LongLeftFlank

Like the C̶a̶d̶i̶l̶l̶a̶c̶ Thread overturning in slow motion, down a cliff, on television.

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.

Yes, there's a fundamental category error here in the utter failure to distinguish Ukrainians, who are overwhelmingly fighting for their nation and elected government, from Iraqis or Afghans who overwhelmingly defer to their local tribal or religious leaders, who in turn decide which flag to salute, or not.

Yes, the smell of hair on fire is getting a little thick in here, innit? I mean, if the thread regulars want to agonise over the fall of the Republic in the context of Ukraine, maybe look at something more directly relevant than microplaning DJT's latest excretion? https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-happened-to-the-us-machine-tool

An' I said, “Litterin'.” An' they all moved away from me on the bench there, an' the hairy eyeball an' all kinds of mean nasty things. ...Til I said, “*And* creating a nuisance.” An' they all came back, shook my hand, an' we had a great time on the bench, talkin' about crime, mother stabbin', father rapin', all kinds of groovy things that we was talking about on the bench, an' everything was fine.

Sigh.

Good comment on the actual war, many thanks, a rarity over the last 10 thread pages. ...I guess only time will tell, but if Shanahan can reinvent football with dense formations, perhaps Syrsky can reinvent tactical warfare using some species of the opposite? The 49ers Defy Modern Football. It’s Why They’re in the S̶u̶p̶e̶r̶ Taylor Bowl.

Maybe BoJo should /sarc embrace the whole Global Criminal Mastermind shtick to fuel his political comeback. Comedians seem to be playing well in politix these days, after all One day leading black hooded SAS speedboat commandos to hit the nuke plant, the next 'sploding the Nordstream pipeline from the deck of his luxury yacht. ...Maybe post some TikToks while stroking a Persian cat.

https://n.opnxng.com/kamilkazani/status/1756091654262477152#m

In 2008, the doors of NATO were opened for Ukraine. In 2014, there was a coup. They started persecuting those who did not accept the coup, and it was indeed a coup. They created a threat to Crimea, which we had to take under our protection. They launched a war in Donbas in 2014 with the use of aircraft and artillery against civilians. This is when it all started. There's a video of aircraft attacking Donetsk from above. They launched a large-scale military operation, then another one. When they failed, they started to prepare the next one. All this against the background of military development of this territory and opening of NATO's. -- V.V. Putin ***** It was Gimli the dwarf who broke in suddenly. 'The words of this wizard stand on their heads,' he growled, gripping the handle of his axe. 'In the language of Orthanc help means ruin and saving means slaying, that is plain. But we do not come here to beg.'

Is that in fact what happened? (Tatarigami seems to agree with you, btw, but he wasn't there either. And his primary gripe AIUI seems to be that Bakhmut should have been ceded about a month earlier once it encountered diminishing returns). ...or were there now and then some positions that simply had to be retaken? and the guys who got shot up doing that are unhappy. Hurtgenwald has been mentioned before, but the sad travails of the 'Bloody Bucket' don't extrapolate to the 'average' GI experience in NWE.

Now I have precisely the right instrument, at precisely the right moment of history, in exactly the right place.

Fun Galeev short thread, related to his leitmotiv that the Mittelstand and its non-German counterparts is what is propping up the Russian war machine.... Nitter link to thread for those who don't X.

I'm troubled by this, and here is why.... As an ordinary (non-professional class) Ukrainian man under 35, choosing between: 1. your patriotic duty to enlist as an frontline combat soldier in an increasingly (?) lethal conflict of unknown duration and 2. fleeing to the EU (or elsewhere), where you might start near bottom economically but keep your life and limbs, and over time may well live better than you would back in even a post-ceasefire Ukrainian armed camp / 'okrajina' ( borderlands) -- also, your more patriotic relatives will forgive you in time if you send money home. ... how many are choosing 'b' these days? For 1916 poilus, landser and Tommies, there was no realistic 'b'. Tatarigami....

