you just had to read, gp wrote quite literally "since there was no barrier-to-entry for people with zero industry experience or no computer science understanding to come along, write shitty code, and ask dumb questions". although i'm not sure about go (it seemed to me yet another unnecessary language reinventing the wheel so i never bothered with it) this is a common problem in software development.

e.g. while many software engineers despise javascript, it is actually quite a nifty language with pretty unique features (granted, and some weirdness). the problem with javascript is that most programmers using it were shitty programmers that never understood this nor bothered to learn the language and just wrote tons of shitty javascript code. this is because most either had no programming background at all, or were java/php programmers that thought it would be a good idea to use javascript as if it were java or php.

you could say that as "it was too popular", or as gp put it, it had "too low a barrier of entry".

it wasn't meant as a justification, more an observation, but nevertheless i assure you that nothing in my mind is rock solid.

dunno, X11 is probably good given its track record but time is also a factor. it has been instrumental but maybe it's just not that appealing anymore, so it slowly goes out of focus, of both sharks and hobbyists. it's still there for those who absolutely want it and it might become relevant again in the future, who knows. anyway, good point, i'll amend my observation: "if not, then humanity just didn't deserve or need it".

regarding ego stoking, spot on and point taken. it has always been about the comments, not the half-assed web scraping interspersed with ads. still, some "news" do convey some actual information or interesting twist, this just wasn't such an occasion, and i felt like pointing out the obvious lest people tend to obviate the obvious and jump head on into passionate discussions about really nothing. oh well ...

i mean, opensource is doomed several times a month around here, it's recurring clickbait.

and why should those be relevant? if they aren't willing or able to properly use/support software that was gifted to them and is important for their business, then let them pay through their nose to some sharks to keep using it. couldn't care less.

sharks be sharks, and this pattern is as old as opensource itself. if the original project is any good it will live on with new maintainers. if not, then humanity just didn't deserve it, and just the same applies to opensource as a whole. i would say it's not doing that bad. but tech reporters have to write about something to meet quotas i guess.

hong kong has been part of china for thousands of years until ... wait, the british took it away and kept it for a century and a half until they handed it over back to china as an administrative region.

"want to do" is not "do". china asserts claim over taiwan and while that's ofc debatable, i don't know of any hostile move by china to take it over yet.

say what? if you mean the huge pile of us dollars in china's possession, that has benefited the us dollar for decades more than anything. other than that, currency manipulation is something every financial actor on the planet does, from private to states.

slavery is a global scourge which is amply promoted by powers all over the world. guess where the 90% of the cocoa for your chocolate cookies comes from ... hint: not from china. besides, cocoa is not only slave labor, it's child slave labor. how you would sustain that china in particular is more involved in that than any other nation would be interesting, but even then it would hardly qualify as "international hostility".

supply and demand, underline "demand". besides, canada and mexico are huge suppliers of fentanyl to the us too, and i don't see them declared "hostile countries". this is just more nonsense.

if you say so ... funny that this is actually the single one of your arguments that could actually make sense because it isn't a straight false accusation, but it's a very weak one. china, like any other country, is perfectly entitled to dictate what business is acceptable inside its borders and under what conditions. anyhow that's being protectionist, not hostile. otoh prohibiting technology that is available to the whole world to be exported specifically to china is not protectionism, because its aim is not to protect one's own economy, but to hamper china's progress. that is an example of a hostile international action.

yeah, i'm sorry but you have no argument.

i just fail to see how any of that qualifies as international hostility.

the article is about beer, not carbonated horse piss.

well, if you reflect a bit on what world powers actually are, you will realize that they will always consider each other hostile simply because they do have the capacity to be a threat. they have to, this is just in the nature of power.

then again, if you're surprised you probably haven't checked reality much lately. us's sanctions and embargoes on china are hostile and there is no record of any equivalent prior act of hostility from china to the us. so yes, flashy news, the us is actually officially more hostile in this context than china. but wait, it gets better, because while china is a pretty harsh regime, they have been behaving pretty peacefully in the international area in the past three to four decades, they expand through trade, while the us has been creating wars all over the planet, clusterfuck after clusterfuck non stop. so if we consider the historical record there is little doubt that the us is the most hostile entity for the world, and by a huge margin. surprise surprise!

maybe you think that since the us are the "good guys" they get a special pass, that all that violence and treachery doesn't count, it's for the greater good blablabla but, well ... that just doesn't float and it doesn't look like that to the rest of the world.

yeah silly, it's of course much smarter to rely on foreign systems from a hostile country because it is certified by white hat hackers ...

