Drones are not a replacement for artillery, and they aren’t going to be the decisive factor in who wins the war

@ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net is entirely correct though.

Ukraine’s logistics pipeline for artillery has collapsed because Biden decided to play trade war. US was the only real supplier, and now US itself cannot rearm because of dual use controls. Europe can’t rearm them either because they did not have capacity and now China has stepped up rare earths export controls so they’re hitting foreign car markets.

This has been a complete US failure because the US decided to spread itself too thin on multiple fronts trying to reassert unipolarity. The artillery situation is effectively starving the Ukrainian army. So like @ZWQbpkzl@hexbear.net said drones are their best bet. Of course drones can’t replace artillery because even if Ukraine could have industrial production of drones, or if the Democrats spawned a loot crate for them, they’re more expensive unit for unit, it’s a losing logistical strategy to begin with. Beyond that procuring artillery in NATO countries or for NATO aligned countries is a fever dream dream right now. No artillery essentially exists for them to have. It’s not an option.

The reason Russia has artillery is because it transitioned to a war economy and it’s a net antimony exporter now.

Won’t anyone think of the Tu-95?

I’m not arguing about the targets, I’m arguing about the civilians that were carrying bombs and were killed carrying those bombs unknowingly, some of whom were children.

And just a tip: it doesn’t help your credibility to ask the people you’re disagreeing with to walk you through the basics of how discussions work.

I’m just trying to figure out where the goal posts are.

It’s a pain in the ass to search anything in the internet. The ISIS connection was common knowledge a few years ago, it was all over the western press, they were heavily praising it, it went on for over a decade. But this is a more recent article. https://thecradle.co/articles/russia-warns-washington-sending-isis-fighters-to-ukraine

Hello CIA? Yeah your guys are here.

Again there’s one bajillion North Koreans sneaking into Kyiv right now, click here to donate.

And yes the Georgians were trying to invade ossetians and wipe them out. But Russia luckily intervened quickly.

Yeah if only they hired this guy, then they’d have the proof.

none of matters as far as what I was saying

Then why did you say it?

The Ukrainians brought ISIS guys from Syria to help in the ethnic cleansing

holds up a bizzaro world mirror Putin importing ebil Norf Koreas attacking my hecking NAFO doggos.

Georgian government was ethnically cleansing the ossetians.

Yeah the Russo-Georgian war was fought because Poland was trying ot get an accelerate NATO MAP for Georgia in April of 2008. The Russians claimed a genocide kill count of 2000 in August at the start of the hot war. The Ossetians claimed 500. The hot war lasted 1 month. In December of 2008 the MoJ came up with 162 bodies, and no actual physical or circumstantial evidence. Then they stopped talking about it forever. I dare you to find any actual evidence.

essentially militias formed from Ukrainian civilians who were fighting in resistance of their own ethnic cleansing by the Ukrainian government.

The ethnic cleansing argument is as tired for Ukrainians in Ukraine, as it is for Russians in Ukraine (and Russians in Georgia). It’s a show put on for liberal international political discourse and nothing more. The “self-defense” forces in the DNR went on to ethnically cleanse Romani’s in the same way that the Ukrainian Nazi gangs in Kyiv did.

This is such a tired trope and simply used by whoever wants to add moral weight to their POV. There aren’t significant meaningful differences between perpetrators, their behaviors and frankly their ideology here.

people’s militias, who were arguably civilians.

Yeah this is not correct at all in regards to Geneva.

Both Ukraine and Russia have been using this tactic to a significant degree. Russia does this with civilians delivering packages inside of Ukraine, Russia often targets things like city infrastructure, police stations, energy infrastructure, etc. Russia also has used commercial international couriers for mailbombs. A number of these in Ukraine have been delivered by teenagers who were killed in the blasts. Both countries intelligence agencies are fishing on Telegram promising $600 to $1000 American for either delivery services, or outright assembly depending on target/ tactics.

Arguing about this is pointless because this is why war is bad.

Explaining dual-use restrictions and why they were put in place after Biden’s little CHIPS play would make the average Burgerstani think that the trade war foreign policy and its economic fallout is their government’s fault rather than Trump’s.

