stevecrox avatar

stevecrox

@stevecrox@kbin.social
stevecrox, (edited )
stevecrox avatar

Tactic developed by Wagnar.

The create a plan with fixed waypoints for a squad to run. They plan for 5-8 squads to run the route at set intervals.

The idea is each squad exposes the Ukrainian position so the next squad knows where to attack. By sending so many squads in a short space of time the Ukrainian position is overwhelmed.

Wagner would plan to have the first 4-7 squads made up of convict units with minimal training, with a trained well equipped squad operating as a reserve. The idea being as soon as a Ukrainian position looked to be close to failure the reserve is dispatched.

Fundamentally everyone apart from the well trained reserve exists to soak up bullets and explosives. They are "meat".

The Russian army had "well" trained battalions, as those battalions are attrited it would shrink them down to maintain effectiveness.

With Wagner's success they backfilled the battalions with convict and mobilisation soliders. Those soliders are used following the tactic above with the original remnants of the battalion representing the well trained reserve.

This is how Russia solved their inability to train new soliders

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

SpaceX have funded it privately. It apparently started operating at a profit this year.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

SpaceX are launching 26-52 satellites at a time and have sustained 3 launches a week for most of the year.

The satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit, without constant thrust, atmospheric drag will force them to re enter earths atmosphere within a few months. This means they aren't adding to junk in space.

Unlike Nasa, ULA, Arriannespace, RoscosMos, etc.. SpaceX have always performed 2nd Stage Deorbit burns, so they aren't adding to Space junk by launching either.

The Low Earth Orbit is to ensure low latency and the need for constant thrust means the satellites have a short life expectancy by design. That is why SpaceX fought to keep the satellites as cheap as possible (e.g. $250k)

First stage booster reuse and fairing reuse means the majority of the launch cost is the second stage ($15 million).

The whole lot is privately funded

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

If you read the reports...

Normally JPL outsource their Mars mission hardware to Lockheed Martin. For some reason they have decided to do Mars Sample Return in house. The reports argue JPL hasn't built the necessary in house experience and should have worked with LM.

Secondly JPL is suffering a staff shortage which is affecting other projects and the Mars Sample Return is making the problem worse.

Lastly if an organisation stops performing an action it "forgets" how to do it. You can rebuild the capability but it takes time.

A team arbitrary declaring they are experts and suddenly decideding they will do it is one that will have to relearn skills/knowledge on a big expensive high profile project. The project will either fail (and be declared a success) or masses of money will be spent to compensate for the teams learning.

Either situation is not ideal

'Online Safety Bill', the UK parliament undermined the privacy, security, and freedom of all internet users (www.eff.org)

The U.K. Parliament has passed the Online Safety Bill (OSB), which says it will make the U.K. “the safest place” in the world to be online. In reality, the OSB will lead to a much more censored, locked-down internet for British users. The bill could empower the government to undermine not just the privacy and security of...

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

The issue is end to end encryption.

The law change requires messaging applications to be able to provide messages between people using their service.

In the 00's, messaging applications would have a secure connection between themselves and person A and anouther secure connection between themselves and Person B.

Person A would encrypt the message, send it to the service, who would decrypt it, open a connection to Person B, encrypt the message and send to Person B.

So if the police got a warrent for communications of Person B (say the police think the person is involved in human trafficking), then the messaging service could provide all messages sent to Person B.

Message services have taken themselves out of the loop, Person A now encrypts the message and sends directly to Person B. So the police appear with a warrent and the message service shrugs its shoulders since it hasno means to get the data.

The law effectively requires messaging services to design the apps/service so they can comply with a warrent.

The issue is less encryption and more the balance between your right to privacy and states right to intrude.

This is why banks aren't upset, they aren't talking about back dooring encryption and bank encryption is between you and the bank so they don't have to do/say anything.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

I have always had 1 question.

In voyager we see the Borg have thousands of ships of varying sizes and control a vast area of space. Voyager is able to take down spheres and small cubes.

Yet in Wolf 359 a single cube attacks and destroys hundreds of star fleet vessels. If a single cube is able to have that level of effect why didn't the borg commit a larger fleet?

You have the same issue in First Contact, they only commit 1 cube.

