No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
57m ago
Pakistan has bought Chinese military hardware including 100+ mile range BVR missiles with datalinks and AWACS aircraft that can guide such, so .. not that unlikely.
There's a whole bunch of footage out there this morning showing various aircraft parts lying on the ground.
No_one
1hr ago
This generalized antipathy has basically been extended to any use of AI at all, so even though the WorldCon committee is insisting there has been no use of generative AI, no final decisions made by AI, and that AI has nothing to do with any Hugo nominations or decisions, people are still Very Very Angry that it was used at all.
I predict the fallout ensuing from eventually discovering their new POC/female high performers are deftly using LLMs to write their works is going to destroy the woke captured legacy publishing industry and the associated awards.
Lots of people are using LLMs to write not just code but also stories. It's inevitable.
e.g. recently this was a pretty big chunk of free Deepseek usage. https://www.novelcrafter.com/
No_one
1d ago
I remember a quote from one of the blogs I used to read.
"Everything is just a LARP until it succeeds" is a quote I'm probably incorrectly paraphrasing, but refers to a real phenomenon. Then referred to the radical headchoppers in Algeria, who started out as mostly a joke or so people though.
Most social movements start out small and ridiculous but because they're using or exploiting some real social dynamic they eventually succeed.
No_one
2d ago
..wait, you sure this is furries? I thought dragons were still a fairly generic sort of fantasy animal.
No_one
3d ago
Trump government is pissed enough with South Africa thanks to millenials who have had it with the rainbow nation being in positions of power. South Africa wouldn't risk it. Russia isn't stupid or nasty enough to do this - they protect killers who acted in the interests of the state, not useless young thugs..
I don't think Venezuela is that big on black power either.
No_one
3d ago
It looks like the dismissal (of this case) was in march '25.
The guy who took the video looks to be Sharmake Beyle Omer, whose criminal history is not very rich. Some 5th degree assault charges from '21 that were mostly dismissed and he was convicted of disorderdly conduct, and some light traffic related stuff.
No_one
3d ago
Seeing as I'm one mod report away from being permabanned because of forgetting to speak nicely about followers of Nick Fuentes late at night two weeks back or so, I didn't want to risk any reports related to the 'word of power'.
No_one
3d ago
From my point of view, no, not really.
I come from a place where our own racial underclass is not treated in a sacred manner and there's no equivalent of the gamer word. You might become a bit of a social pariah at a humanities faculty of a big university if you were filmed doing something like this, perhaps, but moms around the country would understand and forgive.
I don't think the taboo around the word is in any way reasonable and that such taboos should not be enforced or tolerated. I much prefer the situation here where before there's actual violence the parties in a dispute tend to use all the strongest expletives at the loudest possible volume. Keeping it 'fake' helps cut down on wasted police time and all that.
No_one
3d ago
I can't easily checked as like many US sites it blocks foreign IPs.
Huh, worked through TOR on the first try. How did I miss the date on the pdf.
None of these documents for the case is likely to have a summary of the evidence gathered by the police right?
No_one
3d ago
It also seems like it should be noted that the mom seems to be a grifter herself.
Why? There isn't much known about her. Do you know of anything suggesting she staged this ?
Rape charges get dismissed a lot,
I'll grant you that there's a lot of spurious crap out there, but why dismiss charges
- one day after a spicy incident hits the internet
- almost three years after it happened
- two days before the case is due to go to court (the news article said the trial was to start on May 5)
That seems pretty odd but then I'm not a criminal lawyer. Maybe a pattern of dragging unpromising cases before dismissing them just before they're due to happen makes a lot of sense in the context.
No_one
3d ago
Facts are: he was trespassing, he had a knife in a place where he shouldn't have had one and then when confronted stabbed a guy who objected to him being there.
To me it seems outrageous a bond is even allowed. He is being charged as an adult. Letting murderers walk free for months until there's a court case? That's not how thing are supposed to go.
Interestingly, no coverage of a hot-button recent CW issue.
