1. Absolutely no one expected an actual war with Ukraine. When the first news in english press were published (in November I think) about the coming war between Russia and Ukraine, everyone I know just simply dissmised the very idea of it. It seemed absurd, unthinkable. I did not believe there was any possibility of the war whatsoever and so were my friends, my colleagues, my parents, the ukranians I know. The news became a common joke, a meme even. So when I woke up Feb. 24th and opened the internet, I was stunned, appaled and absolutely embarrased on top of it.
I've never read or heard that it is possible to feel enormous embarrassment about the delcaration of war, but it was the strongest feeling in me at the time (and reading various russian sites - not just in me). Despite various disagreements between the Russian and Ukrainian governments, the news about war seemed bizarre. It would be similiar to waking up one day and reading that US Navy are blockading Liverpool and Bristol, US Airforce are bombing London and Manchester, and US Marines are storming Brighton and Southampton. Absolutely surreal.
It took a full week for this feeling to slowly fade away before I regained my ability to think straight; I just couldn't work or do anything productive during that time, I was glued to the news and even more news. My father still haven't recovered - he lost all appetite, doesn't talk with anyone and overall extremely depressed.
2. Reading various russian sites - the first reaction was very negative and almost no one supported the war as it happened. After the first 3-4 days the opinions started to change. People started to mentally cope with the news and invent various rationalizations in favour of war - nobody like to be a "baddie" or feel like one. So the opinion is slowly swaying towards the side that claims that the war is justified. That said, I believe even the official russian TV-propaganda were shocked and didn't know what to do or say at first - it took them several days to find the right groove. Propaganda-wise, there was zere preparation of the population for the coming war. The main downside of constantly manupulating statistics is that it is impossible to know which numbers are genuine and which aren't. It could really be that 70% of russians are supporting the war. Or it could be 50%. Or 30%. Or 99%. There is no way to know for sure.
3. On top of that no one really knows or understands what is it exactly that our army are fighting for, what are our end-goals and, especially, what exactly will happen if Ukrainian government will refuse to sign a peace treaty and deside to fight till the end. "Demilitarization" and "denazification' are extremely abstract goals with no clear purpose. There was (and still is) a strong emphasis that the russian army will not target civilian buildings and infrastructure (and soldiers are genuinly reluctant to do so). But it is plain to see now, that this goal is impossible to achieve in the modern war. So what do we do? Do we start to level Kiev and other cities to the ground? Do we march on Lviv? Just what is the plan? Nobody knows.
4. As for the future - right now I am genuinely more worried about the Ukranians than about Russia. I have friends in Sumy who are now almost two weeks under siege, and who knows how long it will last. The Ukraine itself is suffering an enourmous damage to it's infrastructure - how and when and with what funds it will be restored I have no idea. On top of that it looks like there will be at least 5.000.000 refugees (and probably much much more) - their fate is also unclear, I don't think EU can adequately deal with such a large number. In comparision the devaluation of the ruble doesn't seem as important. It looks like there are three main fears: 1) a large scale unemployment - a lot of businesses are leaving Russia, producing an enormous chain reaction; 2) lack of essential medicine - a lot of drugs are imported from the EU (Germany in particular); 3) complete default of the state - a lot of people have lived through the 90s (which in Russia were somewhat equivalent to the Great Depression in USA), so a certain level of impoverishment and hardship are ok, we are used to it, but a complete bancrupcy will be catastrophic. I don't believe there is any chance for an actual famine. The rest isn't so important in comparison.
5. It is also important to understand, that even in an unjust war it is impossible not to support and sympathize with your army. Wishing death and defeat to your own soldiers just isn't right and would feel dirty.
"The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt" — from The Triumph of Stupidity, 1933.
>The constant nonsense UI redesigns that come about with every new update. The instability, and ridiculous resources consumption. The slowness and slugishness.
>I want a browser that works, respects my privacy, stays out of my way and lets me get shit done. A browser built for professionals, by professionals. I want a consistent UI that remains stable over time. I'm easily willing to pay for such a browser.
>Firefox used to be it, but I no longer feel like it is. Any suggestions for what to try next?
