What's driving this involvement with the US?

International relations stuff is not just A is bad B is now friend. For Vietnam to get as much resources as it can while staying friendly and peaceful towards those that offer to help, it cannot always stir the history soup and make a big deal out of its painful past. Vietnam is more than just whatever came out of the US-Vietnam war.

I'm not sure I agree with the take that Vietnam favors US relations because China did bad things. It paints Vietnam as antagonizing US and China relations. While US-China relations are in fact poor, the reality is Vietnam is a much smaller country that seeks cooperation and as much help as it needs, and has no chance to point out this antagonism publicly.

Vietnamese being very warm and welcoming to visitors may skew their sentiment towards USians coming from the Wild West. The fact that y'all come at all is pretty cool, shows that the food is good and the landscape nice.

Vietnam also receives Chinese visitors, all the time and all day of the year. They show the same appreciation, but it is quite normalized. Both China and Vietnam relations also go a long way back, so there is less of an element of novelty, therefore less need to be humble and polite. China, after all, is like a (much) bigger brother.

"US better" is definitely not the sentiment when I ask Vietnamese this question. They admit China's support is more appreciated and frankly, useful, but wishes to be less coupled to China. The US involvement is annoying to some, and appreciated by others. I don't know if there is much heft to it other than friendly words on paper and in the press.

When Biden visited, Vietnam agreed to receive a lot of help and support in technological, scientific, and energy domain from the US, as well as help to (continue) undoing the mass destruction the US has caused ~~in return for the bodies of US soldiers~~. I don't think Vietnam has forgotten at all. The agreement is not because US is better. Sino-Vietnamese trade stands strong.

Here's another element to the story. China borders Vietnam and thus it (under various names and governments) has history with Vietnam (also under various names and governments) that spans way back to before either were communist.

In Vietnam, it is taught in history classes at a primary level about conflicts and wars with China that last a total of a thousand years. Was this communist China? No, neither was it communist Vietnam. But is it still significant to the extent that it is historical knowledge that is taught in the main curriculum. Otherwise if we solely teach (joint North-South) communist Vietnam history you'd run out of content pretty quick as the country is so recently established.

I don't know what or if at all communist Chinese history is taught in the curriculum. But yeah Chinese warlords did engage in a lot of wars and invasions with the warlords down south in Vietnam.

Now the Sino-Vietnamese war did happen. The sentiment was perhaps a feeling of betrayal and shock. Many understand why China might have invaded, including the involvement of Pol Pot.

But things have changed. I always say this: historical events are real events that happened but they don't act as static backdrop to reduce present phenomenon to simple yes no causality. They are for personal remembrance and for future lessons. Both China and Vietnam have made strict plans to normalize relations in the early 90s. Here is a translated excerpt from a recent article on 45 years after the Sino-Vietnamese war:

With the spirit of "Putting the past aside, looking forward to the future", we have built a bridge across the painful pit of war, working together to build an increasingly sustainable relationship between Vietnam and China!

It is more often discussed how terrible the Pol Pot government was during that time (they also killed and tortured many Vietnamese) and how necessary Vietnamese involvement was. There is also Cambodian-Vietnamese relations to sort out in this equation. While these wars are coupled in a way, modern treatments isolate them in order to rectify the relations individually with its neighbors.

Vietnam has also decided to move on with the US in a similar vein to how it did with China. But the sentiment is not the same. To contrast, here's an excerpt from 2020 on 45 years after the US-Vietnam war:

The victory of Ho Chi Minh's campaign marked a major turning point in the nation's history, fully completing the goal of "Fighting the Americans out, fighting the puppets" as set out by President Ho Chi Minh; liberate all of South Vietnam, ending 21 years of national division, leading to the unity, independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Vietnam on land, airspace and sea; bringing our nation into a new era, the era of national independence and socialism throughout the entire Vietnamese Fatherland.

Conflicts in the South China Sea is a tricky one, but it's not swept under the rug. China and Vietnam have sought to sort out naval and armed conflicts in the area. While it is somewhat of a stale issue by now, I think we just have to wait to see how they decide to settle/regulate it.

I didn't have ads either but being able to use KoReader is a good enough motivation for me.

• You can customize it a lot to your own liking and they do something clever with page changing that it seems a lot more responsive.
• Another thing is I used to have to convert epubs to KFX to get nice hyphenation and good typography but on KoReader you seem to be able to customize all those typography things with whatever epub you throw at it.
• Also, I have a local Calibre OPDS endpoint, you can add that in KoReader and download books over wirelessly. WiFi needs to be on when doing that but with a few tweaks you have read only root partiton so Kindle shouldn't update.

Overall there are a lot of steps to it, if you're comfortable with your current setup it's not worth the hassle/time.

People: want to learn more about Islam, ask for more reading materials on this topic.

Hakim: shares them, indicating that's what he personally read, with some source criticism.

People: refuse to read them and treat a youtube comment to be a Marxist analysis ripe for critique.

And to those who took issue with him being an "educator" and thus shouldn't do this: He's a minor e-celeb who makes videos, he's still a real person with his own worldview, just like the rest of us. He's not saying this is how Marxists should think, he's just sharing some books to better understand the context from his own point of view.

Yeah I agree. To be clear, if you take the reverse of my statement, i.e. if you're on Windows, you shouldn't use Tor, then I would be gatekeeping.

But I'm not implying that, but rather the reverse. I'm saying if you have use Tor for whatever reasons to bypass censorship, do illegal stuff and avoid being tracked, you should at least be aware that at the kernel level, how you're accessing the internet has already been compromised by Microsoft, and consider alternatives OSes

Of course I'd still want people running Windows to be able to use Tor, and also I'd say leaving Windows isn't something you would only do at the "highest threat model".

Privacy will almost always be a trade-off with convenience, I'm pushing the awareness to get people to act, should they choose to. That's all.

They can't even make it consistent. The border radius on the tabs, the URL bar, and the main page are all different.

Genuine question, what is with serpentza and laowhy? I used to watch them before I got deprogrammed and even then, something seemed off. They were expats living in China, who speak the language and have Chinese spouses and children. To this extent, I find it strange they reverted to/still view China through an orientalist sense, since culturally, they've been there long enough to understand the structure and way of things. Yet, here they are, hiding in Amerika, exercising what seems to be limited knowledge on Chinese economics, history, and politics. Pumping out constant fear-mongering takes while cherry-picking stuff on social media. Every video begins with "So I have friends back there who told me how it REALLY is with XYZ", and calling out anyone sympathetic to China a paid shill. They say they take no "sponsors", yet, here they are, incentivized to pump out takes after takes, with millions of views, more relevant than they were when they did their China vlog stuff. YT is platforming them hard, it's just pure fishy.

So while governments can bailout big companies that are able to serve their greater interests, medical companies with cases like this and the bionic-eye one slip away without any kind of intervention?

We have multi-million-dollar VC funds for an app and this shit is allowed to happen.

Damn they're making todo lists a subscription service now??

To answer the question: anything that provides a CALDAV backend (e.g. Nextcloud, Etesync, Radicale). Some are free with limited storage, but some are subscription based, but you get calendar, storage, other stuff too. You can additionally self-host a CALDAV server or Nextcloud to use these services gratuit. For a more minimal implentation, try plain text, markdown, orgmode, etc., and use Syncthing to sync between devices.

Wezterm for me, I like the multiplexer that comes with it.

What about Foliate?

I've tried all streaming platforms on and off over the years. I've always returned to DRM-free methods (if you know what I mean). I currently self-host Navidrome. Not the best for discovery though, for that, maybe try InnerTune.

Check out Headscale, pretty stable on my end