I’m not so sure but I think back THEN there were less captivating PC games as well. My perspective is from the early 00s Russia, when you had to deal with pirated games, unbelievably slow Internet, funny videos shared between friends on CDs, going with a hard drive to a friend’s house just to share your music collection, etc. Basically, we had to know how to do this kind of stuff because the alternative was so expensive. Now with LLMs you don’t even have to “google” anymore, so there’s no need to know, for example, what a file extension is.

I think one of the reasons is that MacOS didn’t really have any games back then, so there was no reason for a kid to be glued to their computer. And if you use something for a long time, you collect problems and ways to solve them, getting the experience and some technical knowledge along the way.

Probably a spelling mistake from an English native speaker. Because of how the transliteration Zelenskiy (or Zelensky) is sometimes read.

I think Dugin gets too much credit, here’s a pretty good write-up from an outsider’s perspective. As a Russian, I think it’s one of the most accurate description of what’s been going on.

https://cscr.pk/explore/themes/politics-governance/aleksandr-dugin-and-russias-military-propaganda-machine/

it honestly feels like a psyop at this point. in russia there was a particular focus on making people “apolitical”, which is a different direction but still was focused on reducing opposition turnout.