I, on the contrary, prefer it when everyone uses mainstream Wine with winetricks and prefixes so if something doesn’t work, you can at least fix it using someone’s advice posted on winehq. With Proton it seems that everyone expects stuff to either just work or doesn’t bother. The Proton advice is usually as valuable as Windows problems advice.

That’s because western elites are generally fine with Putin. Him being the adversary is business as usual.

While us boors not liking him they are less tolerant about.

Which is also why the main group of Russians with no impediments in Europe are Putin’s friends and propagandists and all that kind.

I meant joining BRICS together after formally ceasing to be part of British monarchy. And becoming less dependent on other integrations much abused today.

Ah. It’s more scientific than Star Trek. At least no transporters\replicators. Hyperdrive malfunction is like a small nuke, Jedi are no more magic than, eh, telepaths in Star Trek.

But as a Star Wars fan I agree it’s clearly fantasy set in space. That’s not an insult, rather its clear self-positioning.

If you don’t consider Star Trek sci-fi too, then it’s all fine. I also love Babylon V and also don’t think it’s sci-fi.

I thought I was getting into an epic fantasy adventure and instead I got a wanky musical about walking!

That’s how medieval people perceived their epic fantasy adventures. It’s correct. And authentic. And very cool, when you think about the distances they went, the scenery they saw and that they had no Google Maps, GPS and mobile phones for connectivity. It’s between a very long hiking trip and a one-way ticket sleeper ship to Alpha Centauri.

BTW, another wrong thing from the movies - it feels there as if it all were happening in one world. As if they had regular trains between Minas Tirith and Fornost. As if they had TV. I dunno, something like that, because they behave there as if immune to distractions, one can imagine that in Forgotten Realms setting, where magic does everything that mobile phones and GPS can do, and “adventurers” roam everywhere, but not in Middle-Earth.

In the books they acted like saga characters with some transcendent (in otherwise medieval surroundings) knowledge of the ideals of French revolution and Catholic distributism mixed in strange ways.

In the movies they acted like entertainment park animators. Too much superficial glossiness, too little of the feeling of the book, say, Barrow-Downs, I still remember how the descriptions of the rain and the sun and the stones felt.

LOTR itself is world building through characters, and building characters through their reaction to the world.

The films are just action with lots of nice views.

Ex-Soviet everything since 1991.

Including Kaya Kallas.

Yeah, McCarthyists working together with Bolsheviks-turned-mafia to turn the world into shit. That’s just wonderful.

He’s a Russian businessman who became one in the last 35 years. He’s “dissident” in the sense that he picked the wrong side.

Khodorkovsky’s close associate has been named by French, I think, police as the main suspect for ordering an attack on a Russian opposition figure recently.

Look up Navalny’s organization’s opinions of all those people. Navalny was a controversial figure for many intents and purposes, and I really hope he didn’t return to Russia because of getting desperate and tired of idiots like me mentioning those controversies. His organization might not parrot the western narratives the way Khodor and others do, but it is genuine.

The author’s take is detached from reality, filled with hypocrisy and gatekeeping.

“Opinionated” is another term - for friendliness and neutrality. Complaining about reality means a degree of detachment from it by intention.

When was the last time, Mr author, you had to replace a failed DIMM in your modern computer?

When was the last time, Mr commenter, you had to make your own furniture because it’s harder to find a thing of the right dimensions to buy? But when that was more common, it was also easier to get the materials and the tools, because ordering things over the Internet and getting them delivered the next day was less common. In terms of managing my home I feel that 00s were nicer than now.

Were the centralized “silk road” of today with TSMC kicked out (a nuke, suppose, or a political change), would you prefer less efficient yet more distributed production of electronics? That would have less allowance for various things hidden from users, that happen in modern RAM. Possibly much less.

If there was no technological or production cost improvement, we’d just use the old version.

I think their point was that there’s no architectural innovation in some things.

Yes, there is a regular shift in computing philosophy, but this is driving by new technologies and usually computing performance descending to be accessibly at commodity pricing. The Raspberry Pi wasn’t a revolutionary fast computer, but it changed the world because it was enough computing power and it was dirt cheap.

Maybe those shifts are in market philosophies in tech.

I agree, there is something appealing about it to you and me, but most people don’t care…and thats okay! To them its a tool to get something done. They are not in love with the tool, nor do they need to be.

