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rainworldon An illustrated guide to post-Orwellian censorship (2021)

HN’s supposed to be a well-informed crowd but somehow the last half-year of Ukraine-related doom and gloom in Western mainstream media simply hasn’t registered. Since you’re asking.

Knowing when to quit—it’s a lesson for everyone, of course. Knowing that when you take a gamble you could lose it all.

rainworldon An illustrated guide to post-Orwellian censorship (2021)

Finns still sore about losing the Winter War. Which they lost. They were defeated. They had to tap out. It’s just that they were smart enough to concede and trade a good chunk of their territory for continued statehood. A lesson lost in time.

rainworldon 1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets

Recent Minuteman ICBM test failure: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/11/02/minuteman-iii...

I’ve not heard any concern

Because you’re not supposed to.

have heard a lot since the Ukraine war

Because you’re supposed to.

rainworldon OpenAI is working with the US military now

You know who’s nukes demonstratedly aren’t guaranteed to work these days? That’s right, the US’s: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/11/02/minuteman-iii...

rainworldon Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project

not been sufficiently trained

FTA: In Mali they discovered a 10x breakdown rate compared to home in Germany. And that wasn’t even war. Also, they lack spare parts. The beauty of just-in-time logistics. Read up on how much of a typical NATO army is operational at a given (peace) time. '91 was a long time ago.

Old Leopard 1 tanks would have been a better choice

There goes “crew survived”.

built for a different purpose: combined arms operations

“Easy. Just win before the tanks break down. Just destroy the enemy before you ever get close.” Someone should have explained that to the Ukrainians.

could be won with lots of artillery shells

Shells that NATO can neither supply nor produce in sufficient quantities.

highly mobile artillery

They have (had) enough of those. Barrel wear ruins the range, Lancets ruin the paint job.

rainworldon Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Is Working on a Secret Military Drone Project

current domination of OTAN equipment in the Ukraine-Russia war

Back in the real world:

Hangar queens: http://archive.today/2024.01.09-023929/https://www.spiegel.d...

Barrel trouble: https://x.com/DcDxii/status/1731800411965645092

Death traps: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMX-10_RC#Operational_history

And so on. If anything this war is a vindication of the Soviet approach.

rainworldon Drones are the new drug mules

http://www.hisutton.com/Narco%20Subs%20101.html

rainworldon Mullvad's usage of Kyber is not affected by KyberSlash

As seen below, this vulnerabilty was also present in the reference C Kyber code

https://symbolic.software/blog/2023-12-19-kyberk2sovariablet...

rainworldon Mullvad's usage of Kyber is not affected by KyberSlash

Appears to be a hybrid: https://www.wireguard.com/protocol/

If an additional layer of symmetric-key crypto is required (for, say, post-quantum resistance), WireGuard also supports an optional pre-shared key that is mixed into the public key cryptography. When pre-shared key mode is not in use, the pre-shared key value used below is assumed to be an all-zero string of 32 bytes.

rainworldon Who made millions trading the October 7th attacks?

http://archive.today/2023.12.28-162826/https://www.economist...

rainworldon They want you to forget what a film looks like

One elephant in the room is that noise (film grain) compresses very badly and so movies that would otherwise be transparently presentable with a couple gigabytes have visible compression artefacts in their BD-50 releases. And that almost all presentation is digital these days. And that in the days of digital everything and VFX, the grain is artificial anyway.

AV1 mandates support for film grain synthesis. Maybe, one day, this will become a standard part of film production.

rainworldon The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

It would be really cool if people stopped being gullible marks for psychopathic pedophiles.

‘Perverted, degenerate and indecent acts’

http://archive.today/2020.07.25-172048/https://www.telegraph...

rainworldon The Final Speech from The Great Dictator (1940)

>uses his media empire to convince people to go against their own interests

Well, yes, that’s his job. Do you think that news media exists to inform you?

rainworldon September 11th That You Have Never Seen

I wouldn’t know. The Sleepwalkers is a good start.

rainworldon September 11th That You Have Never Seen

>Germany did it.

