No need to worry, it won’t even be reflected on any map worth using

(just noticed that it doesn’t even get mentioned as an alternative name in the Wikipedia summary lol)

I’m not sure “virtue” is the right word. Perhaps “asshole signaling”?

Why would anyone leak their identity to Telegram when a certain RUssian torrent TRACKER forum ORGanization is right there?

As the other commenter said, not much point moving to Signal, while it is at least E2E encrypted it also suffers from potential privacy issues. I would say if you have to move, move to XMPP or (maybe) Matrix.

As (technically) a Russian dissident, the majority of Russian dissidents are idiots. See: support for Navalniy, support for Gaza genocide. FWIW I’m an idiot too.

Telegram is not private at all, it is not encrypted by default, and there are likely ways for three-letter agencies to leak your identity even without full cooperation from Telegram LLC.

While it’s true that Durov is somewhat anti-Putin, that doesn’t help you as (likely) a citizen of a western country. Durov will clearly cooperate with western governments on their demands, he holds French citizenship and regularly travels to Europe.

IDK about France, but the Rammstein base is American, so I don’t know hoe much control Germany has over what USA does with it.

I think a stance like that of Spain would be ideal: close the airspace to US military aircraft. Let them use the base however the fuck they want.

I know they’ve made problems enough for Trump to be extremely pissed.

I feel like it had more to do with Merz making public statements humiliating trump. There was (and still is!) plenty of US military aircraft landing and taking off from Rammstein. The clown-in-chief is a narcissist who can’t stand public criticism or humiliation of his person, so a reaction like this sounds up his alley.

That is understandable IMO, refueling and recon are not acts of war. So I think they have found that a sensible balance to not seem unreasonable.

Both are logistical support for a war that is poised to seriously hurt their economies.

Look at it another way: what would you say if Romania let Russian spy aircraft use their airfields for recon over Ukraine, and Russian support aircraft fly refuelling missions for bombers, in exchange for “military protection” and “economic support”? Would it still be a “sensible balance” then?

it seems to me that most European countries have done a lot to prevent USA from having an easy time.

Idunno, almost all of them allowed the US to use their territories to wage an illegal war. Whether actual bombing runs were permitted is a bit immaterial here just like the “defensive” label on those operations. Recon and logistics are necessary components of a war, and allowing the US to perform them makes no sense for a war that will hurt you.

This is a very strong signal from Europe that we don’t agree with what USA is doing.

While I agree that there has been some good marginal changes from the last illegal war, it is still clear who is the empire and who is the de-facto vassal. If the relationship is that of equal allies, where are all the European military bases on continental US soil?

No that’s not true, even UK has heavy restrictions on their use. And this is under 2 Prime ministers!

What I see instead is that UK is allowing US bombers to make multiple bombing runs on Iran from its bases.

Afaik there is zero cooperation from France and Spain, and Germany has been difficult enough that Trump has threatened to close the Rammstein base, which is the biggest air base USA has in Europe.

This is mostly true for Spain, even then there were a couple of military airplanes in support roles landing and taking off from Moron. So it seems the claimed airspace closure was more of a gentleman’s agreement rather than a strictly enforced prohibition.

But France and Germany absolutely did allow support airplanes in support roles to use their airfields. The exact nature of the operations is not known but it’s probably to do with recon and maybe refuelling. The reason bombing runs were not on the table is mostly because these countries don’t host any US military bases with suitable runways to support heavy bombers.

Greece allowed a US carrier to dock and repair in between combat operations.

Bulgaria and Romania explicitly allowed the US to use their bases for refuelling and recon.

All of this for a war that is poised to inflict heavy damage on European economies via skyrocketing energy and fertilizer prices. If European countries truly were “independent and free” allies of the US, they could just say no, like Spain - after all this is clearly not a defensive war and doesn’t benefit them in any way. Instead we got a bunch of face-saving claims and a permission to perform whatever support operations are needed.

