It’s also the fact that the measures taken are very reminiscent of that one phrase about locks: they keep the honest people away.

I have serious doubts that an hacker group, government-sponsored or not, would be using corporate, easily-traceable emails, like the removed maintainers did.

Seeing governments tackle tech in general is very weird. Sometimes I wonder if they feel the same way when making this kind of decisions or actually never feel a little odd about them.

Reeks of the chat history access attempts and the like, or is it just my paranoia?

I’m super happy that it wasn’t like Fury Road. I love Fury Road, but I don’t want to see any more attempts at recapturing that lightning, because it never worked well.

Furiosa is a great installment because it’s different and offers more than just action. One of the reasons I loved the first three films is them showing the post-apocalyptic world, giving us lore freaks something to munch over.

Reject modernity, embrace tradition - we’ll still be there for you in the arena and boomer shooter crowd, and of course, various Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 lobbies.

Come prepared.

Thank you.

Ruski here.

This is still hella expensive. 150 rubles for half a liter of beer is around double (maybe 1.5x for some brands) what they cost in probably most shops, with some being cheaper in alcohol-centered shops.

Some actually imported stuff goes for that price and tastes considerably better.

There’s also domestic beer and the like for around the same price (some cheaper, some more expensive) that tastes better, too.

And all in all, considering the incomes and purchasing power, that 1.6 EUR average in restaurants and stuff sure doesn’t feel good.

Well, conflict is, pretty much, the backbone of any story, narrative, or motive. Has been for long.

Still, I’m not sure it’s all that relevant and necessary for a video game, I agree. Some of them just let me do things I can’t in real life, like building my stupid base on different planets and moons, or transforming the landscape for the sake of it.

1. Putin wanted some “victory” to boost his dwindling ratings. Ultimately, he’d fallen victim to his own extremely corrupt system; he’d been told too many lies and led to believe that it would be a walk in the park that would skyrocket his rating again, like the Crimea annexation.
2. There has been and there is. The politically active citizens of any country always make up a minority, because most people are either too busy or don’t care; the less freedom you have in country, the more marginal the politically active become; the more horrifying it is for a person to end up in jail, basically one-on-one with the system that’s been built upon the “best” practices of KGB, the less likely people are to take such risks, and even more so when they have something to lose. Most people looking at the conflict from a country with an established democracy and respect to human life and rights have absolutely no idea what it’s like to end up in a Russian prison, especially for as long as 5+ years. More importantly, the government tries very hard to keep people scared and passive, obedient, so that they never even attempt anything and always assume that they’re going to lose if they ever oppose the powers that be - in part, they do it by brainwashing the police and similar structures into mad zealots that believe that the protestors or the opposition (even if it’s a single mom that’s just not happy with the prospect of sending her son to die in Ukraine or change horribly at the very least, on top of becoming an murderer) are the worst enemy their country has, that these people wish them ill; police gets to torture people, too, and I’m sure that’s encouraged when it comes to political matters. Multiply that practice by decades of practice and you’ll get a very desperate picture of the fear and the sense of helplessness in most people.

I’m sorry that these are not very 5-year-old-friendly, but it’s the best I could do. There’s just so much to say here. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of opinions on both matters, many being defended passionately by the ones that believe in them, so it’s very difficult to find the right answer; but both of these questions absolutely have the right answers, with the rest being a massive misunderstanding and an attempt to explain something people don’t see clearly.

Feel free to ask more questions. I’m a Russian citizen still living in Russia that’s never been abroad, so I consider myself pretty involved and up-to-date on the matter, following the news and opinions and research, etc.; hopefully I can clear things out a little more for you.

This, too, is a form of protest, one though which I fight the propaganda, be it intentional or accidental.

I think it’s worth advocating for quitting shitty games, though.

Out of many friends I’ve had who (used to) frequent games like PUBG, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, etc., most were just having a bad time, all the time. Granted, some of these work on Linux, but the point is, those of my friends that still play Overwatch (“2”, lol) just seem to be happier and more functional when they have to quit for some period of time.

I’ve been having a much better time with my life once I went for the good old enjoyment rather than chasing rank or wins or skill, finally making time to play amazing single-player titles again or just screwing around in online games.

And curiously enough, the online games I actually want to play and have fun doing so are the ones that work on Linux, while the rest thankfully refuses!

Pure Arch here, no issues with Proton whatsoever.

Any chance this could have been related to EndeavourOS in any way? Like with something pre-installed?

I’m just being curious and throwing ideas here.

Mostly that for me on Nvidia (proprietary drivers), although 555 broke my 2nd DVI-D monitor (which is admittedly old, but I don’t have any reasons to replace the little guy).

Nevertheless, I’m very set on getting an AMD GPU whenever I have to replace my GTX 1080 from 2017.

Thanks and you’re welcome!

I somehow forgot to mention this: don’t worry too much about rehearsing words. This is not the most effective way to learn them in most cases, because your brain just doesn’t consider something important and worth remembering until it has a very, very good reason to; forcing the repetition of certain words that way usually doesn’t happen to be that reason.

If you know it works for you, though, then go ahead, but otherwise, don’t beat yourself up and don’t give it more time than it deserves. After all, if you don’t happen to ever use the word or even see or hear it in five years or even more, then why really bother? ;)

I’m NOT a native English speaker by far, but I am a translator and a linguist (according to my BA degree, at least) and have spent 2.5 years teaching people English (with great results, too). Hopefully you’ll find my experience relevant to yours and comforting.

