The Russians have been known to sprinkle anti-personnel mines all through these areas. Seems not in this case, but for me personally I would be as sceptical as you are.

Like most things the true reason is far more complicated than what those simplified narratives often say. Unfortunately they make good headlines.

Nobody who can to speak publicly knows for sure whether or not Putin alone chose to start the war and exactly what the reasons where. But if you look more broadly than just 24th February 2022 the reasons go beyond just Putin. Even without Putin, Russia (the country not the people) had reasons (horrible as they are) to escalate tensions with Ukraine prior to 2022, it had reasons to start the war, and even today it has reasons to keep the war going. In the West, and in Russia, Putin is the personification of the choices Russia makes. But Russia itself would have reasons even without him.

Those reasons are many, and I wouldn't do them justice to talk about the various theories. But one in particular that I feel isn't talked about enough is the Sevastopol Naval base. Crimea, and it's naval base was the centre of Soviet and now Russian control over the Black Sea. Prior to 2014 Russia was leasing the base from Ukraine, so it has essentially been under control of Moscow continuously since the Soviet era. The 2014 revolution in Ukraine posed a threat to that continuing. Russia's rather extreme solution to that was to anex Crimea. If you look at from Russia's perspective they were put in quite a tough situation and they tried to make the best they could from the hand they were delt. Most people would probably disagree with the use of "best" in that sentence, but from Russia's perspective it was the right choice.

Since 2014, Crimea has been problematic to Russia for various reasons, in particular due to needing an outside source of fresh water, and needing the very expensive new Kerch bridge to connect it to Russia. One of the apparent benefits of the full scale invasion in 2023 was to supply Crimea with water from the Nova Khakovka dam via a canal, and connect Crimea to Russia via land from the North. The reality of the war so far hasn't actually been a net win for either of those things. And recently Russia has been forced to move a lot of their fleet out of the Sevastopol Naval base due to Ukrainian attacks. But presumably Russia is looking long term and continues to hope for a good outcome eventually.

Looking to the future, both sides think they can outlast the other's will to continue and hope to eventually force the other side to back down. Russia's end game now seems to be some form of negotiation or ceasefire where they are able to retain as much of what they have grabbed onto as possible. Ukraine's endgame that they have stated publicly is to remove Russia entirely from their land. But there is also the hope of being truly free from Russian influence for the first time in centuries. Ukraine hopes to come out of this war with a strong military to deter any further Russian aggression indefinitely. And possibly also NATO membership.

Russia hopes that eventually the political will for Ukraine to continue fighting for that aim, and the West's will to support it will dry up. They also hope that if they keep the conflict going indefinitely at a small scale, or if they hang onto some territory, then Ukraine will never be able to join NATO.

Ukraine knows that if things continue as they have for the last year they will eventually win. The open question is how long is eventually, and will it be too long.

Unfortunately this means enormous loss of life on both sides for the foreseeable future. Likely 1-2 more years minimum and hundreds of thousands more dead.

Yeah that site is pretty good. There's a lot of information though. I think a good starting point is maybe this page: https://reproducible-builds.org/docs/env-variations/

An important point to add for someone who hasn't heard of reproducible builds before: The key difference to a normal build process is that it is 100% deterministic i.e. it produces exactly the same output every time.

You might think that most built processes would be like this by default, however this is not the case. Compilers and linkers usually have some non-deterministic values that they put in the final binary such as timestamps. For a build to be deterministic these sources of variation must be disabled or mocked to be a repeatable value (i.e. not based on the actual compile time).

It seems like it's alive again. You saved it OP!

His fur is also very luscious. Clearly very well fed indeed.

I hope the mods don't ban him, I heard that well fed foxes aren't well received on some platforms

Would a game that is essentially a micro Linux distro count? I feel that should be pretty doable as a bootable USB stick or CD.

If you did it that way you'd have to bundle the Linux kernel plus graphics drivers at a minimum. But I wonder how much of the OS you could avoid having. Certainly you wouldn't need a Desktop Environment. I wonder if you would need something like X or Wayland or if you could get away without that (to run games built in a normal-ish userspace way). I guess finding the minimal environment for SDL would be a good starting point. That sounds like an interesting exercise for sure.

Although something like that probably isn't as pure as you're looking for, it would be pretty cool to do anyway. Maybe we should start a club.

In the hamburger menu on the left you should find an "Add account" button. IIRC it says the word "Anonymous" and you have to tap it to show the add account button.

Some things in Jerboa are a bit confusing for now. Once you get to know where things are it's pretty good though.

I think the most amazing part about this is the video at the bottom of the article: Miikshi: Cosmic Rays (4K). The caption calls it a "charming fictional animated video to explain their muon-based systems". But I cannot emphasize enough how much this undersells it.

It's like a weird charming mashup between Thunderbirds, Muppets and a real muon science team. You really have to just watch it.

If you had trouble understanding what the muon positioning system from the article might be used for or how it works there is a short explanation from Professor Tanaka at the end of the video.

For a Reddit/Lemmy app though I would still prefer images to load in the app itself, because it's more seamless. For now Jerboa handles images and GIFV just like any other link.

RIF let's you configure this, which is nice. For Jerboa I think the default should eventually be to load them in the app itself (RIF calls this "Native").

Edit: Jerboa does already load the OP image in-app when you open the comments. I think that behavior shouldn't change. It's just when you open the image from the news feed that it opens it like a link currently.

When you open a link from Jerboa it should open a mini in-app version of your main browser. If your default browser app is set to Firefox it will say "Powered by Firefox" and if it is Chrome it will say "Running in Chrome". UX wise it is very similar to having a bundled in-app browser. But the rendering is handled by your main browser.

I'm not up-to date with the story behind this, but my understanding is that new apps that want in-app browers should be implemented in this way. This seems to be the modern way of doing it. The reason for it I believe is mostly security. Your main browser app should be up-to-date on security patches and features, and if apps can just piggie back off that then they don't need to worry about shipping and patching their own in-app copy of the browser. Also it respects the user's choice of default browser. So if your default browser is Chrome it will use that for the in-app browser for all apps that work this way (which is quickly becoming most apps).

Another advantage of doing it this way is that when you use the "Open in Firefox" button it seems to just move the tab from one app to the other rather than reloading it, so it happens almost instantly.

I've been using Jerboa so far. It's pretty nice. At first I was a bit sceptical because it seemed a little half baked. But it's growing on me. Also now that I've used it for a while I think it's relatively well rounded feature wise. It is quite minimal, but I think a lot of people probably like that. I think long term if other apps come up that are more similar to the existing 3rd party Reddit apps I will probably switch though.

My main issue so far is not being able to follow links to communities inside the app. I imagine this will probably be more difficult to implement than on Reddit because of federation, but hopefully apps can get that working eventually.

Also it can be difficult to add new communities from other servers even via search. Which is also a federation issue.

I also miss the features from Reddit Is Fun which let you choose which content is displayed in-app vs in a web browser. But that's only a minor annoyance so far.

I find I am getting used to the visual style of comments. I initially didn't like it, but it's growing on me.