Ben Matthews

I guess you are right about building railways in Romania, for example I remember a train crossing the (then) shiny new EU-funded rail bridge across the Danube from Vidin, then continuing at a walking pace towards Craiova. However, where i lived near Ottignies in Belgium it was no better - they demolished houses, build tunnels and bridges, then postponed laying the rail track for over a decade. As for projects getting delayed and costs inflated by archaeological digs - check out tunnels in London… And don’t get lemmings (?) started on DB infrastructure… Maybe the emergency situation in Ukraine, oddly helps them to get some things moving faster ?

I remember in 1990s the talk about “Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok”, also having crossed the land border from Russia to China several times during that period, I felt the relative european culture on ‘our’ side. So, yes, there was a lost opportunity, and we could have been more welcoming, but it was not a conspiracy, nor were any specific political groups to blame (as article hints) - rather just the slow muddled consensus-processes of EU and NATO could not cope with any faster expansion, meanwhile russians got impatient and let Putin (KGB) take over, so it went bad.
If we were to redesign the whole structure, I’d say we should abolish NATO and replace it with a mutual defence organisation for democracies anywhere in the world - including Brazil, Japan, India, etc. if they like, but with no permanent membership. There should be clearly specified democratic criteria including freedom for political opposition, media, NGOs, etc., and when these are no-longer fulfilled, a procedure for suspension of rights that requires a large majority but no vetos. So, currently Hungary might be suspended, and even USA if it continues its current track, while democrats in Russia (or in exile from R) might be encouraged to see a long-term pathway open.
Such redesign of NATO - conversion from a tribal members club to a defence of democracy - might even be an face-saving way to end the war.

Ah yes, I see it on openrailwaymap, which also indicates mixed gauge all the way along the Tisza valley to Vinohradiv, also a ukranian gauge line from Uzhhorod to Kosice - are these still operating ?

Another trans-european link I should have mentioned for longer term planning - considering that Lukashenka won’t be in the way forever, is a ukrainian-gauge line from Riga to Odesa - reviving already existing connections (and to balance that - a polish gauge line Bialystok - Grodno - Vilnius , complementing rail baltica).

Seems to me a win-win scenario. Remember that Ukraine is actually remarkably good at railways - especially at manufacturing large numbers of comfortable and good-value sleeper wagons, which the rest of europe lacks, and also at maintaining their system in such adverse circumstances - their punctuality today is still much better than DB. On the other hand the track routes in Ukraine are anything but direct, dating from 19th century when capital cities were Petersburg and Vienna (so they align better N-S than E-W), so there’s a lot of potential to make them straighter. The obstacles maybe rather regional mistrust - whether politicians in Suceava accept the status of Chernivtsi - a similar question as whether hungarians / slovakians accept Uzhhorod, polish Lutsk or Kovel,…? Better passenger transport links could help to build trust.

Good, this means passengers can change in Uzhgorod - a nice town, instead of Chop which is just an isolated station with big gauge-changing sheds.
But it’s only 22km. So next step, plan a more ambitious standard gauge connection, from Suceava (Romania) via Chernivtsi, Ternopil, Lutsk to Chelm (Poland) - this could be a really useful european N-S link, skirting around the Carpathian mountains. In parallel, for balance, plan a ukranian-gauge track to Gdansk on the Baltic, to facilitate freight exports, also maybe extend the existing ukranian-gauge track which already reaches from Hrubieszow to Katowice.

So what happened to all the Move Forward supporters, the youthful half of the country, surely a minor border skirmish didn’t convert them into nationalists too ?

The dolomite mountains are spectacular. However such data may be distorted somewhat near borders, if the definition of tourist includes anybody who happens to cross from a neighbouring country for the day. For example, I recall crossing SüdTirol by train, traveling from Linz (Austria) to Innsbruck (Austria) - it’s a beautiful route - and there is a convenient cross-border transport pass too.

