I’m honestly a bit surprised that some kind of net that can be shot from an under-barrel mounted grenade launcher hasn’t been developed/deployed yet. I’m imagining something like a standard 40 mm grenade casing that contains a net that folds out after maybe 50 m (or a programmable distance, or a proximity trigger). Very thin/light strings are enough to take down a drone, so you could probably easily pack a 5 x 5 m or even 10 x 10 m net into a 40 mm casing. People are already shooting at drones with rifles, I would imagine something that lets you shoot out a large net to 100 + meters would make taking down drones a lot easier for an infantryman, and being able to fire it from a standard barrel-mounted grenade launcher would make it very easy to deploy.

I would imagine that this kind of thing could drastically improve the ability of infantry to deal with drones when they are exposed. I’m sure there’s a good reason this hasn’t been implemented, but I have a hard time figuring out what that reason is.

Definitely, however a major advantage of flak over solid rounds (especially with modern automatic range finding and programmable munitions) is that it’s a very easy and cheap way to turn a 1 m miss on that 30 cm drone at 1 km distance into a hit.

The weapons shooting these munitions typically shoot anything from 12.7 mm to 30-40 mm munitions, while even bird shot is enough to take out a drone. With that in mind, there’s really no reason to not make that 30 mm shell fragment into a dispersed cloud of bird shot that would barely harm a plane, since it makes it so much easier to take out the thousands of drones attacking you. Whenever the occasional heavier target shows up, you can just disable the fragmentation effect (programmable munitions) and you basically have a CIWS.

I honestly believe that the enormous amount of drones on the battlefield today will cause a resurgence of flak as a primary AA weapon. For a while now, missiles have been the go-to, but expensive and advanced missiles can be countered by massive swarms of cheap drones. Flak cannons with modern targeting systems and automatic range finding is probably the most reasonable counter to these drone swarms.

I agree that “RTFM” can be insensitive, and even mean. However, the place it comes from is genuine. It’s nobodies job to tell you exactly what page to look at. If you’ve dug through the docs and still can’t find your answer, make it explicit that you’ve searched the manual, and perhaps be explicit about parts you don’t quite understand.

The whole “RTFM” thing was born from people asking for help when they obviously hadn’t made a proper try themselves first.

I was surprised to see all the nordics abstaining from voting (really, almost all of Europe). I would say that abstaining is a long-shot from voting “no”, especially if you see it as overwhelmingly likely that this will go through without your vote. Voting no is explicitly stating that you’re against the formulation, while voting yes is saying that you’re explicitly for it. Abstaining can indicate that you are (for example) for the intent, but have reservations about the specific wording. In that case, you may not want to stop the declaration from going through, but still want to signal that you have reservations and don’t want to unequivocally support it.

Guy had 97 priors including DUIs.

Hence the photo, which should make it pretty easy to figure out who the guy is when he’s already registered in the system. Once you know who he is you quickly find out where he’s living, because again, the guy has 97 priors, so the cops should have a solid database on where he tends to reside and who he knows.

The fucking day he got out he bought a cheap used car, slapped an old out-of-state license plate on it, and went right back to driving around drunk as shit.

That’s absolutely horrendous… hope he gets caught again before he kills someone…

Besides that: That could quickly be a situation where whoever is apprehending him recognises that he’s drunk-driving and that he’s a big enough threat to the public to warrant chasing him down instead of letting him go and apprehending him later.

Or, hear me out: The cops that are well enough educated and trained to recognise that it’s safer to just track down the guy later will also be well enough educated and trained to not do that. Because doing that would be stupid, and the whole point here is that you can and should select and train people with a monopoly on violence to not do stupid shit that gets people killed.

The fact that Ukraine has the reserves to be able to send specialists to the Middle East right now shows which way this is tipping.

While Ukraine is garnering support (and frankly, debt) from some rich nations by sending them resources, russias access to missiles/drones is getting worse since Iran needs them for themselves, so likely won’t export any more for the time being.

