I'm not sure what Russia had to gain from violating our (Finland) airspace with military aircraft countless of times before we joined NATO. Yet they kept doing it.

Russia is an imperialistic state that really doesn't like having neighbours that are not under its political and military control. Violating airspace, GPS jamming, cutting undersea cables is just their way of showing force, and damaging us, who they perceive as their enemies for not submitting to their rule.

Russia commits acts of aggression against NATO states that straddle the line of ambiguity where a bad faith actor could call it accidental or at least unauthorized.

This makes invoking article 5 likewise somewhat difficult because it allowed other NATO members pressure the border states into "not overreacting". The point is to slowly escalate into outright hostility without ever having "the event" that makes it obvious article 5 must be invoked.

It's so odd to me as a veggie that people want something that "tastes like meat". If you've been immersed in decent veggie food for a while this isn't something you crave. Why would I want to eat a bit of dead animal? It's something I might do in a survival situation in a barren place, like Han Solo or something, but not if there are fresh veggies to hand.

If you want to do this for ethical reasons, which you should, then just eat vegetables. They taste way better. You just have to recalibrate your senses to deal with the higher levels of flavour.

But if people really want "chicken nuggets" for some reason then there's no reason it should have to involve animals at all, so this is a good thing, I guess.

I appreciated the Pluto.jl mention! Going from Pluto notebooks that understand data flow to Jupyter notebooks where you have to tell the computer which order to run the cells in is always baffling to me. Why doesn't Jupyter know the run order and dependencies already? The way Pluto handles dependencies between code cells is really just so nice.

I like the idea of a compiled language that takes the look and ethos of Python (or at least the "looks like pseudocode, but runs"-ethos)

I don't think the article gives much of an impression on how SPy is on that front.

The problem with local apps is actually a problem with closed-source software. I refuse to rely on closed-source software to access my data because then I am beholden to the vendor of that software to access my data. It’s only slightly better than putting my data in the cloud. What I really want is the source code to that local app so I can guarantee the ability to continue accessing my data forever. This can be done with open source software but very few companies want to sell their product as open source. Some version of source-available may help but you still have the problem of the company discontinuing support so you need some escape hatch on the license in that case and as far as I know nobody has tried.

During the Cold War, Russia managed to map huge parts of the world, sometimes with higher quality and more accurate measurements than the countries themselves! Especially noteworthy considering that some of those countries (like the UK) were trying their hardest to prevent those sort of maps being made in the first place, yet the Russians ended up with better maps of the UK than UK themselves.

Considering that that happened decades ago, I'm guessing their (and others) capability of doing those sort of things have only improved, not gotten worse. But that's just me guessing.

YouTube is easy to block. Just clear all your history and disable history. This stops home screen recommendations and also disables YouTube shorts