Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦

[Pete @splendid_pete]

This is actually a pretty big admission.

Laura Loomer, of all people, has now openly admitted that she fell for Russian propaganda on Ukraine.

Not because Russia suddenly became innocent. Not because Ukraine was secretly the villain. But because years of “Russia hoax” discourse in American politics fried part of the conservative brain so badly that many started treating every criticism of Moscow as some anti-Trump media operation.

And that is exactly the opening Russian propaganda needed.

Loomer basically said the quiet part out loud: a lot of conservatives put on ideological beer goggles and started seeing Russia with absurd sympathy, simply because they were sick of being called Russian bots.

Then reality kicked the door in.

Russia is not some Orthodox Christian bulwark defending civilisation. It is a corrupt, brutal empire bombing Ukrainian cities, killing Ukrainian Christians, abducting children, flattening towns, and screaming “denazification” while happily boosting actual extremists whenever it suits Moscow.

The trigger seems to have been two things.

First, Candace Owens running off to St. Petersburg, speaking at a Putin-hosted forum, and then getting promoted by Kremlin media like RT. Subtle as a brick through a window.

Second, Loomer’s own podcast editor went to Kyiv and Odesa during Russian missile and drone attacks and came back with the shocking discovery that Ukraine is not a “NATO puppet state” or some internet meme. It is a real country fighting for survival against an empire trying to erase its culture, cities, and people.

So yes, credit where it is due: admitting you were manipulated is better than doubling down like the usual Kremlin-fed clowns.

But the bigger point is obvious.

Russian propaganda did not win people over because it was clever. It won because it found angry, exhausted, reactionary people who hated their domestic opponents so much that they were willing to sympathise with a fascist petro-mafia state just to spite them.

That is not anti-war.

That is being played.

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

https://t.co/rKB2iS1z5y

[Leonid Volkov @leonidvolkov]

Нам всем конечно очень трудно: и тем, кто в России, и тем, кто уехал. Ни жизнь под гнетом репрессивных ограничений цензуры и пропаганды, ни жизнь на чужбине в подвешенном статусе не помогают, мягко говоря, снизить уровень стресса и не препятствуют разрастанию седины.

Но — в минуты тягостных сомнений — не забывайте, что зетникам и путинистам хуже и труднее. Нет более жалких чмошников, чем они, и они прекрасно знают об этом.

Быть сторонником Путина сегодня — это:
— сначала возмущаться из-за удара ВСУ по Старобельску (но ни в коем случае не жаловаться на то, что «лучшее в мире ПВО, которому аналогов нет» ничего этому удару не противопоставило),
— потом страстно заламывать руки, оплакивая жертв этого удара (но ни в коем случае не говорить о том, что если бы Путин не начал вторжение в 2022 году, то все студенты Старобельска и сотен других городов были бы живы и здоровы)
— потом жаждать возмездия, обещанного Путиным в прямом эфире (но ни в коем случае не вспоминать, что строго по плану идет пятый год трехдневной войны, и верховный главнокомандующий только сейчас собрался «дать решительный отпор»),
— потом изображать бурную радость из-за удара знаменитым «Орешником» по непонятным гаражам неизвестно где (но ни в коем случае не подвергать сомнению — чтобы ненароком не дискредитировать ВС РФ — что за этими гаражами и находился главный центр принятия решений всего НАТО),
— и, наконец, делать вид, что слова Путина есть Божья роса, когда он публично заявляет, что боевого применения «Орешника» и не планировалось, один удар был по гаражам, а другой — так вообще по территории так называемой «ДНР» (и ни в коем случае не задавать вопрос о том, «достойно» ли Путин в таком случае «ответил на Старобельск).

И все это должно произойти в одной голове буквально за неделю. Воистину, нет ничего более жалкого чем путинист в 2026 году!

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

I haven't written much about Voxt for quite a while, and the reason is pretty simple: we launched at the end of 2023, and within a couple of months it became clear that the product wasn't where it needed to be yet. I'll write a separate post about what exactly was wrong and what we learned from it. But the short version is that I just couldn't bring myself to spend time talking about the product. If I know we have serious gaps, it's much easier for me to fix them first and only then write about how wonderful it is. I can do it the other way around too, but it's a lot harder - and that part of my own "firmware" I probably won't manage to patch :)

The other thing is that it wasn't even clear how far we were from the point where marketing makes sense at all - for products like Voxt, that's usually the moment when your organic growth turns positive. And if you don't know how far away that moment is, but you do know there's a pile of product problems still to solve, spending resources on marketing doesn't seem like a particularly smart move.