The only research I’ve seen on using LLMs in a school setting found that the kids that were given access to an LLM performed a bit better on exercises that those without. At the same time their experienced learning was a lot better. When they finally got a test assignment, the kids that had been using LLMs during exercises flopped and performed significantly worse than those that hadn’t.

Or, as is commonly done elsewhere, get their plates and a photo, and drop by their house later (unless they’re an active threat to public safety of course).

This is literally the SOP in a lot of other countries: You don’t chase someone in a vehicle unless you absolutely have to. You rather just identify them and apprehend them at a later point.

An air war like this is fundamentally about destroying your enemies assets faster than they can produce them, while building your own assets faster than they’re destroyed. If one part gets an upper hand in that balance, it will inherently snowball quickly, since that party is getting more assets for each day, while the enemy has fewer assets for each day. The most crucial component here is probably your manufacturing capacity for weapons systems.

Of course, it takes a lot of time for this to materialise when russia has had so deep stores of weapons. Hopefully, we’re seeing a long-term effect of Ukraine having a larger manufacturing capacity for air defence assets than russia. If they actually have that, it’s also because their manufacturing capacity has grown very fast, which means the discrepancy will only increase. The tipping point is when Ukraine is both manufacturing air defence capabilities faster than russia, and are increasing their manufacturing capacity faster.

Had something like this happen to me. Luckily, we have laws in place stating that collections companies cannot follow up disputed claims. So I emailed the collections company, with the people that sent the claim to them on CC, telling them I disputed the claim (with some attachments to back up why). They responded by basically saying “sorry, our bad, the people that sent this claim can pound sand.” Then I never heard anything more about it.

What sucks though, is that it’s really stressful to have something go to collections. Most people would probably just have paid, because they get stressed out and don’t know the law.

Full disclaimer: This law may very well not exist where you live.

The worst conceivable argument: When someone tries to shut you down by claiming that “you’re always so combatative, why can’t you just let this go?”

My brother in Christ… you are arguing with me. You are provably being at least as combative as myself. Why can’t YOU just let this go? And of course, if you do anything other than let them have their way, they take that as proof that you never let anything pass.

Which is honestly kind of ironic when thinking about the fact that the EU was built from the rubble of WWII, which was started by a dictator who took over a democracy.

This seems like a good place to start. This kind of task (carrying ≈ 30 shells of ≈ 50 kg each per day) isn’t really on the high-end as far as “exhausting and physically taxing” goes when you consider what soldiers go through (of course, completely depending on how far they’re carried). However, it does place a significant strain on your body to do it over time. That means they can test these things for this kind of task where the soldiers should be completely capable of functioning without the exoskeleton if it doesn’t work properly. That way, they get testing in non-critical situations before they can scale up the use of these to tasks that humans aren’t even capable of doing without the exoskeleton once they’ve ensured they work properly, don’t break down etc.

Looks like it’s only a matter of time before we see up-armoured assault troops that can carry 100+ kg of gear and shoulder-mounted weapons while taking trenches… must suck to be in the next batch of prospective sunflower fertiliser.

I would think a lot of wars were ended by economic exhaustion, the inability to continue despite aggression still working.

I would argue that when someone has been aggressive to the point of exhaustion, where they’re unable to continue, that aggression has failed. I think that’s what’s meant by the quote too. Wars don’t end when one side seeks peace, they end when both sides either seek peace or when the aggressor is unable to continue (aggression has failed).

Awesome, thanks!

I’ve been thinking of self-hosting a server (and some other stuff)for a while. I hope you don’t mind that I post this comment just so I (hopefully) can try getting back to you for tips when I get around to buying the hardware.

Haven’t they already done this though? Purposefully leaked false intel to the American admin just to confirm that it ended up with the russians? It’s the oldest trick in the book to smoke out a rat, and I seem to remember reading about them doing like a year or two ago.

It’s not about the pictures. I honestly think this is just an excuse to get rid of journalists, and a method for hammering home the point that “journalists bad. news fake.” I’m not even sure he’s actually seen the pictures I question.

With that said, I wouldn’t put it past him to actually be so vain that it is really about the pictures. However I think it’s more likely that he would have done something like this anyway, and just picked an excuse.