trompete

joined 3 years ago
[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Some Ukrainian officer explaining that their drone operators are getting hit more and more:

transcript

The second thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is that I’ve felt that the Russians have learned to counter our drone systems, and I’m seriously concerned about this, because in the past few days—the past few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of signs of this, when I see that the number of losses among our drone pilots has increased. Are these ambushes? These are complex measures, unfortunately. And I’ve been thinking about how we need to resist, yes—what we need to do to reduce this impact, because earlier it was only guided bombs, and now it’s “Molniya”, it’s fiber optics, it’s operations with many methods of attack and winged shoot-downs. This story—they're working on a broad scale.

And it really troubles me internally, because I keep thinking about what I can do here to improve the situation over there—to reduce this gap between Kyiv and the front line. That’s the main thing.

And the losses really, if we’re speaking about the brigades specifically, have skyrocketed. They’ve skyrocketed just over the last couple of weeks. We were also just recently at one of the brigades. This happens constantly—you might spend two hours with a brigade and you get the message that there are “200s”, there are “300s”, and of course, this greatly, greatly affects both what’s happening on the front and the overall condition of our military.

What I see now is—they’ve learned to counter our UAVs, and their success is getting better and better, unfortunately, and this is happening in several directions. First, it’s situational awareness on the battlefield. Second, it’s targeting the positions they detect—they’re striking identified positions. I’ve even heard in some brigades—“Let’s change our shifts not every three or six hours, but let’s stay on rotation for a month and then rotate out,” because today, the act of repositioning is very difficult and has deep consequences, including from the effects of the Russian enemy.

Again—three months ago they worked only with guided bombs. Now they’re using both “Molniya” and guided bombs, and now there’s fiber optics that were working three months ago in the Kursk direction, and now they’ve moved—to Kurakhove, to the Kostyantynivka area, and to Pokrovsk.

Three months ago there was no fiber optics at all in Pokrovsk. Two months ago there were just isolated strands hanging somewhere in Pokrovsk, and now—it’s daily operations—again, daily operations. And this is the problem that—I keep thinking about it constantly, and it’s more important to me than the Istanbul track, Ankara... and from what I understand, they’ve basically created an equivalent of our drone forces—that is, a separate branch of troops that focuses solely on countering drones. And in my view, we really, really need to consider—just like we have counter-battery units in artillery, we need counter-UAV units, positions that handle that, because their drones are taking out a major part of our armed forces—honestly.

And we don’t have a separate structure in our armed forces that works against drones on their side. There are specific initiatives at the level of individual units, some companies or battalions—but it’s not a systematic effort.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

Return of the Obra Dinn, UFO 50

Civ 6 works ok on Steam Deck if you turn down the graphics (make the leaders into static pictures especially) and take some time to configure the inputs.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Most emulators are free software and work on Linux and have worked for a long time. As Android and Raspberry Pis have become quite popular as emulation systems, the free software emulators, which are easily portable to these ARM+Linux system, have taken off as the most popular emulators in general. Anything that's also available on Android or RetroPie will work on Linux for sure. There's an emulator for every popular console that works on Linux about as well as it does on Windows.

DOS games you can run in DOSbox. Pretty sure compatibility is 100%. This is also how e.g. GOG makes these games run on Windows, because modern Windows can't run these games either without emulation.

As for old Windows games, it is worth trying Wine, the Windows compatibly layer. Volunteers have successfully been trying to get games (especially games actually!) to run on Linux since the 90s. Twenty-something years ago I was gaming on Linux playing Starcraft, Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 and god knows what. Anecdotally, some old Windows games that no longer run on Windows will work fine in Wine. A prominent example is The Sims 2. There's a video out there of some millennial Sims streamer and housewife instructing her thousands of viewers on how to install Linux in order to get that game to run better.

Steam comes with a version of Wine, called Proton, so 90%+ percent of games on Steam run somewhere between fine and perfectly fine. Not everything though, you should check on protondb.com.

