Yandex does business outside of Russia, they’re not going to do stuff that will get them sanctioned even more heavily than they already are! (Yandex had to split in two after Russia invaded Ukraine due to sanctions and RU government pressure)

It’s a specific misreading of “YandexBot” (their indexer for Yandex Search) as any automated/troll traffic from Russia. Yandex web crawling went to zero. Russian-sponsored troll activity was unaffected.

To be even more nerdy: the reason traffic dropped to zero is that crawling is the least time-sensitive thing you do as a search engine, so in your giant cluster of compute you schedule that work as the lowest priority. When some capacity goes away for “whatever” reason, the crawling jobs stop.

There is a very American attitude to this — that any harm can be fixed with an application of money.

It is very weird because the courts keep saying things aren't "irreparable harms" when they're clearly irreparable! You can't un-cut-down a 60 year old tree! You can't un-deport a gay man to a torture dungeon!

Why is the presumption of normalcy still in effect in DC courts, lol.

Y'all, YandexBot is like GoogleBot. It's the search engine indexer. There's no way Yandex is running troll farms identifying themselves with a Yandex user string and coming from a Yandex-assigned ASIN.

There's shades of grey somewhere between 'trying to reopen the Strait of Hormuz before November 1' and 'nominating false electors to try and steal the election'

A lot of people seem to think the only way to "fuck with elections" is to stuff ballot boxes. I'd argue that there's no bright line between "trying to do policy to make voters like you" and "fucking with elections to win."

I mean I think China also has a lot of demand for tiny size EVs — there’s a reason the best-selling GM vehicle in decades is the Wuling Hongguang Mini!

I mean a fair bit of Geely’s development has historically been in Europe! IMO, one of their strengths has been basically starting their global line from scratch as something that combines expertise from across the world rather than adapting a domestic model for export.

I'm tired of beating around the bush. A lot of the people that choose to drive around NYC need to make better choices and the city needs to make them.

Holy shit that’s a great successor to the RC Z

The spat should be much higher on the arch, like covering only ⅓ of the wheel. On a lightly-loaded OG, the wheel is barely covered and only the tire really is.

I think you can have the snark if there’s competence to back it up. He hasn’t earned the snark.

Yes! This is Bluesky and therefore we’re all thirty or forty years old and do not need this.

I think people confused “YandexBot” which is their search-engine web crawler and the generic idea of a ‘bot account.’ It does make sense that crawlers were shut down, they’re likely the lowest-priority workloads on Yandex’s job scheduler. It’s the first thing you turn off when you lose capacity.

The reason people put an asterisk in the middle of a word like pen*s is because it evaded the early, very lightweight profanity filters that companies put on their email in the early ‘90s.

Putting an asterisk in a word does the opposite of what you think it does. Because you’re too childish to say some bad word, someone else who is trying to avoid it can’t block it out. It’s selfish.

I also had to explain cargo bikes to them. Anyway, they’re now walking their grandchildren to school in the stroller and they seem happy about it.