TL;DR: a low-class looking married mom of 2 had an altercation on a playground in Rochester, MN. Her story is that a kid stole from her bag and she alled the kid the gamer word.
Then, a Somali man who was also present on the playground and who then was due for court over a '22 rape this week confronted her, phone in hand and recorded the confrontation. {obviously, multiple instances of gamer word in the video, from both parties}
She called him the gamer word too and flipped him the bird. Cue online outrage, she is collecting donation to relocate.
After this blew up, the rape charges against the guy who made the video were dissmissed. (see bottom of post, links). It's fairly close to a textbook perfect 'scissor' event, seems to me.
The video was amplified by some sleazy music video director and the mom claims they are getting death threats. People who went through his old tweets found..interesting stuff, he is some sort of perv. Needless to say this isn't his first rodeo - he's been chasing view by covering race and other hot-button nonsense online.
A recent development I just found about while writing is, the man who made the video had the rape charges against him dismissed 'in the interest of justice'.(local news link). It wasn't just some silly statutory rape - he and his brother offered shelter to a runaway from the foster system and supposedly raped her multiple times. The two defendants of course maintained it was all made up.
All in all, it's an interesting development. I don't understand how someone can just dismiss rape charges (more detail including a link) like this. I haven't read the court documents though.
Pursuant to Rule 30.01 of Minnesota Rules of Criminal Procedure, the State of Minnesota hereby dismisses the Complaint in the above-entitled action dated August 29, 2022, charging the offense(s) of Criminal Sexual Conduct - 3rd Degree - Penetration under 18 - Use coercion, Criminal Sexual Conduct - 5th Degree - Penetration - Nonconsensual for the following reasons: In the interest of justice.
^^this seems like really, truly bad optics. Is there an innocuous explanation - e.g. the case was really flimsy etc? But if it was flimsy why was the court system keeping it going for almost three years only to dismiss it now. The news article makes it seem the trial was set to begin on May 5.
Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.
Modern weapons are complex. Building a factory to make something simple today might happen under a year, but for high-tech production of stuff with proprietary components that can't be bought from several vendors it just gets vastly more complicated. This simply isn't the 1940s when the most complex weapons may have had some electronics. Something like radar seeker heads is extremely specialised tech. Solid rocket fuel either, zero civilian use. Missiles are absolutely unused in civilian world, so are probably missile parts like those specialised servos etc. Expanding production in wartime requires having the entire specialised supply chain ready and waiting, so you existing workforce can train new people. This rarely or never happens.
but hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly.
No. Not happening. We aren't in WW2 era where you could convert an auto plant to an airplane plant with relative ease. Scaling production quickly is now really hard. You need whole mothballed plants with crews keeping the production going at low volume to maintain the ability. This is something only governments with money to spare such as Russia or China can manage. It'd never fly in any pensioner-heavy democracy, nor in the US.
If you look into this more closely, 'streamlining' and lowering cost was popular. US ended up with having problems of this type:
There's no reason to worry. US is going to abandon Europe and nothing really bad could result there, worst case Turkey or Russia conquers some unimportant part. The war with China in the Pacific is almost certainly lost on a numerical basis alone, so there won't be a big war. Maybe something silly like US Navy letting Taiwan hang but blockading Malacca strait etc. US itself is pretty safe.
No_one
3d ago
The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen,
That's the impression people doing PR for Ukraine want others to think. But in the absence of enemy heavy weapons fire, light vehicles make sense to use. That the various storage areas are emptying out is likely not just down to attrition, but because Russia is creating vast new units in reserve.. Newly produced equipment is rarely even seen near the front line now.
Russia is tailoring its rearmament plans to meet the needs of the new troops to be stationed along its NATO border. Those units will get much of the new equipment. Most of what is being sent to the front line in Ukraine is old and refurbished Soviet-era arms. “Very rarely are newly built vehicles observed or destroyed lately,” said Dara Massicot, senior fellow in the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment, who wrote a report on Russia’s military reconstitution.