Keep reading.

rainworldon September 11th That You Have Never Seen

>sufficient history training

>action of one person

The murder of the archduke was a literal conspiracy. Involving high-level spooks, too.

rainworldon There Once Was an Empire

The events of 2020 were more than talk. Tears in the rain.

rainworldon Cristiano Ronaldo faces $1B lawsuit over Binance ads

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pour_encourager_les_autres

rainworldon The 1988 shooting down of Flight 655 as a user interface disaster

But it is a feature. Musk’s takeover of BLUEBIRD is a deliberate act of transmutation, possibly even demolition.

rainworldon We Need Taiwan

No, “you” don’t “need” Taiwan. Those who run the American Empire have an interest in denying China the strategic advantage, everything else is window dressing. Doesn’t look good for them, though.

https://taiwaninsight.org/2018/02/26/cross-strait-relations-...

rainworldon X rolls out new ad format that can't be reported, blocked

Two obsidian-black patterns the “X” app has been employing for months:

Force the “For You” tab after Every Single App Switch.

Randomly use a `WKWebView` instead of a `SFSafariViewController` as the in-app browser. Denying you various features like Reader, AutoFill, Fraudulent Website Warning, and content blocking.

Why? To fuck with you. Musk-Twitter has never been a good-faith operation. Where’s tech journalism when you need it? Thought they (still) spend half their days in that app.

rainworldon A trip to the dried-up Kakhovka Reservoir

Shelling was unlikely to have caused that damage.

Non-sequitur refutations followed by a wave of downvotes are my favourite HN feature.

I did neither write nor imply that the shelling caused the damage. I refuted lnsru’s spurious logic of attribution.

rainworldon A trip to the dried-up Kakhovka Reservoir

It was also in Russian hands when the Ukrainians shelled it last year: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraines-russian-held-n...

rainworldon The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter

Science has shown that responding to literal NAFO accounts[0] in good faith is a complete waste of time.

[0]: https://x.com/jnsaff

rainworldon The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter

on occasion

Exactly. These are stunts designed to keep morale high, in Ukraine and the West. Their impact on the outcome of the war is negligible. These are Ukraine + NATO dealing as much damage as they think they can get away with. And Russia absorbing the blows because the alternative—open conflict with NATO and curtailing the freedoms of millions of Ukrainians in Russia[0]—is considered a worse option. For now at least.

The Russian use of drones appears to be less effective then the Ukrainian use for whatever reason.

But thanks to the censorship in place we wouldn’t know, would we? In fact, Ukrainian officials have admitted more than once that the Russians know exactly what they are hitting. And the effectiveness of Ukrainian air defense is obviously way exaggerated.[1] The fact that Ukrainians have admittedly lost more than one fighter jet trying to shoot down drones and cruise missiles is telling.

will surely change some ways that wars are fought

Yes. No one is safe from this, every defense can be (fairly cheaply) overwhelmed.

But the situation here is unique in that Ukrainians can pretend they are not paying the price, and Russia does not respond with significant escalation. For now at least. As for NATO, well, they are paying a price. Bunkers containing NATO officers have been busted. Flimsy cover stories of freak accidents. Remember that B-2 going up in flames? Happened shortly after the attacks on Russian nuclear bases. Predictable, professional, restrained. All in all it’s something, but not enough to deter NATO, or even stop them from escalating slowly.

But then "Putin is someone who generally thinks that revenge is a dish best served cold," [CIA director] Burns said at an annual security forum in Aspen.

[0]: For these attacks usually have a local component. And from the flight patterns of NATO planes we can tell that Western ISR is essential to attacks on Crimea, for example.

[1]: A thing never talked about is the price paid by civilians. For there is a cost if you do AD over populated areas, you are trading civilians for military targets. Which, 18 months in, shouldn’t be located in cities in the first place. Random impacts of AD missiles, both Soviet and Western, are well documented. As are impacts of debris and downed missiles/drones, of course.

rainworldon The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter

despite their staggering incompetence

Easy on the hubris.

rainworldon The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter

Indeed. There’s a pervasive social media-fuelled notion of superiority in this area that does not reflect reality. It hardly gets more one-sided than /r/RussiaUkraineWar2022.

rainworldon The US Military Is Getting Smaller, Cheaper and Smarter

hapless Russians

Or, you know, hapless Ukrainians. Ukrainians may have been quicker to innovate in this area but that was a long time ago.

rainworldon I Snuck into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class (2017)

Piece is not really about Kesey. Here’s something about Kesey:

Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told their friends about it. Who were those people? Ken Kesey, the author of "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest," got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA, by MK-Ultra, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter, the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture. Allen Ginsberg, the poet who preached the value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb, although of course he never knew that name.

NPR talking to Stephen Kinzer about his Poisoner in Chief: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/758989641 (The following paragraph, unfortunately, is extremely boomer and a grave misunderstanding of the situation.)

rainworldon Germany unveils bill to legalize cannabis

That's what makes western culture strong - it's capable of integrating people from other cultures without breaking.

Romans thought so too.