I think activity spread out quite a bit. During the exodus everyone was posting into the same two and a half meme communities causing massive churn on the front page and giant threads, but now everyone has created and/or settled into their comfortable little corners so any particular portion of lemmy looks less active, while overall it’s larger.

Organisation is actually pretty good at the battalion level, there’s plenty of EU Battlegroups integrating neighbouring armies on a deep level – or at least making them acquainted with each other. Gotta know the MRE exchange rates. And that’s not counting stuff that you mentioned, like the Dutch land army being rolled into German C&C or the German/French brigade.

What’s lacking are strategic C&C capabilities on the EU level: There’s just too few of them, there should be more cooperation on that level (member states have those kinds of capabilities) which is exactly what the “EU army” thing is about, operationally. Although it has to be said that push come to shove, with so many EU members in NATO, everyone would just re-assign everything NATO to the EU should the NATO fall flat. Armies have scrambled into fighting stances from worse positions.

Macron could lead Europe, yes, but first he has to manage to lead France.

Back then, Germany was barely warming up to the idea of a EU military. Now it seems to be a done deal, the European motor is going to churn and Poland seems to want to be part of it.

There are virtual spaces that are currently occupied by native inhabitants and deep pocket billionaires are literally bulldozing their way into the space

Nope. Usenet has been dead and conquered ages ago, others are up and on the rise (hey you’re posting on one) but mass adoption doesn’t seem to be anywhere on the horizon. Yes, the internet has changed after the Eternal September, the normies brought their economical system with them.

What I wonder, though, is what that has to do specifically with underpaid Kenyan data sorters or are you colonising their struggle with ours?

The French want to expand the programme precisely because it is expensive: Under French doctrine you don’t really need more nukes to defend the continent vs. the country, but the costs can be shared.

Also there’s no way to get Germany to stop buying F35s without switching Germany’s nuclear sharing over from the US to France: Eurofighters aren’t certified for US nukes due to industrial espionage concerns. France wants to extend their doctrine of strategic autonomy to the whole of Europe, again, costs, which is why they regularly get pissy when other member states buy US equipment.

Hey I’m not a train nerd it’s just that nerds are fascinating :)

I think they want to hire you to write a Sokoban AI, and are offering 800 an hour.

For anyone who doesn’t know: Ukraine uses Russian wide gauge (1,520 mm) as was standard in the Soviet Union, the bulk of Europe uses standard gauge (1,435 mm) modulo Baltics and Finland who are also on wide gauge, at least for regional trains (e.g. Rail Baltica will be standard gauge), and the Iberian peninsula is a complete mess of standard gauge and 1,668 mm. Which is why the Spaniards are word-leading when it comes to building multi-gauge trains.

“Mediterranean corridor” is probably specifically the TEN-T one. TEN-T lines are supposed to be standard gauge only and Ukraine is bound to have standard gauge long-distance lines in the future but it also makes sense to team up with the Spaniards to make sure there’s trains that can navigate non-standard gauge on both ends. Passenger trains are fine going from what Madrid to Kiev and then you change trains to change gauges to get to your actual destination, that’s not that easy with cargo wagons. Containers, sure, there reloading only takes a moment but grain hoppers and stuff you want axles that change gauge. Oh and it’s not just about gauges but also signalling (broadly speaking). Trains can drive on sight but you don’t want them to do that.

Fuck Spez

(Hey noone else said it in this thread so I think I have to)

An IRIS-T costs on the order of a quarter million Euros and certainly doesn’t have a worse track record. This isn’t just about having other things to shoot easy targets with but US military tech being quite overpriced. And this isn’t even comparing to South Korea who produce notoriously inexpensive stuff this is German tech, with all the usual gold plating.

…also, apparently, eye-balling that figure of “several hundred” patriot missiles per year: That’s probably fewer than the production rate of IRIS-T (450-500 this year) and definitely fewer than next year (Diehl said they’re double the rate).

Plenty of self-driving trains around, generally metros where frequency and 24/7 operation is a great boon to overall service quality – you don’t want people to look at schedules, you want them to go to the station knowing there’s going to be a train in a couple of minutes, tops.