He has to beg just ti fill up planes and ships at European bases.

It doesn’t really matter what the clown says in public, what matters is that most european countries immediately rolled over and provided their airfields and ports for a war that is not only aggressive and illegal, but also directly detrimental to them. US has Europe by the balls, militarily, technologically, and energetically. The only countries which even remotely stood up this time are Spain and, to a small degree, Italy. I agree with you that this needs to stop, but currently the situation is clearly that of vassalage.

This proves that neither Canada or any European countries are vassals to USA, but are independent free countries.

USA just demanded a total political and economic subjugation of Canada, and yet Canada still has an active order for 88 F35 strike fighters and contracts with Palantir for intelligence services. The only tangible thing Canada threatened in return is tariffs - in the absence of alternative supply chains for many items, basically a tax on their own people. This is not “independent free country” behavior, it is a vassal trying to demand more equal terms while keeping the mutual relationship active.

Canada wasn’t a US vassal in the narrow feudal European sense of the word — Canada doesn’t even have a lord and never sworn vassalage to any suzerain. But it absolutely was a vassal state in a more generic sense, namely “any state that has varying degrees of influence, but is obligated to a superior state or empire”. By that definition, any close alliance where some members are significantly more powerful than others will have some characteristics of an empire-vassal relationship.

Since “the purpose of a system is what it does”, the system of Canada-US relationships could be described as that of weak vassalage, with Canada providing a strong preference in trade and military support for aggressive wars, in exchange for military protection and/or not being invaded and/or a privileged position in the wealth extraction structures that US is maintaining.

Now that the last point is being dismantled and the first point doesn’t inspire much confidence after the Iran debacle, it makes sense that Canada would try to pull out of the relationship and demand more equal terms.

It’s absolutely insane how USA is trying to treat Canada as if they were some vassal state.

Canada has been the strongest supporter of USA in just about every relevant situation since before WW2, that’s 85+ years now. Where Canada has supported USA even in wars at great cost.

I mean, from what you’re describing it sounds to me like Canada was a vassal state. Independent states are not known for engaging in aggressive, criminal wars “at great cost” for the benefit of another state.

What is happening now is that trump has finally overplayed his cards. A weakening US is not in a financial position to demand more control over its vassals. Carney felt it and is calling the bluff, hoping to reduce dependence and concentrate more control in the hands of the local oligarchy (of which he is part). Don’t get me wrong, local oligarchy is probably still better than the murderous US pedophiles, so I’m on carney’s side here.

The question now is whether trump is crazy enough to use military intervention to resolve this and get the US (temporarily) back in control. It would be absolutely disastrous for everyone involved in long or even medium term, but hey, that’s the logic of capitalism and imperialism for you.

Fair enough. I tend to use it because it just reduces scanning ambiguity when reading text quickly.

Yeah, Google Translate also translates carpet as “ковер” instead of the proper spelling (ковёр), and it actually does translate “carpet mold” as “ковер плесень” (instead of a more proper translation like “ковровая плесень” or “плесень в ковре”).

I’d say it’s 99% google translate

“Ковёр” is closer to “carpet” I’d argue. I’d translate “rug” as “коврик”

The “regulated capitalism” you think of came as a direct result of a threat of socialist revolution, brought by interventionist USSR. Without a threat like that, capitalism degrades rather quickly into what you see today and way beyond. Capitalism itself is an awful system based on greed and exploitation, and it will blow through any guardrails you try to put on it given enough time.

I really worry about fully planned economies being really fragile.

As opposed to the very stable free market economy of the US, which is about to go through a third “once-in-a-lifetime” recession in 20 years?

Meanwhile e.g. Chinese economy is mostly managed by actual economists who aim to balance economic development, poverty alleviation, and quality-of-life improvements. The impact of their crises are felt most by those on top, not only financially but also in terms of prison sentences if they are to blame.