Another great quote:
“The Russian military is reconstituting and growing at a faster rate than most analysts had anticipated,” Gen. Christopher Cavoli, commander of U.S. forces in Europe, told a Senate committee this month. “In fact, the Russian army, which has borne the brunt of combat, is today larger than it was at the beginning of the war.”
"We were all wrong and actually, Russian army isn't getting destroyed in Ukraine."
All in all, if NATO continues with business as usual- being ineffectual, stuck in the past due to lack of bloody experience, and Russians settle the conflict and absorb all the lessons of the war, something which used to be only possible in BAP's alcoholic imaginings such as 'Russia swooping through Poland' might stop being very fanciful.
Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change
The West has an economy based on valuations of Boomer owning expensive real estate and selling each other services. It has consistently fallen short on delivering weapons to Ukrainians, it can't make weapons in large numbers. Most real industry is declining or gone. These days you can read how they're struggling to source cellulose for artillery charges. The West is simply not a serious geopolitical force, it has zero sane ideas, it's a collection of dysfunctional countries that hate their own citizens, whose main interests is keeping the old-age pension scam going for a few more years and where and power is held by people who just want to die comfortably without having to make a real decision.
According to someone who was a serving intelligence officer, NATO is more of an organisation that provides sinecures than a real defence organisation.
No_one
3d ago
that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech
According to the people operating it, their tech is not superior to the Russian one. This is from fall of '24
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.”
Now look how wikipedia puts it
Comparing Russian and Ukrainian drone warfare, he said that the enemy has more drones, as they are better at mass production, but that Ukraine is first with innovations.
I understand why people want to believe in the narrative of Ukrainian tech superiority and why Wikipedia selectively quotes the same article to make it look like Ukrainians are out-innovating Russians, but it's mostly unwarranted. They're basically the same people with a slightly different culture. The difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that Russians have more resources and people, possibly mitigated by a less flexible MoD.
Making such a tech 'safe' would require putting some sort of transponders on every piece of Ukrainian equipment and making such network secure and hard to exploit - the codes would have to change frequently etc. This is hard, logistically, there are spies in the Ukrainian army etc.
Without that, your only bet would be having AI modules on drones that would only activate once the drone is indisputably in enemy territory. How do you make that in a foolproof manner? Inertial navigation of some sort? You could use terrain / map matching but that's a whole another layer of of AI complexity you'd need to make reliable.
But what then if someone fires off the drone in the opposite direction to the front ? Both sides routinely used basically civilian vehicles for transport and transport is one of the primary targets. Any misactivation would result in grief.
In addition, FPV cameras are fairly cheap and low resolution, they AFAIK always rely on recon from another drone. An autonomous drone would require better sensors.
There's a fair amount of complications. I'd not rule this out before war ends, but I think it's more likely to happen after the war. Maybe Ukrainians will get last-40m targetting or something like that, which could really help radio-shadow near the ground.
No_one
4d ago
Some claimed that the US could threaten Russia by promising to "drown Ukraine in weapons" if Russia didn't come to terms.
What weapons? Who were 'some' ? Even though US has some thousands of armored vehicles in storage, it's known all the critical weapons -air defense, artillery are in short supply. Any sort of useful weapon system (good air defense, cruise missiles) that might make big trouble for Russians is in very short supply. At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs AND China not cutting off supplies of parts there in a brutal manner could save Ukrainians. US Stinger production is at a level of 60 a month!
Raytheon told FlightGlobal it was ramping up to achieve production capacity of 60 Stingers monthly. A separate $700 million contract from NATO headquarters in 2024 added 940 missiles to be split among Germany, Italy and the Netherlands
That peace was not going to happen has been clear since the year started. Russians are confident they can keep this going and Ukraine will give in, so why'd they accept a peace that'd not solve the issues they have
American missile production is insufficient, very insufficient..
