food and goods, and something better will rise to replace it.

  > Meanwhile, the EU just unpersoned a Swiss citizen, a writer, Jacques Baud*, for not taking the European side in the US-Russia conflict. Not for lying about it, but simply for not taking the European side.

He was not "unpersoned", whatever that means, but sanctioned for being a professional Kremlin troll and for spreading lies such as claiming that the Bucha massacre was committed by British and Ukrainian secret services, that the war actually started a week earlier with a Ukrainian offensive that the entire world has suppressed, and so on. This is not even a matter of viewpoint, but a malicious flood of obvious lies.[1] Such superspreaders of lies are exactly the kind of people who should be sanctioned.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firehose_of_falsehood

  > The maidan revolution, that put selenski in office was supported by the US.

The Maidan ended with Petro Poroshenko being elected president in the 2014 election. His term ended in 2019, and Zelenskyy won the 2019 election.

The remark about being supported by the US sounds a bit like weasel language. US preferences do not determine the outcome of elections.

Yes it is, and Russia is increasingly being recognized by scholars as such.

This is especially visible in the war against Ukraine, which is colonial in nature. Russia has invaded another country on imperialistic justifications ("reunification of Russian lands" etc), is using domestic minorities as cannon fodder to alter the ethnic composition of Russia in favor of Russians, is committing genocide against Ukrainians to destroy them as an ethnicity, and is resettling ethnic Russians into occupied territories to permanently alter Ukraine's ethnic composition.

The whole "NATO expansion" narrative is complete bullshit when the initiative to join NATO has come from Russia's neighbors, who want to gain the protection of its mutual defense clause in the hope that this would deter Russia from invading them.

Russia has been the aggressor in this part of the world for centuries, and the rest is a reaction to that. Russia is the sole reason why Northern and Eastern Europe have militaries at all; if it weren't for Russia, they could be disbanded overnight.

... says the Russian war propaganda.

In the real world, NATO is a highly exclusive club, which is very reluctant to accept new members and extend its mutual defence clause to them. Ukraine and Georgia sought to join NATO after Russia had already begun violating their sovereign territory, but NATO allies caved to Russian pressure and denied membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. Russia then used this opportunity to invade them without triggering the full arsenal of NATO.

Russia is not a cornered cat, but a nuclear-armed colonial empire that has expanded through war and conquest for centuries, growing from a small city-state into the largest country in the world, exterminating countless native ethnicities in the process:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4a/Te...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Russia

He is not an EU citizen and, as a foreigner, acts as a mouthpiece for a hostile dictatorship. The US has sanctioned similar people too, most notably Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of Russia Today: https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy2559

  > There are a lot of things you can't say or will get shut down for. 

Such as? I honestly can't think of anything.

  > It is unacceptable to ban homeschooling. Some children need to be homeschooled, because of disabilities, or even high intelligence.

European education laws prioritize the child's right to education and social development over parental autonomy as an absolute. Mandatory schooling laws have been adopted to ensure minimum educational standards and to safeguard against neglect and abuse, which is especially important when it comes to disabilities. Someone with proper training and decades of experience will educate a disabled child far more effectively than a parent whose only guaranteed qualification may be knowing how to have sex.

  > NATO itself said they would join the alliance back in 2008.

No. That was merely a polite statement without any timetable or actionable steps, made after the allies had decided at the 2008 summit not to invite Ukraine and Georgia into NATO, leaving both countries exposed to Russian pressure and eventual military aggression.

Nowadays, this is widely considered a severe mistake. For example, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former NATO secretary-general, has on many occasions referred to the exclusion of Ukraine and Georgia as mistakes that emboldened Putin to invade them.

Perhaps you should drop him an email to explain that he doesn't know what he's talking about and that Ukraine was "actually" on the path to NATO membership. So much ignorance in the world, ain't there.

  > They are scientists and conservators doing their best

Perhaps they're simply the wrong people for this problem? I'd very much prefer to see how artists would approach painting the figures, instead of scientists and conservators. Give them the tools that were available at the time and let them do their best.

Even if tastes have indeed changed, something that matches our current taste will reproduce the impact of the statues better than a scientifically meticulous and factually accurate depiction that misses the emotional truth.

That's what I said: the present-day totalitarian dictatorship in Russia was born out of foreign disregard for the deteriorating human rights situation in Russia, willful ignorance of the usurpation of all formal and informal power structures by KGB old-timers, and indifference to the legitimate security concerns of Eastern Europe. Global big businesses in major countries such as the US and Germany were so eager to cooperate on oil and gas extraction that they ignored how a new Hitler was rising as a result of this short-sightedness.

Russia grew into the cancer that it is today not because it had been under imagined attacks from all sides for decades as you claimed (a favorite trope of many dictators), but because of the opposite: Russia was treated like a savage and uncivilized land from which respect for even the most basic human rights was not demanded as a prerequisite for cooperation. Global big businesses were given access to Russian natural resources at below-market rates, and in return Russian kleptocrats were allowed to skim off the top with impunity and park their loot in NYC penthouses.

We can see the same pattern in the current "peace negotiations": Putin is offering Trump and his business partners a chunk of frozen Russian assets and access to natural resources in occupied parts of Ukraine in exchange for the US pressuring Europe to unfreeze the funds and coercing Ukraine to surrender. Big business gets cheap resources and Putin takes another step toward his dream of an empire. What a lovely alliance of big business and Russian imperialism.

  > Or they could integrate it within a wider framework of allyship, or at least let it be, as both of which it has been asking for several decades, instead of advancing towards, ramping up the rhetoric, fueling millitarism, and crossing red lines.

This is exactly what happened and how we got here: turning a blind eye to the destruction of democracy and the growing authoritarianism in Russia, buying oil and gas in the hope that economic cooperation would keep Russians in check out of self-interest at least, ridiculing and belittling the security concerns of Eastern Europe, and ignoring Russia's aggression and wars and constant advances, such as subverting countries like Belarus into dictatorships loyal to Moscow and deploying nuclear missiles and offensive weapons ever closer to Europe.

This approach worked so well that missiles are now raining down on European cities every night, killing innocent people in their homes, with no end in sight, as the Russian dictator relentlessly demands a return to the Cold War era, when half of Europe was a Russian prison camp.