No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
No_one
3hr ago
Never read anything in that vein. If that were true you'd expect a lot more female aces in Soviet Air force. There were only 2 female aces who shot down more than five planes each in WW2..
No_one
17hr ago
and most soldiers don't die in a war.
There are no proper wars to speak atm of -it's all sedate counterinsurgencies or civil wars between people who, left to themselves would be living in mud huts and rustling cattle and struggle with zeroing rifles.
The Ukraine war is killing loads of people involved, and the casualties in a possible air/naval war with China are not worth thinking about as Chinese production of hard to intercept precision weapons is probably higher than that of all other countries combined.
No_one
18hr ago
Star Wars died for me when TFA came out and I fell asleep watching it. The movie has only one redeeming feature and that is the infamous Hux speech.
It warms the heart of every 4x player who ever wiped a troublesome system but never got to see a proper cinematic for it.
Here's to hoping Henry Cavill manages to get Amazon to not fuck up the WH40k miniseries because, come on. Even though WH40k is sort of retarded at least they have created good excuses for why it's all somewhat retarded.
No_one
19hr ago
There's just very little in Rogue One to like, I find?
Star Wars are irredeemably silly in so many ways.. and It could've been much better, yes, but I kind of enjoyed the silly action
I'm not sure why you're so pissed. AI can already write better dialogue than most scriptwriters. Certainly better than George Lucas ever did.
With generative AI, we'll finally get some proper SF on the screen. There's risk that good actual SF could end up produced as miniseries etc.
No_one
19hr ago
I wouldn't call it 'legitimately great'. It's..okay. It's a whole quality grade below shows like True Detective or Fargo. Sure it's better than typical netflix slop but that's not much of a recommendation.
No_one
19hr ago
Americans have better outcomes than their [Nationality] brethren back home for every given group, the American economy outperforms all other economies,
Once the dollar stops being a reserve currency, American standards of living and incomes are going to come tumbling down to a more reasonable level.
It's alleged purchasing power of the $ would decline by about 30% if that happens.
No_one
19hr ago
Out of ~400k trained sharpshooters there were 2,500 female ones who mostly did quite well. 500 survived the war. I remember remarks how women are good at being sneaky and patient from period memoirs.
There were about 20-30 female armor crewmen, mostly achieved that through being insanely persistent. E.g. donates enough money for an entire tank, writes letter to Stalin to be allowed to fight. Or a tractor driver (tractors were often tracked then) whose husband was drafted and whose children died convinced an army doctor to pass her off as male in paperwork, then went on to have some success as a tank driver
About 400 women served as combat pilots.
About 40% of medics and radio operators were women, and later in the war (43 onwards) the % of women involved in frontline air defense was very high, often up to 50%.
No_one
20hr ago
why confirmed lesbians and asexuals couldn't be allowed to serve.
Such women are exceptionally rare and not the best adjusted. It's really not worth the bother to make special accomodations for them, especially given that only something like 10% of young women can physically keep up with young men given enough additional training.
Multiply 0.02 by 0.1 and you get 0.002, 2 in a thousand. Is that worth the aggravation?
No_one
2d ago
In fact committed leftists are inordinately concerned with order, justice, fairness, morality, and so forth.
They think they are.
Anyone happily letting criminals go so they can prey on normal people is not actually concerned with order or justice.
No_one
9d ago
Russia is not fighting the EU, Russia is fighting Ukraine, a country with a tenth of its GDP and a third of its population pre war:
Without foreign supplies and finances, the war would have been over by fall of '22.
No_one
11d ago
Would you be willing to make a bet?
What part of
That's means something. Not at all clear what. Obsessive observers of the war believe Ukraine is likely to hold out until end of '26, early '27. However:
Is hard to understand?
By 1911, around age 36, after seven years of low wages as a pencil-sharpener wholesaler, Burroughs began to write fiction. By this time, Emma and he had two children, Joan (1908–1972), and Hulbert (1909–1991).[15] During this period, he had copious spare time and began reading pulp-fiction magazines. In 1929, he recalled thinking that:
"[...] if people were paid for writing rot such as I read in some of those magazines, that I could write stories just as rotten. As a matter of fact, although I had never written a story, I knew absolutely that I could write stories just as entertaining and probably a whole lot more so than any I chanced to read in those magazines."[16]
The mediocrity of the books makes sense in context, I think.^^
SM Stirling wrote a peculiar homage to that idea of Mars that's both cringe ('hero' getting saved by the princess yawn, strong womyn chars) and kinda awesome for the worldbuilding & and the unimaginable amounts of low-key heresy(explaining why the womyn is so strong) for which he wasn't cancelled. Spoilers on the link. A good read I think, Stirling can write adventure stories just fine.
No_one
12d ago
without consequence, because Ukraine and Russia are irrelevant just as Sudan is irrelevant.
Russia being irrelevant implies that the whole of Europe is irrelevant which .. I'm not decided on but is probably true. After all, it's China that matters now. The developed world is no longer just Europe + Northern America and Chinese outsize those two regions by a factor of 2 in workforce and probably more in other ways.
No_one
12d ago
Was there a serious core of people who believed in a Ukraine victory though?
Western establishment has been knowingly going along with project THD despite knowing it's ultimately futile ?
No_one
12d ago
Dean isn't wrong.
There's always going to be 'will to fight' in Ukraine because the alternative to almost certain death on the front is getting dumped in an unmarked grave by the military administration.