That's my experience as well. I was using FF from v 1.0 back in 2004. Upgrade to Quantum almost gave me a heart attack because it ruined majority of addons and disabled custom themes. Upgrade to "megabar" was a final straw for me. I've spent ~ 3 hours, but finally migrated to Pale Moon ... and it's like I'm back in 2004. Even Noia theme is working again.
FF, in my opinion, went full circle: from being the most functional and the most customizable browser to being the new IE6. There are no redeeming qualities left really.
Goodreads has been around for ~15 years now and it's still lacking the basic search functions. E.g. I'd would like to see a list of books published in 1965 in Science Fiction genre with at least 1000 votes, sorted by the number of votes. Hell, even just seeing a list of books, published in X year would be nice. IMDB can do this, progarchives can do this, a lot of similar sites can do this. But not Goodreads. And without the proper search function the "discoverability" tends to zero, which, in my opinion, should be the main focus of any site, devoted to books and book reviews.
On top of this, the UI is horrendous. Just as one example, compare Goodreads author page, say https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3706.George_Orwell where the only useful things you could see is the short bio and the most voted books of the author with a similar russian site https://fantlab.ru/autor238 Fantlab displays all the works, categorized into novels/novellas/short stories/essays sorted in chronological order (and you can sort by other criteria as well) that gives you a clear overview of the author's works. The book pages are hardly any better.
The only advantage Goodreads have over other sites is it's huge user base, and because of this, I'm afraid, we are stuck with it for a very long time and it's not going anywhere.
>Spotify and co have obliterated music piracy on the internet. It's hard to find torrents for music these days and even the best private trackers can't compete with Spotifys ever growing catalog.
Eh? Maybe it depends on a musical genre, but from my experience musical piracy is about as popular as it ever was, with a lot of new releases every day (although I admit that it didn't really grow). I can still find anything I'm interested in less than a minute.
Besides yandex there are also rambler.ru (less popular, but even older) and mail.ru
dic.academic.ru allows you to search through several dozens encyclopedias. And bigenc.ru adds onother one (the largest and the most recent).
fantlab.ru is the best site dedicated to sci fi/fantasy literature (it is IMO 10 times better than goodreads or librarything). There are also a lot of site dedicated to literature like proza.ru lib.ru litres.ru feb-web.ru www.obshelit.su etc.
Besides habr, forum.ru-board.com ixbt.com cyberforum.ru overclockers.ru 3dnews.ru are very popular sites dedicated to hardware/software/coding.
There are a lot of sited about video games like old-games.ru goha.ru stopgame.ru riotpixels.com as well as a streaming platforms like goodgame.ru
rutube.ru exists for many years now but it's crap.
There are several sites dedicated to popular science like elementy.ru arhe.msk.ru gramota.ru histrf.ru
www.intoclassics.net and www.classicalmusicnews.ru are popular for those interested in classical music. www.darkside.ru and rock.ru for rock music.
forum.awd.ru and otzyv.ru are popular travel sites.
There several general purpose forums like forum.rcmir.com www.e1.ru/talk/forum/ In general, classic forums are still very much alive in runet (hell, even LJ is still alive) and there are a lot of niche forums you could visit.
There are more than 100 news sites, but the quality is quite average (like everywhere else). meduza.io ria.ru rbc.ru tass.ru inosmi.ru for example. sports.ru and championat.ru for sport-related news.
ozon.ru is now a russian version of amazon.
And obviously there are a lot of pirate sites from rutracker to flibusta to libgen.
I am a casual internet user and have no connection to IT industry, but i've been using Firefox practically since the very beginning - I installed v. 1.0.0 back in 2004. It's main selling points for me were: 1) it wasn't IE; 2) easy customizability of the UI layout - FF had as many great themes as Winamp; 3) lots and lots of different plugins and extensions for even more customizability: from AdBlack and Smooth Scrolling to various video downloaders and paywall skips.
And it was great! More importantly it was already a more or less finished product. The updates were slow, sparse in time and didn't change much (it took 3 years to get from v. 1 to v. 3).