Considering how difficult the federation finds holding them back, attacking with 3-6 cubes would seemto assure victory

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

Because the Tories have upset everyone internationally, so it isn't really an option. If you've been paying attention the EU has been playing a bunch of jobsworth type games with the UK.

Notice how he will do this in 2025, when the current agreement is up for renewel rather than immediately.

You also have the fact rejoin isn't winding the clock back to 2016, firstly we would loose all of our opt outs, things like the rebate, the euro, etc.. I don't think the reality would actually be popular.

Secondly the UK blocked a number of things like the EU Army (personally I think its a terrible idea, countries that don't spend enough looking to combine to "save" money) so it isn't the same EU.

Lastly see above mentioned jobsworth behaviour, I would not be surprised if the EU demanded the UK to complete all the paperwork of a new joiner and drag the process out as long as possible (it takes ~10 years for most countries).

Far better to put the UK on a stable footing and then ask if EU membership is something the UK still wants. It took the 13 years to get to this point, so its unlikely everything will be fixed during the next government. So why bring something like rejoining up?

stevecrox, (edited )
stevecrox avatar

Similar to most navies.

Engineering's workload won't really change, they'll do certain types of maintenance.

Most navies don't have command staff on the bridge full time. There would be a watch officer who is fairly junior learning how to operate the ship so the down time is an opportunity for them to grow and learn.

Most navies seperate the captain and first officer, with the first officer involved in running the ship and the captain running the big picture.

So you would expect the first officer to spend the time checking on every department to ensure they are up to standard.

That would mean department heads would be running drills or bringing equipment down for maintenance so its ready.

The captain would likely be planning and thinking through the encounter.

For any free time senior officers have there is probably a mountain of reports (personnel, ship, intelligence, etc..) to read and keep tabs on.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

The other person was just wrong.

Large scale Hydrogen generation isn't generated in a fossil free way, Hydrogen can be generated is a green way but the infrastructure isn't there to support SLS.

Hydrogen is high ISP (miles per gallon) by rubbish thrust (engine torque).

This means SLS only works with Solid Rocket Boosters, these are highly toxic and release green house contributing material into the upper atmosphere. I suspect you would find Falcon 9/Starship are less polluting as a result.

Lastly the person implies SLS could be fueled by space sources (e.g. the moon).

SLS is a 2.5 stage rocket, the boosters are ditched in Earths Atmosphere and the first stage ditched at the edge of space. The current second stage doesn't quite make low earth orbit.

So someone would have to mine materials on the moon and ship them back. This would be far more expensive than producing hydrogen on Earth.

Hydrogen on the moon makes sense if your in lunar orbit, not from Earth.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

The GAO has performed an annual review of the Space Launch System every year since 2014 and switched to reviewing the Artemis program in 2019.

Each year the GAO points out Nasa isn't tracking any costs and Nasa argues with the GAO about the costs they assign. Then the GAO points out Nasa has no concrete plan to reduce costs, Nasa then goes nu'uh (see the articles cost reduction "objectives").

The last two reports have focused on the RS-25 engine, last time the GAO was unhappy because an engine cost Nasa $100 million and Nasa had just granted a development contract to reduce the cost of the engine.

However if you took the headline cost of the contract and split it over planned engines it was greater than the desired cost savings. Nasa response was development costs don't count.

Congress reviews GAO reports and decides to give SLS more money.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

Thats just national pride talking,

Personally I think Plymouth's Pasties are superior to all other pasties (Ron Dewney for the win) and love them. But a pasty can only be so good and I accept people wouldn't put it in a S tier for food.

Another example is Americans claiming Jack Daniels is the best whiskey.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

Both the US and UK define a biscuit as a small unleavened cake.

For some reason US folks call all but one type of small unleavened cakes "coookies" which is a specific type of biscuit.

It would be like calling all beer "stout".

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

Years ago there was no way to share IDE settings between developers.

You ended up with some developers choosing a tab width of 2 spaces, some choosing 4 spaces and as there was no linting enforcement some people using 2-4 spaces depending on their IDE settings.

This resulted in an unreadable mess as stuff was idented to all sorts of random levels.

It doesn't matter if you use tabs or spaces as long as only one type is consistently used within a project.

