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...

He justifiably complained about PVP games having non-Linux-compatible kernel-level anti-cheat.

I'm tired of people conflating gaming as a whole to extremely mainstream titles that fit into "online PVP with malware anti-cheat" such as Apex Legends, Valorant, and Battlefield, and then bashing Linux for "poor gaming experience".

Their experience with titles they enjoy is very valid, as valid as any other, but it's not the entirety of gaming and OS experience, at all. There's tons of games that run extremely well on Linux, even out of the box, no tinkering required, both on Nvidia and AMD hardware.

Grrr.

Ruski here.

This is still hella expensive. 150 rubles for half a liter of beer is around double (maybe 1.5x for some brands) what they cost in probably most shops, with some being cheaper in alcohol-centered shops.

Some actually imported stuff goes for that price and tastes considerably better.

There's also domestic beer and the like for around the same price (some cheaper, some more expensive) that tastes better, too.

And all in all, considering the incomes and purchasing power, that 1.6 EUR average in restaurants and stuff sure doesn't feel good.

Komisch, wie viel unendlich Wachstum klingt wie der Krebs.

Reject modernity, embrace tradition - we'll still be there for you in the arena and boomer shooter crowd, and of course, various Counter-Strike and Team Fortress 2 lobbies.

Come prepared.

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.

Es ist gleichzeitig traurig und komisch, wie ein Mensch so alt kann so ein edgy Teenager sein ohne Entwicklungsstörung. Er ist so cringe und durch seine Unkenntnis gefährlich.

Reeks of the chat history access attempts and the like, or is it just my paranoia?

Privileges and rights an application has has little to nothing to do with whether said application will be able to hide from an anti-cheat software or fool it or whatever. It's more about being able to access different secure parts of the system, like memory, which is where everything lives basically, including game data that the cheats are supposed to manipulate in some advantageous way.

This is what leads many to plea for server-side anti-cheat that doesn't invade the privacy of the end user (the client).

The games that use kernel anti-cheat are still largely infested with cheaters of many sorts. At this point, defending such deep access sounds like letting some security people live with you, totally at your expense, all the time, even in the bathroom and watching you sleep and masturbate and everything, in the name of safety, because they'll supposedly be there when some criminal comes to do some crimes, only for them to turn the blind eye when that criminal comes with proper disguise and a gun.

Russian Cyrillic here.

Yes, there are both upper- and lowercase letters. Most kinda look like the same letter.

Yes, there are serif and sans-serif fonts. I haven't noticed any difference in use between the Russian and the English alphabets in that regard -- serif is more prevalent in books and printed media, while sans-serif rules the digital (and maybe headings and headlines in printed).

As for the emphasis, the Russian alphabet and fonts (at least the popular ones) do support emphasis, like bold, italics, etc., but italics is used much less liberally. For example, I often see italics used in English to either make the reader emphasize a word or a phrase differently, or to make a name of a piece of fiction stand out (e.g. Dishonored vs Dishonored). I can't recall a single time I've seen the former being used in Russian, neither in fiction, nor on the Internet -- the only thing somewhat close to it would be in-universe letters or writings, but those are often put in their own paragraph with different margins and all.

The italics in the Russian digital fonts is not the same as the Russian or Cyrillic cursive, though. While the latter may be vastly different from the printed letters, varying by the age group (older generations have pretty different cursive from people my age, especially with some letters like the lowercase T), the former is basically the same style shift as in the Latin alphabets. For example:

• Regular: Съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю.
• Italics: Съешь же ещё этих мягких французских булок, да выпей чаю.

As for the Russian cursive, I would say it's actually closer to the printed Russian than the English cursive is to the printed English. There are some letters that often tend to blend together in cursive, such as the lowercase И, Л, Ш, Щ, but with proper spacing, they're really easy to tell apart; especially given how they're not that often that close to each other in most sentences.

The cursive English lowercase F, on the other hand, or uppercase S, or lowercase R, for example, left me guessing the first few times I saw them.

So, the Russian, or the Cyrillic alphabets are pretty boring in that regard when compared to the Latin-based alphabets of Europe. The region may be vast and varied, but its peoples are still pretty close and similar to each other.

RIP, thanks for the fun.

That's a lot of very misdirected effort, with a lot of bad and not-at-all-necessary consequences.

I could not imagine myself in this timeline.

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

Russian here.

For the most part, it's all English. Not even romanized Russian in variable names, although that happens sometimes. Comments are mostly in Russian, though. Depending on the company and whether it has to deal with countries where Russian isn't as widespread (e: which is not a lot of companies these days), that English can be a little difficult to understand once you start applying English language logic to it as opposed to basically writing Russian poorly translated to English. It's fine if the variables, classes and method names are short and offer little room for stringing words together, but anything complex poses risk of producing something that will be difficult to read without heavy Russian background and developed English skills (at both comprehending and producing).

However, there is a number of Russian-based programming language. I am fortunate to have never worked with any one of them. One of them is 1C:Enterprise, which is also a sizeable business for automation software and such.

Here's what it looks like. I can spot a couple of English words there, though. And having learned programming through English and English only, I actually find it more difficult to read, because Russian-native developers still often refer to things in English, even if there's a word for that same thing in Russian - it's just that much part of your programming work.

Not happy about these Indiana Jones type of system requirements. I was coping that DOOM: The Dark Ages won't have mandatory ray-tracing, even though I knew they'll be using either identical engine or some "minor" variation of it, because. well, id software, idetch engine, etc. Fitting name!

DOOM (2016) and DOOM: Eternal ran extremely well on my GTX 1080 paired with Intel i5 3470. Now I won't be able to run the new title with same GPU paired with Ryzen 5 5600x. There's a lot of people in the comments in various places saying it's totally fine or just arguing with people that are not in favor of such demands.

And there won't be any multiplayer.

The mighty have fallen.

I'm going to give you no source for this, but power users are not the people that big tech usually extorts for money and data that easily, not compared to the most of the clientele, and that's not something that makes the line go up -- sometimes the power users manage to educate the non-power users on how to be more of a nuisance to the company, too, which also does not contribute to the line very well, and we all know that MBA considers this treason, theft and punishable by death.

I think it's worth advocating for quitting shitty games, though.

Out of many friends I've had who (used to) frequent games like PUBG, Dota 2, League of Legends, Valorant, Overwatch, etc., most were just having a bad time, all the time. Granted, some of these work on Linux, but the point is, those of my friends that still play Overwatch ("2", lol) just seem to be happier and more functional when they have to quit for some period of time.

I've been having a much better time with my life once I went for the good old enjoyment rather than chasing rank or wins or skill, finally making time to play amazing single-player titles again or just screwing around in online games.

And curiously enough, the online games I actually want to play and have fun doing so are the ones that work on Linux, while the rest thankfully refuses!

I am not enjoying living in a cyberpunk world at all

Every time I'm done with it. Same for work. Even for laptops.

The only gaming device I can put to sleep for a longer period of time without feeling weird about it is my Steam Deck, and even in such cases it either means I'll be back in minutes (essentially putting a game on standby) or a few hours tops.