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Cake day: May 16th, 2024

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  • For movies/TV shows, try rutracker.org. The interface is in russian, but the torrents almost always include english audio tracks for US/UK movies. Movies from other countries typically do include the original audio track and english subs.

    They have a tone of older torrents, with some relatively rare content. There are some strange nuances such as SD rips are often posted with Xvid encoding (even new ones) and HD releases have a rule where they need to include all known russian Dubs/MVO/DVO/AVO audio tracks, so a large part of the file is audio.

    But the good thing is that, even low health torrents often eventually have a seed appear. They have a massive networks of seeds/peers that are actually "federated" with lots of other trackers).

    For relatively high seed/peer content you can also basically stream the release via "Download in sequential order" and "Download first and last piece first". I regularly essentially stream movies via this method.

    They are decent for music too. Video games will likely be challenging if you don't speak russian and many releases actually don't include the original language.



  • While RMS does come off as provincial and somewhat delusional, he is a very smart and forward-looking fellow. I agree with his take on big corporation, privacy, freedom.

    What I don't agree with is promoting Snowden as a messenger for RMS' viewpoints. You can't have it both ways; he can't be both forced to collaborate with the russians for his "survival" and be open in his statements. There are many other folks worth promoting who share RMS' viewpoints.

    There isn’t such a thing as “good surveillance”, or “better surveillance”, if you do surveillance you can’t pretend a position of moral superiority to others who do the same, even if you still don’t chase people who say certain things online, it’s on the horizon. Thanks to Snowden sacrifice we know some of the USA government surveillance. He didn’t “back down at the first sign of trouble”, what he did made him lose the life he had, I’d like to see you in his position.

    This is where you have a very primitive and parochial take. Getting sent to jail via kangaroo court for a relatively moderate social media post is far more damaging than the impact of western surveillance. If you don't understand this you are lost.

    He did back down at the first sign of trouble. He chose to work with the russian security services when things got rough. He had other choices, go back to the US, refuse to work with the russians and just let them know that he would prefer to keep quiet.

    You seem to have a very "hollywood" interpretation of russian security services. Yes, they are brutal, but their propaganda/communication outreach is not some "star wars antagonist" type bullshit. They see value in Snowden, simply executing him or even sending him to jail would undermine this value for them.




  • Assange has also worked directly on russian payroll (he had a program on RT) and has basically admitted that he supports russian imperialism (not in such an explicit manner, but we are all adults here). Not to mention he had no issues undermining the safety of whole multitude of people in his leaks as part of his quest for fame.

    Snowden knew (or should have known) what he is signing up for. Collaborating with the russians (whose internal control of local internet services and jailing of people for social media posts makes the US look reasonable and human rights focused) is not right.

    And even from a pragmatic standpoint; let's say I believed all the stories about Snowden not having any other options (I speculate that he actually supports russian imperialism and their methods); why should anything he says be given any attention?

    Tomorrow the russians might tell him that he needs to promote that Stallman is evil pedophile and Adobe are a great company. You're saying he will suddenly reject their orders and refuse to execute them?

    What is your logic here?







  • He has been directly collaborating with russian security services via his internet outreach. I don't know if you know russian or know anything about their propaganda initiatives (both current and its ideological roots), but this is pretty obvious from his messaging. I disagree with your characterization as a fallacious argument; you seem to be ignorant of the matters at hand. Honestly, you seem concerned that someone dared criticize an individual that you seem to venerate.

    You don't see any issue (in context of technology-focused discussion) of highlighting his endorsement of FOSS while ignoring that he works for a regime that has absolute surveillance powers over local digital services and routinely jails people for social media posts?






  • Fair point. I guess this was more of a casual post, so I didn't think too much about it.

    I would have preferred if they switched to new keyboard model in version 8.x by default.

    I am a relatively light Linux user. Raspberry Pi headless via DietPi/Debian for NAS/Media server/torrents/PiHole and some experiments with self hosted services on major cloud services. I prefer to stick to defaults whenever possible.


  • I don't mean to underestimate or playdown China's potential. Being from the former (russia-occupied) USSR, I think both the west and global south severely underestimate and misunderstand the nature of China/Russia (and how to deal with them).

    What I am saying is that there are also inherent weaknesses to their economic and political systems that are often completely ignored; typically because they tend to be more medium/long term in nature.

    Hell, you can see it now with older chips at bigger physical nodes where China is now a significant portion of global production.

    Genuinely curious if you have any data on this.

    Will the PRC chip industry face many challenges? Of course it will. However, the PRC’s track record of going from nothing to 5nm in a few years cannot be ignored by TSMC.

    This is one example of "western" misinterpretation/misunderstanding of a regime such as China. While one should not casually dismiss their achievements, one should also be critical about their PR statement regarding 5nm.

    To my understanding their 5nm approach has yet to be delivered (show me a product with a 5nm chip) and its fundamentally unsuitable for mass scale production.

    It is reasonable to evaluate the role of "5nm" as a PR move and not as a working product.

    I would speculate even their "7nm" chips may be less competitively viable than one would think based on their use in Huawei's smartphones. I could be wrong though, it's difficult to find good information on this topic.




  • The development of PRC's chip industry is not guaranteed to go on a exponential curve.

    There are inherently some disincentives to PRC's approach to managing their chip industry, lots of money chasing limited productive projects (you can bet some opportunistic people in China are going to try and piggyback the money faucet). Essentially no-bid type contracts that are going to create a culture of stagnation (at least partially). Lack of a broad customer base (e.g. Apple essentially bankrolling new nodes at TSMC); global demand will always be way bigger and more sophisticated than China, Russia and Iran.

    Then you also have technical limitations like lack of access to hardware from ASML, more limited (and less competitive) tooling and design ecosystem.