Spaces tends to win because inevitably there are times you need to use spaces and so its difficult to ensure a project only uses tabs for identation.

IDE's support converting tabs into spaces based on tab width and code formatting will ensure correct indentation. You can now have centralised IDE settings so everyone gets the same setup.

Honestly 99% of people don't care about formatting (they only care when consistency isn't enforced and code is hard to read), there is always one person who wants a 60 charracter line width or only tabs or double new lined parathensis. Who then sucks up huge amounts of the team time arguing their thing is a must while they code in emacs, unlike the rest of the team using an actual ide.

stevecrox, (edited )
stevecrox avatar

Do not mix tabs and spaces.

Its impossible to automate checking that tabs were only used for indentation and spacing for precise alignment. So you then take on a burden of manually checking

You end up with the issue where someone didn't realise and space idented or anouther person used tabs for precise alignment and people forget to check the whitespace characters in review and it ends up going inconsistent and becoming a huge pile of technical debt to fix.

Use only one, you can automate enforcement and ensure the code renders consistency.

Linux file system developer: we're severely under-resourced (lore.kernel.org)

I’ve said this previously, and I’ll say it again: we’re severely under-resourced. Not just XFS, the whole fsdevel community. As a developer and later a maintainer, I’ve learnt the hard way that there is a very large amount of non-coding work is necessary to build a good filesystem. There’s enough not-really-coding work...

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

The linux kernel is very old school in how it is run and originally a big part of the DevSecOps movement was removing a lot of manual overhead.

Moving on to something like Gitea (codeberg) would give you a better diff view and is quicker/easier than posting a patch to a mailing list.

The branching model of the kernel is something people write up on paper that looks great (much like Gitflow) but is really time consuming to manage. Moving to feature branch workflow and creating a release branches as part of the release process allows a ton of things to be automated and simplified.

Similarly file systems aren't really device specific, so you could build system tests for them for benchmarking and standard use cases.

Setting up a CI to perform smoke testing and linting, is fairly standard.

Its really easy to setup a CI to trigger when a new branch/pr is created/updated, this means review becomes reduced to checking business logic which makes reviews really quick and easy.

Similarly moving on to a decent issue tracker, Jira's support for Epic's/stories/tasks/capabilities and its linking ability is a huge simplifier for long term planning.

You can do things like define OKR's and then attach Epics to them and Stories/tasks to epics which lets you track progress to goals.

You can use issues the way the linux community currently uses mailing lists.

Combined with a Kanban board for tracking, progress of tickets. You remove a ton of pain.

Although open source issue trackers are missing the key productivity enablers of Jira, which makes these improvements hard to realise.

The issue is people, the linux kernel maintainers have been working one way for decades. Getting them to adopt new tools will be heavily resisted, same with changing how they work.

Its like everyone outside, knows a breaking the ABI definition from the sub system implementation would create a far more stable ABI which would solve a bunch of issues and allow change when needed, except no one in the kernel will entertain the idea.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

I am actually arguing for a stable ABI.

The few times I have had to compile out of tree drivers for the linux kernel its usually failed because the ABI has changed.

Each time I have looked into it, I found code churn, e.g. changing an enum to a char (or the other way) or messing with the parameter order.

If I was empire of the world, the linux kernel would be built using conan.io, with device trees pulling down drivers as dependencies.

The Linux ABI Headers would move out into their own seperately managed project. Which is released and managed at its own rate. Subsystem maintainers would have to raise pull requests to change the ABI and changing a parameter from enum to char because you prefer chars wouldn't be good enough.

Each subsystem would be its own "project" and with a logical repository structure (e.g. intel and amd gpu drivers don't share code so why would they be in the same repo?) And built against the appropriate ABI version with each repository released at its own rate.

Unsupported drivers would then be forked into their own repositories. This simplifies depreciation since its external to the supported drivers and doesn't need to be refactored or maintained. If distributions can build them and want to include the driver they can.

Linus job would be to maintain the core kernel, device trees and ABI projects and provide a bill of materials for a selection of linux kernel/abi/drivers version which are supported.

Lastly since every driver is a descrete buildable component, it would make it far easier for distributions to check if the driver is compatible (e.g. change a dependency version and build) with the kernel ABI they are using and provide new drivers with the build.