My native language is Russian (thanks for the alphabet) and I’ve never been outside the country. I learned English mostly playing Space Station 13, which is an online role-playing game (if you let it be) where you have to read a lot (some of it even outside the game, i.e. guides and forums to get a good grasp of some mechanics) and write a lot (to communicate with other players); I mostly opted for translating single words or, sometimes, short phrases that I couldn’t understand, and did it both ways, i.e. to English and to Russian. On top of that, I spent a lot of time talking to people on the Internet, both on forums of various kind and through private/direct messages.

So I read a lot, admittedly, even if it wasn’t fiction. I also watched a lot of YouTube and other media, but I can’t say it did much for my vocabulary.

As expected, I saw more progress when I was not that good with the language, because I had to face a lot of the frequent words, phrases, and constructions. At some point I just stopped encountering much new.

But that was until I picked up fiction in English. I can’t remember how often I had to look a word up, but I can definitely say that I had to do that more with Lovecraft than Rowling, for example, and never with some others. Hell, sometimes I have to look things up when reading Russian writers.

So, first of all, this is completely normal, especially if it happens with words that you recognize as non-essential for the plot or your understanding of the events. Second, it very much depends on the book and the author.

If I had to guess, you probably experience that with verbs or adjectives, as these usually serve as the means of introducing some variety or profoundness into one’s texts. I would say that, if you can help it, ignore them until they really prevent you from truly grasping the idea of what’s going on or what kind of emotions it’s supposed to invoke. You, however, mention that you are able to infer the meaning of many of the words you look up from context - and I, being a bit of a scientist, say that this is probably the best (if not the only) way to actually learn a word.

I’m saying this because language is a very abstract phenomenon, and so is everything that it is comprised of. In English, for example, we have two separate words for a desk and a table, while both are translated as “Стол” (Stol) to Russian, because the distinction between the two never necessitated a single-world solution to my ancestors, apparently. Whatever people put in dictionaries is an approximation of what multitudes of people that speak the given language think of when they hear or use the word, and that’s very different between languages.

So, I think that the best a person who understands the language as much as you do should just try and consciously resist the urge to look up meanings, for it seems to me that the context can already give you more than enough idea. As a result, I believe you should enjoy the act of reading more and develop a more natural, intuitive understanding of the words you may encounter.

But most importantly, don’t forget to praise yourself on the already-massive achievement you’ve made, and thank yourself for the gift of being able to comprehend the vast amount of literature and other thoughts and ideas that the speakers of the English language have produced across centuries. Good job, good luck!

Not sure what lists you’re talking about, but it’s nerding time anyway.

The backslash (the \ symbol) is used to “escape” characters in the software world, i.e. tell the software to treat the following character as a simple symbol, not some instruction. It’s very well-known among developers, so if they happen to be the ones writing guides on Markdown (the syntax where you use asterisks and some other symbols to dictate the final layout while having the luxury of being able to edit the document in a plain-text editor), it can actually elude them because it’s mundane.

In fact, some software won’t allow you to use the backslash in short text fields such as names or passwords because doing so could potentially open up security risks where the malicious actors “inject” some instructions into software to cause all sorts of trouble. On the other hand, this is probably a redundant old measure, as there are usually other means to prevent this kind of attack today, but that’s the power of habit, I guess; and, well, if it’s a simple measure that works, there’s not much reason to get rid of it, is there?

Obligatory fuck AI and the illeterate bros pushing it.

What kind of videos, though? A lot of such material is very far from being proper educational material that we show other people to really teach them much, let alone educate them well enough to be anywhere trustworthy. This is a very processed material, with years of preparation once you consider the prior education of the individuals involved in the creative process - think of the past experiences silently influencing them, their initial knowledge on the subject obtained from somewhat basic facts from school or otherwise, their misconceptions, iterations that nobody knows about, and many other things that we don’t usually directly associate with the act of working on something like a video, but that eventually do dictate a lot of the decisions and opinions put into it.

It’s one thing that the AI has no intelligence in it whatsoever, but the fact that it’s being pumped with information and “knowledge” in basically the reverse order doesn’t help it become any better.

On the other hand, the entire thing is not about making something that works well, but something that sells well. And then there’s people putting too much faith into the thing and trusting it with way too much stuff than they should (which is also the case with a lot of other tech, though, admittedly).

Some things of today are so damn unexciting.

We’re very proficient at walking, but somehow haven’t produced a walking home or anything like that.

It’s not very linear.

In most cases, it is - it means you get way less money for the period, because for many, their salary consists of some fixed base rate (usually small, not even making 50% of the total compensation) with various bonuses on top (which employers use for punishment and leverage, etc.); naturally, you don’t meet the KPIs or whatever equivalent when you’re on vacation, so the money you end up getting paid is actually insultingly small.

The exceptions are, of course, various execs, top management, etc., but also some industry workers (although that may heavily depend on the company, role, branch, etc.); the latter sometimes get other benefits, though, life being eligible for a full vacation pack type deal for a fraction of a price or something like that, but that, too, has been dwindling for many years now. too.

The rest depends on your company and role, like the IT people still feeling good all things considered, because their base salary is just that much higher.

Same with sick leave.

People voting for populists are much more likely to see the scapegoats their electees talk about in their life than an actual billionaire that exploited them, though. And there’s the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” narrative we’ve been forced upon, too.