Then something changed in 2011 and updates started showering almost every week for no apparent reason. It was annoying and I've completly stopped installing updates after v. 13(everything worked perfectly anyway). Then after 4 or 5 years I started to have a problem with playing youtube and twitch videos, so I decided to finally update my FF. It was already v. 57 (Quantum) and it made me absolutely livid. 2/3 of my extensions weren't working (and still aren't) and the ability to change UI theme was completely gone (and so I am now stuck with that bland default theme). And all that for no visible benefit on my part whatsoever.
I've immediately installed Chrome, Opera and Safari to see if they were any better, but ... they all are almost identical to the new Firefox (although I am now using Opera on mobile). There is almost no incentive to change from one browser to another now.
Well, it's year 2021 now, but somehow my user experience is worse than it was fifteen years ago. How is that possible I do not know.
1. Absolutely no one expected an actual war with Ukraine. When the first news in english press were published (in November I think) about the coming war between Russia and Ukraine, everyone I know just simply dissmised the very idea of it. It seemed absurd, unthinkable. I did not believe there was any possibility of the war whatsoever and so were my friends, my colleagues, my parents, the ukranians I know. The news became a common joke, a meme even. So when I woke up Feb. 24th and opened the internet, I was stunned, appaled and absolutely embarrased on top of it. I've never read or heard that it is possible to feel enormous embarrassment about the delcaration of war, but it was the strongest feeling in me at the time (and reading various russian sites - not just in me). Despite various disagreements between the Russian and Ukrainian governments, the news about war seemed bizarre. It would be similiar to waking up one day and reading that US Navy are blockading Liverpool and Bristol, US Airforce are bombing London and Manchester, and US Marines are storming Brighton and Southampton. Absolutely surreal. It took a full week for this feeling to slowly fade away before I regained my ability to think straight; I just couldn't work or do anything productive during that time, I was glued to the news and even more news. My father still haven't recovered - he lost all appetite, doesn't talk with anyone and overall extremely depressed.
2. Reading various russian sites - the first reaction was very negative and almost no one supported the war as it happened. After the first 3-4 days the opinions started to change. People started to mentally cope with the news and invent various rationalizations in favour of war - nobody like to be a "baddie" or feel like one. So the opinion is slowly swaying towards the side that claims that the war is justified. That said, I believe even the official russian TV-propaganda were shocked and didn't know what to do or say at first - it took them several days to find the right groove. Propaganda-wise, there was zere preparation of the population for the coming war. The main downside of constantly manupulating statistics is that it is impossible to know which numbers are genuine and which aren't. It could really be that 70% of russians are supporting the war. Or it could be 50%. Or 30%. Or 99%. There is no way to know for sure.
3. On top of that no one really knows or understands what is it exactly that our army are fighting for, what are our end-goals and, especially, what exactly will happen if Ukrainian government will refuse to sign a peace treaty and deside to fight till the end. "Demilitarization" and "denazification' are extremely abstract goals with no clear purpose. There was (and still is) a strong emphasis that the russian army will not target civilian buildings and infrastructure (and soldiers are genuinly reluctant to do so). But it is plain to see now, that this goal is impossible to achieve in the modern war. So what do we do? Do we start to level Kiev and other cities to the ground? Do we march on Lviv? Just what is the plan? Nobody knows.
4. As for the future - right now I am genuinely more worried about the Ukranians than about Russia. I have friends in Sumy who are now almost two weeks under siege, and who knows how long it will last. The Ukraine itself is suffering an enourmous damage to it's infrastructure - how and when and with what funds it will be restored I have no idea. On top of that it looks like there will be at least 5.000.000 refugees (and probably much much more) - their fate is also unclear, I don't think EU can adequately deal with such a large number. In comparision the devaluation of the ruble doesn't seem as important. It looks like there are three main fears: 1) a large scale unemployment - a lot of businesses are leaving Russia, producing an enormous chain reaction; 2) lack of essential medicine - a lot of drugs are imported from the EU (Germany in particular); 3) complete default of the state - a lot of people have lived through the 90s (which in Russia were somewhat equivalent to the Great Depression in USA), so a certain level of impoverishment and hardship are ok, we are used to it, but a complete bancrupcy will be catastrophic. I don't believe there is any chance for an actual famine. The rest isn't so important in comparison.
5. It is also important to understand, that even in an unjust war it is impossible not to support and sympathize with your army. Wishing death and defeat to your own soldiers just isn't right and would feel dirty.