And now, for the first time in a long while, my intuition and the metrics are telling the same story: for about half a year now, our Android app has gone from "organic decline" to organic growth. There's a slim chance we're over-interpreting the metrics, of course, but a shift from -10% MoM a year ago to ~8-9% MoM now is clearly more than just noise. So as I'm switching from "product mode" to "marketing mode", you'll see me posting much more often - not just about Voxt, of course, but also about Fusion, the unique aspects of our architecture, AI-assisted development, and all other topics that have taken up a fair part of my life lately.

But first, let me run through the highlights from the past year.

From the very beginning, #Voxt was about making text, voice, video, and AI post-processing a single medium, rather than separate modes. Most communication tools still make you jump between different scenarios depending on what you're trying to do: you start in a chat, switch to a call, then move to, say, Zoom to share your screen, and a week later try to find what you actually agreed on - all of it eats time, half the context gets lost somewhere along the way, and so on.

Voxt was meant to be the exact opposite of that - a single space where all of it comes together:
- If you're talking to someone who speaks a different language, translation is simply there, right inside the conversation.
- If you missed a discussion, you can read a summary instead of listening to an hour-long recording. Though if you prefer, you can listen to it as well - in a car, maybe at 1.5x speed. Or read the whole transcript.
- If you need to find something that was said out loud a couple of weeks ago, you can just search for it.

So, here's what's new - the most important bits:

🎥 Live Video

In short, it's like Zoom or Google Meet, but built in. Video works in one-on-one and group chats, on desktop you can add a screencast, there's camera switching, automatic switching of the main video (whoever's speaking is the one you see), and so on.

We use spatial and temporal simulcast layers, which gives us much more flexibility when network conditions change. Unlike most competitors, we genuinely went all in here and didn't build everything on top of #WebRTC - so we're not bound by the limits it imposes, and that's exactly why, over time, we'll be able to do noticeably more with video and audio than products built on it.

Since this is by far the newest part of Voxt, the UX there is definitely not perfect. But we'll fix all the serious problems over the next month or two.

🌍 Real-Time Translation

You can speak your own language while the other person speaks theirs. Each of you is transcribed and translated in real time, right inside the chat. If you regularly talk to friends, family, colleagues, or customers who speak a different language, it turns out to feel surprisingly natural.

🤖 AI Summaries

We automatically detect and "fold" long discussions (both voice and text) into two-level AI summaries. This works in all new chats (in older ones you enable it manually in the right-hand panel). By default you see the short version; "Show more" reveals talking points and action items; and finally, you can expand a summary all the way down to the original.

🧵 Threads

We've added genuinely handy threads - they make it much easier to find your way around large, active conversations.

📎 Sharing and Media

Fully resumable media uploads (they survive app and device restarts), drag-and-drop file sharing, a more convenient sharing flow on mobile, and a bunch of smaller improvements in the media viewer.

😀 Animated Emoji, GIFs, and Richer Messaging

Animated emoji, GIF support, more text-formatting options, improved @mentions (another update is coming here soon), better link previews, and so on.

📱 Improved Android, iOS, and Windows apps

Faster startup, clearer notifications, a smoother sign-in, native audio, and a lot of reliability improvements.

You can try Voxt online or download it here: https://t.co/H9lgHh5X35

And if you'd like me to show you how it all works - open https://t.co/iaLsMuaIOE, it's my account on Voxt, and I'll be glad to walk you through it. It's also one of the best ways for me to find out what's still off there, so - seriously - don't hesitate, just PM me there.

[Konrad Kokosa @konradkokosa]

I've built a full LLM inference engine in C#/.NET 10. From scratch. Not a wrapper - native GGUF loading, BPE tokenizer, attention, KV-cache, SIMD-vectorized CPU kernels, CUDA GPU backend, OpenAI-compatible API. Solo dev, ~2 months, AI-assisted (not vibe-coded!). First preview is out.
Check it out for mode details at https://t.co/Bl5wAYalYY and https://t.co/rQWhKN0iVA

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@Nekrolm Без бенчмарков очень непросто хвастаться performance :) https://t.co/qKCjNEvnDh

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@headinthebox @anuraggoel A typical human-pleasing AI response in a situation where agreeing seems totally ok. All of us know how frequently Claude uses git commit history.

