Just what the fuck is this timeline? I was born in Russia and spent a good chunk of my life basically idolizing USA, UK, EU, other European countries, English-first countries, etc.

By the time I had the language and professional skills to try and migrate into a probably really good life, suddenly there’s a rise of authoritarianism, loss of privacy, rollback to the political right and intolerance and hatred and whatever.

There’s still a long way for these nations to go before things are as bad as here, but the differences still are dwindling at an alarming rate and I often find myself wondering if it’s gonna be worth the effort if I want to eventually move to someplace that still respects privacy and freedom and is sensible about the Internet and digital technologies.

There’s still a lot of perks from knowing English as well as I do, but at this point, I think I’d have to learn German or Swedish or some other northern EU language if I ever make up my mind.

And by the time I’m ready, these countries will roll out some bullshit, too, right?

And then there’s Visa and MasterCard telling you what you can and can’t purchase because some conservative cesspool wrote some emails - but gamers’ emails are ignored…

It’s all so demoralising. I miss looking forward to the future with hope and excitement for things.

This and what Putin’s presidency turned out to become in the long run is what I now happen to imagine largely felt like to witness the Nazis rise to power.

You just don’t know what’s coming before it’s actually there. The historical evidence even shows that the Nazis weren’t that out-of-touch with reality at first, at least in terms of what was largely acceptable back in their day - like rights to land, borders, with many countries and nations being in a very turbulent state after the first World War. It’s only after they got the power and set up the frameworks, like gradually oppressive laws and manipulating opinions and values through propaganda, that they went to do what we ultimately associate them with.

Putin spoke very high of “the west” and democracy and such at first, but quickly showed his true self when the Kursk sank, then with Beslan (the Nord Ost), then many more times, but back in the day, without today’s hindsight, it seemed so… plausibly deniable? Like people could just vote him out the next time or excuse some things with the same traumas and biases that still brewed in the generations born in or shorty after the USSR. Now a full-blown tyrant, modernized to dictate through deceit, looking wild compared to his first days - a proper example of boiling the proverbial frog; turning the dial little by little, either compounding into some greater evil or simply revealing its true self, both equally inconsequential in the end.

Trump and Musk, similarly, have for the most part been interesting characters, so bizarre that excepting anything more felt naive, beyond the realm of possible. And yet again, unless there is enough backlash early on, people like this will keep pushing, until they lead us to the edge.

I never wanted to see for myself how something so terrible can rise to power, seemingly past everyone’s attention. It’s dreadful to think that the lessons of history are bets learned on one’s own mistakes, that the Germany’s experience is not enough to generate the unrest that keeps such people out of power.

I’m not even on the same continent as these two, but I know they’ll be influencing a whole lot of change around the world, change that will never benefit any way.

The more things change…

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?

That’s a direct pipeline, it seems. Goes straight to the EU.

There’s a different pipeline (maybe several, not sure) going through Ukraine.

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.