An assault rifle with a ~30 round clip is great for shooting drones in the hands of a trained human but automation + bullets creates a massive issue.

A human with an assault rifle can observe a drone in context to their firing angle and establish a reasonable assessment of risk when firing in a snap decision…a robot? Well most of the time…

I feel like this community is accidentally also about Lisp.

Also, billionaires are always a national security risk.

On this point, to bring it back to something that isn’t armchair general stuff, a lot of the technology involved with making 155mm trucks and carriages and associated electronics isn’t too far from a lot of heavy industrial truck work, the biggest difference in chassis design is the immense cost and weight of armoring the passenger compartments over a civilian vehicle… but even there Ukraine is on a technological edge in the sense that the passenger cabs in these artillery systems are being designed to protect to some degree from from air pressure blast waves from explosions, either from the cannon/rockets on the vehicle or from being attacked by a UAV or something else… but just as operating heavy weapons over time exposes you to similar risks as repeated concussions so do many heavy machines that are utilized in heavy industry (another reason UGVs are so important for allowing human operators to operate heavy equipment from nearby but not physically ON TOP of the violently loud machine), just because we don’t necessarily like to talk about the quantifiable negative impacts of noise on human bodies doesn’t mean it doesn’t cost us, and here is a whole new world of technology Ukraine has been forced to deal with on a practical level holistically in defending itself.

For an example of this see how in the design of the 155mm Archer (swedish, but whatever, it proved itself in Ukraine) automated artillery system part of the design specifications was not to expose the crew operating the cannon to concussive air pressure, from the beginning that was valued in the design process and that has many practical implications too for peaceful sophisticated engineering of heavy industrial equipment.

The people cranking out these machines of war can turn around in with some mild bit of retraining start cranking out heavy industrial trucks that can do an immense amount of peaceful work while preserving the health of the operators.

Ukraine’s adoption of many heavy ground and air vehicles relying on electric drive systems also points to a world where noise and air pollution from heavy industrial work can be massively reduced, which has not only human implications but of course ecological implications.

I am not some massive fan of heavy industrial stuff or anything, but we are talking about the things that build bridges where they are needed and that can build apartment buildings where they are needed, build water infrastructure for entire cities etc…

Yes and that is great but also don’t forget.

According to Militarnyi, Ukraine had manufactured more than 600 Bohdana artillery systems by March 2026. The 155mm howitzer can strike targets at distances of up to 50 kilometers (31 miles), depending on ammunition.

https://united24media.com/war-in-ukraine/ukraines-battle-tested-bohdana-howitzers-set-for-polish-production-as-defense-firms-join-forces-24040

These can also fire ramjet guided munitions, potentially for even air defense if a sophisticated articulating turret is used… this stuff doesn’t get reported on because it is so industrial, but also 600 is a monstrous amount of 155mm artillery and by now that number is way higher likely if that wasn’t always an under count…

Look at the shear size of those things

The big change is that Ukraine is able to hit the static air infrastructure the fighterbombers rely on to deploy glidebombs at long ranges with drones and missiles. This gpuges the bottom out of russia’s landwar strategy since they lost the ground artillery war to Ukraine.

Note, russia still uses an immense amount of artillery, but the best use of artillery is to put it in threatening positions and russia cannot do that anywhere near the frontline anymore without getting curbstomped by Ukraine…so russia still uses all that artillery it just isn’t where it ever really needs to be to truly count.

Wow! Every time I see the wreck it takes my breath away… It has been preserved so well! If you look closer you can still see the ads they put everywhere on the search pages as a last ditch effort to keep it afloat just before it sunk.

This is as close as we go however, we will only trail our submersible along the edges of the outer hull, this is the resting place of thousands and thousands of bots and it would be disrespectful to disturb their grave…also you need to login to an account and eew…

Yeah I am not trying to downplay anything, but this is the first time Ukraine consistently has had the initiative in most places across the frontline, while right now and this winter will be brutal there has also never been a point in this war before where Ukrainians could sit in their foxhole individually but in a sense together and think “yeah this sucks but russia isn’t making any progress, there is no inevitable march of the russian war machine anymore, we broke that”… and to me that is more valuable than anything else in this conflict in terms of power.

