Absolutely! I remember going from “holy shit this guy is terrifying and we have video evidence of him being able to kick ass” to “what the fuck? These not-as-terrifying looking people are messing him up bad!”

Nah, but the Russians took massive losses at some point last year (I seem to remember) because the Ukrainians launched a bunch of mines behind an attacking column, so that when the column was beaten back, they ran straight into a newly placed mine field.

My impression is that remote mining is used for two purposes: Defensively, you can break up or slow down an advance by suddenly laying mines either in front of, in the middle of, or behind, an advancing column (the latter preventing reinforcements from arriving, or the attacking force from an orderly retreat). Offensively, you can use remote mine laying to cover the flanks of an advancing force, or prevent reinforcements from reaching a position you’re attacking.

Using the wrong filament isn’t Darwin Award worthy. Test firing a newly manufactured weapon with your hand is. And that would be true even if this wasn’t an experimental home-made design…

I definitely think the ramping up is going far too slowly, and as such it isn’t strange that there are shortages.

This is a huge war- the largest land war since WWII. All of NATO is still operating on a peace-time economy, so ramping up production to the levels required to support a 500 k - 1 mill. strong army like the Ukrainians is taking far too long.

However, as far as I can tell, production in Europe is only heading one way: Up. Not only that, Russia is operating in a war economy, which is, more or less by definition, unsustainable in the long run. Europe has the economic capacity to double its production, and maintain it indefinitely. I just think we should prioritise more heavily, and scale up more quickly.

The amount of people I’ve been helping out that have copied some code from somewhere and say “it doesn’t work”, and who are dumbfounded when I ask them to read the surrounding text aloud for me…

Along the same line: When something crashes, and all I have to do is tell people to read the error message aloud, and ask them what that means. It’s like so many people expect to be spoon-fed solutions, to the point where they don’t even stop to think about the problem if something doesn’t immediately work.

Once again proving that mobile armour most definitely has a place on the modern battlefield, and the importance of good armour!

Here’s to hoping these guys are still in shape to keep it up and train others. And let’s get moving on sending more of these and everything else that can protect them while they throw out the Russians!

It seems to me like most European countries see supplying equipment to destroy the Russian army in Ukraine as preferable to destroying the Russian army on their own soil. Although I do hope Germany picks up the pace rather than reduces it.

However, even without Germany, there are plenty of other European countries that will be capable of buying truckloads of equipment from German manufacturers.

I can’t even begin to imagine what this must have been like… I’m wondering about several things:

1. What kind of reaction was there to your dissapearance? Have you ever looked up any archives to find out what happened in the days after you dissapeared?

2. What is your life like now?

While I do agree with most of what is said here, I have a hangup on one of the points: Thinking that “docstrings and variable names” are a trustworthy way to indicate types. Python is not a statically typed language - never will be. You can have as much type hinting as you want, but you will never have a guarantee that some variable holds the type you think it does, short of checking the type at runtime. Also, code logic can change over time, and there is no guarantee that comments, docstrings and variable names will always be up to date.

By all means, having good docstrings, variable names, and type hinting is important, but none of them should be treated as some kind of silver bullet that gets you around the fact that I can access __globals__ at any time and change any variable to whatever I want if I’m so inclined.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing though. I use both Python and C++ daily, and think that the proper way to use Python is to fully embrace duck typing. However that also means my code should be written in such a way that it will work as long as whatever input to it conforms loosely to whatever type I’m expecting to receive.

There have been major investments in the European military industry the past years. Europe is ramping up its production. With new factories in place, it makes no sense for Europe to start cutting down on production- that would mean huge sums have been spent to build factories that aren’t used.

Also, a bunch of countries have already paid for huge orders of equipment that will keep flowing for the next several years. Even if no new investments are made, there will be a substantial flow of weapons from European manufacturers.

That’s not even mentioning that Europe has finally understood that we need to be able to stand on our own feet militarily, because we can’t trust that the US will actually honor the NATO pact if shit hits the fan.

Accounting for purchasing power parity, the US economy is about 1.1x the size of the EU, and the population of the EU is about 1.5x that of the US. So it’s not like Europe doesn’t have the capacity to massively scale up its military power.

Remember that up until 80 years ago, the European militaries were by far the most powerful in the world.

See answer N-1.

Honestly, I’ve read a psychological study on this that basically concluded the it should be called “dadsplaining” because it’s based in a natural instinct of wanting to explain things to help your kids grow.

That’s a lot like how other NATO countries operate as well. But my impression was that the American national guard units were professional full-time units, is that not the case?

Out Norwegian equivalent (the Home Guard) consists of civilians (i.e. people with normal jobs) that train a number of times a year, some of which have their equipment at home so that they’re ready to deploy on short notice. They have some coordinated training with the army, and are intended to function as a kind of “local force” in their region, with in-depth knowledge about local conditions that the ordinary army doesn’t have.

