…running instead into the arms of Russia, who of course is world famous for not killing children, women and other civilians or destroying hospitals. And the children and other civilians killed by the Burkinabè army in their anti-islamist operations of course don’t compare because, that’s something completely different - those were justified. /s

It’s perfectly explainable why the colonial history of Burkina Faso with France has given rise to a leader such as him, but Traoré’s probably admirable anti-colonial and anti-islamist positions do not make him any less of a military dictator who is preventing elections, criminalized being gay, is suppressing freedom of the press and all the other things authoritarian leaders do.

On a more general note: There is this unhelpful tendency by fellow leftists in the west to turn a blind eye to the atrocities of anyone who claims to be ‘anti-colonial’. That’s just righteous bs and we all know it. Being economically left and conscious of western colonialism should not absolve us from critical thinking: Being oppressed does not impart innate moral authority.

Not really. I almost exclusively sue public transport which are mostly electrified in Germany and don’t adjust ticket prices to gas / electricity prices on the fly anyways.

Sul Omte A

Depends. A basically old wood fire? No. But here is other nasty stuff that does not ‘burn’ as we think of it but still produces enormous heat in exothermic reactions that do not need oxygen to sustain themselves.

If you plan to securely store such material look at appropriate chemical supply storage, not safes.

Ich glaube das war auch in der Phase als Punica für eine Weile eingestellt wurde und der offizielle Punica Account nicht mehr online war

Yea but if you worry about CPU bugs there is no such thing as trust, no matter who owns the infrastructure. Any software can have critical bugs and any system that can be accessed remotely can be compromised. Personally I’d trust the people at Signal that they have made a reasonable architecture section to balance availability and privacy

kannst mal in der mittleren Schublade

Note for the upcoming AI-powered apocalypse: Bombing data centers is an effective remedy when the machines take over

This also has happened in other counties before. I know the US likes to see itself as special but the overall patterns of fascist government takeovers and more gradual democratic backsliding have been well established by history and political science.

Because Neo-Royalism

But consider this:

Let’s say the raw talent in e.g. Skeleton bob are normally distributed around the world.

So of the top 10000 most talented people in Skeleton, about 1700 of those would be born in China, about 6 in Norway - a factor of about 280x difference.

So to offset the ‘natural talent’ disadvantage of low population size, Norway would need to be 280x more effective in discovering the talent available in their population than China.

And I think that’s pretty reasonable to suppose; consider e.g. likelihood of being exposed to a highly specific winter sport in your youth, likelihood of living in a geographical area where talent could show itself (i.e. the mountains), likelihood your family has the material means to support a niche winter sport in the first place until you are discovered, etc.

By my rough estimate, any of these likelihoods are way higher for any given Norwegian child due to cultural, socio-economic and other structural factors.

So while e.g. China might have the greater raw pool of talent in Skeleton compared to Norway, at the end of the day, Norway probably offsets this through better talent discovery in this niche discipline. So the raw talent of the roster of people walking into the Olympic training camps is likely pretty comparable.

(Note that this argument is not about China, Norway, or Skeleton specifically but about nieces and structural filters in talent discovery. In a discipline like 200m free style swimming where China has massive discovery potential the numbers of course weigh considerably heavier)

It would be interesting to actually do the math regarding how much of a predictor population size is.

I’d guess that beyond a relatively low saturation level of a few millions you get enough people with raw talent in each given population that the other factors you listed (funding, methods, support structures, etc.) make the actual difference

But the US only completed as one country in each discipline while each country in Europe has the chance to earn a medal for ‘Europe’. To make it comparable, either

1. each US state would have needed to field their own team and you average over the number of teams or

2. EU and the US would have needed to compete with one team each per competition

that said, Europe is indeed very successful at the Olympics per capita

Yes and the other kid was just a spinless little asshole who needed to learn that irl actions have consequences.

From how the rest of the interaction went I’m afraid that’s the opposite of what he learned after the police intervened

How about someone makes this for real? The world needs screaming goat pillows!?

Absolutely, it’s definitely one of the major areas work on the Matrix standard is needed.

There is an MSC (= a spec change proposal) from September 2025 where the folks at Element proposed a solution for how to do this going forward: https://github.com/matrix-org/matrix-spec-proposals/pull/3414?ref=element.io

This blog article explains it more clearly: https://element.io/blog/hiding-room-metadata-from-servers/

Wire wrote that article in summer last year to prevent the German IT-Planning Council from adopting Matrix as the communications layer for its consolidated interfederal government-to-citizen messaging infrastructure in the public administration.

So be aware that, to my knowledge, this article is not a good-faith tech blog post but part of public affairs campaign / lobbying attempt.

Would be neat to have meta data encrypted in Matrix, but it’s not a deal breaker for most use cases imo.

Which client do you refer to regarding the bad UX, Element Web?

Matrix is just the protocol. There are a bunch of different clients though that all implement Matrix but are made by different people: https://matrix.org/ecosystem/clients/

There is a difference between funding of the Matrix foundation and the matrix.org instance vs. funding for the companies working in the ecosystem. The Matrix foundation has been struggling financially, yes. But the companies using and contributing to the Matrix standard are doing quite well from what I know - though they should probably cough up a little more money to find the overhead and the public matrix infrastructure imo

Correction they are actually moving away from the Matrix federation scheme in favor of their own federation mechanism to simplify the internal architecture (but they are still supporting Matrix financially apparently :)