111–120 of 507 posts
I run a small home lab, about 30 services One day I decided to change my main disk and used the opportunity to rebuild everything from scratch and from backups. I was up in about an hour. And then I spent a week fixing this and that, ah yes I changed that too and, crap, I cannot remember why this thingie is set up this way. And some more. This is a one-man lab, with simple services, all on docker. I also work in IT.…
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If there was any real will left in EU people, Ukraine would wipe Russia off the map (at least the putinesque remnants), it will happen anyway, but we'd rather just expend vastly more money and vastly more humans and time in the process. Considering the current rate of inflation, switching the EU economies to war production would save so much money and lives, and bring down prices.
War economies famously known for low inflation and wide availability of basic goods.
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Russia is also behind in modern technology by over a decade. I'm pretty sure if the CIA wanted they could destroy a lot of Russian software infrastructure, but it suits them to be in and out of Russian systems collecting information instead.
This seems a bit of a stretch of a claim to make. In what ways would you say that Russia is a decade behind? I visited Russia a few years ago. Commercially, they have all the same technology we have (for me, in the UK). Like us, they outsource most of their manufacturing to China, but internally they produce software equivalent to (or to be honest greater than) what we produce. The difference seems to be that a lot o…
Every country had it's own facebook. The difference was not features but scale.
Russia scales to million of users. Facebook/Google etc. scale to billions of users.
Everybody use Office, Chrome, commercial CADs, etc. Russia has no alternatives in most of these categories, and where it has alternatives - it's usually global (i.e. mostly made by programmers paid by western corporations) open source project they fork and add a russian skin over it.
> And when it comes to hardware, none of us are particularly strong with that.
USA and EU design the top-end chips and make crucial parts of the machines that produce chips (see ASML).
Russia was left behind in 90s and tries to catch up using some open-source alternatives around RISC-V. But they have no capability of designing nor producing chips anywhere near modern desktop CPUs.
Russian Lancet drones use smuggled Nvidia AI chips for example. We do not use smuggled Russian chips :)
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That is not how I read the parent comment. I read it as US making Ukraine do what US wanted to do.
It's tough to say that Ukraine and US are allies right now. US refuses to hold security assurance, as promised, and forbids Ukraine to restore nuclear arsenal, as before the promise. Bullies behave is such way, not allies.
The point is that US made Ukraine do something that the US wanted to do but did not do because were it the US, then it would have had repercussions on US, so they made Ukraine do their dirty work.
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Without software, drones are useless. I suppose they can still assemble manually operated quadcopters if they know their inventory by heart, but they will be unable to produce more parts by 3D printing or drones capable of stable flight, autonomous operations, surveillance or any more advanced use cases. Even remote control is probably out of the picture.
They can continue to run the same thing they had before. As an old software engineer, I can say with certainty that software engineering is a very, VERY wasteful practice. We could all be running Windows 3 right now, DOS, or some old Unix. The overhead involved in making actual advancements shows our slow progress as a species, and that we’re in a thread discussing a drone manufacturing facility being blown up in a w…
I can't agree with you. People have got their human mind as a result of ever increasing and self-inflicted costs driven by a competition among males. They developed minds to play politics and they came to a point when 20% of metabolism of human body was devoted to its brain.
The result of such a wasteful way to spend their energy resources? Humans colonized all the Earth, drove to the extinction almost all big animals, and now there are as much humans on the Earth as mosquitos. Looks like a win, doesn't it?
These things go off the rails sometimes. Just today I've found a new example to it:
highlanders who had practiced brutal initiation ceremonies “in which they were forced to drink only partly slaked lime that blistered their mouths and throats, were beaten with stinging nettles, were denied water, had barbed grass pushed up their urethras to cause bleeding, were compelled to swallow bent lengths of cane until vomiting was induced, and were required to fellate older men, who also had anal intercourse with them” gave them up after only minimal contact with outside disapproval. Some later told anthropologists they felt “deeply shamed” by their treatment of their own sons and were relieved to stop.[1]
The waste of resources into useless things doesn't lead to good outcomes each time, but I believe that software engineering will lead to something. I'm not Jesus, I can't predict exactly what the beneficial results will be, but at least I can point to a growing ability of engineers of handling complexity. It lags behind their ability to create complexity, but still it grows.
