Marek Defeciński

Android programmer. Humble servant of JUG Łódź @juglodz

[Illia Ponomarenko 🇺🇦 @IAPonomarenko]

There's one moment from the liberation of Bucha that will stay with me for the rest of my life.

At the entrance to the city from the Irpin side, near the railway line, there's a very nice and cozy apartment complex, I once wanted to buy an unfinished flat there, but it was out of my price range.

When we returned to Bucha alongside Ukrainian forces, that same complex had been badly hit. The Russians had positioned artillery in the courtyards nearby, so shell and fuse crates were scattered everywhere. Burnt, torn-off BMP tracks lay strewn around.

In the parking lots, among mountains of debris and wreckage, Teslas burned to the ground. Nearby, rows of small buildings with little shops, cafes, bakeries, riddled with bullets, looted and torched.

All around -- grayness, darkness, the feeling of an exhumed grave, as if you could feel with your very skin that something evil had happened here.

And there, on the basketball court, a man was wandering aimlessly in silence. Just walking in circles, over and over again. He still couldn't come back to himself.

All 33 days of the occupation he had hidden in a basement right there under those buildings, literally right under the Russians' noses, hiding so as not to end up among those who, as captured on camera, were marched in single file with their hands behind their heads and taken around a corner to be shot.

But that guy was lucky.

Several days had passed since the Russians left, and he was still walking there in circles, in silence. I tried to talk to him, to ask if he needed anything, and he raised his eyes to me and said: "Do you know why they hate us so much?"

He started to sob, wiping away tears. "Do you know? Tell me, why, why, what did we do to them? Tell me."

I think that evening I came home to Kyiv after a day in the field reporting on the atrocities in Bucha, and for the first time in a long time, I got drunk.

[Joni Askola @joni_askola]

It is beyond pathetic to watch European jets actively shoot down drones in the Middle East while refusing to do the exact same thing over Ukraine.

We are willing to militarily defend airspace on another continent but let a European nation face genocide alone

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

Robert Mueller died last night.

He was 81 years old. He had a wife who loved him for sixty years. He had two daughters, one of whom he met for the first time in Hawaii, in 1969, on a few hours of military leave, before he got back on the plane and returned to Vietnam. He had grandchildren. He had a faith he practiced quietly, without performance. He had, in the way of men who have seen real things and survived them, a quality that is increasingly rare and increasingly mocked in the country he spent his life serving.

He had integrity.

And tonight the President of the United States said good!

I have been sitting with that word for hours now. Good. One syllable. The thing you say when the coffee is hot or the traffic is moving. The thing a man who has never had to bury anyone, never had to sit in the specific silence of a room where someone is newly absent, reaches for when he wants the world to know he is satisfied. Good. The daughters are crying and the wife is alone in the house and good.

I want to speak directly to the Americans reading this. Not the political Americans. Just the human ones. The ones who have lost a father. The ones who know what it is to be in that first hour, when you keep forgetting and then remembering again, when ordinary objects become unbearable, when the world outside the window seems obscene in its indifference. I want to ask you, simply, to hold that feeling for a moment, and then to understand that the man you elected looked at it and typed a single word.

Good.

This is not a country having a bad day. I need you to understand that. Countries have bad days. Elections go wrong. Leaders disappoint. Institutions bend. But there is a different thing, a rarer and more terrible thing, that happens when the moral center of a place simply gives way. Not dramatically. Not with a single catastrophic event. But quietly, in increments, until one evening a president celebrates the death of an old man whose family is still warm with grief, and enough people find it acceptable that it becomes the weather. Just the weather.

That is what is happening. That is what has happened.

The world knows. From Tokyo to Oslo, from London to Buenos Aires, people are not angry at America tonight. Anger would mean there was still something to fight for, some remaining faith to be betrayed. What I see, in the reactions from everywhere that is not here, is something older and sadder than anger. It is the look people get when they have waited a long time for someone they love to find their way back, and have finally understood that they are not coming.

America is being grieved. Past tense, almost. The idea of it. The thing it represented to people who had nothing else to believe in, who came here with everything they owned in a single bag because they had heard, somehow, across an ocean, that this was the place where decency was written into the walls. That idea is not resting. It is not suspended. It is being buried, in real time, with 7,450 likes before dinner.

And the church said nothing.

Seventy million people have decided that this man, this specific man who has cheated everyone he has ever made a promise to, who has mocked the disabled and the dead and the grieving, who celebrated tonight while a family wept, is an instrument of God. The pastors who made that bargain did not just trade away their credibility. They traded away the thing that made them worth listening to in the first place. The cross they carry now is a costume. The faith they preach is a loyalty oath with scripture attached. When the history of American Christianity is written, this will be the chapter they skip at seminary.

