No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
1d ago
That has since changed. Now, enemy drones outnumber Ukrainian ones six to one. But superior tactics and innovation still keep Ukraine competitive. Ukraine tends to be first in developing and adopting new technologies, driven by a policy of diversification. Russia’s advantage in mass production means it can adapt and scale up much faster. The pace of change is frenetic, with feedback loops meaning that some software is updated every few hours. By the time Russian drones reach the front lines, Ukraine has sometimes already developed counter-measures, Colonel Sukharevsky claims. “Quantitatively Russia is ahead, but qualitatively we are keeping them at parity.”
Pretty clear, no?
No_one
1d ago
No, I said in per capita it's 10x higher. If we go by the mediazona estimates for Russians (~200k) and this leak of half a million, it's 1:2.5 in favor of Russia. I believe I estimated lower numbers earlier, 300k and up.
Side note, how do I embed links? I look like my father using emails here. text in [] link in (), no space between them
No_one
1d ago
You may feel you're talking in circles. My perception has always been that the million dead Russians line of thought was bullshit and you and others like @Dean never presented any arguments that could overturn the extremely simple calculation based on the similarity of both countries and simple weight of material on either side.
I mean, you're free to bet on Polymarket on there actually being only 100k Ukrainian KIA which could imply they suffered only 2.5x relative casualties of Russians.
Based on the above, would you suggest Putin should sign up to Trump's deal?
Based on how much ordinary Russians hate the deal, and how the front is deteriorating, no..
They're sure to get a better deal soon once all the reserves are gone.
do you think that's the most credible outcome based on the fact that Ukraine is on the ropes in your assessment?
Pretty sure everyone would be happier if there was a Ukrainian nationalist containment zone left. Western Ukraine has no interesting economy or mineral deposits. Russians don't want to run a harsh occupation, Americans would prevent not having to deal with ten thousand war hardened drone operators. I mean, imagine what would happen if some of them wanted to displace the blame from the war from themselves onto Americans? How many FPV snuff compilations featuring US elites would be one too many is the question FBI doesn't want to ask itself.
No_one
1d ago
Ukraine is instructive - Americans knew Russians would either cuck or fight.[1] Either cost Americans little and hurt Russians, so it was all fine by them. Who gives a shit about half a million dead Slavs, right?
Now, what do you think would happen if Americans attacked Russia directly, eh?
No, in a conflict with Russia what would happen would be that the moment Russian air defense situation got critical, they'd launch tactical nuclear weapons at American air bases in Europe and the air war would abruptly cool down to manageable proportions. Or the world would end, I guess.
I guess it's all up to how lucky the Americans feel, I guess.
[1]>“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I’m using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”
No_one
1d ago
There was also an imbalance in FPV drones too, with Ukrainian drone forces commander claiming Russians were using several times more last year.
More recently, they were also saying the Russian state-supported drone program is overwhelming and the very modern, very gamified Ukrainian drone ecosystem one isn't up for scaling sufficiently.
So I'm guessing situation hasn't changed drone wise much.
They aren't that much larger.
The warhead is a mere 200 lb, twice as heavy as a howitzer round. While missiles can be thin-skinned and with fragmentation cover a larger area, it's not massively better than a common modern howitzer shell.
Very good against targets in the open, yes. If you wanted to target people in the basement of a reinforced concrete building, you could spend millions of $. Needless to say, the fragmentation warheads is probably useless even against sturdier dugouts, which must be hit with the unitary warhead.
It's a decent weapon especially with the ISR Ukraine is given, but they're getting too little ammo for some reason. Daily rate of fire was allegedly <10. Military artisanal complex strikes again!
Shoot and scoot should be much safer than setting up one of those monster cannons, right?
The systems countering HIMARS is Tornado (250 kg warhead, 200km range) and Iskander (~500 kg, 500km range) are both similarly mobile and capable of leaving the launch site quickly. They're also vulnerable to stuff such as Lancet drones, but these are less common now, perhaps bc they can be intercepted with electric drone interceptors that are more common now.
No_one
2d ago
Vadym Ivchenko, Member of Committee on National Security, Defence and Intelligence of Ukrainian parliament has said, in public and over the internet, that Ukrainian armed forces have likely sustained at least half a million dead.. He is from Tymoshenko's party, with a pro-Western record.
