That one I might give you. Outside uninvited consultants should *always* be a source of fear. Ones that think they know how to tell you to interact with our coworkers doubly so.

The whole thing is so much more complex and incomparable. Some of the best research in the US was done in private company research departments, like Xerox PARC or Bell labs. However, they had a whole bunch of government integration and not just with the DoD. They also had huge links with the US national laboratories which also used to do a whole load of important work. The US government used to understand the value and, for example, made sure that the people funding Bell labs could continue to do so.

Now we got to the time of the cretinous people who honestly believe "the five scariest words in the English language are 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help'". This means that instead of trying to ensure that their government is doing sensible things and ensuring that their country develops, they instead set out to destroy everything.

This is still not entirely gone. SpaceX is effectively funded by the US government and they understand that enough to limit Musk's ability to support and collaborate with Russia. Still, the corruption that having people like Musk involved is a huge problem.

That's what we have a judicial system, investigators and "innocent until proven guilty" for. It' not easy and I don't delude myself into thinking it is. However, it's really really important to do it. Also important to note is that you don't have to do it perfectly either. The fact you catch some provides a threat that dissuades others and also the risk of being caught limits people's ability to act. The situation improves considerably even if you only catch a small percentage of the traitors.

I should add here, that the fact that I have named both a left wing and a right wing extremist should make it clear that this should not be a partisan issue. Everyone should be able to come together and say that traitors have to be dealt with.

No, the Tatars are a unified Ukrainian people. Ideally anything that belonged to the Crimean Khanate, likely at it's greatest historical extent, and not including lands that belonged to Georgia, should be given to Ukraine. Georgia should get back anything that it possessed earlier.

However, the key priority is a buffer zone around the land borders to the North and East of Ukraine, where there's needed some form of trigger/buffer zone to limit future Russian aggression.

Lack of borders is in practice yet worse than the problems that borders cause. EU regulations around border zones (which guarantee access to work and trade for people living in border regions) show how consent and cooperation can eliminate almost all the problems borders cause whilst still maintaining most of the most important benefits.

If that wasteland provides a barrier which allows you to stop Russians invading your remaining valuable land then it is, actually, in itself valuable. Not brilliant, but better than losing more.

You do have a point though, and really the final resolution of the conflict in the distant future really should see Russia give up tracts of valuable land in compensation to the nations it has harmed including Ukraine and Georgia. How realistic that is will depend on all sorts of things, especially Russia's internal stability.

The way that they have already been identified. The crime is not the speech, the crime is taking money from the enemy to spread it. A number of the extremist bloggers have already been caught doing it. Where the typical penalty in history for treason has been execution, they have barely even been fined. Look at Tucker Carlson and Hassan Piker right now. They have been openly going on trips to St Petersburg in service of Putin.

You are replying to the wrong person because that was a quote on my part. On the other hand you have a point. Putin really is very afraid of the veterans so there's a good reason, beyond just hoping to use up drones and making Futurama quotes real why they are sending the crippled back to the front. They have already had some problems and so he rightly believes that dead people don't protest for veterans rights.

There's never a good time to rise up, but the Russians are going to keep suffering until they finally rid themselves of their current ruling class.

Obviously, the list of people killed issued by Russia will not contain the people that they don't want to admit to and will contain people who it suits them to include. Women are currently serving in the Russian armed services and 19, just after completing mandatory education and before they could have a settled life is approximately the most likely age that they would join. Releasing a list of women only is not a sign of innocence. It is a sign of Russian manipulation.

Instead of allowing quick access to the scene, we know that Russia staged the scene for two days. That is standard procedure in Russia where a mililtary target has been hit and means that almost certainly all of those killed were actually the members of the military targeted. Having said that, it is always possible that civilians were killed, we should not in any way accept that civilian deaths in this conflict are anyone's responsibility other than Russia which could stop this war immediately by withdrawing all Russians from the territory that Russia has stolen from Ukraine from 1919 onward, paying reparations for the damage they have done and injuries they have caused since that time and handing over Russia's weapons and diplomatic privileges to Ukraine.

