Quite high actually. Peter Magyar is likely going to be the new prime minister. Whether or not Peter will actually change anything or just be Orban 2: Electric Boogaloo is the more important question, imho. He’s also a conservative, was part of Orban’s inner circle before the child abuse scandals, and is running on a platform of “Orban but not corrupt”, which doesn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence from me having seen that exact same cycle play out in Romania.

It’d be great to see Orban out regardless though.

I’m one of those nano weirdos. I mean, I get why people use vi/vim, but I’m a lazy man who has the nano shortcuts hardwired into my muscle memory. It’s definitely not as full-featured as vim, but it does what I need it to do quickly and easily. If I need to just quickly drop into a file and do a find/replace, takes me maybe 3 seconds.

Also, to share an ancient joke from the dawn of computing: emacs is a great OS, I just hope someone makes a decent text editor for it eventually.

Different people have different thresholds. I can say that in my personal experience, the majority of people in Romania have been able to rationalize everything until this point as Trump just running his mouth, but the “real powers” (Romanians in general are very conspiracy-minded) would never let him actually upset the apple cart.

Some people had the spell broken months ago, during the first round of universal tariffs. Some people saw the stories of Europeans being abducted for weeks at the border for no reason and that woke them up. Some explained all that away as a few unfortunate mistakes, not a real pattern. Then the next round of negotiations with the EU, widely considered a capitulation to the US around here put some people back to sleep (we gave him what he wanted, maybe he’ll leave us alone now).

The higher tensions get around an actual military engagement, the more worried people are getting, the more people are snapping out of it.

LBC radio host James O’Brien has been shouting from the rooftops about the worst case scenario for months, and unfortunately he’s being proven right.

It’s normalcy bias. Career analysts, people that have made their living predicting the next major geopolitical shift, are more vulnerable to it than your average Joe. The world has operated one way for their entire lives, and it’s very difficult for most people to see that the rules of play have completely and irrevocably shifted.

They assume that the US won’t do something this patently self-destructive because the US has (mostly) operated on a logical set of self-interested principles dressed up in the language of “Democracy” and “Freedom”. The idea that it would blow its own kneecaps off while overtly and clearly talking the language of imperialism and might makes right is so outside their experience that it’s unthinkable until the spell of normalcy bias is broken.