None of this will ever happen. C/C++ developers loath dependency management and people can ve stringly attached to mono repos for some reason.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

This is why Java rocks with ETL, the language is built to access files via input/output streams.

It means you don't need to download a local copy of a file, you can drop it into a data lake (S3, HDFS, etc..) and pass around a URI reference.

Considering the size of Large Language Models I really am surprised at how poor streaming is handled within Python.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

During the pandemic I had some unoccupied python graduates I wanted to teach data engineering to.

Initially I had them implement REST wrappers around Apache OpenNLP and SpaCy and then compare the results of random data sets (project Gutenberg, sharepoint, etc..).

I ended up stealing a grad data scientist because we couldn't find a difference (while there was a difference in confidence, the actual matches were identical).

SpaCy required 1vCPU and 12GiB of RAM to produce the same result as OpenNLP that was running on 0.5 vCPU and 4.5 GiB of RAM.

2 grads were assigned a Spring Boot/Camel/OpenNLP stack and 2 a Spacy/Flask application. It took both groups 4 weeks to get a working result.

The team slowly acquired lockdown staff so I introduced Minio/RabbitMQ/Nifi/Hadoop/Express/React and then different file types (not raw UTF-8, but what about doc, pdf, etc..) for NLP pipelines. They built a fairly complex NLP processing system with a data exploration UI.

I figured I had a group to help me figure out Python best approach in the space, but Python limitations just lead to stuff like needing a Kubernetes volume to host data.

Conversely none of the data scientists we acquired were willing to code in anything but Python.

I tried arguing in my company of the time there was a huge unsolved bit of market there (e.g. MLOP's)

Alas unless you can show profit on the first customer no business would invest. Which is why I am trying to start a business.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

The issue is the state pension was raided in the 1980's to allow for reduced taxes and so now an increasingly large chunk of the national budget goes on state pensions.

If you factor in the majority of the NHS budget goes on geriatric care or elder social care you end up with more than 50% of the annual budget is to support the elderly.

Its not sustainable.

I think the easiest approach would be to means test the state pension by using tax thresholds. If your household income (excluding state pension) exceeds the free tax threshold (£12,500) then you don't qualify for a state pension.

Ideally we would increase minimum wage, the tax thresholds and state pension to align with the living wage foundation recommendations.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

As an admin, how do kbin moderation tools compare?

Also does lemmy.world have the spare cash to offer cash for features?

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

It was an incredibly poor technical choice.

Programming goes through fads where people will claim X can solve every problem. Eventually people realise a languages strengths/weaknesses and communities form.

Rust is the current fad language, its developed a strong following in C/C++ communities but they have nothing to do with middleware (the role Lemmy is using Rust).

It means lemmy devs will have to build everything themselves (instead of focussing on lemmy) and the pool of contributor's will remain small.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

See my goto is Java/Spring Boot or Typescript/TSOA.

I avoid Python because Setuptools/Twine/FastAPI/<insert major framework> docs conflict and seems to change so creating a good practice project layout is a huge time sink and none of the Python devs I meet seem to understand it.

I am doing GoLang atm, its ok but dev adoption is low where I am and no one has shown me a killer library/framework and being controlled by Google I am waiting for them to get bored and kill it.

Spring Boot takes longer to get going than TSOA/Express but hibernate makes SQL interactions trivial. I love typescript but types makes complex NoSQL queries far more convoluted than Java equivalents (its because Types can't inherit and client libraries don't use interfaces). So TSOA rocks in cases of speed or simplicity.

stevecrox,
stevecrox avatar

I don't think its aged well.

This game looked incredible for the time and introduced a rail gun sniper rifle you could one shot kill people with.

This map let you camp out and be a sniper but it was possible to overwhelm the sniper so the game stayed fluid and teams had to support their sniper.

Quake, HL2 Deathmatch, Counterstrike had similar weapons but quickly filled with people who could launch themselves 100ft in the air and headshot someone half a map away through a window which is why single shot weapons faded out of FPS games.

If you try multiplayer on some of these games, the skill level of opponents is even higher, they know every trick and execute them flawlessly. This destroys the reason the map was so good.

Playing the sniper in 4 player borderlands story is probably the closest you would get to the original experience.

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