Lasers are probably going to come out of testing to be the go-to defence against drone swarms in not too long. As you say, they would do what the Gepard is doing, but even better (at least against small drones), they just need to be finished first.

Just do a quick search for “mushroom cloud”, and you’ll find that all this combined is nowhere near what a nuke would look like.

The mushroom cloud formed from a small nuke like little boy (small by modern standards) reaches up to about 8 km. that’s close to cruising altitude for an airliner. The reason the cloud from a nuke “mushrooms” in a different way than conventional munitions is that the intense heat is causing enough hot air to rise to form a literal cloud when it reaches high enough that the humidity condenses. This can even cause radiative rain shortly after the bomb has gone off.

The fireball of Little Boy is estimated to have been almost 400 m in diameter with a surface temperature approximately equal to that of the sun, and every building within about 1.6 km was instantly completely destroyed.

It is difficult to comprehend just how much more powerful even a small “tactical” nuke is than any conventional weapon. There’s a reason soldiers that were shown blast tests of them during the Cold War have told stories of breaking down crying at the sight, because they just couldn’t fathom what they were seeing.

There was no nuke blowing up here.

*Breaks the law

*Is convicted

*Refuses to pay fines

*Stops receiving funds

*shockedpikachu.jpg

At this point I really can’t understand what is driving Orban anymore. He obviously must have known this would happen, and is likely doing it on purpose so that he can point at the EU as the “bad guy” back home, but like… what does he gain from this? Isn’t it better to just get a shitload of free money from the EU that you can funnel to your friends and family than to not do that? If he legitimately dislikes the EU he can just leave.

Maybe he’s just sticking around as long as he can grab cash? It kind of seems like he’s going for the “see how far you can push it before you’re kicked out” play. Essentially trying to find out how much of an obstructing, law-breaking, corrupt asshole he has to be before the rest of the EU finally has enough and kicks him out, at which point he can peace out to some safe-haven (I’ve heard there are spare rooms in some of Putins palaces).

Awesome to see the effectiveness og the Gepard like this. It seems perfectly suited for these kinds of slow-moving low-cost targets that you really don’t to send expensive interceptors at.

Especially when the leading drone tactic seems to mostly be “send enough to saturate the air defences”, having stuff like this that can rapidly burst down a bunch of drones at low cost, using ammunition that’s quick and easy to produce, seems perfect.

it would seem crazy to sacrifice it if it wasn’t damaged

To be fair, the best kit you’ll ever get is the right kit at the right time. If what you need is a tandem warhead that can track, hit and destroy pretty much any vehicle, or punch through a bunker, at anything from a couple hundred meters to a couple kilometres, and you have a Javelin… you’re in luck! On the other hand, if what you need is a tandem warhead to destroy a static armoured target that you can’t get line-of-sight to, and you have a Javelin… You’re carrying a very expensive but useless rocket and tracking system that just happens to also contain the exact warhead you need.

Once a piece of equipment like a Javelin is in the field, it’s only real value is in whether it can help you achieve your objective. Its dollar value seizes to be of relevance. The only relevant questions are “Do I have a large enough supply of this munition to prioritise using it for that target?” and “Do I have another munition that I can and should use instead?” If the answer is “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, you use the munition in whatever way is most practical.

Wow! I think this is the first video I’ve seen of active clearing of dragons teeth, and clearing of mines using line charges. This even has the follow up of lighter vehicles following through the breach! Do you have more footage like this and/or a geolocation?

Holy shit! Was this caused by drone strikes? I can’t imagine how Russia could have this much ammunition located within range of this kind of strike, let alone how enough munitions got through the air defences to set all this off, or how the fire prevention measures are bad enough that this could be the result of a fire spreading from just a few hits.

“Enshittification will continue until revenue improves”

I’ve found that regex is maybe the programming-related thing GPT is best at, which makes sense given that it’s a language model, and regex is just a compact language with weird syntax for describing patterns. Translating between a description of a pattern in English and Regex shouldn’t be harder for that kind of model than any other translation so to speak.

In general I agree: ChatGPT sucks at writing code. However, when I want to throw together some simple stuff in a language I rarely write, I find it can save me quite some time. Typical examples would be something like

“Write a bash script to rename all the files in the current directory according to <pattern>”, “Give me a regex pattern for <…>”, or “write a JavaScript function to do <stupid simple thing, but I never bothered to learn JS>”

Especially using it as a regex pattern generator is nice. It can also be nice when learning a new language and you just need to check the syntax for something- often quicker than swimming though some Geeks4Geeks blog about why you should know how to do what you’re trying to do.

