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LongLeftFlank

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Everything posted by LongLeftFlank

  1. https://nationalsecuritynews.com/2024/03/exclusive-satellite-images-reveal-the-expansion-of-russian-war-cemeteries-following-huge-troops-losses-in-ukraine/ Especially VDV division home cities.
  2. Duuude, this is the LongLeftFlank© gambit I've preached before here; others have too. As our @The_Capt hath taught us, this is the very thing that the AFU has been doing brilliantly since 23 Feb: set the RU up in no-win situations and then force them to ride the hell ride anyway. Planting bushels of landmines and lobbing in giant bombs won't help Ivan out of this one. There's just too much squishy ground to cover. Their only possible counter is to feed in equally tough swamp rat infantry, but even after 2 years my read is even VDV just don't have the C4ISR to match the Ukes. Kinburn spit. ...All that said, those Ukrainian forces are going to suffer heavy losses, make no mistake.
  3. Augh! I love you man, but for the sake of YHVH, don't go there, or at least not on here!!!!
  4. 1. There are migrants in desperate parts of the world who would man the modern equivalent of Birkenau crematoria blocks if they could wire home 700usd per month. 2. That said, they can't wire home that monthly pay if they are missing arms, legs or their heads; or if it's simply getting stolen. And word will get around, fast. 3. My personal KPI for Russia running out of mercenary cred, FWIW, is Norks. The Kim dynasty has sent thousands of young men to awful jobs in inclement parts of USSR/Russia (logging camps, mines) to earn money for the glorious Juche state ever since the Gulag tailed off. Their opinion in the matter is not requested. I suspect there are already some DPKA military specialists working to support the RUAF. When tiny corpses of (underfed) Korean kids start showing up in the storm units, we'll know other options for mercs are running down for Putin Inc.
  5. Thanks for this, and as of 2022 I might have agreed with most of this. But consider the following: 1. The Krynki bridgehead remains after 4+ months, in spite of nonstop attacks by Russian heavy forces + VDV. And that's a zone the Russians can actually supply via a major highway. It's hell for the Uke marines who are there, indeed, but they and their support forces are also giving better than they get, by plastering the RU attacks and LOCs. 2. The further you get down the delta (past the Kherson bridge), the harder it is for the Ivans to deploy and sustain heavy forces -- AFVs, shells, in that boggy, poorly roaded area. I'd actually argue that their logistical challenge out there is WORSE than the Ukrainian one. At a bare minimum, this zone is flypaper to chew up their best remaining troops (VDV/Spetsnaz) as sustaining mech is going to be a nightmare. Pure Sun Tzu. 3. On the other hand, there's plenty of space in those bayou lands for savvy crack troops to spread out and minimise the damage from glide bombs. Drone airlift/medevac and drone ships can keep Ranger battalions supplied indefinitely; heavy forces, no, but they're not useful here. The Cossacks invented these tactics hundreds of years ago. 4. The RU aircraft and helos are going to need to make attack runs from the southeast, given that the Western Black Sea is quickly becoming a Ukrainian lake.... 5. In spite of being marshlands, Kinburn spit east to Oleshky sands is probably the most essential strategic territory for Ukraine to recover, as the Russians can be expected to build another Sebastopol there in a cease fire situation so as to menace the entire Kherson-Mykolaiv-Odesa portion of Ukraine. I'd actually argue that this is a must have! Look forward to your reply, as none of the above is going to be easy....
  6. This may have been posted before but a thread search didn't find it. Important points here though by Watling. https://www.rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russian-military-objectives-and-capacity-ukraine-through-2024 The Russian military began 2023 with a highly disorganised force in Ukraine comprising approximately 360,000 troops.... By the beginning of 2024, the Russian Operational Group of Forces in the occupied territories comprised 470,000 troops.... Russian forces have reverted above battalion level to the traditional Soviet order of battle of regiments, divisions and combined arms armies, but have been significantly altered below the level of the regiment. Battalions are organised as line and storm battalions, and tend to operate in company groups which fight in small, dispersed detachments [due to a] shortage of trained officers able to coordinate larger formations, with a significant proportion of Russian junior officers currently being promoted from the ranks.... Units can generally be rotated out of the line once they have taken up to 30% casualties – the point at which they are judged to be ineffective – and are then regenerated.... In this way, the Russians are maintaining a consistent pressure on a number of points.... If Ukraine's partners continue to provide sufficient ammunition and training support to the AFU to enable the blunting of Russian attacks in 2024, then Russia is unlikely to achieve significant gains in 2025.
  7. Ha ha, no. They might possibly be, if China wasn't sitting on the Spratlys.
  8. https://www.spglobal.com/commodityinsights/en/market-insights/latest-news/oil/022224-feature-russia-defiant-two-years-into-war-reshaping-global-energy Nice infographic, for those interested: Interesting that in spite of its stated intent to remain neutral in the conflict (partly in gratitude to Russia for its past support), energy-hungry Vietnam is not a significant importer of Russian oil.
  9. https://www.scribblemaps.com/maps/view/The-War-in-Ukraine/091194 Some very approximate frontages, based on the current situation: Kharkiv-Belgorod frontier (E-W, disregard frontier north to Sumy): 230km Oskil-Zherebets rivers (N-S Kupiansk-Kreminna): 180km Sieversk salient: 70km Bakhmut-Avdiivka: 90km Avdiivka-Vuhledar: 50km Zaporizhzhne front (Vuhledar-Dnpr E-W): 180km Dnpr-Kherson river (E-W, less Kinburn spit): 300km Total active front: c.1100km
  10. Yeah, I was enjoying a beautiful clear night last summer on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, only to see a line of 5 satellites ascending, all in perfect line.