[Leading in to summer 2023] mobilisation had helped refill personnel levels within the Russian military and yielded more than 70 additional motor-rifle regiments, among other units*.... Russia had enough reserves to rotate in airborne regiments by September and generated additional combat power sufficient to launch its own offensive in Avdiivka in October.... In most battles in Ukraine, each side has been able to range the other’s ground lines of communication, command and control, and forward logistics, with the lines often separated by a few kilometres. With rare exceptions, the combatants could not control the engagement via fires, resulting in attritional warfare that could last weeks or months.... Although fire control appears impractical, Ukraine could instead cultivate an expanded long range strike capability for targeting key supporting elements of the Russian war effort far beyond tactical depths.... They should not be viewed as a substitute for close battle, however. No matter how abundant, long-range strike capability is not likely to force a collapse of Russian positions without another ground offensive.... Russia has several material advantages. It is likely to retain an artillery-fire edge over the course of the year and beyond. Russia will also continue regenerating combat power, recruiting more than 10,000 troops per month. It will probably hold the strategic initiative along much of the 1,000 km front line and expand its strike campaign against Ukraine given increased production of drones and cruise missiles. * According to the Conflict Intelligence Team, a total of 123 military units were established, including 77 motor rifle regiments and 18 separate motor-rifle battalions. See ‘As Part of the Mobilization, More than 120 New Military Units Were Created in Russia. A Third of Those Called Up Were Sent to Personnel Units – To Make Up for Combat Losses’, Meduza, 5 October 2023

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-losing-drone-war-eric-schmidt This January piece is mainly opinion, and bearish at that, but two interesting items here: A Ukrainian battle commander also told me that FPV drones are more versatile than an artillery barrage at the opening of an attack. In a traditional attack, shelling must end as friendly troops approach the enemy trench line. But FPVs are so accurate that Ukrainian pilots can continue to strike Russian targets until their fellow soldiers are mere yards away from the enemy.... Ukraine aims to acquire more than two million drones in 2024—half of which it plans to produce domestically—and Russia is on track to at least match that procurement....

Armenians, and many many many other groups (too many to list) whose historical lands got 'solved' by war, progressively or all at once, might differ with that assessment.

That deep strike drone thing cuts both ways of course, albeit with some lag and significant incompetence (to date) on the RU side. At least until someone can scale down ECM jamming to squad level. Depending on how 'deep' is deep, the Russian rail net seems like the lowest hanging fruit here. Hit trestles, culverts, etc., hit the stalled trains, hit the Pioneer repair crews, keep doing it. Every damn day.

At the risk of being over my skis yet again here, can 152/155mm tube artillery be largely superseded in frontline use by a combo of: -> drones for swarming or hunting mobile targets, and for nearly all forms of precision work and harassing fire -> mortars for plastering attackers driven to ground by the drones. Are there cluster rounds for 122mm mortars? -> heavy rockets mounted on a variety of mobile launchers, for demolishing fixed positions once identified ... with the other systems (HIMARs, ATACMs etc.) being used for more 'operational' targets. And remaining heavy tubes joining them in the long range PGM delivery category, ceding their longtime role as the high-volume 'fire hose' of the artillery arm?

A screaming comes across the sky.... Good lord, mech really is toast, isn't it? absent a phase change in ECM Time to get busy standing up those leg battalions. ...Well, maybe not entirely leg, mobility enhanced with these things and various other nimble hard-to-hit ATVs, plus the aforementioned jetpacks. **** P.S. Cool score on the video, any idea who it's by?

Hey grogs, for the benefit of refuXeniks (like me), it seems that the excellent mirror site Nitter has been killed by another policy change, perhaps for good this time. If you click on a nitter feed you get a 'certificate expired' error message. Explanation is here (though I'm not a techie and can't verify the details). "Nitter currently relies on the mass generation of guest accounts, a weird anonymous form of account that was only supported by old versions of the Twitter app. Creation of them was totally disabled today, so every nitter instance will be dead in under 30 days (when they expire). Scrapers apparently also relied on this, as every public nitter instance was being hammered by scrapers earlier. Instances will probably shut down quite soon unless someone finds another way to create tens of thousands of accounts in an automated fashion for free." That said, there's another mirror site that still seems to work; you can follow the feeds, but can't get to individual posts (or comments): https://n.opnxng.com/DefMon3 (or whatever handle you're looking for)

Ha, deep in the mists of Forum history, I recall a certain Calgarian (long departed now from these shores) blowing a gasket over CMSF not providing ladders for top down assaults, or allowing squads the organic capability to breach and mousehole walls or buildings anywhere they damn please, enter via windows, etc.

Galeev backgrounder (short thread) Punchline: 1. This has nothing to do with "Russians protesting against Putin". 2. These are protests in an ethnic Turkic & Muslim region largely motivated by the disregard to local sacred places & ecology 3. And, to a certain degree, by the local nationalist sentiment **** While I'm looking at Galeev:

An oldie but a goodie...