While I don’t necessarily agree with the commenter you are replying to - I can relate to how hard it is to separate Russia’s contributions from what is currently happening in Ukraine.
Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.
Interesting - I never attributed that to moving borders. USSR had a pretty mixed society with many people moving between different republics during their lifetime (especially in the 40-60s). Don’t think borders changed much during that period.
Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.
I don't think "genocide" is the right term here. It is part of a wider man-made famine, which is an act of great evil perpetrated by the communist regime, but it affected all parts of the southern USSR, including areas with mainly ethnic Russian populations. For more information, you may want to read more about the policies that led to this event, such as "dekulakization"
I am aware that genocide is a disputed term in this context. I lean towards it because the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians (and Kazakhs) and was at least in part not mitigated intentionally to punish minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment.
There's an interesting question there whether the primary distinction for those "minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment" was ethnic or economic. It just so happens that your average Ukrainian (and, to a lesser extent, southern Russian) peasant was a fair bit more rich - partly because of better soil and climate, and partly because the brutal Russian take on serfdom wasn't practiced as long there as it had been in central Russia. And rich peasants were considered "economic enemies", which Soviets interpreted in very draconian terms (tainted the whole family).
But, of course, this possibility does not exclude the other. If this was the primary motivation, however, it neatly explains why some southern Russian regions were also severely affected despite not having any separatist tendencies.
This particular map is the territory claimed by the then still newly-minted Ukrainian state. Basically the then-current Ukrainian equivalent of the likes of Greater Serbia, Greater Hungary etc.
There was no border in those territories for so long, anything they could have drawn wouldn't really have any meaningful historical connection. So IIRC they went by the Russian Imperial demographic maps and claimed most territories on those showed >25% "Malorossians". Ironically, this ended up pilfering some territories from Belarus, as well - note where Pinsk is on that map!
It's kinda amusing what these people are bashing current Russian maps with Kherson, yet they are fine with a postcard as the evidence of.. expansive borders.
Outside. Basically, there was a broad swath of territories where smallholder peasants thrived and wouldn't agree to collectivization without state terror. It included most of Soviet-controlled Ukraine and a large chunk of southern Russia.
The discussion basically amounts to "are heavy-handed anti-crime policies targeting urban youths racist against Blacks or not?"
- "No they aren't, because they target all urban youths, including Hispanics and Whites, and not just Blacks"
- "Yes they are, because they affect a disproportionate share of young Black people. The fact that they affect a disproportionate share of young Hispanics doesn't make it less racist"
Rostov-on-Don. It was kind of founded 1749 on decree of the Empress Elizabeth so it couldn't get even more Russian. But we have many different ethnicities there https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TWD2Kkrd_bo (german filmmaker 1918)
> Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.
Outside. Specifically, Volga Region, Kazakhstan, Urals and Siberia
I am curious to know whether this Western perception was supported or opposed by the Soviet state. They have definitely “prioritized” Russian culture internally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflation was at least in part created by the Soviets.
Well, the original Russian culture was destroyed/changed by the communists as much as the Ukrainian one (collectivization, anti-religious movement, industrialization, etc.) The Russian culture before the revolution was very different from what was under USSR. There was little left in the USSR of it other than the language and a few fairy tales.
Never really thought of that in this way. Do you think Russian poets, writers, composers, artists of the early and mid 20th century were a product of the Soviet culture more than the Tsarist/pre-Soviet world?
In that case 'Russia' was harrassing itself: the regime first established in Kiev in late X century has conquered the northern territories and spread its rule there, then lost core southern territory in the aftermath of the mongol invasions, and eventually came back, also spreading as far as to Alaska in the east.
We have to agree that either “modern Ukraine” was created in 1920s from Russians and Russian territories or there were different people on that land long before that.
If you are leaning towards the former then this could be extended even further: Soviet Union only ever harassed itself. There were no occupied Baltic states, there was no Ukraine, etc etc - just one big happy family called USSR.
Russian Empire and its successor states USSR and Russia is a product of imperialism that was born in Kiev when Grand Prince Vladimir has brought Orthodox Christianity to those lands. This imperialism conquered some territories, lost some territories (Kiev proper), then regained them back and conquered a lot more, then splintered. The current war is the result of the imperialist successor of the original Kiev regime to gain Kiev back.
Well if you go back that far you should blame the Swedes who established the first centralized(ish) Rus state in Novgorod (not Kiev...). So the current war is in fact the result of the imperialist ambitions of successors of the Swedish Vikings from the 9th century.
