But beyond this, I don't think this war is about Ukraine anymore than a war in Taiwan will be about Taiwan. It's little more than a proxy for hegemony in both cases. Russia did not want NATO parked in their Achille's heel of the Ukrainian flatlands. NATO did, and we pushed forward against endless threats of it being a redline, essentially as a means of indirectly imposing our will on Russia and establishing a hierarchy of dominance.

And similarly, for those that don't the Taiwan-China history - the Mao led Chinese revolution was a success. The existing government of mainland China fled to Taiwan where they brutally oppressed the locals, in an era known as the 'white terror' [1], and established power through 40 years of martial law. And of course we backed them, solely to use them as a weapon against China, because geopolitics.

This is why these wars are so important for the participants. The US couldn't care less about Ukraine, but withdrawing without ruining our ability to militarily threaten other peer or near peer countries is difficult. And similarly the last thing Russia needs is more land, but if they never act on claims of red lines, then they can never expect their interests to be considered in the case of a conflict in interests between them and the West.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)

the issue were the 100s of tracking cookies and that websites would use dark patterns or simply not offer a "no to all" button at all (which is against the law, btw.)

Most websites do. not. need. cookies.

It's all about tracking and surveillance to show you different prices on airbnb and booking.com to maximise their profits.

https://noyb.eu/en/project/cookie-banners (edit: link)

Cookies are a client-side technology.

Why does the government need to be involved?

While they are at it, I hope they do it to the other big techs too.

Being a "hacker type" (whatever that means) does not equate to being complacent to these companies abusing their economic power.

Can Substrate disrupt ASML using particle acceleration?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/28/technology/can-a-start-up... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45732431)

See also:

Return to Silicon Valley

https://substrate.com/our-purpose

(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45741489)

Thiel apparently 'only' has 27 billion USD, so if this is mostly his investment it's 1/27 of all the money he has, and I think when you're spending those sums on highly technical stuff involving physics and precision, you'd have the person representing the project you're planning to invest in, some physicists you know and trust, some people from a relevant industry, and then you sit down and think about the idea as you do when you read a paper, and you'd sit in this seminar for hours and use the blackboard, and my assumption is that you'd go away very close to knowing for sure whether it would work or not.

There are some strange things in this writeup-- I don't think it's clear that the machine they claim to intend to sell is supposed to be a direct writing machine, I assumed it was supposed to be like EUV but with X-rays and some kind of special x-ray tolerant photoresist, but the identity of the founders is at least quite damning, the electrostatic chuck thing might be damning I guess, unless there's some special concern. I assumed that even if it were sensible, it wouldn't work well enough, with damage to the resist or something else that manufacturers would find unacceptable, but this isn't my area, so I can't really judge.