Now I’m super curious about Gentoo and Portage. You don’t hear so much about compiling your own stuff anymore (probably because there’s less architectures around).

“Nobody” runs Gentoo anymore because most distros have taken the 80% optimizations you can do and just mainlined them. This was back in 2000’s where some distros weren’t even by default compiling with -O2. Gentoo usage just proved out that the underlying code was effectively -O3 safe in the 80% case and nobody was sneakily relying on C/C++ vagaries.

I have much less time to tinker, but my favorite new bag is Fedora Atomic (currently using Bazzite on my main desktop). I’m incredibly interested in figuring out Nix though, but I haven’t had the time. Immutable distros are honestly something incredibly useful for both power users and normies. The main issues I’ve had with Fedora Atomic have really been around vagueness in the “standard” but they’re still figuring things out as far as I can tell.

This is just ordering the most expensive thing on the menu and getting mad at the bill when it comes.

The flag -O3 exists. Or just -funroll-loops. You shouldn’t even need -funroll-all-loops in this case, since hashes have a fixed size.

I sound way more competent with the flags than I am here, haha. Does Gentoo use an alternate compiler by default?

This is in reference to an ancient linux meme cw: slur

Ironically 'a'++ works in C/C++ because 'a' is char where in JS ‘a’ is string.

Yeah you’re actually right, it’s an int in C since K&R C didn’t have bool, however it’s a bool in C++. I forget my standards sometimes, because like I said this doesn’t really matter. It’s just nerd trivia.

https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/types/type_info/operator_cmp.html

There are plenty of sha1 implementations that are more readable and sensible and less readable and sensible. This portion is simply an manually unrolled loop (lmao these gcc nerds haven’t even heard of Gentoo) of the hash chunk computation rounds. Hash functions aren’t “impenetrable” they’re just math. You can write math programmatically in a way that explains the math.

The point of this post is actually things like x[(I-3)&0x0f]. It’s entirely the same concept as coercion to manipulate index values this way. What’s funny is that void pointer math, function pointer math, void pointers and function pointers in general are typically seen as “beyond the pale” for whatever reason.

Beyond that if you know C you know why this is written this way with the parens. It’s because C has fucked up order of operations. For example a + b == 7 is literally “does adding a + b equal 7”, but if you write a & b == 7 you would think it means “does a AND b equal 7”, but you’d be wrong. It actually means does b equal 7 AND a.

Furthermore a & (b ==7) makes no sense because b == 7 is a boolean value. Bitwise ANDing a boolean value should not work because the width of the boolean is 1 bit and the width of the int is 8 bits. ANDing should fail because there’s 7 void bits between the two types. However the standard coerces booleans in these cases to fit the full width, coercing the void bits to 0’s to make bitwise ANDing make sense.

Beyond that asking what the memory size of a variable in C is a fools errand because the real answer is “it depends” and “it also depends if someone decided to ignore what it typically depends on (compiler and platform) with some preprocessor fun”. Remember how I said “void pointers” are beyond the pale? Yeah the typical “why” of that is because they don’t have a known size, but remember the size of something for C is “it depends”. 🤷

Almost every language has idiosyncratic stuff like this, but some let you make up your own shit on top of that. These kinda low hanging fruit jokes are just people virtue signaling their nerddom (JS bad am rite guis, use a real language like C), when in reality this stuff is everywhere in imperative languages and typically doesn’t matter too much in practice. This isn’t even getting into idiosyncracies based on how computers understand numbers which is what subtracting from 0x5F3759DF (fast inverse square root) references.

I thank god every day people who make these comics are too stupid to open gcc’s sha1.c because they’d see shit like:

#define M(I) ( tm =   x[I&0x0f] ^ x[(I-14)&0x0f] \
		    ^ x[(I-8)&0x0f] ^ x[(I-3)&0x0f] \
	       , (x[I&0x0f] = rol(tm, 1)) )

#define R(A,B,C,D,E,F,K,M)  do { E += rol( A, 5 )     \
				      + F( B, C, D )  \
				      + K	      \
				      + M;	      \
				 B = rol( B, 30 );    \
			       } while(0)