It’s a false dichotomy only if you indeed believe that Russia has “created” Ukraine and that Ukrainians are not a real nation. Russia has as much right to claim Ukraine as Ukraine - Russia. None.
There are some people, including some modern Ukrainians, who claim that Ukraine is a continuation state of people who had always lived in that area and have founded Kiev (I assume that it wat this 'ancient Ukraine' you were referring to here [0]). In that case, yes, 'Ukraine' was 'harassed' by itself, as Russia is nothing else, but a state created by this 'ancient Ukraine'.
If you hold another opinion - that Ukrainians are mixed descendants of people who came to live in this area in ~15 century after it was devastated by Mongol invasions and later steppe nomads plundering in 13..14 centuries, then no, Russia could not have harassed it in 'ancient' times.
I beg to differ. Ukraine was a divided country born in 1991 with two very different parts - east and west who didn't quite get along since then. But thanks to Putin's aggression, after 2014, and especially now, it is a one nation firmly united and resolved to not be a part of Russia. So Ukraine is a very real nation now, created paradoxically, by none other then Putin. This guy is a great reconciliator: he healed the east-west divide in the Ukraine, expanded NATO, and even united all of the EU, Great Britain, Switzerland and other nations.
No. Novgorod was established first (since it's closer to Sweden..). Not that the Novgorodian republic is in any way closer to being a predecessor of the modern Russian state than Kiev is.
The phrasing they use is a bit confusing. "Speech" is not a clear quality description, so it's odd to compare speech to a CD quality recording (presumably 44.1 kHz). Speech can also be sampled at CD quality. If they meant to emphasize the difference in frequency range or dynamic range - there were, perhaps, better ways to do that (e.g. "telephone conversation" vs "symphonic orchestra recording").
My best guess is that all they meant by "CD quality" was that it was targeting full band stereo replication, rather than narrow band as is typically used for speech. Not that it could achieve transparent compression at any particular bitrate.
The tiny music clip in the sample, encoded at 6 kbps, is obviously not any kind of evidence for "CD quality" one way or the other. (The clip itself, if you download it from the page, is re-encoded with 64 kbps AAC.) No way to know how it would stack up against 96 kbps Opus on a stack of CDs with blind testing, I don't think.
Shazam produces an embarrassing number of false matches, which I assume are hash collisions or something similar in the world of their fingerprinting system?
Shazams correct hit rate has certainly lowered in the many years I've been using it. Presumably because the pool of music it now is being asked to decipher is becoming unwieldy.
I am permanently pleased to learn one size does not fit all even in gargantuan saas companies.
It is impressive, but it's also not something I would want to use for music listening. I guess the "10x" goal makes for an impressive chart, but I'd like to know what are the more realistic goals and gains.
The interesting part to me was that they used specifically a 64kbps example, not a higher bitrate that would be more appropriate for music listening. Just speculating, but if they managed to get 10x higher compression rate compared to 64kbps MP3, could they achieve an even higher compression rate when compared to 320kbps MP3? If the algorithm is so good that it can compress audio down to 6kbps with just a few artifacts, would it sound almost good at 12kbps? 24kbps?
Between this effort and the recently announced Google-led multi-channel/immersive audio codec initiative, I am pretty excited about the future of audio streaming and distribution.
A somewhat tangential question: what are the ways KYC can be made less vulnerable to identity theft? Do people who verify the uploaded document use some automated government services to check for stolen documents?
It seems like a process like the one in this flow (upload a document and a selfie) is useless if a document is stolen (since in most cases you can just look up the person's social account and download their selfie). And even worse, it would give a badge of authenticity to the scammer.
And if the backend people do use some government service to verify the document, then what is the value of submitting a selfie?
Its true, a document and a selfie are not enough in some cases. there are a couple of technics to make a better guess if the selfie was live but they are not good as liveliness checks.
We already started to work on a liveliness step with a customizable challenge, meaning the developers can configure what action the user should perform in this step (like turning the head in a specific direction, perform hand gestures, and more).
The mobile SDK's will have more sophisticated tools to detect fraud, we will write about it soon.
It's not what they're doing here, but you should be able to read the biometric chip using a phone and verify the data that it contains server-side (since it's signed). Not sure how easy it is to get hold of the public keys though.
Which also would be a nice feature if it could be implemented here, might be possible with WebNFC :)
I've seen cool computer vision demos that run client-side in the browser, so I hope they don't stream the feed. OTOH if they do stream, warning the user would go a long way.
> since in most cases you can just look up the person's social account and download their selfie
Are these reviewed by a human? If so, why not 'just?' require the selfie to contain the document, some written nonce, and/or a weird body position, like a flag semaphore position?
Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.