Any source for that claim? I can only say from the personal experience that people I know and I used to be addicted to nicotine (not only in tobacco products)
The question was if people (I assumed a regular folk, not journalists and opposition) are allowed to make jokes about the government, and I answered to that. Of course I know that Russia has no traces of democracy left and I am aware how Russia targets high-profile people, including journalists. You should be more reserved before telling people they don't know anything.
Not exactly... In the US, organizations use this form of self-censorship to prevent a potential backlash from the public, whereas in Russia, the bans are direct orders from the government and the employers simply don't have any choice.
Criticism is allowed unless you have ambitions to work in government. Critique of the government has become actually quite common in the Russian stand up comedy scene. There are some exceptions, like you cannot show any public disrespect to the Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov (you can google how people apologise to him).
Edit (forgot to mention): also, participating in anti-government protests often results in people losing their jobs or being expelled from the universities
Edit 2: also, there is an ongoing crisis with the independent media: the Russian government is trying to suffocate the independent news outlets by classifying them as foreign agents (which has pretty bad practical outcomes for the news outlet)
The parent commenter didn't say that everybody should use ML in all circumstances. Real world tasks are often more complex than invented toy examples, and quite often hand crafted policies don't work so well. And it was not elaborated in the original blog post. So I think it was a valid point.
I think speed could change over time because our generation uses computer and common shortcuts from childhood. People who participated in the study could have been much less experienced users at that time and the shortcuts might have been less established and more varying from platform to platform