Now I want to talk about the men who stand next to him.

Because this is the part that actually breaks my heart.

JD Vance is not a bad man. I have to say that, because it is true, and because the truth matters even now, especially now. Marco Rubio is not a bad man. Lindsey Graham is not a bad man. They are idiots, but not bad, as in BAD! These are men with mothers who raised them and children who love them and friends who remember who they were before all of this. They are not monsters. Monsters are simple. Monsters do not cost you anything emotionally because there is nothing in them to mourn.

These men are something more painful than monsters.

They are men who knew better, and know better still, and will get up tomorrow and do it again.

Every small compromise they made had a reason. Every moment they looked the other way had a justification that sounded, at the time, almost reasonable. And now they have arrived here, at a place where a president celebrates the death of an old man and they will find a way, on television, to say nothing that means anything, and they will go home to houses where children who carry their name are waiting, and they will say goodnight, and they will say nothing.

Their oldest friends are watching. The ones who knew Rubio when he still believed in something. Who knew Graham when he said, out loud, on the record, that this exact man would destroy the Republican Party and deserve it. Who sat next to Vance and thought here is someone worth knowing. Those friends are not angry tonight. They moved through anger a long time ago. What they feel now is the quiet, irrecoverable sadness of watching someone disappear while still being present. Of watching a person they loved choose, again and again, to become less.

That is what cowardice costs. Not the coward. The people who loved him.

And in the comments tonight, the followers celebrate. People who ten years ago brought casseroles to grieving neighbours. Who stood in the rain at gravesides and meant the words they said. Who told their children that we do not speak ill of the dead because the dead were someone's beloved. Those people are tonight typing gleeful things about a man whose daughters are not yet done crying. And they feel clean doing it. Righteous. Because somewhere along the way the thing they were given in exchange for their decency was the feeling of belonging to something, and that feeling is very hard to give up even when you can no longer remember what you gave for it.

When Trump is gone, they will still be here.

Standing in the silence where the noise used to be. Without the permission the crowd gave them. Without the pastor who told them their cruelty was holy. They will be alone with what they said and what they cheered and what they chose to become, and there will be no one left to tell them it was righteous.

That morning is coming.

Robert Mueller flew across the Pacific on military leave to hold his newborn daughter for a few hours before returning to the war. He came home. He buried his dead with honour. He served presidents of both parties because he understood that the institution was larger than any one man. He told his grandchildren that a lie is the worst thing a person can do, that a reputation once lost cannot be recovered, and he lived that, every day, in the quiet and unglamorous way of people who actually believe what they say.

He was the kind of American the world used to point to when it needed to believe the story was true.

He died last night. His wife is alone in their house in Georgetown. His daughters are learning what the world is without him in it. And somewhere in the particular hush that falls over a family in the first hours of loss, the most powerful man and the biggest loser on earth sent a message to say he was glad.

The world that loved what America was supposed to be is grieving tonight. Not for Robert Mueller only. For the country that produced him and then became this. For the distance between what was promised and what was delivered. For the suspicion, growing quieter and more certain with each passing month, that the America people believed in was always partly a story, and the story is over now, and there is nothing yet to replace it.

That is all it needed to be.

A man died. His family is broken open with grief.

That is all it needed to be.

Instead the President said good.

And the country that once stood for something looked away 🇺🇸

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Rutger Bregman @rcbregman]

The BBC just released a new adaptation of Lord of the Flies, the classic novel by William Golding. It's beautifully made, but it's still telling the wrong story.

A few years ago, I went looking for the *real* Lord of the Flies. I wanted to know: has it ever actually happened? Have kids ever been shipwrecked on a deserted island?

It took me a year of research, but I found it. In 1965, six boys from a boarding school in Tonga stole a boat, got caught in a storm, and drifted for eight days without food or water. They washed up on 'Ata, a remote, uninhabited island in the Pacific. They stayed there for 15 months, and what happened on that island was the exact opposite of William Golding's novel.

These boys set up a small commune. They built a food garden, stored rainwater in hollowed-out tree trunks, created a gym with improvised weights, and built a badminton court. One of them, Stephen (who would later become an engineer) managed to start a fire using two sticks. They kept it burning the entire time.

Of course they fought too. But then they argued, they had a rule: go to opposite ends of the island, cool down, then come back and apologize. As one of them told me: ‘That's how we stayed friends.’

Back home, everyone assumed that the boys – Luke, Stephen, Sione, David, Kolo and Mano — were dead. When they were finally discovered by an Australian captain named Peter Warner, he radioed their names to Tonga. After twenty minutes, a tearful response came back: ‘You found them! These boys have been given up for dead. Funerals have been held. If it's them, this is a miracle!’

