@kobenz Critically it means two things 1. no updates that break backward compat, 2. no updates that fix critical bugs.

Take the good with the bad I suppose.

@iiii What would I find fun instead?

Doing what I set out to do, without resource constraints. I set out to crack RSA, and every dead line has been missed, but every subsequent deadline and breakthrough has been shorter than the last. Real breakthroughs. Converging on some near-future date.

Beyond that, camping, ruck marching, fighting, drinking, and fucking beautiful women, but who doesn't love those things.

Whats this have to do with your friend though?

@iiii "why a shotgun?"

is gonna serve him (arguably) better against loitering munitions and suicide drones. More effective in trench warfare.

As someone who has survived not one, but two street riots (didn't participate, got caught out in the open), and got stuck in (or was the target) of several gang shootings, four home invasions, and sundry other armed and dangerous situations, I am at least marginally qualified to comment on how to survive armed situations.

There is also an open legal question about whether the ukrainian government can keep him drafted, or charge him with desertion, owing to the fact they have suspended elections and are now no longer a lawfully elected government.

But again, not legal advice.

This isn't me taking sides, I wouldn't be deign to do something as boring as that. Every government has its reasons for going to war, good, bad, and ugly.

Just some food for thought.

@iiii I'm aware, and all governments, some more than others, suffer from enormous graft.

I would advise him to, if possible and legal to do so, to trade his service weapon to another soldier who has a shotgun.

I would also advise him, if it is legal to do so, to obtain mylar blankets, and not to piss out in the open.

The mylar will block his heat signature, and pissing out in the open produces visible heat blooms which also regularly gets people killed.

And last but not least, he really should try the conversion-embassy route.

Again, mandatory disclaimer, not legal advice.

Consider it a going away present.

Or maybe they were trying to convince you to stay!

Once worked in an office where they kept nerf guns on a dozen desks. Sometimes we had a stand up meeting where everyone would collectively shoot each other, or if one person was being annoying and obstructing the meeting, they'd say "jason, you're being annoying", we'd all point our nerf guns at the person and shoot them. Many eye rolls would follow, the message recieved, and we'd get back to business.

Then one girl in HR got a complaint because someone got hit in the eye, and the following day the boss's assistant went around to collect the nerf guns in a black trash bag.

He took em home to his kid, so not a total loss.

Someone had an early christmas.

I could advise him how to defect and escape effectively but that would be illegal and I lack legal cover to engage in those sorts of activities, so I won't.

I WOULD, if I could, advise him to convert to Judaism which may give him an out of the war if he really believes hes not gonna make it or if he believes the war is lost. And to seek the Israeli embassy after conversion, but it has to be a real conversion, which is not trivial.

Tl;dr mandatory disclaimer, this is not advice, nor legal advice. Consult an attorney before taking any action. Not liable for any end results.

Good luck to your friend though. If he survives it hes gonna have one helluva story.

@iiii while I don't take sides in wars, I can say this: if the ukrainians want to handle the drone problem heres what they need to do.

Big anti-drone shotguns. The pellets should be titanium chips.

Need field recordings of russian drones to extract the infrasound for recognition.

Shotguns can be mounted on turrets to lock onto infrasound, each drone has a unique signature, and unlike thermals and visual camo, IFS is hard to mask even for military tech.

But even without automated defenses, large anti-drone shotguns will do the job, especially with titanium pellets to shred chassis.

This doesn't help your friend at all, but it does help his nation.

Why shotguns? Drones are too hard to hit with individual rounds. A lot of drones are armored, and loitering munitions often have capabilities for dodging nets and incoming rounds. Weapons that fire multiple rounds (especially shotgun shells, which are easier to make) have a spread pattern thats hard to dodge.

I didn't end up joining. Shame on me. Family called me away to play scrabble!

@scor "I am become death, destroyer of worlds" intensifies.

relevant:

https://youtube.com/watch/...

Get a cat poster that says "hang in there". You'll make it through. Remember to celebrate when you do. 🎉󠄹󠅤󠄗󠅣󠄐󠅑󠅜󠅜󠄐󠅗󠅟󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅤󠅟󠄐󠅣󠅘󠅙󠅤󠄐󠅑󠅞󠅔󠄐󠅣󠅟󠅝󠅕󠄐󠅠󠅕󠅟󠅠󠅜󠅕󠄐󠅟󠅞󠄐󠅒󠅟󠅤󠅘󠄐󠅣󠅙󠅔󠅕󠅣󠄐󠅑󠅢󠅕󠄐󠅤󠅢󠅩󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅤󠅟󠄐󠅝󠅑󠅛󠅕󠄐󠅙󠅤󠄐󠅘󠅑󠅠󠅠󠅕󠅞󠄞󠄐󠄿󠅞󠅜󠅩󠄐󠅧󠅘󠅕󠅞󠄐󠅤󠅘󠅕󠄐󠅣󠅘󠅤󠅖󠄐󠅓󠅑󠅞󠄐󠅑󠅞󠅩󠅤󠅘󠅙󠅞󠅗󠄐󠅒󠅕󠄐󠅢󠅕󠅒󠅥󠅙󠅜󠅤󠄞

As they say, from your lips to God's ears.

