*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).

At first it looked to me like he quickly sat up and had half the ammunition within a half-kilometer radius sent his way, with a grenade for good measure. It makes sense that the grenade was already there when he got up.

I never understood that. Apparently they use it as a primary way of messaging each other? At least that’s what younger relatives have told me. I’ve tried to have them explain what makes the app designed to hide/delete stuff after it’s been read better for communication, but so far haven’t gotten an explanation I could make any sense of.

“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.

Ngl you had me until the 1772 bit

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

Looking up “historic” election victories for the German far-right

Always gets me how these advanced pieces of technology, that defy gravity while carrying radars, optics and tracking tech that can spot and hit a small vehicle at many kilometers distance … have a side mirror. I love how the simple reliability of a side mirror is still pretty much unmatched for the purpose of quickly looking over your shoulder.

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).

Let them use the ATACMS too.

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.

The issue with cruise missiles and bombers as a response to artillery fire is the response time and air defences.

A cruise missile launched from well within Russia takes long enough to reach the target that mobile artillery has sufficient time to get out. You also need a significant amount of missiles if you want to get any through the air defences.

Bombers struggle to get in range for conventional bombs without being shot down. They also have the issue of response time.

Cruise missiles and bombers are more suited to rather stationary targets, like a command Center, FOB, strongpoint or trench system.

Long range artillery has pretty hard limits, and once you approach the 100km range, time to target becomes a real issue, even for missiles that can be shot down.

Modern anti-air hat a range of several hundred km, and has been combat tested. More short-range systems (< 50 km) are in use (with huge success) every day in Ukraine. Of course bombers have also improved, but I wouldn’t put money on the bombers having improved relative to the AA.

Ps. I’m not the person downvoting you, I think you make a decent point, I just disagree :)

I specified “a reasonable distance from shore” because an important part of the point of a carrier is exactly that it can stay easily 100 km from shore and still strike far inland. If a carrier is in range of shore-based torpedoes, they’ve likely messed up long ago.

As for bombers: They’re historically the major threat to carriers, but I don’t see any modern developments that make modern bombers any more of a threat to modern carriers than WW2 era bombers were to WW2 era carriers.

Saying they were always more trouble than they were worth is a bit of a miss though: They completely dominated for a period, to the point where entire columns would be redirected or kept in port if intelligence arrived saying that a certain battleship had left port and was on the hunt.

As for the “modern” aircraft carrier: I think it will remain viable until we see a fundamental paradigm shift in how naval warfare is conducted. A carrier is at the centre of a carrier strike group, and is probably one of the most well protected places on the planet at any time, and can move at over 40 knots. I have a hard time imagining what could locate and take out an alert carrier in reasonable distance from shore, other than another carrier group.