Peter commissioned a new ship, hired all six boys as his crew, and named the boat the Ata, after the island where he found them. They remained friends for the rest of their lives – Peter and Mano even became soulmates. I tracked them down, and it became one of the central chapters of my book Humankind.

Here's what struck me most: William Golding (the author of Lord of the Flies) was a troubled man, an alcoholic who once said ‘I have always understood the Nazis, because I am of that sort by nature.’ I think he was projecting his own darkness onto children. And we turned it into a lesson about human nature that we teach to millions of kids around the world.

I think the real lesson is the opposite. When real children found themselves alone on a real island, they didn't descend into savagery. They cooperated, they took care of each other, they survived.

I'm not saying that the Tongan castaways were representative of all kids everywhere. But I am saying that every kid who has to read or watch the fictional Lord of the Flies also deserves to know what actually happened when it played out in real life.

Stories are never just stories. We become the stories that we tell ourselves.

[Natalka @NatalkaKyiv]

My dad’s cousin died in Poltava.
He was a remarkable man, very passionate about everything in his life.

He woke up at 5 a.m. every morning and didn’t stop doing something until nighttime. He built everything with his own hands. He knew how to weld.

Going to his house was always an adventure. He kept pigeons. At one point, he decided to breed fancy, fluffy-looking chickens. People came from far away to buy the chicks.

At another point, he turned one of the rooms in his basement into a “fish room.” he remodeled the room himself and installed heating.

He kept all kinds of exotic fish that no one else had. He studied everything in depth to make sure his fish were comfortable and healthy.

He was like that with all the living things he surrounded himself with. Above all, he loved his family.

My dad spoke to him less than a day before he died. They reminisced about a fishing trip they took in the summer of 1972.

They had lived on an island in the middle of a river. The local villagers used it as a “cow brothel,” as my dad called it. They brought a bull and a lot of young cows to the island, hoping the bull would impregnate them all.

The bull was rather aggressive and even grabbed my dad’s cousin’s little dog. In the bull’s defense, the pup was attacking him. Thankfully, they were able to rescue the dog. It was covered in bull’s saliva but was not hurt.

Since they only fished very early in the morning, they came up with crazy ways to occupy themselves for the rest of the day. One of them was ‘playing corrida’ with the bull.

“Dad, you are crazy! You could’ve gotten yourselves killed!” I told my father as he was recounting their adventures to me today.

“We were young and felt immortal,” my dad said. “Also, Valera was always fearless. Literally not afraid of anything!”

“He was asking about you,” my dad added. “He was always asking about you.”

I haven’t seen my uncle Valera in years. We didn’t go to Poltava the last time I was in Ukraine. I was planning to go there in 2022…

And now I will never get to see my uncle.
God, I hate Russia.

[Nemo @akaNemsko]

In watching the clip below of Danya's last stream and hearing the pain in his voice, how deeply the baseless accusations affected him, I am left so mad at what we all allowed to happen right in front of us.

It's time to stop worrying about the backlash. I am calling on the FIDE EDC to remove Vladimir Kramnik from the FIDE record books, revoke his title, and disqualify his world championship. Chess is one of the most beloved games in the world and should be a place for kindness and inclusion. It should be unilaterally unacceptable to use a platform that Chess has given you to bully, harass, and slander a colleague. What Kramnik has done to David Navara, Hikaru, and Danya, and others can not be tolerated.

It is up to our community and the governing body to set an example that this type of behavior will have consequences. Make it known loud and clear that Chess stands against these hateful acts. If you do them intentionally and maliciously there will be no place for you in our game.

FIDE and it's EDC must establish clear policies moving forward around the safety of it's players both in person and digitally. The events leading up to this tragedy happened in broad daylight over the last 18 months. They could have been stopped. Nothing like this can ever be allowed to happen again.

[Marcin Moskała @marcinmoskala]

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[Marcin Moskała @marcinmoskala]

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[Marcin Moskała @marcinmoskala]

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Learn the patterns that work in production and finally master coroutines.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

The US abandoning its allies & rehabilitating the Russian war criminal invader at Ukraine's expense will also confirm that having your own nukes is the only reliable defense. Ukraine and other European nations will act to acquire, as will Japan, South Korea, et al. 7/7

[Piotr Kaszuwara Dziennikarz @piotrkaszuwara]

No to teraz padniecie. Właśnie ukazał się nowy raport UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, komórki ONZ i firmy badawczej Deloitte, na temat wpływu uchodźców z Ukrainy na polską gospodarkę. I uwaga ‼️ okazuje się, że w 2024 roku mieszkający w Polsce Ukraińcy wygenerowali 2,7 procent naszego PKB. Więcej opowiemy jutro w Radio 357. A tymczasem kilka wniosków.