@iiii "can you smuggle a human across a border?"

I am capable of accomplishing anything if I desire.

Unfortunately breaking the law is not something I wish to do.

But I can offer comfort.

Where they stuck anyway? Ukraine?

@iiii on a long enough timeline, the survival rate drops to zero.

@iiii "I know as a fact no one here can help me in any meaningful way."

You don't know that as a fact, I've drove 300 miles and crossed state lines, with only enough gas money to get back in order to help total strangers.

"Be the change you want to see" is either feel-good bullshit, or an ideology to live your whole life by.

@iiii "but black outs are good for the environment!"

@wojtek322 Praise zeus!

Thank you. Gonna join tonight and shitpost.

@lungdart I'll take another anti-dry rant please.

Holy shit.

Fucking knew it was gonna happen.

Congratulations.

Never been this stoked for a cartoon avatar of a giant boa constrictor and his pet, a guy with yellow hair in a white shirt!

@atheist And on that note, if you ever do build out a platform, I'll come post content, and comment on new users posts like crazy to keep people around and engaged.

I've been wanting for a while now to do both more long form and short form content, with more variety than math shitposts and hottakes. Just haven't found the right platform for it. DevRant was, and is great, but I knew from the day I joined that it was a cooling ember of a 'community' (too many people use that word), but of all the platforms it came the closest to actually achieving what that word means.

Almost felt like an insiders club that was semi-open.

And unlike sites like say reddit, content was mostly unmoderated, and unlike sites like substack, it was always two-way communications where everyone was supporting and engaging with each others comments and posts, not just one-to-many relationships.

@atheist I'm completely useless as far as technical help, but I think it'd be cool to see a few regular DR people like you, retoor, and a couple others build out a full successor.

It wouldn't be DR, but it'd be the next best thing seeing as DR is slowly fading. But I think too what made Devrant what it is, is the people to begin with.

It made the post/thread content highly visible, like it was some site-endorsed level post, instead of just another blog post, it made looking up users who responded and voted easy, so you could reward engagement by going through their own stuff and co-comment and support good posts and have people keep coming back.

It kept advertising tasteful (and minimal, maybe too minimal for a site trying to support itself).

It didn't have too many frills, just the right kinds, like identifiable avatars.

Voting was designed to minimize bullshit and mostly worked for a while.

Honestly theres been some solid attempts to build lua-like languages and improvements to lua.

I like wren a lot, keeps the smallness, but adds some much needed affordances.

Moonscript is cool too but is definitely abandoned.

From a technical perspective they give you very few things in the way of maintainability (but what scripting language doesn't). But for what they are, they're genuine if small improvements to lua.

A proper language building on lua's bones, keeping all its constraints in mind, could go a long way in the same way the erlang vm now gets more use than erlang.

@Lensflare walk it off!

"Them selling it as it being like the fucking newest invention. "

Like all the startups announcing new battery tech once a month, and saying "still needs research", and its essentially (or sometimes actually) just a straight repost of a science post from the previous month, ad infinitum.

@jestdotty linux master bait.

@atheist probably retoor.

Look whatever you got to say can't be any worse than half the shit ostream used to say.

And we didn't drive him out.

Though no one is immune to being laughed at or judged.

Be you. Fuck being afraid to express an opinion.

Thats how we decompress, and thats how people correct each other.

We can't know what the problem is if you don't tell anyone. And if we can't know the problem, we can't listen or help fix it.

@jestdotty "have you ever chaos magic."

Can't sell a soul that you don't have.

But self-depreciating humor aside, thats a cogent and interesting comparison.

"will" might be a harder thing to algorithmically define, but could also be an emergent capability.

Most developers that have thought about it long enough, if they aren't in the "no free will camp", have concluded at minimum that we at least have "free won't", which reduces to a utility problem.

For example it is reasonably hypothesized that the part of the brain known as the PMC, or premotor cortex, is at all times, generating potential movement plans for different parts of the body, and then actively filtering out the ones that don't match certain criteria and higher level constraints.

Which is why (most of the time), we don't walk backwards to get anywhere, its severely suboptimal. But for the higher level goal of being funny, someone might just walk backwards for that very purpose.

@atheist thread content, username, comment.

Flawless combo. Perfect timing. S rank.

@jestdotty who the fuck steals someones cat and uses it for extortion?

What a piece of shit.

I'd push the guy in front of a moving bus and thoroughly enjoy it, just on principle.