Fedor Skuratov

@gr1ngray @tioplain @kkocos У малых народностей другое национальное самосознание: традиции общинности намного сильнее, так как урбанизация произошла позже на пару поколений (и уж явно не в масштабах европейской части РФ). Второе третье поколения уже ассимилируются

Отличительная черта русских за границей - полное отсутствие институционализированной диаспоральности. Европейцы постоянно спрашивают про русскую диаспору и ее мнение по разным вопросам, каждый раз недоверчиво слушают, что никакой диаспоры-то и нет

@akarlin ‘Surrounded by enemies’. This is the superpower of both Russia and the Russian people, even if neither those around them nor the citizens themselves like it.

@akarlin but demonstrated the highest degree of mobilisation and technological breakthroughs: a shortage of resources, a lack of freedoms, and a crisis situation in the world and all around.

> Is Russia just not involved with AI at all? Russia is a geopolitical adversary of the West. It doesn't have access to frontier AI hardware. Not does it have the internal economies of scale to recreate the world chip manufacturing complex internally. Only China can even attempt that. It is ruled by a boomer who has never used the Internet and genuinely believes it to be a CIA project, possibly targeted against himself personally. He wants the Internet under the thumb of his security forces - the war on VPNs is pushed by the same FSB department that poisoned Navalny. For their part, these security men have taken it as license to loot IT companies (and everything else) for their own personal enrichment. At best, the owners get some modest compensation. Sometimes, they just go to jail. Russia has no VC ecosystem. It was marginal before 2022 and is non-existent today. Needless to say, this is not a political economy under which a real VC ecosystem is possible even in principle. Internet access is unreliable because Putin has nightmares about Ukraine taking him out like Israel did with Khamenei. Putin's neuroses and personal cowardice take precedence over all other economic and technological considerations. There are discussions over blocking access to foreign LLMs, and developing a "sovereign" national AI model. They even want to block GitHub. As a Russian, you need to be clinically insane to work on anything genuinely innovative or that involves substantial investment into fixed capital assets (such as data centers) that cannot be easily moved at a moment's notice. Unless your business plans heavily revolve around military- or surveillance-related stuff - like, say, automating keyword searches on VK to help the FSB meet its extremism arrest quotas - you have no coherent reason to stay in Russia. This is not an environment in which anyone of talent or personal ambition wants to work in. Most nerds do not want to be under the thumb of jocks as they were in high school, and leave when the latter rule the roost. That is precisely what is happening. What AI talent does exist - and Russia's "cracked math/CS academics" are in any case somewhat exaggerated (actual surveys of CS graduates show Russians to be about as able as Indians and Chinese, and 0.5 SD below Americans - has been emigrating non-stop, and this will now continue for as long as the Putin system endures. Most fundamentally, Russia's GDP is 10x smaller than America's and China's. Even all the above aside, why would you expect anything more from it than you would, from, say, France? The European middle Powers are its actual "peers" in terms of economics and technological capability, not the global superpowers.

@akumabuyou @kkocos Социологи в России выделяют два среза: один атомизированный с индивидуалистическими ценностями, второй — с коммунальными. Первый это европейская часть и города, второй - все остальное. Атомизированы так то почти все городские везде — сильнее.

@teodorix @kkocos скорее говори об атомизации россиян, на самом деле

@tioplain @kkocos Русскоязычных. Диаспоры, преимущественно, не русскоязычные. Язык - ключевой фактор общности, едва ли не основной.

@teodorix @kkocos русские* сейчас помимо русских, очень много обезьян выучили русский

It offers those returns to people who passionately want to get rich without having any talent. For this segment, Telegram is still perfectly suitable. And for this segment, there is still no obvious alternative to Telegram.

In fact, the masses of "crypto enthusiasts," in the traditional sense, are simply speculators. They lack the money and skills required to trade on proper exchanges. Crypto, meanwhile, can still offer decent returns, although with enormous risk.

I came across a post by @mert, the CEO of Helius, asking why Telegram is the "default" messaging app in the crypto community. He argues that Telegram is not suitable for business; Slack is better for that.