Your reasoning is solid, but you’re not a KGB agent with a financially challenged background and extreme paranoia with likely assortment of other psychological -pathies that shape your entire worldview.

Also, Putin sure seems like someone who isn’t planning escape routes or anything - he’s burn everything and everyone around him, maybe even himself, if he had to give up power (which we’ve been witnessing for a while).

Even if he had to flee Russia and rely on stashed wealth and secret locations and whatever, he would have probably used another framework, not some already well-known American citizen that does finances.

We’re not in the timeline to doubt anything, but Putin strikes me, a Russian living in Russia and closely following the politics at least of my own country, especially from the not-so-safe side, as someone who would not choose someone he can’t control and have in his grasp to run anything like this.

Not to mention his paranoia, ego mania and the alleged financial skills that, again, allegedly let him win a lot of trust among the people de-facto making big decisions in Russia before he wriggled into presidency.

I don’t doubt that Putin had dedicated financial managers at some point, it’s just hard to belive it could’ve been anyone like Epstein, i.e. someone outside Russia or even Moscow where Putin could blackmail and hurt them or at least first treaten them into obedience, even with the eventual murder somewhere outside Russia (Litvinenko poisioning).

Not that nothing unexpected and hard-to-believe hasn’t been surfacing for a while already, though.

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.

Another gem, thanks for sharing. God damn.

This is actually great! Welcoming your example to my now collection of two, alongside Wealth, shown to scale.

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.

Happy to help!

A gentle nudge towards, let’s say, alternative means of acquiring media to enjoy. One that, ironically enough, Neil Gaiman commended himself (under certain circumstances, of course). One that is still better than giving money to someone you don’t want to support as a person or a creator.