They were a Stalinist dictatorship throughout the Cold War and built tens of thousands of bunkers around their landscape, spending a large part of their economy on preparing for the inevitable invasion by the capitalist imperialists and/or ideologically degenerate socialists. Then, afterwards, they gave the world Dua Lipa and a few other successful pop artists.

Do they use electric pumps as Britain does?

I think that’s meant to be an English-German pun

Being able to set up personally hosted RSS feeds would be useful. If the feeds are fetched periodically, that could also allow archiving of accounts.

Or even if it could provide RSS feeds of accounts, for following in a RSS reader.

Though excellent work!

“Ronnie” has a nice midcentury vintage feel, if that’s of any value to you one way or the other.

If it was a bear selling that lamp, none of this would have been necessary.

Cory Doctorow once gave the hypothetical example of a phone company doing a deal with Domino’s so that every time you called a rival pizzeria, you got “press 1 to be connected to Domino’s or wait 30 seconds to be put through to the number you dialled”

Godwin’s Law was an artefact of a time when we knew that Nazis were as extinct as Vikings and Mongol hordesmen, and comparing someone to one was dramatic hyperbole. It, of course, no longer applies.

Also, in the age of online communications, when information can be limitlessly copied, it’s impossible for authoritarians to destroy information they disapprove of. It is possible, however, for them to make it difficult to find by flooding the world with vast quantities of plausible-looking alternatives to it, making it hard to identify what is real. Before LLMs, doing this at the sort of scale that would have been effective was prohibitively laborious.

Ariana was a brand name used by a Chinese manufacturer of cheap luggage of the sort you’d find in neighbourhoods with working-class immigrant populations. I once had a backpack of theirs which was the maximum airline carry-on size, which is to say, muy grande.

Isn’t that Donald Trump’s phone background?

Was the video made in Australia or New Zealand by any chance? There are two Microbees (Z80-based computers from New Zealand, virtually unheard of in the northern hemisphere) in the photo,

America! Fuck yeah!

I can vouch for Mythic Beasts

In Ottoman Turkey, burglars would set a tortoise with a lighted candle on its back loose in a house they were planning to rob, to check if there was anyone home.

He should be awarded a prize for services to womens’ horticulture, given the number of women at MIT who filled their offices with houseplants just to keep him away.

RMS doesn’t approve

How about “jackanapes”?