So, at least around 2.5x more than is the Mediazona estimate of Russian casualties, and assuming identical age distributions, the per capita losses are 10x higher.
Seems like Russians are employing a simple if sound strategy to win a war of attrition as manoeuvre is sort of dead because nobody has enough counter-surveillance technology. The only remotely safe way of moving forces up to the front is sending infantrymen in small groups into prepared positions.
According to this report on Ukrainians training in Poland, nobody told NATO, at least the lower ranks, that the nature of war has changed.. Even though it's been 3 years of heavy recon drone use in Ukraine, NATO units still mostly trains and operate as if the drones weren't there, which is surprising to observe in a force that prides itself on being reliant on technology and good training.
No_one
3d ago
Wanted to post this elsewhere but so far it's just in the 'fun' category, I think.
**Aligned, Multiple-transient Events in the First Palomar Sky Survey **
Abstract:
Old, digitized astronomical images taken before the human spacefaring age offer a rare glimpse of the sky before the era of artificial satellites. In this paper, we present the first optical searches for artificial objects with high specular reflections near the Earth. We follow the method proposed in Villarroel et al. and use a transient sample drawn from Solano et al. We use images from the First Palomar Sky Survey to search for multiple (within a plate exposure) transients that, in addition to being point-like, are aligned along a narrow band. We provide a shortlist of the most promising candidate alignments, including one with ∼3.9σ statistical significance. These aligned transients remain difficult to explain with known phenomena, even if rare optical ghosting producing point-like sources cannot be fully excluded at present. We explore remaining possibilities, including fast reflections from highly reflective objects in geosynchronous orbit, or emissions from artificial sources high above Earth’s atmosphere. We also find a highly significant (∼22σ) deficit of POSS-I transients within Earth's shadow when compared with the theoretical hemispheric shadow coverage at 42,164 km altitude. The deficit is still present though at reduced significance (∼7.6σ) when a more realistic plate-based coverage is considered. This study should be viewed as an initial exploration into the potential of archival photographic surveys to reveal transient phenomena, and we hope it motivates more systematic searches across historical data sets.
No_one
3d ago
Well.. no implication isn't true. They're non-negotiable. You can't fail them, that's a game over and they're fairly tough, some of them.
No_one
3d ago
This is way more of a plague in Slovak because there's a regular rule for producing lesser or greater variations of nouns and some people, I suspect women, abuse it greatly and every second or 2/3rds of nouns in certain texts are diminutives.
E.g. dom - house diminutive: domček - houselet (?) augmentative domisko - huge house (not really used tho)
No_one
3d ago
I believe dozens at least in Britain, possibly up to a hundred. Real stupid policy, they went after basically nobodies too. They also tried to debank Farage which backfired.
More locally, Martin Sellner said he ultimately had to go to .. Latvia, I think, to get a working bank account?. In this lawsuit against Erste Bank, he claims he made 400+ attempts to open an account, and when he succeeded, in 93 cases the account was terminated a few days after.
In the proceedings, Sellner and his attorney demonstrated that 394 banks had refused to open accounts for him upon request , and according to his own statements, he has had 93 accounts closed over the years, with nearly 400 account applications rejected.
Now he's suing Erste Bank in Austria. Mind you, his organisation was acquitted from the organisation charge and doesn't seem to have a criminal record except some self-defense in 2017. He got charged with that mostly on the basis of accepting a donation from Brenton Tarrant and swapping a few emails. That was the guy who made money in crypto and then committed a mass shooting.
Anyway, it seems a low-lvl court ruled in his favor, so I wonder how it'll go from there.
The Commercial Court in Vienna (Handelsgericht Wien) ruled partially in Sellner's favor, stating that bank accounts in Austria are subject to an obligation to contract, provided there are no objective grounds against a business relationship, and that political views or media assessments are not sufficient grounds for refusal
No_one
3d ago
Dude, stop sanewashing the Russian lost a million. Meduza only got up to what, 130k, which would give 700k total losses.
their bumfuck rural cousins
Yeah, let's just elide the fact the bumfuck 'rural cousins' used to be the most industrialized part of USSR, are getting loads of assistance from Americans, and are, per capita, at least as capable as Russians and likely way more motivated.
The writing ranges from tolerable(dumb but excusable to okay if artless - much of the plot) to barely tolerable (Netflix tier slop - certain characters, notably Karlach).