Except they're going to run out of people to busify eventually.
No_one
12d ago
If you insist on PPP then at best 20%
And yet, despite being 1/5th of the population and 1/5th of the economy, they're still winning what EU leadership is painting as an existential conflict.
What, does it say about the EU that it can't win a war against a foe 5x weaker ?
No_one
12d ago
for the lethal force crackdown that Yanukovych and the Russian-aligned interior ministry had attempted to initiate.
I ask you again, does the initial shootout on that last day that saw 20 wounded riot cops, who mind you, were wearing assault-rifle proof plates vs 10 wounded 'protesters' look like an 'attempted lethal crackdown' or more like unprepared riot cops attacked by a stronger force amply armed with assault rifles and worse. (.308 /7.62x54mm rifles also feature in the testimony iirc).
The difference is in whose false-flag agents they were, and the intended result of the orders.
Given that Yanukovych was content to wait out the protests, and did not need the massacre, and given the timeline on the day of the massacre given by Ukrainian themselves first shots around 5 am, then a lop-sided exchange between riot units and the 'snipers' which saw the riot units retreat bc they incurred 2 dead, 20 wounded despite having serious body armor. Mind you, the 'snipers' were not very discriminate, as in, BBC published a video of their crew under fire.
local party mayor withdrawing city riot police from the conflict area
That's a novel claim that the police withdrew because of an order by a .. local city mayor, and not because they were facing a pretty serious gun battle during which they incurred, what, 20 wounded and 10 dead were somehow in the chain of command of Berkut, which was run by the ministry of interior, which, for Americans is the ministry that runs law enforcement, prisons and so on.
No_one
14d ago
Being ignorant of absolutely everything else, I have heard vastly more false predictions from the pro-Russian side.
Are you any idea of what a 'selection effect is' ? What gets covered, what gets pushed in the media?
Completely forgotten evergreen hits such as 'Russia is running out of missiles', washing machine chips , 'Crimea beach party' (the 'summer offensive' of 2023), 'Russian economy will collapse bc of sanctions (any year, really) etc?
No_one
16d ago
What are the Ukrainian people afraid of, being conquered by Russia?
The Western part simple- nationalism. It's a very powerful ideology, derived from the tribal instinct. You can't discount it, and it's why Russia never intended to conquer all of Ukraine. Basically the interesting parts (strategic, resource, industry) are east of Kiev.
Lot of the people in the eastern part of the country were never that invested into the whole nationalist LARP. You can find videos of Ukrainians executing those traitors weekly. (nsfw, obviously. Two old people and a small dog getting blown to bits trying to cross the front line)
No_one
16d ago
Why do you believe the EU is broke?
It's not 'broke' as say, Argentina (of big countries, France seems irreversibly doomed), but the outlook is very grim.
- high energy prices, world's worst regulations, abysmal demographics EVEN if we got rid of the welfare migrants.
- elites are wholly Renfields, totally subservient to Americans. Odds are, replacing aging out workforce with robots won't be possible even if there's money for it.
- total loss of competitiveness in heavy industry, only thing that still is are some specialty firms like ASML or Carl Zeiss. For now, in 5-10 yrs, Chinese will make do then it's over.
- EU is committed to the insane decarbonisation program that is worse than useless.
No_one
16d ago
I must have hallucinated the Russian Tanks rolling into Ukraine originally, were those a CIA op?
The tanks were downstream of the coup, which was downstream of the bloodbath at Maidan, after which every major western government demanded Yanukovych steps down. The coward he was, he did so, thus in a way, bears partial responsibility for the utter shitshow that followed.
Who do you think asked for the bloodbath at Maidan?
You should read the narrative of it, even the semi-official one.
The riots units initially, despite having plate carriers and body armor suffered 2x many casualties as the 'peaceful protesters', to the point they retreated despite having partial cover. Then they got the whole of blame for the massacre of the protesters on the square despite being outgunned, withdrawing etc. As mentioned previously, even the obviously not very neutral Ukrainian court found that some of the dead protesters were shot by other 'protesters', and not by accident, deliberately.
No_one
16d ago
sent in various paramilitaries to remove sections of civil society and kill chunks of them - it seems like they wanted a literal decapitation of civil society so that the puppet regime they installed would last and be able to become another Belarus
[citation required]
Arresting foreign funded activists is obviously the right thing to do, but it's rather easy to expel them and massively less problematic. That said, I've never seen a single indication they had a naughty list. Although it'd make sense for them to have one, after all that has happened in Ukraine.
Let me quote a famous screenwriter
Older LLMs write slop by default bc the training data is weighed towards obnoxious California tier crap. If you take the barest amount of care they stop writing slop bc tasteful writing is in their weights. As I found out when I was enraged by slop while experimenting with roleplay. Most people don't have taste so don't care, don't even seem aware they're reading slop. In short, if your LLM powered RP or ERP has slop in it, it's a skill ( you were using dumb models or can't prompt a SOTA model properly) or taste issue. So, I have no problems saying someone used to LLM writing could use it to write a script that's better than okay and definitely well above typical Netflix tier shit.
Newer ones seem to almost avoid slop even without anti-slop prompts. E.g. consider this fake SlateStarCodex essay by Gemini. You can kinda tell it's not Scott A but it's not easy. It has almost zero of of the typical LLM tells.
Something better than Baen-tier mil-sf slop or silly hippie crap from Le Guin getting filmed. Either a good film based on some golden age classics, or modern actual SF getting filmed.
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