article from the Wikipedia footnotes with a success story involving a 30 year old virgin IT guy. might be interesting for the wider lemmy userbase (affectionate) https://www.salon.com/2003/10/08/virgin_6/

Hard to believe it’s legal in the US though (even the regular therapist in the article didn’t believe it initially).

Honestly, I’m not full on Russian. I haven’t lived there since 2022 and when I did I was not meaningfully politically active, nor do I personally know many people who are. All I really have is the language and a view of Russian social media.

However Russia still has free and open Internet access, with the notable exception of Facebook Instagram and Twitter (and lots of people evade those blocks as well- laws on firewall evasion are harsh but enforced pretty selectively, like for content piracy in the West).

Unfortunately many politically opinionated Russians seem to have very right wing politics only occasionally dressed up in “liberal” language (hey, kinda like America). For example, a prevailing opinion among “liberal” opposition is that Gaza should be annexed and/or turned into a parking lot by Israel (possibly because Putin himself has expressed lukewarm verbal support for Palestine). And also like America this is a generational thing with the youth seeming to be more left wing/anticapitalist, but that position is locked out of politics. But even on e.g. reddit you still have plenty of people on /r/askarussian. Same for YouTube and telegram. Those are all proper social media with sizeable Russian populations and relatively lax censorship. I’m sure there are some on the fediverse too, but they can’t get too uppity lest they invoke the wrath of roskomnadzor (fedi is more vulnerable to selective censorship than centralized networks like yt/tg). I’ll compile and link to a list of English speaking public figures I like in a followup comment.

As for the future changes, it’s very hard to predict, but I think the most probable change in Russia will start after something happens to the physical health of one very paranoid man. The war is so clearly against the objective interests of a very large portion of Russia’s ruling class that I’m amazed it was allowed to happen at all, but so far it seems like an effective method/excuse to tighten the screws on internal opposition. Seems like that’s really the only thing the regime excels at and how they stay in power. The tipping point (as it was all the other times) is a physically unbearable economic crisis, to the point people start experiencing real hardship such as famine. At that point people start looking around for alternative answers to their political questions.

it’s just called that, it’s not meaningfully Russian. But also people exaggerate, it’s not as bad as all that- my instance lemm.ee federates with both and I haven’t run into too many issues.

What is pt?

Also, amazing story and glad that you’re doing better

Have you looked into whether people with the condition are more likely to be LGBT? I get the feeling like it could be linked

One immediate difference is that the mountains of Afghanistan are very ill suited to fighting a conventional artillery centered war, unlike the steppes of eastern Ukraine.

Also I disagree with the second paragraph. As our (inshallah) future president says, “you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you”. Ukraine’s decision making is dependent on the internal politics of the US and to a lesser extent the EU. I kinda doubt the EU by itself could handle supplying Ukraine if America elects trump and tells them to take a hike). Shit, we are seeing europe turning to fascism before our very eyes now that they’re experiencing real inflation since the Russians cut off their cheap gas.

I am very worried about how that will affect Ukraine aid as europe turns inward and starts focusing on rooting out the evil immigrants who are apparently to blame for all their problems.

Despite all that, as a Russian and a socialist I do hope Ukraine isn’t conquered and the Russian pseudo monarchy has a revolution and is replaced with something more democratic. I just don’t see a clear path to there with how things are going in the world.

If things somehow went very south for Ukraine and they were at risk of losing significantly more territory (not a +1% gain) and Trump gets reelected and the alliance fragments, then perhaps they’d try to negotiate

Shouldn’t it be obvious that at that point, Russian high command would see no point in negotiating much of anything? The best time for Ukraine to negotiate and sue for peace is when they have the initiative due to some technical/strategic innovation that leads to short term battlefield success (at least until the Russians adapt). The gains following the introduction of HIMARS back in 22 are one example. But himars is a child’s toy compared to real military innovation, which was already done in 1945 and we’ve been living in low key terror ever since.

But besides jokes about letting Ukraine have nukes again, I cannot see them ever winning a conventional war of attrition. They simply lack the manpower.

Discord also has an option to pay for server boosting (increased bandwidth and storage limits) which is a much more reasonable thing to pay for imo

Man I remember reading about them in wired back during the bush administration nope it launched in 2010

My (we’re Russian) mom always said it was because true cowboys know that if you take them off a scorpion could crawl in, so better safe than sorry

Varoufakis (Marxist econ professor and also briefly the Greek finance minister) wrote a book about this called “the adults in the room”. He’s biased of course but I respect him a lot

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iirc some phone keyboards autosuggest emoji when you type a word, op probably just didn’t bother to remove it

We already tried this with something awful and it was still in fact kinda awful

afaik they can’t do any business with Russian customers since March 2022 because of the sanctions

It’ll probably be done with an overlay/prompt for the user to click on (Unless the advertiser is paying for exposure and not direct traffic idk). But such a popup would provide a hook for a patched version of yt-dl to detect the ad and trim it out of the final video.

Also, shouldn’t a forum signature at all should be enough to screw with AI scrapers? No need to link to anything specific

Semantic/licensing quibbles aside, these futo guys seem pretty based (affectionate). They even use the word “normies” in their goals/value statement.

Seriously tho, with power/wealth as lopsided as it is in america, we really need capitalist class traitors to get anything done and I’m glad people like this exist

What do you mean nobody controls the information? We’re sitting here talking on lemmy, but most people (or at least most vooters) get their information from capital intensive sources controlled by the ruling class. Television is captured and subject to manipulation, mainstream “algorithmic” social media is captured and subject to manipulation, independent (local) print media is dead. I get really depressed when I think about it

That’s not the criteria, the criteria is whoever is the loudest in criticizing the status quo. And the far right is the loudest

The far right would make everyone poorer but wouldn’t change the class structure, so they are allowed to exist while the left gets suppressed. See for example how many of the titans of industry in west germany who supported the Nazis got off scot free (or with much commuted sentences) and got to keep their assets. The system works :)

30 years, no?