Just had this mental image of a combat swimmer that crawled out of the sewer arguing with Rambo who got through the ventilation if that statue is southern or northern Macedonian style and what period.

Would make a good movie too, with a giant Spiderman points at Spiderman scene where a bunch of dudes from different nations with a tenuous grasp about what exactly they are supposed to recover have a hushed standoff to figure it out before security shows up

OK, cool now teach your family that calls their web browser “The internet” enough computer science to adequately understand and audit this proposed open system and convince themselves that their votes are counted in a fair, verifiable and secret manner. Also that the implementation does not have obvious side channels and what is actually running is built from the published source code.

Like, If I was part of some shady powerful elite I’d love a fully automated setup. Most people will not be able to check the system deeper than “phone displays green check mark” without an unreasonable time investment.

On the other hand, “room full of people opens box full of papers and counts them while verifying each other” is intuitive enough for almost anyone to grasp and gain confidence in.

In the same boat. and recently of all the issues that could pop up, Teams has decided to become a buggy mess. Their own software on their own OS just stops working after just one year of using the machine.

Not to speak of all the other slowdowns and child-diseases that the thing has developed.

Meanwhile my desktop install of Linux is nearing its 10th birthday, has all sorts of legacy configs that I never bothered to clean up, has moved drives 3 times and to a different filesystem+partitioning scheme, changed bootloader… Yet still is way less of a pain than Windows at work.

Apart from the other points that have been raised: basically every recent report about Ukrainian troops has gotten a bit in it along the lines of “they’re exhausted and have taken heavy losses, but are in good spirits and willing to fight on”.

Especially if you read what individual soldiers are saying, I get the feeling that this war would not end, even if support to Ukraine where to vanish completely (good luck convincing Poland, the Baltics and Nordics). You’d just get Afghanistan, but the invaders are openly genocidal and don’t give a fuck about civilians at the best of times.

Or get chased around by explosive FPV drones and Ali-express quadcopters dropping grenades.

And that’s before someone with more resources than Ukraine inevitably makes an airplane load of these things that just automatically go for anything vaguely human shaped.

Loki. If he doesn’t find a way to mess it up, it’s truly bulletproof

But that included not paying for servers, firing people and finding out later that they had irreplaceable knowledge, demanding constant crunch time from the poor sods that are left and randomly turning off “unnecessary” services.

I’d be really surprised if that made the overall state better.

From a purely technical perspective I’m a bit confused how this clown-car has kept going for so long, after all the slash-and-burn restructuring that’s happened. Hopefully there’s going to be some engineers telling the story when Musk manages to fubar it after all.