Playing in a VM is a terrible idea btw, the performance will suck. You don't need to and don't want to do that.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

They are either trying to be an independent imperialist power, or they're just doing the US empire's bidding. Either way it's imperialism. If you believe their insane plans will actually manifest (I doubt it), their goal is to be able to win the next round of war in eastern Europe. Clearly they're not winning this round, so wherever the front settles, they want to be able to do re-match in couple of years.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

I so hope this backfires. First of all, I don't think they can pull it off anyway, the corruption and incompetence is off the charts with these people and that's not due to lack of vision (which they also don't have) or whatever, that's systemic. All that money will go into private pockets and fuck-all will be delivered, and thank Allah for that.

Also, this will antagonize other EU countries (well, some of them, I assume the Baltics will hail their German overlords), making it so much easier for nationalist EU-skeptic politicians to gain support.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 month ago

https://www.jungewelt.de/artikel/499987.ukraine-moskau-muss-brennen.html

Junge Welt reports that the Deutsches Freiwilligenkorps (DFK; I assume they go by Freikorps), made of German Neo-Nazi volunteers, will be integrated into the 49. storm battalion "Karpaten-Sitsch":

Founded in 2014 after the Maidan coup by members of the Svoboda ["freedom", formerly social-nationalist] party and the “Sokil” military sports group [article says "Wehrsportgruppe"; famously Wehrsportgruppe is what Nazis like to call their little militant clubs in Germany], the “Carpathian Sitsch” battalion, which has since been disbanded and reactivated in 2022, is a volunteer unit. It follows in the tradition of the “Carpathian Sitsch”, which was formed in 1938 on the initiative of the fascist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and wiped out in the fight for independence against Hungary.

The DFK to this day recruits from the milieu of the small party Der III. Weg [the third way]. The neo-Nazis have maintained contacts with Svoboda, Sokil and the “Azov” movement for years, collect donations for Ukrainian fascists and took part in a conference of the Fascist International in Lviv in August 2024 together with the DFK, the Russian Volunteer Corps [these are the Russian Nazis that raided into Russia in 2023] and other neo-Nazi units fighting for Kiev. The fact that the DFK congratulated Adolf Hitler on his “birthday” on their official social media channel on April 20 does not seem to bother the Ukrainian army leadership. Nor does the revanchist manifesto published by the DFK on the 80th anniversary of the liberation: “In Germany, the 8th of May 1945 has not been forgotten, and it will certainly not be celebrated!” declared the DFK, demanding that the German people show “the same courage, the same loyalty, the same willingness to sacrifice” as Hitler's soldiers once did - “for a bright future in the glory of the old glory”.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I understand this is joke, but the F in PFAS "forever chemicals" is fluorine. You'd think the fluoride whackos would be all over this, after all it is a communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

To be clear, a bit of fluoride in the water is fine, the problem is that they made synthetic polymers out of carbon and fluorine and they don't degrade and just accumulate in your blood and organs forever and disrupt whatever is normally supposed to be going on there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Soft serve I have only ever seen at McDonald's around here. Since I was also interested, I looked it up: It's lower fat, a lot more airy and the serving temperature is only -4 °C, whereas store ice cream is like -15 °C or thereabouts (freezers are supposed to be -18 °C) and Italian gelato (very popular here in Germany) is around -12 °C. The serving temperature isn't just some unimportant detail: Soft serve would presumably turn into a somewhat airy but hard ice cube in a freezer, while gelato would turn into soup at -4 °C. You cannot turn any recipe from either into the other. The adjustments would be massive if you tried. All the ingredient ratios would be totally different. You'd have to change pretty much everything.

I suspect you need a special machine to create soft serve. I don't think a usual ice cream machine, which basically just cools and churns, is able to do the airiness justice.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah i was thinking about using the egg whites but realistically they'll just sit in the fridge until I throw them out, I'm not that organized. I'll look up Japanese pancakes, thank you.