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@davidfowl @rick01 And that's one of things making .NET feel so "enterprisey" / heavyweight. Wanna read a single config line? Here is your book on IOptions. Came to a psychologist with a simple question, ended up with 10 sessions of a therapy you never asked for.

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@davidfowl @rick01 Sorry, but that's one of the worst inventions in .NET. Especially in k8s age, when your services restart smoothly on way more significant changes than just a configuration related one.

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

Study shows that 7 weeks exposure to X's algorithm makes one move to the right politically and measurably anti-Ukraine.

https://t.co/H2yWetbLFo

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@rohanpaul_ai The only thing AI will change is the complexity of software we're able to make - it will jump to the next level. Whoever thinks lower costs won't drive the complexity upward is dumb as f..k - they assume we already have the very best software, I guess.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

BREAKING: This is some 1930s Germany rhetoric by Greg Bovino.

He’s claiming that Alex Pretti was killed because he made the choice to listen to politicians and journalists who vilified ICE after they murdered Renee Good.

Bovino warns the media that there’s consequences if they say bad things about ICE.

This is what happened in Germany. Don’t let it happen again in America.

[Mario @PawlowskiMario]

I grew up under communism in Poland. I know exactly what state harassment looks like.

What I saw in Minneapolis was not law enforcement. It was intimidation, escalation, panic of unqualified law enforcement, then murder.

They surrounded a woman. She tried to leave. She backed away so she would not hit anyone. They shot her anyway and now they lie.

That is how police states work. Start the chaos. Kill. Rewrite the story.
This never ends well.

This was a murder👀

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@li_fds @Fyodorrrrr Не погибли, а сдохли по вине отца.

[Maxim Mironov @mironov_fm]

Присоединяюсь к президенту Зеленскому @ZelenskyyUa в его рождественских пожеланиях к Путину.

Российский народ, как и украинский, желает, чтобы он побыстрее сдох.

[Jay in Kyiv @JayinKyiv]

What's ironic about the Trump team selling out the entire post-WW2 global security architecture in exchange for the promise of Russian riches is that they would have made alot more money by just cheaply helping Ukraine crush the Putin regime, freeing Russia itself, setting up a western custodial system for the largest land mass on earth and its massive resources, the ability to decide the future of "Russia" for decades. In addition, there would be golden Trump statues all over both Eurooe AND Russia.

But Trump, being the short-sighted moron kleptocrat that he is, will never see it.

[Dominik Hasek @hasek_dominik]

Exactly, Mr. Kasparov! Thanks to Ukraine, thanks to its immense heroism, thanks to Ukraine's enormous loss of life, the rest of us in Europe are still living in peace. When will we all finally start to realize this and start to properly support Ukraine against terrorist Russia?

[КОБЗАРЬ 🔱 @KostaKrempov]

Хочу от лица украинцев поблагодарить Гарри Кимовича за адекватную позицию🫂💪
И вспомнил анекдот :
- Чем отличается Каспаров от Брежнева?
- Каспаров ходит е два е четыре, а Брежнев едва-едва.

[Christo Grozev @christogrozev]

I happened to see an early version of the "peace plan" , about 6 months ago. It was a purely Russian concept and was nearly identical to what we see today (certainly the 50/50 Russian assets + EU investment in Ukraine reconstruction was there).
However two items are glaringly missing.
First, a proposal that US (investors) bail post-war Russia out of a pending cash- and investment-strapped recession, "like in the 90s". This was meant as an inducement for Trump (whether as a legitimate US sweetener or as one for friends and family, that wasn't explicit)
The second "offering" was a new Russia-US alliance against China. A lot of "Christian alliance" demagoguery was included under that item.
I am absolutely certain that this is a Russian, not a jointly developed, proposal. I also cannot imagine the Russians didn't include the 1st of the two extra items. I can see however how that wouldn't be part of the publicly leaked plan.
On item 2, can't be sure if Russia dared to include the anti China offer. Again, if it did, it wouldn't be public.
So all in all, it might be a 30-point plan after all.

[Alex Yakunin 🇺🇦 @alexyakunin]

@leonidvolkov С Днём Рождения, Леонид!