So. Say what you want about Russian racketeer government’s practices, the former local franchise called “Vkusno i tochka” doesn’t do this.

Does feel bland other than their fish burger though.

I’ve read Burger King is considered bad in the USA, in Russia it’s kinda fine.

No pair of different CPU models is an apples to apples comparison. But comparing two CPUs of the same ISA with similar implementations using tact frequencies and core numbers and cache sizes might make sense. Like two AMD Ryzen CPUs or two Intel CPUs.

OK, I mean, there are benchmarks for this kind of thing.

I’m not sure rounded corners or a certain kind of icons are much better.

Read again.

SEO is not the problem, the problem is that it’s not balanced with opposing interest.

I’ll explain: there’s no mechanism to reward fighting it, and there’s no mechanism to reward providing computing resources to some ideal public search engine, sort of modern take at Archie, that would allow complex queries, would be federated and wouldn’t rate results by some obscure metric.

I mean that if, suppose, some sort of (for public indexes) a mechanism similar to garbage collection in programming existed for search engines, where the referenced objects to be preserved would be those taken from some modern alternative of trusted web rings and directories, and the rest would be discarded as it should, you could have a usable search engine with no obscure metrics.

The problems here are - 1) web rings and directories were not a technical concept, but a social one, a kind of webpages, 2) trust was also social, 3) you need to reward people making these, these can only be made by people.

Which is where I want to say that maybe cryptobros were much better than AI bros, since they have produced some means to make that.

Good rings and directories can be rewarded by cryptocurrency payments. Their consistency can be tracked via blockchains, that’s one of the good uses, I think. And the same thing with trust.

Then the actual content of indexes might be shared via some Kademlia-like network.

In short, you need ability to pay for good things made by people, which was a problem in the golden age of the Web, and you need to make search engines not the enemy of web rings and directories, but something working on top of them.

There’s a lot of misguided enthusiasm over taking people out of the loop and somehow making a system that will purely automatically find what we need, there’s no such thing. Web rings and directories were how it should be done. There just should have been a different model of layers in that whole “Web” thing. Rings and directories being technical objects and not a kind of webpages, tying together pages and groups of pages, and indexers walking over those of them someone wants to track in a standard way. It just should be structured. Probably links (references) should also be a separate object, containing versions of two pages, the source and the target, position inside them and some display information. Not a link inside the page object.

OK, I’m thinking about this again, what the hell.

I think in older search engines the results were not rated at all, and you could use syntax similar to SQL.

Using them as sort of a Web index. Would be very useful if not for all the bots and SEO sites.

Unfortunately, Google, Yahoo and others gradually reduced that to just a set of keywords.

Yes, that’s how plenty of 60s’ and 70s’ sci-fi stories were about finding gems in the dust, and much of XIX century gothic stuff.

That’s sarcasm. Each time is like no other, but also the grass is always greener 100 years ago, and it’s always somehow better and worse at the same time.

But then, of course, there are tendencies and periods which won’t be remembered kindly or won’t be remembered at all.

I have only one question about that title - why the hell would anyone play a game with ads? People play games to relax, to get some rest from society, or to have some personal time with their friends mowing down cockroach hordes or something like that defending their city-fortress.

Until competitors are able to develop and sell games without such ads, people will just play those.

sometimes well over a decade ago.

Sometimes before I was born, that’d be 3 decades ago.

Networked collaborative office applications were a thing before 1995, BTW. Networks were not quite up to the task, but the rest was there.

Famous things like Word, Photoshop, AutoCAD and even raytracers were already feature-complete (by the computing ability of that time).

The Web (not the current one, but the hand-edited HTML pages by amateurs, Perl scripts as CGI, web rings and directories one) was the main new revolutionary thing in those, as you might have noticed, it’s also the very thing they are trying to destroy from all angles.

The overarching problem is that people who want you to buy things you don’t need and not buy things you need from someone else and not tell them to go to hell are able to push regulations and standards in their favor. They are joined by power-hungry people in governments in that.

All that is tangential to personal computers. A personal computer is a very powerful concept, especially with the Web (as it existed), and there are people trying to dilute and disperse and destroy that.

It’s all similar to printing press, mass media, widespread literacy, freedom of speech, all these things. A very important thing to protect.

That’s because didactics and urbanism of today are not science-driven, or more precisely, they are science driven, but aimed at things different than stated.

There’s the famous city benches example, that today’s typical benches are only useful for sitting in one inconvenient pose not doing anything useful and not moving, and for not too long, you won’t even be able to relax. And that’s considered good urbanism, it disallows people to lie down on a bench (that’s in itself not too bad a thing, who the hell decided we all should be upright stick-in-the-butt serious types, preferably in suits, with faces like from ads, only doing things the accepted way? what’s the problem in someone sleeping a few hours on a bench? it attracts drunks and homeless? they’ll make their own bench of cardboard and junk, I promise you it won’t smell better), to take conversational poses while sitting on a bench (like when playing chess or drinking coffee or eating a sandwich or whatever, use it as a social space), to even rest - one would think benches are for resting.