So, Xanthan and carob gum (I actually found that in the shop) are stabilizers, which make the solids stay dispersed evenly throughout the mix. The way this works, as I understand, is that these long carbohydrates form a sort of netting throughout the mix that stops larger particles from clumping. Supposedly using both at the same time enhances the effect.

You need at least two kinds of sugar, because sugar influences both sweetness and freezing point at the same time. If you just use one type of sugar, and you make the recipe to be eaten at -16 °C or whatever, you'll just have to live with however sweet it turn out to be. If you want to control both sweetness and consistency at the same time, you want an additional sugar like maltodextrin, which is both less sweet and doesn't depress the freezing point as much. You can then change the ratios to adjust sweetness while keeping the freezing curve the same.

The dehydrated milk powder is the only way I can think of how to make e.g. coffee ice cream. Coffee is mostly water, but you want a certain amount of milk solids. So if you want ice cream and not watery coffee sorbet, the milk needs to be added somehow while not adding too much additional water, hence the dehydrated milk powder.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

Oh yeah already did that. The emulgator in eggs yolks is lecithin, but you can get (already ordered, will hopefully arrive this week) pure soy lecithin if you want an alternative that is vegan, cheaper, and doesn't require tempering (not that hard but a bit of pita, look it up!). Seems a bit wasteful to throw away two or three egg whites to make a liter of ice cream, when all you really need is the very small amount of lecithin contained in the yolks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Yeah from what I gather, what you do is (a) churn (ice cream machines do that for you), and (b) have other stuff in the mix, i.e solids, fat globules, stabilizers (maybe, not sure if they affect crystal size?) and so on, so the crystals don't get too big.

But unlike stovetop cooking, where usually there's a ton leeway on the amounts of stuff you can put in, the water-to-sugar-molecule-ratio is actually very important. It will literally turn into a block of ice or, on the opposite side, soup, if you don't get it right.

As side note: I have to order a ton of ingredients on the internet. Physical stores around here don't stock maltodextrin, xanthan, lecithin, dehydrated milk powder and god knows what else I will need/want.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

Yeah they are trying to become indistinguishable from the AfD, and they're also increasing surveillance, repression, censorship and propaganda, which to some degree target the AfD (among others), because what's important isn't what someone is doing, but what's in their heart of hearts.

1
arte schmarte (hexbear.net)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
 

Radlibs love this cursed French-German propaganda channel

arte ultras :stalin-gun-1: :stalin-gun-2:

 

On tech forums like r/linux or hackernews, you'll frequently see posts by (presumably) old guys reminiscing about how great the user interface of their youth was.

"Oh how tasteful were these pixel art icons!"

"How utilitarian and consistent were the 3D effects!"

"How very intuitive are these menus!"

"It's all gone downhill since $PRODUCT. It's all flat and empty and useless now!"

Bollocks. These user interfaces sucked. The menus were a mess, because trying to shove 50 random items into 6 hierarchical categories, two of which are preordained to be "File" and "Edit", cannot be done in any way that isn't arbitrary and confusing. Thus you looked through all the little menus with your terrible mouse hoping to find something that sounded like it might be what you need, trying not to make a sudden move that made the submenu disappear.

Under the menu bar were between 30 and 200 tiny pixel art icons. They were just as incomprehensible as today's minimalist ones, only there were more of them and most of them looked like ass.

Oh and so many popup windows. Everything you did created a popup window. Why does the settings popup only use one third of the screen while having three tabs? Why can I see my document underneath it, half-obscured, but I can't actually click on anything there? Why do half the operations create an "OK" popup for me to click on?

Nothing about this was "functional" and yet it also looked grey and cramped and ugly. Like it was designed by C++ programmers (who by their choice of programming language have already proven that their opinion cannot be trusted, especially not in matters involving good taste), which of course it was.


Fucking brain worms, all of them.

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