You are right regarding China being a considerable opponent due to its manufacturing power but you are wrong about Russia. First it is a petrostate but one that is dependent on western equipment for continued extraction. Especially with natural gas it had to scale back a lot of projects due to sanctions. Second its military complex is only good at dumb ammunitions and outdated equipment fit for human wave attacks. Those may be working in Ukraine thanks to population advantage but they are not fit for a fight against NATO. And Russia is already experiencing worker shortage in manufacturing. I wonder how that "giant military complex" will fare after another mobilization drive.
>Second its military complex is only good at dumb ammunitions and outdated equipment fit for human wave attacks.
This comment is not based on material facts. Russia has a lot of SotA military equipment. Including AD, EW, smart bombs, glide bombs, hypersonics and so on. These so called "human wave" attacks never happened and is a complete debunked meme.
Russian weapons are nowhere near state of the art. More like hopelessly outdated Cold War designs which makes sense because the USSR unlike Russia was actually capable of innovation though often narrow in scope.
If you are talking about Kinzhal then it is hypersonic in the same way ATACMS is hypersonic. It is not maneuverable at hypersonic speeds and can be intercepted by modern air defense systems as proven by Ukraine.
> These so called "human wave" attacks never happened
How ironic to read this just a few weeks after the "Goodwin" and "Ernest" scandal. What does your metodichka say about them?
> Even dumb Shahed drones are assembled with American FPGAs and other microcontrollers.
Imagine not using cheap commodity chips that are easily available.
>If you are talking about Kinzhal then it is hypersonic in the same way ATACMS is hypersonic.
Look up Zircon and Avangard.
>How ironic to read this just a few weeks after the "Goodwin" and "Ernest" scandal. What does your metodichka say about them?
How many Ukrainian scandals should I mention? No one is saying that the Russian military is perfect, but taking this example as a way to show that Russia is utilizing human wave attacks is stupid at best.
It's hard to understand what you're arguing about - Russian troops and chain of command showed utter incompetence at the beginning of the war, with a giant convoy being stuck and gradually destroyed at will by Ukrainians.
More precisely, I wouldn't use term "human wave". It's just Russian command don't care that much about their own casualties as they are used to thinking they have a lot of human material. And while it's true, it's a terrible way to manage a state.
If an only if you have the stomach for it, first hand accounts with vids of meat wave style attacks and more are available on Reddit, at ukraineconflict.
So as they say: knock yourself out! :-)
I have been following the conflict since the beginning in 2014. I've probably seen more combat footage than you ever will. Most of the real footage is on telegram btw.
Yeah I mean people who underestimate Russia, they seem to talking their cues from the disastrous opening stages of the invasion in 2022. Russia has learnt and adapted a lot. I recommend the RUSI reports on the conflict for anyone who wants to catch up - Russian EW is perfectly capable of countering HIMARS at this stage, from the reports I’ve read.
Their lancet loitering ammunition drones are really effective and so are their observation drones which they produced in large quantities and keep watch over the entire frontline.
It’s a sophisticated effort.
Russia, particularly its MIC, seems at least the third best in the world at this point, after US and China.
They produce enormous amounts of material and are now building enough to hold a war of attrition against a large neighbouring country (that’s now armed with some NATO equipment).
They’re also developing combat knowledge that virtually no other country has gained in the same way in a war against a well armed near peer competitor.
Seems this sentiment is coming up in every recent Proton related thread. Despite all the counterarguments offered each time.
The simple reality is that there are decades worth of Windows games that will never have a Linux version. Because of the studios being gone. Because of the source code being lost. Because of the licensing issues for dependencies, assets, music. If not for the Valve efforts people would always need a copy of Windows to play a good chunk of their libraries. At which point why bother with Linux? But with Proton the calculus changes. Most of those Windows-only games are now fully playable on Linux. Many people no longer need Windows and that's a huge win for desktop Linux adoption.
By this logic Apple should not have developed x86 translation for its latest Macs because it showed they are not serious about the platform and disincentivized devs from providing native Arm ports. Except we know that's not what happened.
I get the reasoning from your other replies. If Microsoft extends Win32 with some new API that cannot be reimplemented in Proton then Valve is screwed. So you want them to require a native Linux version from every game published on Steam.
However I really do not think Valve is in a position to dictate such terms. They have multiple competitors both in distribution and console space. Big names are already publishing on their own stores. Small indies can move to itch.io. Everyone else can switch to Epic. Steam Deck is already underpowered compared to recent Windows based handhelds. If it stops supporting Windows games via Proton then it is as good as dead.