Hmm, problem is it’s regional, and there’s a lot more steel and cement produced and consumed in Chongqing and Fujian (examples reported) than in the west where most of the wind sun and hydro are. Will this help shift more energy-intensive industry move to provinces with surplus renewable energy ? Did anybody analyse, what are the national shares?

Although not convinced any such bridge is an efficient use of resources, I’m glad the plan includes railway as well as road.

The link suggests this is based on car data - so it just shows where it’s (too) easy, or not, for dutch to drive.

Isn’t it technically possible to split browser functions so we can recombine as we like? - i.e. separating the rendering / js engine from everything around the side - managing all the tabs, bookmarks, cookies and passwords, workspaces and sessions, mail, notes etc. In my case, I like the workspace structure provided by Vivaldi, but don’t see why it has to be built on chromium browser. Anyway as a developer I need to test against blink, webkit and gecko, so would be nice to swap them within the same user interface structure.
By the way, I develop a “javascript-heavy” web-app (interactive climate model) and it seems to be working fine, and fast, in firefox, so I’m not convinced by complaints in the article.

Well problem with any Lemmy community as such a forum, is that current usage (not necessarily intrinsic to the software) is so ephemeral. So it’s good for discussing breaking news, but not to gradually accumulate discussion of solutions to complex problems, over years. I wish this were not the case, but doubt anybody will even notice this comment, as no longer ‘hot’, and folded away … Rather, a few weeks later the same topic will be reopened under a different post, and we start over again.

I agree with most of what you say. I’m a long-time fan of calculating more complex things client side, as you can see from my climate model (currently all calcs within web browser, evolved from java applet to scalajs).
Also, in regarding social media, keeping the data client side could make the network more resilient in autocratic countries (many), and thelp this become truly a global alternative.
On the other hand, some ‘trunk’ server interactions could also doing more not less, bundling many ‘activity’ messages together for efficiency - especially to reduce the duplication of meta-info headers in clunky json, and work of authentification-checking (which I suppose has to happen to propagate every upvote in Lemmy?).

Thanks, that makes sense if I think about it, but maybe users shouldn’t have to - i.e. the Mdon part-conversation way still seems confusing to me (despite being a climate modeler and scala dev), although haven’t used Mdon much since I found Lemmy. And I still feel that both ways seem intrinsically inefficient - for different reasons - if we intend to scale up the global numbers (relating OP).

Combined with topic of trains, this reminds me of the famous movie Dil Se with the Chaiyya Chaiyya song on the roof of the steam train - itself in the SW, but of which the core plot was also about an rebellion in Assam… i.e. it reminds that this problem is older than current government …
But maybe they will be motivated to catch up, as China will soon have a direct railway from Sichuan to the frontier of Arunachal…

That makes sense, to store only popular stuff, or temporarily - especially for ‘heavier’ images (although as we see with lemm.ee, that leads to issues when an instance dies). Yet I also wonder about the scalability of just the minimum meta-info, whose size does depend on the protocol design.
For example with Lemmy every upvote click propagates across the network (if i understand correctly, mastodon doesn’t propagate ‘likes’ so consistently, presumably for efficiency, but this can make it seem ‘empty’). Maybe such meta-info could be batched, or gathered by a smaller set of ‘node’ instances, from which others pick up periodically - some tree to disperse information rather than directly each instance to each other instance ?
As the fediverse grows, gathering past meta-info might also become a barrier to new entrant instances ?

I don’t think the general architecture scales that well (think of all the duplicate storage …

That’s my hunch too, although haven’t studied in detail - so I wonder how we can fix it ?
Is there an forum that discusses this scaling issue (in general, across fediverse) ?

Since much (so-called) “AI” basic training data depends on Wikipedia, wouldn’t this create a feedback loop that could quickly degenerate ?

Ayayay. I’m tempted to write - how are they so stuck in a past worldview ? Yet Cyrillic script and orthodox church developed in Bulgaria and then in Kyiv, not in Moscow, and even back in the days of Tito, Yugoslavs understood that Stalin was not their friend.
Anyway, at least he attended - halfway progress ?