Otherwise it's a fun game, nice graphics, interesting tactical combat on the higher difficulties. I'd defo buy it for say €30.
I got vastly more fun out of Rogue Trader which is mechanically somewhat worse but writing ranges from quite decent to tolerable.
No_one
4d ago
nearly full-stack offering, so you have options
Try even installing wechat. Last I checked it was an unbelievable pain in the ass.
No_one
4d ago
Putin and Gadhafi mostly dont even bother to wave the fig leaf of democracy)
?
Despite some amount of electoral fraud, Putin gets pretty securely elected. It's nowhere near as impressive as the democratic fig leaves in the West, but he's clearly taking care to preserve democratic legitimacy.
No_one
4d ago
This is cancellation for power politics reason, not bc of culture war.
If it happens, it will happen because AI analyzed your online activity and decided it crossed a threshold of dangerous
In Europe, debanking etc isn't due to Americans. Nobody in US cares about random anti-immigration activists who are typical targets.
No_one
5d ago
Le Guin didn't respect physics or common sense enough to warrant the label SF. I don't think she was an SF writer for the same reason I don't think Star Wars is science fiction.
has been that it is only capable of a very superficial, formulaic level of production.
What exactly do you mean by that? What's an example of a work that is the opposite of that?
No_one
5d ago
I can imagine women might be at a disadvantage in complex maneuvers, but the main difference between aces and dead guys was really sharp eyes and paying attention, with proper tactics they could have been quite successful. You don't really want to get in turn fight furballs and people with high scores generally didn't do so.
There just weren't many women involved.
No_one
6d ago
Let me quote a famous screenwriter
AI. I just sent chatgpt a script I'd written some years ago and asked for improvements. In five seconds it responded with notes as good or better than I've ever received film a film executive.
AI slop for entertainment,
Older LLMs write slop by default bc the training data is weighed towards obnoxious California tier crap. If you take the barest amount of care they stop writing slop bc tasteful writing is in their weights. As I found out when I was enraged by slop while experimenting with roleplay. Most people don't have taste so don't care, don't even seem aware they're reading slop. In short, if your LLM powered RP or ERP has slop in it, it's a skill ( you were using dumb models or can't prompt a SOTA model properly) or taste issue. So, I have no problems saying someone used to LLM writing could use it to write a script that's better than okay and definitely well above typical Netflix tier shit.
Newer ones seem to almost avoid slop even without anti-slop prompts. E.g. consider this fake SlateStarCodex essay by Gemini. You can kinda tell it's not Scott A but it's not easy. It has almost zero of of the typical LLM tells.
'some proper SF'?
Something better than Baen-tier mil-sf slop or silly hippie crap from Le Guin getting filmed. Either a good film based on some golden age classics, or modern actual SF getting filmed.
No_one
6d ago
Never read anything in that vein. If that were true you'd expect a lot more female aces in Soviet Air force. There were only 2 female aces who shot down more than five planes each in WW2..
No_one
6d ago
and most soldiers don't die in a war.
There are no proper wars to speak atm of -it's all sedate counterinsurgencies or civil wars between people who, left to themselves would be living in mud huts and rustling cattle and struggle with zeroing rifles.
The Ukraine war is killing loads of people involved, and the casualties in a possible air/naval war with China are not worth thinking about as Chinese production of hard to intercept precision weapons is probably higher than that of all other countries combined.
No_one
6d ago
Star Wars died for me when TFA came out and I fell asleep watching it. The movie has only one redeeming feature and that is the infamous Hux speech.
It warms the heart of every 4x player who ever wiped a troublesome system but never got to see a proper cinematic for it.
Here's to hoping Henry Cavill manages to get Amazon to not fuck up the WH40k miniseries because, come on. Even though WH40k is sort of retarded at least they have created good excuses for why it's all somewhat retarded.
No_one
6d ago
There's just very little in Rogue One to like, I find?
Star Wars are irredeemably silly in so many ways.. and It could've been much better, yes, but I kind of enjoyed the silly action
I'm not sure why you're so pissed. AI can already write better dialogue than most scriptwriters. Certainly better than George Lucas ever did.
With generative AI, we'll finally get some proper SF on the screen. There's risk that good actual SF could end up produced as miniseries etc.
They tried drafting everyone btw 25-60 or so.
They won't get much from 18-25. Smaller cohorts too, lower birthrates.
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