I can’t speak for everyone, but I believe the peace time professional militaries of most democratic European countries would be dwarfed by the number of people those countries would be able to mobilise in a war time situation.

In the case of Norway, we have a standing army of some 20-30 k soldiers, with a reserve (i.e. peace time civilians with ordinary jobs that have pre-set places to meet up in the case of a conflict) of some 50-70 k soldiers. If shit hits the fan, I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get another 100-200 k to volunteer (at the peak of the cold war I believe we had standing army + reserve of some 500 k). The issue is that we are nowhere close to being able to equip that many soldiers.

That’s just Norway, one of the smallest populations in Europe, and we would likely be able to field 100 k + soldiers within a week or two, with another 100 k following up in the next months, given that we have the equipment for it.

Call me naive, but I honestly believe that people in democratic countries would be willing to enlist if there is a real threat of an autocratic regime invading at taking over. Given that we have sufficient numbers of well trained soldiers to hold out the initial weeks/months and train those mobilised, and sufficient equipment to give the mobilised, I hope that we would be able to put a solid force on its feet relatively quickly.

Also, just the sheer population of Europe (≈ 450 million in the EU) is so much larger that e.g. Russia (≈ 150 million) that we should collectively be able to field several million soldiers as long as we have enough equipment for it, and enough trained personell to train the mobilised. So I definitely think it’s reasonable to focus on building equipment stockpiles in peace time, rather than having huge standing armies.

At some point it looks like the road will become so congested that it becomes an issue in itself. I’ve heard that the Russians deploy very few recovery vehicles, so blowing up a couple more tanks on that road could actually cause a problem for them. With the (very delayed) mud season coming they can’t go off road to get around either.

That’s not even mentioning the morale hit it must be to constantly be driving through absolutely wrecked convoys like this on the way to the line.

Keep it up Ukraine! And get your ass moving on more supplies Europe!

I used Iran as an example because they specifically have a religious leadership that uses exactly the Quran to justify their laws.

There are plenty of non-Muslim Iranians that have burned Qurans in anti-regime protests, specifically to separate the religious regime (symbolised by the Quran in that context) from the country and its culture as a whole. That is: They are specifically protesting the religious regime, and therefore don’t burn the flag, which they don’t associate with the regime.

I would elaborate a bit more, and I think you have a good analogy with “burning a cross in a black family’s yard”.

Just like burning a cross to protest the church is different from burning it in someone’s yard to threaten them, burning a Quran in the context of protesting against (for example) the Iranian regime is different from burning the same Quran while simultaneously encouraging violence towards Muslims.

If my understanding is correct he isn’t being punished for the Quran burning alone. It’s what he’s been saying while also burning the Quran.

A more similar example would be burning a flag while saying something along the lines of “All immigrants from X country are terrible people and we should use all possible means to force them out of the country”, with a strong “won’t someone rid me of this troublesome priest” connotation.

Essentially, burning a symbol would be ok in an isolated sense. Inciting hatred and violence, and using the burning of symbols to aid you in delivering that message is not.

That’s just not how they’re using drones. They have specialised drone units, as well as drone operators that are attached to ordinary infantry units. If every guy in your unit is operating a drone, you’re ridiculously vulnerable to people advancing on your position, if only because a drone, while being accurate, has a stupidly low “rate of fire”. See my other comment on suppressing an enemy.

If a couple dozen soldiers with or without armoured vehicles are advancing on your position, you need a certain rate of fire to keep them pinned down to prevent them from advancing. One drone hitting that group every 30 seconds does far less of a job in that regard than a single MG sending out bursts every two seconds. Of course, once you’ve pinned down the advancing enemy, drones are great, but you can’t get away from small arms being essential in combat situations where distances are < 400 m, which is a lot of them.

Even in WWII, most soldiers didn’t usually see the enemy they were firing at with small arms. Even if your sentiment that small arms combat is a negligible part of modern warfare was correct (which it isn’t), this comment would still be wrong.

Yes, most casualties are not caused by small arms but by artillery. That doesn’t means small arms are useless, they just fill a completely different role.

When fighting with small arms, the major goal is fire superiority, which essentially means firing more bullets in the general direction of your enemy than what they fire back. You will generally be firing at either known enemy locations (“A guy is in that building, let’s shoot at the building.”) or suspected enemy locations (“There might be a guy behind that bush”). This prevents the enemy from popping out and shooting at you so you can manoeuvre on them and use grenades or call in artillery or mortar fire. Sometimes you will hit people as well, because you are shooting at places it’s likely that they are (the guy in the building eventually gets hit if enough people shoot enough shots at the building). Very rarely will you see an exposed person that you shoot and observably hit.