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Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

ir.yandex

181–190 of 359 posts

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#181
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"We managed to move out the majority of our people from Russia." Much respect to these guys for their principled stand. Ok, I had let my CLion subscription lapse because I didn't like where they were going with the RustRover/CLion split (I do both C++ and Rust work, and would prefer one tool). But this may make me reconsider.

The 'canon' way to do multi-language development is via IntelliJ Ultimate. I have no idea how well it works for rust at the moment, since RustRover is still in pre-release. Update: I gave it a quick go, and it seem to have feature parity with RustRover. Give it a shot if you haven't.

The question is what is happening with the Rust plugin generally. The talk was that it wasn't going to be maintained in the future, and instead all the work folded into RustRover itself, and nobody seemed to be clear if Rust had a future in IntelliJ Ultimate but I'm pretty sure the answer is "no" since C++ isn't in there either.

I'm 100% sure I'm not on the only team that does both Rust and C++. Rust in CLion was perfect for me.

I could get my employer to pay for both, potentially, but I like to have my own licenses for things for the purpose of doing my own open source work independent of my employer, without any ambiguity about IP or potential for conflict.

For myself ... the way they handled this (bad communication of roadmap) irritated me enough that I dusted off emacs and got myself set up with a nice configuration with lsp, company, projectile, and treemacs and made myself productive in it.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slight edit to this. I didn't realize the core founding team was pushed out and largely committed Aliyah for Israel after the 2022 War began. Not surprised either, as the core team was fairly progressive and anti-war, as a lot of Russian techies are. Also, it was the core team that was working on forward facing bets - sort of like a more functional version of Larry Page and Sergey Brin - and they're keeping those for…

Given the move from Russia to Israel and the timing of when most Russian techies left, I suspect it is more out of fear of the draft than out of principle. Not that I blame them - I doubt I would leave the US even during an unjust war… but a draft?

> Given the move from Russia to Israel and the timing of when most Russian techies left, I suspect it is more out of fear of the draft than out of principle.

Techies bring in $$$, so they are exempted from the mobilization.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#183
post #113

Dang: please edit the link to the actual press, https://ir.yandex/press-releases?year=2024&id=05-02-2024 , not the index page for the year 2024.

This does nothing, if you want dang to help, use the email address in the bottom Contact footer.

I'm not 100% sure if behind the scenes he has some sort of @dang webhook alert/filter or if he skims comments regularly

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Talking to people actually living in the place could give you a clue. Putin is a neocon, sure, but no bureaucrat started this war and Ukraine is very unlikely to just fold and submit if the US stop their support. Liberals have also nothing to do with Russian aggression.

This war will likely end with Ukraine losing some amount of land - it is just a matter of if they ever accept this or whether they want a Korea style frozen conflict.

The war will not end there. Just pause.

It will not "end" until Russia has installed a subservient client regime in Ukraine like it has in Belorussia.

If you doubt this, I encourage you to look at actual opinions within Russia itself. Interviews with Russians (the 1420 channel on Youtube for example), Russian media, Russian politicians. Their objection is far more than "there's Russian speakers being persecuted by Ukraine." Their national chauvinism leaves them unable to tolerate actually-sovereign nation states on their borders, especially one with an intertwined cultural-linguistic-political history like Ukraine.

"Split Ukraine into two and give the far western half to Poland and absorb the rest into Russia" is a commonly held "solution".

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#185
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nevermind. I was wrong. Asking someone to write out an acronym is too much.

I don't think Yandex is an acronym...

Yes, the context of my comment was lost when I edited it. For clarity, I wasn't claiming that Yandex was an acroynm.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happens in 2014 when Ukraine lost Crimea. They accepted it and lived on. There is zero safety guarantees for them.

Not quite! The immediate history here plays a huge role in where we're at today. In the 2014 the US backed a [coup, revolution, insurrection - whatever you want to call it] in Ukraine that saw their democratically elected pro-Russian President overthrown. Numerous Ukrainian territories that also leaned pro-Russia refused to recognize the new government and declared their independence, the Donbas region and Crimea amo…

So do you think all of Russia's annexations should be recognised by the international community?

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are assuming I am some Trump American-first Republican. I think you are severely misjudging the politics of Ukraine support in the US, which has collapsed in the last few months. Perhaps I am opposed to harsh projections of American power in an increasingly multipolar world? The global playing field is leveling, I think that is precisely the wrong time to be making even bitterer enemies.

Yes I am assuming that very much, but it does not matter that much, either you're America first or you agree with their foreign policy anyway on Ukraine. I understand that Ukraine support has been politicised even when it should not be. This says much more about the utterly dysfunctional state of American politics and the decline of American society whereby you're seriously entertaining reelecting Trump next year. It…

It's pretty typically American to only be able to see the world through the lense of their own parochial internal interests and partisan conflicts. Their economy and military and geography of the country are so big that the gravity field of the place is massive, and both liberals and conservatives there rewrite things in terms of their own dysfunctional political cultural battles. Not to say other places in the world don't have ideological blinders, but the US is extreme.

The prime example of this was the nonsense that got Trump impeached ... Trump trying to strong-arm Zelensky into intervening into US domestic politics. "Art of the deal" wasn't so much that, as it was just total blindness to anything outside his own internal interests. American tribal politics were clearly so important that the survival of Ukraine itself was a bargaining chip.

FWIW up here in Canada none of the 5 mainstream political parties have taken a position against supporting Ukraine, financially and militarily. Given the size of the Ukrainian-Canadian population (third largest Ukrainian population after Ukraine and Russia) such a position would be electorally toxic.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#188

This is likely related to the US imposing secondary sanctions early this year. Yandex would lose access to their US/EU bank accounts if they were still operating in Russia.

Not just that. Russia is going to confiscate all Western assets in Russia as a counter measure. Valued roughly at 200B USD, mainly owned by EU countries. Yandex would lose their Russian business in any case.

With that is goodbye to any chance of wider Europe investing in Russia for the next century.

I hope India takes notice because so far they seemed to have cared little about the blood on their hands.

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is little hope of normalizing relations with Russia, so unfortunately these "Western assets" need to be written off anyway. A large part of them ($98bn) came from Cyprus which might just be round-tripping Russian money.

All wars have something in common: they end. That thought in your head about lack of hope of normalizing relations is just the current propaganda working. Edit: it's amazing just how short-sighted people can be. Look, we still bring up the Nazis as an unassailable argument for how something is bad. And yet the war with Germany ended and they are now a US ally fighting Russia. I'm sure in the midst of WW2 the common f…

[deleted]

Re: Yandex to divest its Russia-based businesses

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most Russian techies left This was about them getting paid fat paychecks from western clients/employers not out of draft fears.

Not a new phenom, whereas the draft is.

IT Professionals and most other white collar jobs are draft exempted in Russia [0]

To make up for the unfairness, mobilized Russian soldiers are being paid Russian/Eastern European white collar level salaries ($2,500/mo) [1]

The issue is if you're a Russian contractor working for a western company, how is the western company supposed to pay you? Russia's banking system has been decoupled from the west, and even Asian banks in China and India (major trading partners of Russia) are hesitant to fill the gap out of fears of secondary sanctions.

If you want to earn dollars, best to move to a Russian speaking country that isn't sanctioned like Kazakhstan, Georgia, or Bulgaria or to an easy to move country for Russians like Turkiye, Serbia, UAE, etc.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-excludes-some-it...

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/opinion/russia-ukraine-wa...

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