it makes perfect sense because it is not at all the same. those embargoes were a threat and actually boosted their own production, so they are now better suited to actually become independent, specially in public and critical infrastructure. that would be a smart thing to do for any country, but much more so for china going forward, precisely because of those embargoes. and afaik they aren't really banning anything but tbh the article is really vague beyond the screaming headline so, who knows, this might be all just creative reporting. still plausible, it's the sensible thing that i would expect them to do.

your "easy fix" not only tries to solve the wrong problem (the mechanical process of voting instead of the systemic disinformation and candidates being rigged in the first place, which was gp's point) but also creates a huge denial of service opportunity. imagine millions of trump voters (or biden voters for that matter, but in light of recent events trump is a more graphic example) challenging an election the next day just because they don't seem to find their name on the list, or they suspect names from non-existing persons. who is supposed to even try to supervise that clusterfuck, and how? furthermore, how would you possibly "know that no extra votes were counted"? do you know everyone on the list by name?

this is a common problem with "easy fixes", they tend to actually not be easy and not to be fixes at all.

fun fact, that mechanical problem is actually already adequately solved in many countries with id's, voting cards and polling station lists, while still respecting voter anonymity. guess what, elections are still largely a farce just about everywhere, because the mechanic isn't really the problem.

the whole point of deviating from the herd is that they don't.

and the solid evidence for that would be?

nope, the us uses other means you might find more civilized and ethical but have ended up in war just the same. if us elites hadn't meddled to push for ukraine's incorporation into the western sphere of influence, ukraine would still be a peaceful country today, they probably wouldn't have had a civil war, they would still hold crimea and wouldn't have suffered the ordeal of an invasion and getting wrecked. then again i'm not seeking any moral ground here, just observing the power game playing out. that's just the reality of power dynamics and i find moral justifications (or lack thereof) are largely irrelevant in that context, only useful to either appease or inflame public opinion.

that's not even a bad description of events. of course russia probably wouldn't want to kill zelensky outright, just depose him, but we know these things can get easily south. yanukovich's car got shot at while he was fleeing for his life (although he denied to be fleeing) when he was deposed by the coup.

and what you got fundamentally wrong, i think, is russia's fear. for one, it doesn't even really matter what you or me think, what matters is what they think, and the fact that they're definitely not a chihuaha. what we do know is that they have definitely told us once and again. and let's not fool ourselves, nato isn't "a defensive alliance", in fact it is an alliance only in name as europe is completely subservient. nato is the projection of us military power over the european continent and russia has, as recent history shows, every reason not to trust the us. just imagine a warsaw pact inching nearer and nearer to the us and "promoting democracy" in say, canada, mexico or cuba.

i also would advise (again) against this form of wishful thinking (that's where we started!), although you got your facts pretty straight about the geography and it is determinant, there are lots of ways to wage war.

sorry for the delay in replying, i'll gonna be offline a couple of days.

possibly. i really hadn't looked at that region too closely, thanks for pointing that out. on a more general level, you tend to favor to point out how and where russia might be in trouble. russia no doubt has lots of troubles and fires to tend to. i would like to reiterate that i'm not defending or even endorsing russian positions, nor am i particularly vested in russian success or even survival. but for me russia is just as rational an actor as anyone else, i can see where their motivations come from, and for me it is 1st about understanding the world and what is actually happening around me and why, and 2nd about russia being "too big to fail" and the particularly worrying prospect of some in the west being very eager to see it fail. we (our generation) never expected a war in europe, but it did happen, and it could be worse.

on point, my uneducated guess is that russia would easily cede kaliningrad if it came to blows albeit it being an important commercial and strategic hub, it's simply not holdable. it could be an excellent asset but they way it is now it's just a liability. how that came to be i really don't know, it's really uncharacteristic. russia was weak at the time, but it was waging "special operations" relatively shortly before and after that for similar reasons, so there must be something more to it. the whole thing is an anomaly, and the story of their relations with lithuania in particular seems also curious and full of ups and downs, i'll have to dig a bit into that.

kaliningrad was pretty much compromised when the baltic states joined nato, russia tried vehemently to oppose that too but was far too weak to do anything about it. that's something they have to live with now.

the finnish border is indeed another story, but that cuts both ways. now finland will be on the frontline if trouble escalates between nato and russia, which is why russia already said they will be amassing units there. that escalation could happen far away, say for example in ukraine if nato involvement becomes so blatant or extensive that not even russia is able to play it down. as i said before, i'm not sure that's good news for neither russia nor finland nor the continent. then again the argument can be made that if such escalation happens there probably won't be a safe place anywhere in europe anyway, maybe not in the world.