There’s a screwdriver. I can imagine there’s a fitting basic amount of attention a piece of knowledge gets. I can imagine some person not knowing how to use a screwdriver (substitute with something better) is below that. And some are far above that, maybe.

I think the majority of humans is below the level of knowledge computers in our reality require. That’s not the level you or the author possess. That’s about the level I possessed in my childhood, nothing impressive.

Mr. author, no one is stopping you from using your TI-99 today, but in fact you didn’t use it to write your article either. Why is that? Because the TI-99 is a tiny fraction of the function and complexity of a modern computer. Creating something close to a modern computer from discrete components with “part numbers you can look up” would be massively expensive, incredibly slow, and comparatively consume massive amounts of electricity vs today’s modern computers.

It would seem we are getting a better deal from the same amount of energy spent with modern computers then. Does this seem right to you?

It’s philosophy and not logic, but I think you know that for getting something you pay something. There’s no energy out of nowhere.

Discrete components may not make sense. But maybe the insane efficiency we have is paid for with our future. It’s made possible by centralization of economy and society and geopolitics, which wasn’t needed to make TI-99.

Do you think a surgeon understands how a CCD electronic camera works that is attached to their laparoscope? Is the surgeon un-educated that they aren’t fluent in circuit theory that allows the camera to display the guts of the patient they’re operating on?

A surgeon has another specialist nearby, and that specialist doesn’t just know these things, but also a lot of other knowledge necessary for them and the surgeon to unambiguously communicate, avoiding fatal mistakes. A bit more expense is spent here than just throwing a device at a surgeon not understanding how it works. A fair bit.

Such gatekeeping! So unless you know the actual engineering principles behind a device you’re using, you shouldn’t be allowed to use it?

Why not:

Such respect! In truth, why wouldn’t we trust students to make good use of understanding of their tools and the universe around them, since every human’s corpus of knowledge is unique and wonderful, and not intentionally limit them.

Innovation isn’t just creating new features or functionality. In fact, most I’d argue is taking existing features or functions and delivering them for substantially less cost/effort.

Is change of policy innovation? In our world I see a lot of that. Driven by social and commercial and political interests naturally.

As I’m reading this article, I am thinking about a farmer watching Mr. author eat a sandwich made with bread.

A basic touch on your thoughts further is supposed to be part of school program in many countries.

Perhaps, but these simple solutions also can frequently only offer simple functionality. Additionally, “the best engineering solutions” are often some of the most expensive. You don’t always need the best, and if best is the only option, then that may mean going without, which is worst than a mediocre solution and what we frequently had in the past.

Does more complex functionality justify this? Who decides what we need? Who decides what is better and what is worse?

This comes to policy decisions again. Authority. I think modern authority is misplaced, and were it not, we’d have an environment more similar to what the author wants.

The reason your TI-99 and my c64 don’t require constant updates is because they were born before the concept of cybersecurity existed. If you’re going to have internet connected devices they its a near requirement to receive updates for security.

Not all updates are for security. And an insecure device still can work years after years.

If you don’t want internet connected devices, you can get those too, but they may be extremely expensive, so pony up the cash and put your money where your mouth is.

Willpower is a tremendous limitation which people usually ignore. It’s very hard to do this when everyone around doesn’t. It would be very easy if you were choosing for yourself without network effects and interoperability requirements.

So your argument for me doesn’t work in your favor, when looking closely. (Similar to “if you disagree with this law, you can explain it at the police station”.)

Don’t think even a DEC PDP 11 mainframe sold in the same era was entirely known by a handful of people, and even that is a tiny fraction of functionality of today’s cheap commodity PCs.

There’s a graphical 2d space shooter game for PDP-11. Just saying.

Also on its architecture some Soviet clones were made, in the form factor of PCs. With networking capabilities, they were used as command machines for other kinds of simpler PCs, or for production lines, and could be used as file shares, IIRC. I don’t remember what that was called, but the absolutely weirdest part was seeing in comments people remembering using that in university computer labs and even in school computer labs, so that actually existed in the USSR.

Kinda expensive though, even without Soviet inefficiency.

It was made as a consumer electronics product with the least cost they thought they could get away with and have it still sell.

Yes, which leads to different requirements today. This doesn’t stop the discussion. That leads it to the question what changed. We are not obligated to take the perpetual centralization of economies and societies like some divine judgement.

We don’t need most of these consumer electronics to last.

Who’s we? Are you deciding what will Intel RnD focus on, or what will Microsoft change in their OS and applications, or what will Apple produce?