In 2022, Ukraine was able to maintain a highly effective defence against the aggressor’s air and missile arsenals, mainly due to post-Soviet long-range S-300 systems. However Ukraine has lost as many as 80 fire units and has used the majority of its estimated 5,000 interceptors. Apart from an S-300 battery delivered by Slovakia, so far transfers of these systems from Bulgaria, Cyprus, and Greece have not been finalised.
Ukraine used thousands of S-300 missiles and now has basically none. US is, with great fanfare planning to increase its production of Patriot missiles to 650 per year.
In December 2023 it was stated that production of Patriot interceptors was 550 a year and would be increased to 650 a year in 2024.[55]
Really, it's hard to put in words how depressed one should be here. E.g. Poland is expected to have <1000 Patriot missiles in its air defense. How long would the Poles last against Russia, which is making ~600 Iskander missiles a year according to Ukrainian information. Since Iskander is a maneuvering and fast missile, interception is by no means assured with a single interceptor either as it'd be against simple ballistic missiles or planes.
Typical NATO air defense would be utterly exhausted within a few weeks by a determined foe spamming improved cheap drones like the Geran, especially ones with better avionics that could fly themselves low and thus would be hard to intercept from the ground.
No_one
5d ago
They had orders to just wave people through. They had orders not to detain anyone, even criminals or sex criminals apparently, as unbelievable as that sounds.
https://x.com/BreannaMorello/status/1917993116952580533
I'd welcome some evidence that is made up because releasing known alien sex criminals seems just plain nuts.
No_one
5d ago
How sustainable is American power projection in Hawaii?
Very. US is inevitably going to decline in importance, you can't keep fucking up that long and that badly while barely doing anything about an ascending rival, but it's keeping Hawaii. It's simply too important from a strategic point of view as it allows controlling the seas in a huge distance around it.
It does seem possible that it could end up being the most westerly outpost of US if it loses a Pacific War against China.
But South Korea feels like the only country that is truly living in the 21st century. The food is plentiful and nutritious. Young people are healthy and attractive
They're not attracted to each other. It's a dead country. In my opinion all countries are mostly dead but Korea would be dead even if we had 'business as usual' conditions of AI not ever being a thing.
Reddit has a taken a turn. Racism is now leaking into mainstream subs. I kept Sailer-posting in /r/Europe and getting banned by mods and evading and got myself an IP ban in.. '19 I think. It was apparently lifted, I made a new account and signed in with the same email address that once got banned.
Might be worth looking at the terms & conditions now.
No_one
8d ago
It's the content game. You want to be popular you're going to be a little political. Soon, you belong to the algorithm. If you don't fight it, you end up as Ian Miles Cheong eventually.
You mean Russians tried hacking France, but accidentally hacked grid control computers in Spain. That doesn't seem very likely.
What is likely is that the renewables heavy grid collapsed because it's just not stable because the inputs fluctuate, and keeping it stable is no easy task and there has been several near misses, such as the near blackout in Germany in '21.
There's a vast amount of essays out there that ackshually connecting intermittent sources of energy to the grid is perfectly safe and something such as unexpectedly fast arrival of clouds causing a decrease in solar can't be a problem because you can just fire up gas peaker plants you are, of course, maintaining in running order for just that eventuality.
Obviously, relying on a finite set of known weather-independent power sources is a lot easier than carefully balancing varying power production with demand.
Renewable-heavy grid stability requires many weird, and unnatural approaches. Such as simply heating hot air and blowing it out into the atmosphere. Currently, Czech officials are looking at approvals for about 1 GW worth of 'electricity wasters'.
Luckily, a law was passed to prevent the construction of a gigawatt worth of power-wasting devices..
No_one
16d ago
You try to avoid such wild maneuvers with liners.
Iirc, no one has ever flown a loop with one, but one pilot performed a barrel roll at a lower altitude with a 747 in view of corporate onlookers.
Do we know India has a sufficient amount of deployed thermonuclear warheads to actually destroy Pakistan?
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