Dane potwierdzają szybkie włączenie uchodźców z Ukrainy w rynek pracy. Zatrudnionych na nim jest dziś 69 proc. ukraińskich uchodźców w wieku produkcyjnym, czyli tylko nieznacznie mniej niż obywateli Polski (75 proc.). Badanie pokazuje, że wejście ukraińskich uchodźców na polski rynek pracy nie wpłynęło negatywnie na gospodarkę, choćby poprzez np. wzrost bezrobocia lub spadek realnych płac; wręcz przeciwnie, przyczyniło się nie tylko do wzrostu zatrudnienia wśród Polaków, ale także do poprawy produktywności polskich firm i pracowników.

Wszystkie dowody wskazują, że – dopóki pozostaną w Polsce – uchodźcy z Ukrainy będą nadal wywierać pozytywny wpływ na gospodarkę, znacznie przewyższając koszty wsparcia, jakie otrzymali.

„Ktokolwiek myśli, że uchodźcy obciążają gospodarkę, niech pomyśli jeszcze raz. Pozwalając ukraińskim uchodźcom natychmiast podjąć pracę i założyć małe firmy — po tym, jak zostali zmuszeni do ucieczki przed rosyjską agresją — Polska zwiększyła swój PKB o – bagatela – 2,7 procent w 2024 roku” — powiedział Kevin J. Allen, Przedstawiciel UNHCR w Polsce.

„To robi wrażenie i jasno pokazuje, że mądre wybory polityczne na froncie humanitarnym i gospodarczym nie wykluczają się wzajemnie. W rzeczywistości, Polska stworzyła scenariusz korzystny dla obu stron: przekuwając napływ uchodźców we wzmacnianie polskiej gospodarki i inwestując w kapitał ludzki uchodźców, którzy – kiedy to już będzie możliwe – pomogą w odbudowie Ukrainy”.

[✙ Constantine ✙ @Teoyaomiquu]

They say Ukraine provoked russia targeting civilians by destroying russian war planes.

What did Ukraine do to provoke children hospital bombing in Kyiv ?

What did Ukraine do to provoke a residential building bombing in Dnipro two years ago?

I’ll tell you what, Ukraine existence and being a free nation is what provoking russian terror.

and if Ukraine loses, the same fate awaits our people as those on occupied territories: mobilisation and a war against next russian target. Just like it happened to locals in Donetsk and Crimea. Packed and sent to die for Moscow empire.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

Note to Trump and EU leaders: This is how you negotiate with Russia.

[Polina Shumakova @SumakovaPolina]

🫶💖Start a new mission💖🫶Day 3

Need products,personal care products🙏For 43people🫂🎯To go 793

I will be grateful to everyone for the support of these wonderful people.🙏❤️

If you want to support the mission with a donation🔽

🅿️🅿️ [email protected]

☕️ https://t.co/OohBqcEXS8

🅿️🅿️ [email protected](if the first method doesn't work)

[Marek Defeciński @marekdef]

@VasiliyZukanov It's here (the 3rd).
The latest version has this feature.
https://t.co/YhXVacJNsl

[Jakub Wiech @jakubwiech]

Mili Państwo, gdyby prezydent Joe Biden zrobił czy powiedział 10% tego, co zrobił czy powiedział prezydent Donald Trump w ciągu ostatniego miesiąca, to mielibyśmy w Polsce grzaną do białości przez prawą stronę narrację o „Resecie 2”.

Ale jak widać Trump chyba może.

[Obserwator Wojen @ObserwatorWojen]

Zacharowa: "Nowa administracja USA szybko zmienia politykę zagraniczną i w dużej mierze jest ona zgodna z naszą wizją".

Tak informacyjnie dla tych, którzy w Polsce popierają Trumpa i skakali z radości, że wygrał wybory.

[KT "Special MI6 Operation" @KremlinTrolls]

Enjoy! 😉

[(((Tendar))) @Tendar]

Overall, the whole situation once again emphasizes that Europe has to do more and I’m not only talking about financial matters. The core issue is as mentioned earlier security guarantees. This can only be achieved with a robust intervention force. European armies have to move into Ukraine and secure the territory. It will give Ukrainians not only the cover for defending themselves, but also give an unprecedented morale boost. It will underline that Ukraine is part of Europe and that we stand together no matter what. It is after all the most important lesson we have received the last days, but also the last 3 years. It is time to act accordingly. This is our responsibility and legacy. (7/7)