It’s being justified in various ways, but in fact these “urbanists” are not too different from police agents, their only goal is to destroy opportunities for public social spaces in urban areas forming. They are approaching the problem scientifically, just not the one they are claiming to approach. They don’t want you to just meet and talk with strangers, or hang out with your friends, without all the control apparatus of FAANG moderation, whitelist of allowed ways to communicate typical for today’s Web, blackbox recommendations and no agency at all. That’s also why today’s urban park zones are more like green streets than like well-treated small forests.

It’s the same with learning environments for children and playgrounds. It’s being claimed that those “safe spaces and only vetted ways to communicate” environments and approaches are scientifically justified for didactics, for that they are not, but they condition children to obey authority. It’s aimed to discourage them from thinking outside of the presented ruleset, from verifying and checking claimed reality, and from experimenting before believing. Like those idiotic colorful playgrounds with nothing really to do, which is why children are usually not very excited with them. If you take a child to a zoo, they’ll look at animals all the time and never be bored, and they’ll play in all the spaces around, just because those are neutral things like containers for junk and benches (normal ones) and signs. But in a dedicated playground (a modern one, with all that colored plastic round crap) they’ll be bored to hell, because those are not designed to be interesting for children. They might play in the surroundings, because, well, they usually don’t erase the district around that new playground, but those playing in the new playground itself are usually like 4-6 years old at best.

It’s all crap aimed at somehow “growing” and “conditioning” people who will be better material for what these jerks want the humanity to be, with their likes being the ones making policies, of course.

It’s the lowest quality human material experimenting on others’ children.

Each and every such initiative should be met with Molotov cocktails and just somehow broken legs for those pushing them.

Because, no matter the inconveniences, universal city spaces are necessary with all the homeless and drunks and junkies and exhibitionists and hooligans included, and environments for children allowing to learn are also necessary.

Those doing all this “safety” crap only want to somehow grow a generation of humans that will obey.

Kaspersky had, of what I’ve head, their hardened OS implementing Linux ABI (of 2.6 times). Was apparently even floating somewhere around the interwebs. Don’t know of commercial uses, but honestly there could be such amounts of money directed at solving that goal that all the Russians in Thailand combined won’t be very significant in comparison, even evaluated themselves as potential organs.

How do you know the pay is terrible?

Qualified people seem to work for drug cartels and slavers. I’m certain a nation-state can provide both pay and conscience better than that.

How do you know?

I suppose people allowed near him are already sufficiently background-checked and threat-impressed.

Of what I’ve heard about Putin and computers, it’s very probable this PC is running some hardened Linux distribution made look like Windows, or even a specialized OS developed for him specifically, and all it does is show previously prepared pictures and run some narrow-function native applications too developed specifically for the occasion.

And it’s probably not a persistent installation. And it’ll probably be destroyed after he’s done with voting or “voting”.

And I can’t imagine it not being air-gapped with the kind of security measures they write about in other things.

And I’m probably confidently wrong in many things, just the security part with computers that man seems to take seriously enough.

Honestly this is right, when you are considering how wary you should be of this or that thing, it’s good to pay attention to what powerful people are doing of what seems more or less certain. They, of course, can afford some things impractical for you or me.

This wasn’t the case before 2022, but after MS no longer officially selling licenses in Russia, it’s everyone again.

But it’s different, for things you can’t license because of sanctions piracy is seen as normal, for other things nobody cares, but people stopped pirating.

In general, the ex-Soviet culture of not understanding copyright violations as real crime at all, period, is gone. It’s a few tech-savvy people, sometimes older, and “pirate party” idealists, and communists (not all of them by far).

Those Russian piracy sites are, as a rule, banned in Russia. They mostly started 20+ years ago.

However, those doing copyright protection in Russia are mostly former pirates who legalized their business via some acquaintances. Oops. I also doubt that Aldebaran (the e-book library), for example, licensed all of the books they give for a buck from authors, and with LitRes it’s also highly unlikely. There are plenty of other such Russian paid e-book libraries, movie sites and so on.

It’s a common opinion in Russia that there’s some western “rule of law” which, if applied to Russia, could fix it, I think it’s the other way around, the main problem with Russia’s society is the inferiority complexes, the “rule of law” one among them, leading people to overlook brakes and feedbacks existing in the wild to good effect, when deciding what they want “fixed” and “civilized” to be good.

That “rule of law” idea sometimes leads to following laws set by people who just don’t understand what “acting in good faith” means.

EDIT: What I meant is that piracy situation in Russia is close to what’s it’s in the western countries now, except for sanctions. Younger people pirate, but not all of them. Older and middle age people often see piracy as something bad and shameful. In the “nobody in Russia pays for software” times it was the other way around, most people didn’t understand the concept, and younger and more fashionable people had some licensed copies to boast and would tell their acquaintances that actually it’s very cool to buy official copies, pay for software, give it back to authors, and that otherwise it’d be theft and those people whose names are printed here and here wouldn’t really approve, to say the least.