  11. Thanks as always for the digest and the threadreader link, for those of us who don't X. ...The Threadreader ads are just nuts though, supermarket tabloid 'Elvis alien clone' stuff. Or maybe that's just my part of the world.
  12. I agree. There's zero likelihood that NATO splashed an AWACS in Russian airspace, cuz WW3. You and I are much of the same mind, it seems as I composed this before I read your post.... The Russians don't necessarily *know* that their manifest destiny and grand strategy is built on a tissue of lies and self-delusion. 1. The Russians (and their overseas amen corner) have always preached that all the major Western weapons systems in AFU use (Patriot, HIMARS, etc.) are crewed by NATO mercenaries and technicians. 2. Same 'reasoning' at root: hohol pig farmers and Eurof**gy cosmopolitans can't possibly be cleverer or tougher than Great Russians. Like most bullies, whose behaviour is rooted in a need to prove their superiority (to suppress insecure feelings that they actually aren't), they deeply need to believe that. 3. By corollary, they also 'know' that once T shuts off the tap and recalls the mercs, 'so-called Ukraine' will collapse like a rotten log, the NATO-backed civil war will end and restore the Greater Russian Union State from Zhitomir to the Dnistr, with only Polish- and Hungarian-controlled rump provinces remaining as a buffer. ...So in short, all the US wingnut mouthing is putting the 'comfort' in 'aid and comfort to the enemy'.
  13. Thanks for the clarification, but you might consider thumbing down the ad hominem attacks a bit.
  14. @Grigb is one of the best contributors to this thread. Just sayin'. **** VERIFICATION REQUEST. Is it true Russia only has one more A50 AWACS? Or is this yet another Sushko disinfo special?
  15. What we're all REALLY waiting for of course, are the 'spinners'.
  16. Many thanks, those of us who decline to be e-stalked by Xwitter are unfortunately out in the cold at the moment.
  17. I have some firsthand experience with umm, incoming mat. New Yorker also did a piece on it in 2003, reprinted below for those interested. https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A2=russian-teaching;aa8fa082.03 "In the Soviet period," he says, "the status of the high lexicon was devalued-words such as 'fatherland,' 'motherland,' 'truth.' In the context of Soviet ideology, these words acquired a negative resonance, not only for the general population but also for Party propagandists. In this situation, obscene words began to function as markers of authenticity."... [Zhirinovsky] responded to my questions about mat with an impassioned speech: "This is our living language! Who has decided that mat is just bad words and deviant vocabulary? They're rejecting the language of the people. Obviously, part of the vocabulary of mat was created in the prisons, but then haven't we driven the entire population through the prisons? This language has become the norm!"
  18. lnteresting attempt, even if likely ineffectual.
  19. https://about.opnxng.com/blog/#nitter https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/twitter-front-end-nitter-dies-as-musk-wins-war-against-third-party-services/ Der Nitter ist verloren. The ongoing march of en****tificaton
  20. Sure, and I come to praise the Brainjar not to bury him! While I am not, and never have, coded anything more complex than an Excel VBA macro, I am in general agreement with what I think OP @markshot was asserting, to wit: ...that the new generation of AI tools are already making it easier and cheaper for small devs like BFC to layer highly pleasing and 'up to date' looking gaming graphics atop their core proprietary physics and tactical decision engines. So they can stay focused on refining that engine and the player interfaces ('Follow Me' commands, etc.) while 'outsourcing' most of the crowd-pleasing visual effects. Again, all easier said than done, but our dear sponsors have also got to move with the times, elsewise get bought out and folded into a larger shop that won't allow them full creative control.
  21. Like the C̶a̶d̶i̶l̶l̶a̶c̶ Thread overturning in slow motion, down a cliff, on television.
  22. Oh, oh I'm sorry, this is Abuse.... Ah, don't let these grumpy old cranks put you off! Exploring possibility space is just fine IMHO, so long as the substantial gaps to meaningful implementation are also appreciated. **** https://openai.com/sora (LinkedIn commentary): If you think OpenAI Sora is a creative toy like DALLE, ... think again. Sora is a data-driven physics engine. It is a simulation of many worlds, real or fantastical. The simulator learns intricate rendering, "intuitive" physics, and long-horizon consistency, all by some denoising and gradient maths. I won't be surprised if Sora is trained on lots of synthetic data using Unreal Engine 5. It has to be! Let's breakdown the following video. Prompt: "Photorealistic closeup video of two pirate ships battling each other as they sail inside a cup of coffee." https://cdn.openai.com/sora/videos/ships-in-coffee.mp4 - The simulator instantiates two exquisite 3D assets: pirate ships with different decorations. Sora has to solve text-to-3D implicitly in its latent space. - The 3D objects are consistently animated as they sail and avoid each other's paths. - Fluid dynamics of the coffee, even the foams that form around the ships. Fluid simulation is an entire sub-field of computer graphics, which traditionally requires very complex algorithms and equations. - Photorealism, almost like rendering with raytracing. - The simulator takes into account the small size of the cup compared to oceans, and applies tilt-shift photography to give a "minuscule" vibe. - The semantics of the scene does not exist in the real world, but the engine still implements the correct physical rules that we expect. Next up: add more modalities and conditioning, then we have a full data-driven UE that will replace all the hand-engineered graphics pipelines.
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