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-arguments-about...
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Modern IT practices don’t really contemplate disaster recovery. Even organisations with strict backup procedures seldom test recovery (most never at all). Everything is quickly strapped together due to teams being understaffed. Preparing infrastructure in a way such that it can easily be recreated is easily twice the effort as “just” setting it up the usual way.
Just the other day one of my clients had a production critical server failing and we started restoring it from backups. Turns out some of the software running on it had some weird licensing checks tied to the hardware so it refused to start on the new server. It turns out that the company that made this important piece of software doesn't even exist anymore.
This is why I like docker, if you keep the sources, you recover no matter what (at least until the "no matter what" holds water)
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Czechia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... Bulgaria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/01/arms-dealer-10... Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/12/poland-to-clos... And UK. Plus a million cyberattacks against all sorts of infrastructure.
So then how come hasn't Article 5 been activated yet? Does that mean that said Article 5 is not even worth the piece of paper it has been written on?
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Czechia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_... Bulgaria: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/01/arms-dealer-10... Poland: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/12/poland-to-clos... And UK. Plus a million cyberattacks against all sorts of infrastructure.
So then how come hasn't Article 5 been activated yet? Does that mean that said Article 5 is not even worth the piece of paper it has been written on?
Now, predictably upon being told that it happens you pivot to NATO is useless.
Which is it: a set of attacks so obscure no reasonable person would be aware, or a horrendous onslaught where Article 5 should have been invoked and a mass retaliation begun?
NATO countries historically didn't invoke Article 5 even for terrorist attacks killing their own citizens. It takes a certain level before it makes sense to invoke, normally something beyond the capacity of that country to handle.
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China has been a big winner, it can now get cheap energy and it gets to set Russia whatever conditions it pleases. Russia is now utterly dependent on China for many imports. Russia itself has been the biggest loser. Massive budget deficits, massive inflation. 1M of its smartest people have moved abroad. 1M Russian casualties in the war. Demographics and economy are disastrous. That and Russia is now a pariah state. N…
Russians and foreigners travelling to Russia regularly blog live. Everyone there is doing fine. The world order is changing to a level you won't believe - Russia, Venezuela were reported by WSJ or similar to even be running journalist schools in Africa to break the media control there by western media brands.
Lmao, food prices skyrocketed, quality plummeted, interest rates are at record highs, budget deficit. Totally doing fine, comrade.
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Russia and all non-usa allies have been the winner. China etc have seen the strategies used in sanctions. They know how to limit their impact now. It's also brought Russia/China/Iran/North Korea and wider Brics together. It's been a disaster for the west. The measure of success was Russia weakened and ideally Putin weakened or gone. And instead Russia have shrugged off the sanctions, and Putin is much stronger. And t…
With more than 1.2M dead or out of service injured, Russia is spent. It's why North Korean troops had to be deployed. All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense. Sure they can bomb from afar. But even of they take the Ukraine now, they have no force to hold it with.
> All they can effectivley do, until they grow new soldiers, is defense.
I'm genuinely curious what your information diet/sources looks like that would lead you to make such statements.
According to Ukrainian sources, Russian end strength in Ukraine continues to increase and they are maintaining a strategic reserve of personnel as well:
https://kyivindependent.com/russia-plans-to-increase-groupin... The Russian military plans to increase its grouping in Ukraine by 150,000 soldiers in 2025, equivalent to around 15 motorized infantry divisions, Presidential Office Deputy Head Pavlo Palisa said on April 3, Ukrainian media outlet Suspilne reported.
"Their formation is ongoing. The Russians have no problems with recruiting personnel now..."
https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/syrskyi-warns-russia-stockpi... "Moreover, Russia maintains an additional 121,000 troops in its strategic reserve—comprising 13 divisions, as well as various regiments and brigades—that could be deployed to the battlefield if necessary."
"This means their army grows by an average of 8,000 to 9,000 soldiers every month," the Commander-in-Chief noted.
As for Russia only being able to defend, how do you square that with this Finnish analysis group's tracking of Russian territorial control rates increasing every month this year?
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1l30kb...
That data roughly matches one of Reddit's most prolific meta-analysts, who mostly uses Suriyak data (the most reputable Russian mapper):
https://old.reddit.com/r/UkraineRussiaReport/comments/1lpspn...