I understand your idealism. But a step like this would kill gaming on Linux much quicker than anything Microsoft could do. Because Valve is the only big distributor even remotely interested in it. In contrast Epic is absolutely hostile to Linux. And they're the ones to gain the most users in case Steam fails.
You should travel to parts of the Eastern Europe that used to be under Soviet occupation someday. Share your views on Russia with the locals over beer and you'll find out rather quckly why "blithely trusting the state department" is a hell of a lot better than dealing with the Russians. Not to say that people are wholly uncritical of the US. But having experienced Russia up close it's clear as day what's worse.
Also as a reminder Russia could end the war today by withdrawing its armed forces from the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine.
Agreed in general. Though the points on character design may be a bit too reductionist. Concord didn't really need characters with clear sex appeal. Or even characters people immediately want to be like. The original characters aren't that bad! At least judging from the concept art. They just suffer from extremely poor and downright unprofessional execution.
Take this redesign for example https://www.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1fdz1m.... The results are pretty close to originals and do not pander to any specific demographic. But there are just enough interesting and unusual details in the new designs that make you want to learn more about those characters. That's what the released game is missing entirely.
My pet theory is this had to be nepotism in hiring. I struggle to find another explanation for how they botched the execution so badly that the characters can be legitimately seen as "designed to make people squirm". Which I don't believe could be any executive's intention.
Is any of the original concept art public? I've seen some images purporting to be that but if you track them down they're actually redesigns made after the game flopped to show how it could have been done better.
The first redesign you link to isn't really "my type" but even so I think that's a viable character with sex appeal. They ditched the ugly lipstick, redistributed her mass to give her wide hips, and swapped out her depressed "I just want to die" facial pose with a big smirk that's full of life. They changed the gross loser into somebody who looks fun and lively.
As far as companies with a Russian origin go JetBrains and Yandex are at complete odds with each other. JetBrains condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine and suspended sales and R&D there shortly after the war broke out then left the country entirely as soon as they relocated the employees. Whereas Yandex stayed and as a result their home page today is chock-full of Russian propaganda. JetBrains may have originated in Russia but they have nothing to do with that country anymore so counting them in with Yandex is wrong.
Yandex has no way out of Russia. Most of its businesses are russian-targeted and going “full outside” makes zero sense for them, because to continue they’d have to bow before authorities anyway. As a media company, to condemn the war for them meant being instantly raided and re-owned, which sure isn’t far from truth, just was less dramatic.
Agreed that exiting the country was much easier for JetBrains who are more internationally focused. But my belief is that Yandex leadership made a strategic mistake in not spinning off their core businesses to Europe. They had a chance at establishing themselves as an EU-first search engine, mail provider and cloud that can compete at the equal footing with Google. Yet they blew it and now they are FSB owned in everything but name.
Same story with my reMarkable 2. It's one purchase I still regret years later. I take a lot of handwritten notes and bought the reMarkable to keep them organized and indexed for full-text search. Well, the writing recognition turned out to be too imprecise and clunky to use, with many manual steps required and nothing even close to transparent background indexing that lets you search handwritten notes (okay, expecting that is a failure of expectations and product research on my part, but still, it felt like an obvious feature to go with the sync subscription...). Worse, having to put up with e-ink latency when typing out a search query quickly proved to be too tedious, and the software doesn't help, as you can't even do text search across all notebooks, only within a single one (what's the point of having directory and notebook hierarchies, then?) And that's the core functionality, secondary stuff like reading ebooks is even worse. It kind of exists, but the experience compared to say the recent Kindles is absolutely subpar. It's not just software though, I also couldn't get used to the feel of the pen, it's too taxing to use for any non-trivial note taking and the lag, while impressively short for an e-ink device, is still there. Honestly, I regret getting swayed by all the positive reviews I'd seen on HN. I'm sure there are use cases where the reMarkable works better, maybe PDF annotation or sketching, but I don't feel it measurably improves on the paper note taking experience, and I don't feel it justifies the steep price if that's what you buy it for.
> I'm sure there are use cases where the reMarkable works better, maybe PDF annotation
I can tell you right now that taking handwritten notes and annotating PDFs are my primary use cases and my RM2 has not been in use for several months now. It's just not as good as even pen and paper, let alone a Supernote, for example. Few features, imprecise screen, no search, etc. It took them one a half years after I bought it to introduce drawing of straight lines, and besides that they're apparently focusing on their keyboard - for an expensive device that should primarily be used for handwritten notes, instead of trying to be a laptop.
