The most bizarre aspect has been the Kadyrovites. They're easily the least professional, least skilled elements of the Russian army, yet they're also consistently better equipped than the regular forces. They use their fancy gear to blind fire, hip fire, randomly throw grenades, etc. all while yelling.

They've been dubbed the "TikTok Batallion"

Except the Su-34 is the best fighter-bomber that Russia has. It's their newest and best, and they only had 129 of them at the start of the war. You don't put substandard equipment in your best gear.

Russia has sent their best weapons into the conflict. Su-35s, Ka-52s, T-90Ms, etc. The only things we haven't seen yet are their wunderwaffe prototypes like the Su-57 and T-14 (because they only have like 10 of each and they're still working out the bugs).

They're for getting tracked vehicles (particularly tanks) unstuck from the mud. Usually when they're ready to push forward with tracked armor, they'll load them onto one of the lighter tracked vehicles like a BMP. Then if a T-72 gets stuck, they'll grab the logs and stick them under the tracks to give the tank purchase to pull itself out of the mud.

OK, that would cause acute radiation sickness. We kept hearing reports of people with acute radiation sickness, and I was thinking "That doesn't make sense, even if they were digging in the red forest and ingesting Strontiium-90 from the mud, they're just giving themselves cancer, not anything acute."

Messing around with Cobalt-60 though is the number one cause of radiation sickness. Usually via dumb scrappers stealing medical equipment.

That's not even a joke. If Waze can keep people updated on rapidly changing road conditions, they can keep people updated on rapidly changing road conditions. "Stopped by friendly checkpoint, road ahead is contested by Russians." etc.

It has nothing to do with race, but rather getting what you pay for. India has produced many bright, capable technicians and engineers, and the good ones can ask for more money.

The cost of living in India is lower, but only for basic stuff. Once you move to having a higher-end standard of living, you start spending closer to the same amount of money that you would in the west. A nice car isn't any cheaper in India. A Playstation 5 isn't any cheaper in India. A nice house in a secure neighborhood is cheaper, but not by orders of magnitude.

Consequently a lot of the high-end engineers and technicians in India move to the west for the better overall standard of living, and the ability to interact directly with their coworkers, even if their money would go a little further in India. Brain drain is a thing.

But even the ones who stay still pull salaries in the same ballpark as people in the west. You only have to undercut the competition by a little.

The dirt-cheap employees in India are NOT high-quality. They're just greater in number, and are cheap because at the bottom-end, the cost of living is far cheaper in India. It's cheaper to train someone in India to do a mediocre job at $2/hr (7 times the minimum wage in India) than to train someone in the US to do the same job at whatever the minimum wage is in a given state in the US. Even if you don't need to train the US employee, it's still a huge loss paying them $15/hr.

But the quality engineers and technicians in India are not making a mere $2/hr, or even $15/hr. They cost almost as much as they do in the west.

There's nothing wrong with canned assets. It's just like making a movie in real life. Do you think movie or TV crew, shooting a scene in a park, build a whole park from scratch? Do you think they design their own custom park benches, trash cans, etc.? No, they just use an existing park "asset", with off-the-shelf park benches and trash cans.

When they decorate the apartment of a character, the stuff that goes in there is all consumer stuff they bought. There might be some unique props that they created, but they usually don't design a bed from scratch, they buy it from IKEA or something.

A lot of movie makers like buying props at thrift stores.

Yeah there are big budget sci-fi movies where most of the props are made custom for the show, but they're usually still kitbashed from some existing thing. (akin to buying an asset from the asset store and then tweaking the model a bit to turn an MP5 into a "space gun" or something).

Having to create all your assets from scratch was an anomaly of game development in the past. Now that games have far more assets, and far more detailed ones, using licensed, royalty-free assets will be more and more the norm.

Oh yeah, *that* one. I just had it filed as "prototype" in my head since it was never used to carry humans. Thankfully.

Wait, airplanes have food?

This old argument. Yes, COVID is probably not going to kill you. Even if you're fat, old, or sick, you'll probably survive it. Diseases can hurt you in more ways than killing you.

Let's compare it to polio. Most people survive polio, the vast majority of people who contract polio (95%) don't even have any symptoms. But for the unlucky, polio leads to all sorts of crippling damage, even though almost everyone who gets it lives.

We beat polio by mass vaccinations, by isolating people who've had it, and by being careful about managing its spread. We had almost totally eradicated polio from the planet, until a few religious antivaxxers (mostly Muslim) in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Nigeria decided that vaccines were a plot to make them infertile. Now polio is rebounding because it has a fertile reservoir.

I lament the loss of the spirit of Eisenhower-era Republicans who were proud to get vaccinated, and proud of the medical advances that American science was making.

Now it's just "LOL 99% survival rate!"

Two for ISS. One for tourists. One "hot" spare ready to go if one is damaged (or god forbid, lost), and one ready spare to act as backup if hot spare is used, so you always have a backup ready while you build the next one to backfill the first spare.

Running RAID-5 with only one hot spare is bad if you really value your data.

Although Wikipedia says 5 crew dragon were built. Did one get retired?

That's kind of picky. Beggars can't be choosers. Anyone who takes out Putin is taking a big risk, so if it happens, we should be generous to whoever did it.

Indeed. I look forward to it. Please do it American History X style. Maybe rough me up a bit first though, you have to be stylish and not just rush to the main event.

This. Kaspersky has long struggled to be independent and fair, and has long stood as probably the best antivirus software on the market in terms of protecting against all threats. The problem is that as Russia has become more authoritarian, they can't really resist the influence of the Kremlin anymore. You can't trust any company from Russia at this point, because anyone who doesn't play along with Putin winds up accidentally falling off a balcony.

A lot of commenters are saying "Yeah the C64 is not rare"

Maybe so, but there were also a ton of rare computers in the collection, including *very* rare Soviet bloc computers. Computers were not as widely available in Soviet times, and got heavily junked when communism fell, because way better stuff was almost immediately available. There was some really hard to get stuff preserved at this museum.