“Well you see, if Germany had just…”

Kirghizia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan also added in the referendum a question about them being independent and only joining the new union as independent members. After the coup attempt Ukraine moved not to sign the treaty and held a referendum on just becoming independent.

The Soviet people voted overwhelmingly in favor of retaining the Soviet Union, albiet with reforms, in a referendum that was ignored when the leaders of the USSR’s constituent republics agreed behind closed doors to dissolve the nation.

The referendum (the only one they ever had) with it being in 1991 it was already a much different Soviet Union than we usually think and very late in its life as an effort to somehow keep it together, even though in a pretty different form. The wording makes it so that there was very little reason to oppose it unless you were a hardline independence advocate (so you might not respect their authority anyway or don’t want to give them credibility etc) since independence or no, it was promising more independence, human rights, freedom and so on. And in some countries that was tied to “let’s become independent at the same time but also keep in this new federation or what have you”. So it wasn’t even a “should we keep Soviet Union or not” but rather “should we make the union different, better”, which again, not much reason to oppose it no matter what you thought. Keeping it as it had been was the hardliner approach of keeping the older style Soviet Union and that wasn’t very popular.

And the new treaty was never signed because communist hardliners tried a coup to reverse the course. The attempt backfired horribly and just lead to even swifter dissolution. But I’d say it was already heading towards that anyway with people seeking to break away from Moscow and the whole system in a turmoil over reforms (to some too radical and to some not radical enough). In hindsight it feels like they would’ve needed a miracle to keep it together in any recognizable form.

Ah yes, let’s recommend the browser that is “targeting a first Alpha release for early adopters in 2026.”

Way too few of those

I thought most stuff was viewable even without account. Doesn’t seem like a big deal if you can view their post but not interact with it since I would’ve thought others interacting with you was what you wanted to block them from doing anyway.

I’d say Mozilla, but they just took all their social media funding away and threw it at AI.

Nobody was using their instance from what I heard. So a bit of a wasted effort.

What sort of money are they throwing at AI? I only know about the sidebar and that’s basically just a tab to a website of your choosing. Couldn’t have been expensive.

Definitely has managed to invest in some incredibly profitable stuff but he also says and does the absolutely stupidest shit imaginable. It’s astounding

covert

Lmao

People used to use almost all parts of animals. Being able to be super picky is more modern extravagance and it’s good the parts are still used. Unnecessary waste otherwise

I’ve just stirred the drink, no clumps

I’ve just stirred the drink, no clumps

Silja Serenade, hell yeah, been on that ship a bunch of times

that nobody wants

lol

I would’ve guessed with that username kek

Often immigrants come to do very low-paid jobs so it’s no wonder that among that group there’d be more really poor people and those on the dole.

Both are good advice

Oh, okay. I just know about the translating thing and the sidebar

Forcing bullshit genai stuff into their browser

It’s an opt-in feature that just opens whatever AI service you picked, their website in a sidebar. You can even use your own local AI if you want to. Or not use it at all. But the AI isn’t actually in your browser any more than it is in your browser when you open their website in a tab.

If the translation thing counts as AI then that’s actually a really cool and more private use of it compared to querying a server. It can do the translation completely locally. Works pretty well too in my experience, though it does think for a moment when you tell it to translate.

I don’t think Firefox has any AI that they need to run for you. The language thing (if that counts) is local thing.