It’s way different for long-haul service, freight, passenger, doesn’t matter. Longer and less frequent trains with way more passengers in them, and you probably need other staff too, like someone needs to run the bistro. The tracks they’re running on are also way less predictable, with a metro you can have station screen doors everywhere (which btw necessitate automatic driving, humans aren’t accurate enough) try that with an international train: Regions much less countries can’t even agree on uniform platform heights. Much less door locations: Automated long-haul would require dedicated platforms at every station and while those could be served by trains with drivers, trains nowadays are all smart enough that including a button “stop at exactly that location, to the half-centimetre” isn’t an issue, those trains would have to have doors at the right location. Now go ahead and convince Germany and France that they need to replace all TGVs and ICEs to have doors in the same location as your regional trains.

Oh and none of that automation tech used with trains uses machine learning, btw. At least not at the basic level, when it comes to actually driving the train. I do remember watching a documentary about Singapore’s metro, where they have an ML algorithm scheduling track maintenance, minimising not service interruptions as such but impact on people’s commute. First the workers complained that none of the orders made any sense, then the developers made the computer spit out context and motivation alongside with the orders, workers changed their tune to “that’s fucking brilliant”.

…which, actually, brings me to the conclusion: Also with automated systems we’re going to need maintenance which isn’t going to be automated any time soon. If you automate a metro that currently doesn’t run 24/7 you don’t have that many drivers in the first place, and probably have other jobs for them to do. Automating really is about making “a train max. every five minutes, 24/7” possible without breaking the bank.

To threaten Russia all you need to do is threaten Moscow and Petersburg. The rest of the country doesn’t exist as far as power structures are concerned.

I’m not too familiar with the specific legal status of the OSCE in American law, I bet there’s a treaty or the other, but generally speaking a) you’re a member and b) you regularly send out your own people as OSCE mission members into other countries to observe elections and c) Every member state gets observed (alongside non-member countries inviting the OSCE because it’s a stamp of approval and can help stabilise democracies, establish trust in the procedures). Cursory observations are done for basically all elections that aren’t strictly regional, more in-depth ones every couple of elections. It’s democracies holding each other accountable.

If Bumfuck, TX, wants to make a statement against Canadians observing their elections that’s their god-damned right but it’s also the duty of Washington to shut them the fuck up. Not too filled-in on the details either but when you start arresting people with diplomatic passports accredited by the federal level I think you should maybe take a step back and make a phone call before deploying handcuffs.

You don’t need an ID in Germany to vote just, push comes to shove, a way to make your identity believable. Expired ID, student ID, personalised public transport ticket, perfectly sufficient. Generally you just vote with your election notification, a sheet of paper with your address, ballot location, and number in the voter registry on it. If you try to vote with an ID but without notification workers are going to roll their eyes because they’ll have to manually search for you in their lists, heck, you might’ve turned up at the wrong location.

I don’t need my ID to vote, also it’s valid for 10 years. Municipalities fill the voting registry from their citizens’ registry, then send out notifications to everyone. You literally cannot miss an election. You generally go voting with that notification, it’s sufficient, or use it to request a mail-in ballot.

I’m sure administration is sufficiently different in the US than it is in Germany for the thing to not be able to work like that, but, big picture: The IRS can find everyone. Have them fill the registry, then.

The OSCE reports are usually just shy of scathing. The US reaction to those missions ranges, as far as I’m aware, from being completely oblivious to it or its results to Sheriffs trying to arrest observers.

The only reason I can think of to get that data is to circumvent archive.org’s limitations on renting out stuff so your bots can slurp books without getting throttled.

That is, my best guess is that this was pirates seeing if they can’t add to libgen.

Or it’s a “prove you can do stuff” kind of deal.

The latest annoyance is that they will AI-translate posts and stick those into search engines.

a) how powered and for how long?

Might even be passive, a tuned resonator. Heck it could be a bug, IIRC ironically passive bugs are (age-old) soviet tech. Imagine sweeping the whole frequency spectrum for resonators with 50s tech they were a nightmare to screen for.

and b) why a chocolate bar if so?

Maybe the idea is to track people for some time to gather intelligence on trench operations? Most probably aren’t going to eat the thing right away.

This kind of stuff got legalised in Germany: Banks said that e.g. Sofortüberweisung was instigating their customers to break their TOS and should be shut down, anti-trust then said “nuh-uh you can’t just shut down legitimate business” (Sofort is indeed legitimate) and instead put third-party systems under banking regulations, and required ordinary banks to have APIs allowing third parties do do sensible things.

…which theoretically could mean that you’re sent to your actual bank to authorise and thus getting rid of the normalising phishing problem, dunno, haven’t checked I’m boycotting them out of principle for going down that route in the first place. Don’t serve any purpose now that we have real-time transfers, anyway.