Authority, again.

If it still works, why isn’t he using one? Could it be he wants the new features and functionality like the rest of us?

Yes. It still works for offline purposes. It doesn’t work where the modern web is not operable with it. This in my opinion reinforces their idea, not yours.

These are my replies. I’ll add my own principal opinion - a civilization can be as tall as a human forming it. Abstractions leak, and our world is continuous, so all abstractions leak. To know which do and don’t for the particular purpose, you need to know principles. You can use abstractions without looking inside them to build a system inside an architecture, but you can’t build an architecture and pick real world solutions for those abstractions without understanding those real wold solutions. Also horizontal connections between abstractions are much more tolerant to leaks than vertical ones.

And there’s no moral law forbidding us to look above our current environment to understand in which directions it may change.

The western countries are dependent on the imperial framework of “the eyes” cooperation, other intelligence and security cooperation, NATO cooperation, similarity of financial, patent and IP regulations, similarity of legal systems, interconnectivity of their elites and various blackmail material on those, and their common crime networks (one would hope that at least mafia groups should align along some other clusters on the map, but it doesn’t seem so).

Those regulations support the status of western elites, which means the elites themselves won’t reform anything in any good direction.

The NATO cooperation is extremely efficient and comfort-providing - instead of countrywide mandatory conscription you have small groups of professional soldiers and military bureaucrats, military matters are not something that all the society cares about.

Instead of domestic military industries sufficient to fulfill the needs of a military you can have as much silent and respectable corruption as you wish. It’s both convenient for the population and for the elites (criminals) to have a small professional military, an international (imperial) MIC framework, all not influenced significantly by domestic popular opinions.

Intelligence cooperation allows domestic intelligence services to bypass all limitations that exist for them on paper about their own citizens. It also makes every such service more powerful than intended.

Similar financial regulations lead not only to good things, like smaller cost of doing business, but also to bad things, like monopolies. Even the EU supposedly big regulations don’t prevent big tech from abusing honestly whatever they want. GDPR is a farce in its actual enforcement.

Patent and IP regulations - well, that’s basically a way to legal monopoly, and that’s how it works. BTW, let’s just remember that even trademarks are a relatively new thing legally. And copyright. And patents. And when all these were introduced, that was similar to state monopoly on alcohol beverages in some countries or state monopoly on tobacco in others, and was reasoned legally in exactly that way - authorship and right to print something should be registered for the crown to have an income from that, not because of some ownership of ideas or protection. It still works like an imperial mechanism.

Similarity of legal systems - I’ll admit at some point I thought English law is the best thing after sliced bread. But I’m not so sure at this point. At some point a German court acquitted Tehlirian, after all. As an example of the main competing family of legal systems.

Elites and crime - I mean, your whole part of the world is in the “trade and denial” stage after really buying the 80s and 90s idea that democracies and institutions don’t require perpetual struggle to maintain. That is, fiction of those years would usually argue with that idea, but sometimes wide masses just want to believe something so badly that no art can dissuade them. And in the 00s it was decided.

OK, too much text.

What I really mean is that for Canada it doesn’t make sense to join BRICS unless it manages to pull a Brazil and somehow switch the camp from “imperial” to “fringe kingdoms”.

Without the home front there wont be any weapons, ammo, rations, aso…

Your countries are part of an empire, their possible home front is intentionally limited for these. Due to US unreliability they are changing, but it’s not yet done.

Would be the other way, if USA can use it over fakes, then its actuality for real purposes is less certain.

Poland has a military.

target Yevgeny Chichvarkin, a dissident Russian who owns Hide, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Mayfair

So funny, such a “dissident” to reach there in Yeltsin and Putin years.

His biggest success of the war was the blitzkrieg of France, and it was absolute blind luck (mixed with French ineptitude and lack of preparation) that it ended up going the way it did.

One can rather say that the French too prepared for Germans trying to

reproduce the trench war stalemate of WWI on the Western front

, except when it became visible that they are not putting all their effort into that, it also became imperative for Germans to act offensively. They couldn’t afford a long standoff without France actually bleeding.

And here it became apparent that French politicians were not prepared for France actually bleeding at all.

Trust us bro.

Repeat: It’s a Latin word with no exclusive connection to Australia. And don’t try teaching others how to talk, especially when you are clearly wrong.

It’s a Latin word with no exclusive connection to Australia.