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.

There's a bunch of effects. Most crops get far more light than they actually need over the day. If you angle the panels correctly, they will block out the strongest sun but allow morning and evening sun. That can provide more of the right light level for many crops. Also, reducing the strength of the sun falling on the ground reduces moisture loss from the soil, especially the upper layers. There has even been research showing that this can slow down or even reverse desertification. And then, also, there is likely what you are saying and protection from and reduction of wind can protect some crops.

Nuclear plants fail as wholes, often due to simple issues like lack of cooling water (see France, which has repeated huge summer problems) where multiple plants in different locations can even fail at the same time. Sometimes due to disaster such as earth quakes (see Fukashima, where one natural event took out many reactors in the same location simultaneously). That means that not only do you want to have battery for immediate backup, key storage technologies like pumped storage hydro power were created specifically to deal with the flexibility limits of Nuclear.

In the meantime, as long as you distribute them widely so that weather effects don't happen simultaneously and overbuild them so there's almost always spare capacity, solar and wind power are much better. Because they deal with small individual units, failures take out small sections of your power generation. Even better, you can have both solar panels and wind turbines sitting there ready to generate but just reduce their power output to whatever level you want. They are complementary too, with wind power providing 24/7 power whilst solar fills in the daytime peaks where everyone's working and air conditioning gets turned up to maximum.

That means that that solar and wind systems can provide synthetic inertia that is better for grid stability even than the inertia old coal plants used to provide. That's something that Canadian wind farms have been doing since 2005 and that's now becoming a major source of grid stability in places where it's demanded.

Which makes sense. Whilst it's a bit stupid that the analysts didn't expect Dell to be selling servers with NVIDIA, it's not 100% stupid. It could have ended up that the cloud providers were providing all the AI for all the companies. It could have ended up that some Chinese server vendors were winning and Dell got almost no business. Now we know that Dell's succeeding in selling servers on the back of AI, so now their valuation goes up.

In the case of BT, from reading the literature they sent, this seems to be the exact scenario they support. I think they are basically doing something equivalent to ISDN over IP in the background and thus avoiding almost all problems of incompatibility.

What if the people are disabled so you get support from the state to employ them?

I'm not sure I disagree. I think what you are saying is more or less what I wanted to say, just with more specific detail. I am, however, assuming that somewhere out there are investors who haven't been following Musk in detail.

This clearly needs some out of the box thinking. An idea. How about we put a member of Waymo staff in the vehicle who can see even when network coverage is out and can halt the vehicle? You could even give them a set of local controls, duplicating the ones the remote staff use so that if the remote staff can't respond to a problem they can just take over and keep the vehicle able to move. You'd call them an "engineer" like in a train or a "captain" like in a ship.

BT in the UK is getting rid of its last real POTs customers by offering VOIP with power backup. They can even install a copper to fiber conversion in the DSLAM to make it work, in which case they maintain the last mile copper but nothing else. AT&T could find better (defined as more independent of the wireless network and less subject to collapse during emergencies) solutions than wireless if they wanted.