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If you'd be able to speak Russian, you'd already know that there's western propaganda for all levels of IQ. From highbrow to lowbrow in all the media you can find. And it's there for decades already.

Also, you can find in the Snowden's documents lots of evidence that there are entire departments in CIA and MI-6 working on this propaganda and ways to deliver it.

And it's quite effective, too. CIA managed to instigate many coups in the world using their propaganda approaches. Arab Spring, Ukraine coup in 2014. In Russia they had almost succeeded, there was (and partially is) large percent of population that believed propaganda despite that we already succumbed once in the recent history (in 1991) and results were absolutely catastrophic.

> But I guess liberal governments are just too good to use the same weapons. It could be their downfall.

Western governments are spending billions on propaganda. There's so-called "Russian opposition" - a clique that receives millions from western funds such as NED (CIA proxy fund).

If you open YouTube from a freshly created Russian google account, the whole home page will be filled with videos from Radio Liberty, BBC News Russian, DW Russian, Khodorkovsky Live, and other channels. The theme of all these channels is the same: "You must surrender and bow to the great western overlords".

Even though my google account is ~15 years old, I still get such recommendations on my main YouTube page daily.

There was an interview with a former Russian lady that works for Google in London and her job is to pick such videos to push to Russian audience.

I always wonder how western population is so brainwashed that you always explain everything using two mutually exclusive ideas:

1. "Russia is insignificant infinitely small nothing. It's economy is less than economy of Texas!"

2. "Putin and russians are controlling all the world. They bought every world leader, everyone from Trump to Xi is controlled by them! Anything bad that happens in the world from USA to Africa is directly staged by Russia!"

I worked in a EU company that was developing a product competing with one of Microsoft offerings. All the code was hosted on GitHub, we used Azure for hosting and all the internal communications were in Microsoft Teams.

To me it looked absurd. But I was almost the smallest cog in the corporate structure, so I never asked what were the reasons for all these decisions.

I'm not saying that it's not catching bugs. Sometimes it does. But most of the rules are nonsense and the number of rules that makes no sense is growing.

Also, mutable default argument is not a bug. It is a bug only if mutable default argument is mutated inside the body of a function/method. Which is almost never the case.

You know how many bugs I've met working on large Python codebases over 20 years, caused by unsorted imports or `except Exception`? Yeah, you've guessed it: exactly 0 bugs.

It's really annoying how many people think that if you enforce stupidly strict rules about formatting, more strict that those of Fortran in 70s, you'll automatically get good code.

I've seen companies that enable 100% of ruff rules, use several other linters, and enforce other rules (like every variable name should be at least 20 characters long to fully describe its purpose). And they have awful buggy unmaintainable code. But it is nicely formatted (although reading code where half of the screen estate is consumed by the variable name is a bit difficult) and has no "dreadful" `except Exception`. Or every mutable class attribute variable is annotated with `typing.ClassVar` (RUF012 - the most idiotic rule I've ever seen). Nevermind that it doesn't really stop anyone from changing value of that attribute. You must annotate it with `ClassVar`!

It's an idiotic cargo-cult.

What? In other words, you're saying: "Russia is losing war with Ukraine, so it wants to start a second front with bigger enemy".

Also, how's Ukraine war is sustainable for Ukraine? It's economy is non-existent (almost 100% dependent on western donations), it has less than 50% of population of 2022 (they don't publish any population stats directly, but if you combine available statistics, there are about 10-15 millions left most of them old retired people or young people that are too young to send them to the front lines), they are losing territory every day.

This is some weird "Ukraine is winning but front is moving in the wrong direction" logic.

West is living in its own bubble of misinformation. Including the government.

On many occasions I've read self-soothing wishful thinking messages about my country. In 2022 it was that Russian army is fleeing, all Russian tanks were burned down, and Russian soldiers are deserting from a front lines with a speed of 100,000 persons a day. Here on HN. Written by the people who had no clue how to distinguish Russian tank from Ukrainian tank.

Or in 2022-2023 EU leaders said that Russian soldiers are fighting with shovels and stealing microwaves and washing machines to extract microchips from them.

Or just recently someone wrote to me that we are living in the stone age, whatever that means.

On the other hand, I'm happy that West prefers to live in a bubble with no access to real information. And if you try to convey real information, they'll call you "Kremlin bot" or "North Korean bot" or "Chinese bot". It means that less countries will fall prey to neocolonial practices and wars because you cannot wage wars and govern colonies based entirely on misinformation from propaganda your own media creates out of thin air.

> Would we still get web browsers?

There was Lynx text browser that was ported even to MS-DOS. I was using it until about 2010. It was a great browser until websites become unusable.

Crypto was and is inconvenient to use. So many years passed and almost nobody uses crypto daily. It's too inconvenient.

And it's not secure or anonymous at all. At some point you need to buy crypto or sell crypto, or buy some goods with crypto, and at that point you can be easily identified. Happened so many times.

Even here in Russia, under all US sanctions, only a few use crypto. It's so inconvenient that even under pressure of US sanctions it hadn't become more popular.

> Of course, right now nothing can dethrone Visa/MC for international payments

UnionPay can. They are accepted in many parts of the world, and they are free from US restrictions.

Russia had roughly ten years to prepare. First talks about building national payment system started around 2010-2012. And it was meeting notable opposition: "why should we care? MC/Visa are good enough, why spend money on national infrastructure".

But yeah, it is amazing that in 2022 nobody here even noticed that MC/Visa left. Even MC/Visa cards haven't stopped working and are working to this day (banks made a rule that cards that expire after 2022 continue to work for several more years so that everybody has time to switch to MIR).