Success for Rutte (and NATO) is protecting NATO members against invasion or attack.

If the US' membership is raising that risk for the other members rather than lowering it, then in that situation letting the US exit can be a net benefit for NATO's members (which would no longer include the US).

The point is to make belligerents back down by raising the cost they'd have to pay by carrying through.

This particular belligerent backs down so often that there's a special acronym for it, so NATO's a perfectly good protective tool here.

40 years is an unreasonably long timeframe to be making projections like this. Assuming the US is still having elections there will have been 10 opportunities for their government to completely flip-flop its intentions in that time.

There have recently been direct annexation threats against Canada.

Yeah. It's no longer okay to have a plan that says it's okay if Russia takes some territory, we'll just take it back a little later. We've now seen what happens to the people living in territory that happens to.

And even if small places could survive an invasion attempt by Russia, it would still have an immense cost in lives and destruction. Why not prevent that in the first place?

Or, alternately, preparing NATO for America's exit. I could easily see a scenario where they're more trouble than they're worth.

I didn't say anything about the "prevent instances from being overloaded" part being good or bad. I didn't even give an opinion on ActivityPub, just pointed out the practical limitations and incompatible design goals.

Personally, I've got no problem with websites implementing rate caps and whatnot to ensure that their traffic remains within the limits they can handle, or throttling specific IPs. I am very concerned with how Cloudflare in particular has become the single centralized "gatekeeper" for vast swaths of the Internet, though. If they decide that some particular client isn't allowed to see stuff then poof, a big chunk of the Internet is cut off. That's worrisome IMO.

Your original post didn't specify a particular kind of data scraping. TropicalDingdong had no way to know you were only specifically interested in that one kind of data scraping, so his comment is appropriate - you can't stop data scraping in general, and attempting to do so in the general case goes directly against the goal of ActivityPub.

This sort of nonsense, along with idiocy like that guy who uses the þ character in place of "th" in all his comments, does absolutely nothing to hinder AI training. The only effect it has is to bother human readers. Completely counterproductive.

That's a very narrow view of data scraping, there's lots of ways to get data.

The Fediverse is built on ActivityPub, which is an open protocol that's designed to broadcast data with no limitations or restrictions. If you don't want your data to end up in the hands of anyone who wants it - including those nefarious AI trainers - then that's an inherently incompatible goal with ActivityPub.

If you're just worried about specific instances being overloaded with requests, then sure, all the usual rate limiting DDOS-prevention Cloudflare tricks will work. But the data itself isn't "protected." Someone who wants it could simply run an instance of their own specifically to collect it.

It's possible that it's a bluff at getting ready for another round of mobilizations. If Putin thinks that Ukraine is at a breaking point and is relying on Russia also being at a breaking point then doing things that make it seem like Russia's ready to draw this out a lot longer might force them to the table.

I don't think Ukraine actually is at a breaking point, but Putin might think so - I seriously doubt he's getting good intel from his underlings.