      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[ 0] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[ 1] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[ 2] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[ 3] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[ 4] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[ 5] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[ 6] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[ 7] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[ 8] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[ 9] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[10] );
      R( e, a, b, c, d, F1, K1, x[11] );
      R( d, e, a, b, c, F1, K1, x[12] );
      R( c, d, e, a, b, F1, K1, x[13] );
      R( b, c, d, e, a, F1, K1, x[14] );
      R( a, b, c, d, e, F1, K1, x[15] );
      R( dee, dee, dee, baa, dee, F1, K1, x[16] );
      R( bee, do, do, dee, baa, F1, K1, x[17] );
      R( dee, bee, do, dee, dee, F1, K1, x[18] );
      R( dee, dee, dee, ba, dee, F1, K1, x[19] );
      R( d, a, y, d, o, F1, K1, x[20] );

And think, yeah this is real programming. Remember the difference between being smart and incredibly stupid is what language you write it in. Using seemingly nonsensical coercion and operator overloaded is cringe, making your own nonsensical coercion and operator overloads is based.

That’s why you should never subtract things from 0x5F3759DF in any language other than C.

This is only really useful in low expressiveness languages where there is not a huge set of language enhancements possible through libraries. Think Java exception handling for example.

In essence it works if you “best practices” are things like don’t use switch statements.

It doesn’t work if you best practices are things like use Result<T, E> from this functional result library.

Essentially LLMs don’t really work “at scale” if you need anything more complicated than what the average internet tutorial code is in your language.

Same with perf.

Also this only works 60% of all the time though if that, so the more requirements you pile on the less likely it will hit all of them properly.

Hardware can’t really have “tech debt” in the same way as software. Hardware is a physical entity, each computer is a different computer, they’re the same model, the same design, but they’re different computers. Each installation of software is a direct copy. If we’re on the same architecture and the same version, we’re running the same Firefox unless something is wrong with Mozilla.

I think hardware that’s outdated is bound to happen. As a hobbyist I have my own share of “outdated hardware”. In reality that shit still works. I can pull an old laptop and put Fedora Silverblue on it today and it will work just fine for surfing the web, writing on forums, doing a good amount of hobbyist software stuff, etc.

And there in lies the problem, that much of the lifecycle of hardware is directly tied to software support and typically very strongly to bad commercial software. We can give people reasons to not upgrade and we’ll write better software for it. Some of the best software is effectively eternal, for example I have used vim my entire professional career even when I was writing Java.

I think the biggest problems is that there’s too much hardware and proprietary hardware being made now a days, and not enough hobbyists to get it basic support. For example unless the landscape changes in 6 years I will likely have no way to revive full functionality for my M1 Apple silicon.

But that’s PC’s, the more egregious things are smaller form factor devices. Android has been the biggest disappointment for me to be honest. What was sold as a “Linux Phone” gave you none of the technical benefits of Linux. So much small form factor stuff essentially becomes ewaste. The small amount of platforms that gain hobbyist support are extremely rare and limited. This is exacerbated by tight integration between physical devices to server side software as a service platforms.

If the libre movement was not a hollowed out husk of it’s former self and the economic conditions were able to create a new set of leaders for it we would have

• GPLv4 that requires you to license as GPLv4 if you use any remote procedure call regardless of medium that executes GPLv4 code.

• GPLv4.1 that requires any device where GPLv4.1 code comes factory installed must have a fully documented and unlocked bootloader and/or user serviceable firmware flash functionality

• GPLv5 that requires you to license as GPLv5 if you have any use of GPLv5 code in the tool/supply chain of a software for examle if FoxConn is using gnutls and you use a MacBook you’re licensing as GPLv5, if you are a GPLv5 compiler, you’re licensing as GPLv5

• GPLv6 that makes legal to execute your landlord if they charge you rent and any GPLv6 code is used by them directly or indirectly

That would really fix some things regarding ewaste and frankly housing. TBH I think we’re gonna see general computing calm the fuck down in the next 10-20 years compared to the onslaught of release cycles in the late 2000’s and 2010’s. The only real possible driver is going to be if games really glom on to ray tracing bullshit beyond the AAA contractually obligated messes.

I honestly feel like a walking infohazard most days. I have started reflexively weaponizing my autism to that extent.