Well it’ll still be climate change, just a more abrupt one.

First of all, that speech is awesome.

But I want to comment on something regarding modding, and ask an honest question: Shouldn’t reiteration of historical speeches or texts be omitted from rules about slurs? I mean, reiterating a speech, or a section of Huckleberry Finn, is obviously not the same thing as devaluing someone by calling them a slur. We actually have a quite hot debate going on in my country about this now, where some teachers were harassed for “being racist”, because in class they read aloud a famous poem written by an immigrant about racism, where he writes some of the things that were shouted at him. The whole point of the poem, and of reading it in class, is of course to make a point out of how bad racism is, and to educate about racism. Still, these teachers have been stamped as “racists” because they reiterated specific words in the poem.

For the honest question (I’m not American or a native english speaker): Isn’t there a historical difference between the word “Negro”, and a certain similar word I’ll refrain from reiterating? The way I’ve understood it, the former is a historically more neutral form, that was simply used the way we today would use “black person”, while the latter has more or less always had some kind of devaluating undertone. I’ve gotten that interpretation, among other things, from having read speeches where people are promoting equal rights, and use “Negro” to refer to black people, while clearly not believing that they are inferior in any way (hence the promotion of equal rights). Of course, today, both words are considered unacceptable, but I would like to clarify if I’ve misunderstood, as it helps in interpreting things that were said or written in the past.

I would love to see Harris just stop for a second, turn over towards Trump, and say something like “Your mic is turned off you know, could you stop yelling for a moment?”, and have the cameras cut to a silent video of Trump furiously yelling at his turned-off mic.

I think it’s horrible to see what the Taliban government is doing to oppress the people of Afghanistan. I’m also surprised that so few people of Afghanistan showed any real will to prevent Taliban from taking power. They had 20 years to prepare, with ample support and loads of equipment from NATO and others, and when the foreign forces left they just … capitulated.

It’s baffling to me that seemingly nobody was willing to fight to prevent this. Thousands of people were at the airport during the last evacuations, and I vividly remember videos of people holding on to cargo planes that were taking off in an effort to get out of the country. Lots of people clearly knew it was going to get bad, but seemingly nobody was willing to fight to prevent it. I honestly have a hard time understanding how that happened.

Of course, Li-ion batteries will never cover large-scale power demand. Not primarily because of lack of lithium, but because it’s a technology that scales far too poorly into the MWh/TWh scale, and has a far too short lifetime.

The battery tech we need for truly large scale storage is different from what we need for small, portable storage. Stuff like redox-flow batteries are looking promising.

There’s also hydrogen, with different storage methods being actively researched- from direct storage to using ammonia as a carrier.

The issue with using mechanical storage (like pumped hydropower) is threefold (off the top of my head):

1. It has ridiculously low energy density
2. Even after > 100 years of pumps and turbines, the power loss in a pump/release cycle is very high.
3. It’s heavily limited by geography

I’m not saying pumped hydropower isn’t part of the solution: I believe the solution is that we need many solutions. I just think it’s important to point out that battery tech isn’t some monolithic thing, and that there are issues with pumped hydropower (and mechanical storage in general).

Awesome! Let’s keep ramping this up!

Let them use the ATACMS too.

I’ve been doing the same thing, went back to read it now, and I have to admit I had a good time. Even though it took time to manually turn my comments into gibberish, it gave some hilarious results!

Came here to say this. Just get home brew up and running. One you have gcc and your other basic tools installed, there’s very few Linux guides that won’t work on a Mac. A couple shell tools have different names, but that’s about it.

The currently most viable counter to artillery in Ukraine today appears to be either fpv drones, which have relatively short range and limited payloads, or counter-battery radar + artillery, which exposes your artillery by putting it in range of enemy artillery.

Ukraine typically has more accurate artillery than Russia, and seems to win more artillery duels, but of course still has an issue because of Russias huge volume of guns.

Targeting the drone operators is definitely something both sides do- they were considered priority targets last time I heard someone mention it. The issue, as someone else pointed out, is locating and hitting a small, highly mobile person or group that can operate from behind cover and concealment. That turns out to be pretty hard. Just consider that an infantryman’s primary survival strategy is “stay hidden when you can, covered when you can, and move as fast as possible when exposed”, and that drone operators are doing exactly that, while also not needing to stick their head out to be effective.