That was the case up till recently. This came under serious pressure because of electronic warfare which attacked the remote control of drones by blocking the command connection and the pre-programmed attack drones by blocking GPS signals. The first real solution to that was the fibre-optic drone, but they have a limit to the fibre length of around 30-50km.

Ukraine is now many drones that have some kind of automatic targeting and, using current terminology, that would mean "AI" or rather deep learning and machine vision. This means that they can be piloted to the general area and then, if they lose communications, the automated algorithms can take over and complete the guidance to target, vastly increasing the proportion of drones that do damage.

You have to recognize that there is a bunch of stuff which is real. The Turing test has been pretty much busted. We are now able to operate on much larger neural networks and various applications are improved. One of the ones which is improved is automatic target recognition and interception, which is exactly what drones are quite often using. Cheap ARM processors with neural network support hardware provide energy efficient and sophisticated guidance for modern drones. That is an example of a real and actual advance from the modern AI hype.

Which is not relevant here because the actual truth is missing

Ukraine actually hit a training academy of young drone pilots; a legitimate military target. Putin is angry because, long distance drone pilot being one of the cushy jobs in the war, one of the people killed was an actual Oligarch's son.

That doesn't work as well in the current conflict. Russia has been sending the seriously wounded back into the field even with barely functional legs and crutches, with the basic understanding that one man destroys one drone independent of how well he moves. This is also a large part of the reason that with "only" 1.3 million casualties, Russia has over 500k dead. A nation which values life will normally have something like 1:3 or 1:5 dead to casualty ratios and many recent conflicts with modern forces came to over 1:10 because of the effective evacuation and treatment available. That just doesn't apply in Ukraine.

That's not just a primate thing. Although it's expressed in more visible complex social structures in primates, resource competition and need for defense at least and probably attack is a recurring theme across all living beings. The most defenseless of beings become those that breed the most effectively using the resources of all the others and essentially starving them out.

Seeing only that, of course understates such things as cooperation. Microbial groups come together to live and cooperate; however when they do that what they often produce is an environment that is toxic to all the other microbes (look at kefir or lactobacteria in yoghurt). That's their defense against defectors and enemies trying to take their resources.

If we want a social system that works well for everyone that has to be a social system that knows how to enforce the safety of its rules. We need to identify those people that are spreading Russian propaganda on social media, for example, and we need to ensure that they are completely and utterly dealt with. In social terms, we need to overcome the paradox of tolerance and not tolerate those that are absolutely intolerant.

A bunch of people doing good technology work, quite a bit of it based around software development and AI technologies and using that to save lives in Ukraine and stop the Russian genocide there. I think that's pretty much "news for nerds" and so yes, I do think we have to have this here. Even more so because lots of the technologies have developed from open source

The real question is what kind of Vatnik mind would question that. Europe has spent hundreds of billions of dollars, probably even trillions over time, on buying expensive American hardware provided by the true inheritors of the neo-Cons - America's disaster capitalists. Now those expensive defense systems, like Patriot batteries and F-35s are completely useless because America kept control over manufacturing of the ammunition they need and won't provide things like PAC-3 interceptors or AIM-120 missiles in adequate quantities for European defense. Europe should really sell most of that expensive America equipment to someone like Israel or Saudi Arabia that America would supply and use the money to develop their own solutions or buy from Ukraine and France.

That makes stories like this, where technological solutions are being found to the problems caused by your neo-con biddies extremely relevant for European "nerds" at least.

I think you are 100% right to have some cynicism. Life is always more complex than some simple single number statistic. Politicians on both sides always get over-enthusiastic and want results now, before their next election cycle, even if it might be better to wait a year or so and do some extra testing. Local communities have local special interests that actually do matter.

What I'd say is simple. Try a small area first; see what the results are. Try different configurations. Maybe somewhere North, lowering the density of panels by having a big gap between rows reduces the effect on growing season without increasing the cost of the installation noticeably. Maybe (black) panels directly mounted on steel into the ground help heat the soil and redirect frosts, allowing seedlings to start a bit earlier.

With a little bit of sensitivity and interest on both sides, maybe there can be less arguments about this whole deal.