Pure socialism has been proven to be just as historically toxic as pure capitalism.

This is precisely what capitalists would want you to think. It is indeed what I thought a few years ago before someone pushed me to read a bit of Marx, Lenin, and Kropotkin, and look at the history of rising socialist states critically. If you actually examine what socialism has done for the working people, it becomes obvious that it is a flawed system but a massive improvement over capitalism.

Social democracy thrives only on exploitation of the working class elsewhere. Its citizens enjoy free healthcare and a robust social net, paid for by a person on the other side of the world hyperexploited by the capitalists in charge.

Meanwhile socialist societies, while imperfect or even awful in many ways, actually build the productive forces necessary for human development and thus actual positive human rights.

Socialism is going to be better tho.

Stop it homophobia and/or misogyny and/or sexshaming. There’s nothing wrong or funny about sucking big cocks.

No, don’t feed the troops actually. The sooner they mutiny the fewer missile strikes on schoolgirls and shipwrecked fishermen.

Yeah, still, I wouldn’t claim “as no human would end up falling into that”, given that it may not be that unlikely to find at least one human who displays similar writing the more humans you involve.

No, it is actually statistically impossible for a human to replicate this on sufficiently long runs of text.

This is not about replicating writing like a model. This is basically about guessing which words to pick from the list of suitable words based on a rule that you don’t know (because the key is secret).

To reduce this to the simplest possible example, imagine you are writing a “text” from just two letters: “a” and “b”. Let’s say for convenience that the text is supposed to be random. So the text would look something like “ababaaabbababbbabababaabbbabaababbaaabbabaabbaaaaabaaabbbaabaabababbabbbbbbbbabbabaabbbbbbbaabbabaab”

(generated with '''.join(random.choice(['a', 'b']) for i in range(0, 50)))

The watermarking works as follows: the model owner holds a key, and then uses that key to influence the random choices between “a” and “b” somehow, in a context-dependent way. The actual algorithm is quite complicated, but for simplicity let’s just say we have a secret pattern which biases the random choice towards it. In order to see the exaggerated results, let’s say the secret key is “aaaabbbb” (of course this is a bad secret key, once again just an example), and that the bias is strong (let’s say 80%). So this would mean that the first four letters in our text are more likely to be “a”, the next four letters are more likely to be “b”, then the next four letters are more likely to be “a”, and so on.

Then the text would look something like “aaaabaabaabaabbbabaaaabbaaaababbbaaaabbbabaabbbbaaabaabbaaaaabbbabababbaaaaabbbbaaabbbbbaaaaababaaba”.

(generated with ''.join(random.choice(['a', 'b'] + ([key[i % len(key)]] * 3)) for i in range(0, 100)))

You can see visually that the secret key has affected the text. Of course in this example even if you didn’t know the secret key you could probably figure it out, in reality the algorithm is way more complicated than that, relying on cryptography, so you wouldn’t be able to know the secret key or see that the string has been biased at all.

If the text is long enough, and you know the secret key, you can guarantee that the text was generated with it. In our examples, the letters in the text match our key 77% of the time. The probability of an actual random algorithm generating a text like that is already very low, despite the base entropy being only 100 bits. If my math is correct, for our example the p-value is 2.7 * 10⁻⁸, or about 0.00000027%. I would bet a hungy that the text was generated by our watermarking algorithm, with odds like these!

Of course we did exaggerate the bias and our base algorithm was random. In reality the bias is smaller, the algorithm for determining the likelihoods of possible next tokens is very complicated (it’s the LLM itself), and the algorithm for determining which token to bias is also way more complicated (involving cryptography and real secret keys). That said, hopefully it should help you understand why, for sufficiently long texts, this fingerprinting is just not possible to be replicated by humans.

I think the idea is to postpone this long enough to appoint even more pro-trump judges and capture the courts even more, so that when trump inevitably loses (maybe even by default), he can appeal and get a more favorable judge.