Russia can deny deny deny deny deny deny but it cannot take from Ukraine in the same way it used to, which changes the relationship of endurance completely.

This was after all what cities like Pokrovsk were forced to sacrifice themselves for and even though these places were eventually occupied the defense Ukraine fought did the task it was necessary to do, it stopped a tsunami in its tracks, not just locally but across the entire wavefront.

You have to understand, this came about after Ukraine got extremely effective with counter battery radars, drones and artillery crews at hunting russian artilleru, this was a precursor to Operation Vivaldi for example.

The mass number of glide bombs exposes how desperately russia uses them as an artillery crutch… and Ukraine has already hit multiple fighterbombers at bases deep in russian territory, so this crutch is already breaking.

Let me put it this way, if russia can’t make progress after hurtling that many glide bombs at Ukraine what happens when they begin to lose that crutch?

It used to be more interesting and elaborate, switching between different models. I used to use Cursor, then Codex, but since Opus 5.5 came out, I just use the Claude IDE. I got rid of all my skills and just set it to medium. Then I vaguely talk to it about very high-end things that I want, and it comes back with magic. Rinse and repeat.

I’d say the biggest trick is just to tell it what complete looks like. Be very specific about what you want it to come back with once it’s done. That gives it a good idea what the goal is. It’ll automatically create subagents and all that stuff. Although if you have money to burn and you’re doing something large, you can tell it to just go wide or boil the ocean.

Also, make sure you’re working on at least five different things. Otherwise, you’re sitting around for one agent.

Hackernews comments always make me feel like I am robotripping and I accidentally crossed into a different reality. There are worse things than death…

Ubisoft CEOs

appears out of a bush Hey rocketman!!! Is that you? Crazy to see you out in the Zone even after all of these years. Wait where is your helmet? Also is that story about you true??

You sound like an artillery man.

Maybe, but that is kind of like saying a blacksmith is an anvil man, it implies the blacksmith can do their work without an anvil and simply prefers to use it for aesthetics.

Which I guess is what an artillery person would say…

Step 1. BURN AI AND GOOGLE DOWN TO THE GROUND WITH FIRE

Step 2. Hire human teachers and pay/treat them well

Yeah but then my car got impounded and I had to switch over

It has a kickstand yes

I’m a man who loves an analogy, thanks for the french fry story. It makes sense, and aligns with Russia’ passion for corrosive fuckery.

Well if you understand the metaphor, make sure to understand the cruelty done to Ukraine by denying it proper artillery support for far too long even when Ukraine made it clear it needed more. Allies like the US let the situation build up in Ukraine where russia could exploit the “steal a french fry at a time” strategy of small unit dispersed infiltration and before that armored maneuver with obsolete, inadequately armored vehicles… to put it another way this is what artillery has always been for when employed defensively, to channelize the attacking enemy forces into concentrated and vulnerable pushes that can be dismantled by applying overwhelming pressure at just a few points.

Think of artillery at present in Ukraine this way, drones have replaced the first ~15 shells of any given skirmish/battle, which is a lot and they do it with maximum precision but artillery provides the next ~250 shells. After the first ~15 shells the role of drones becomes more and more as the eyes for more traditional artillery rather than being the sledgehammer itself, it just makes basic sense.

The problem for russia is Ukraine got so good at counterbattery operations that russia has been forced to pull back their artillery and can’t place it into threatening positions to provide general artillery pressure along the front which is necessary to maintain a coherent offensive or defense… Russia has spectacularly found a temporary solution in glide bombs and you can absolutely look at the numbers there on that huge shift, but Ukraine is able to reach out and hit the fighterbombers necessary to deploy them at their home airbases so… russia is forced to keep relying on drones to always be the eyes and the sledeghammer at the flashpoints where it really matters.

Remember, just because Putin is Trump’s daddy doesn’t mean Trump can handle being on the losing team with Putin, or that he can handle even being perceived to be on the losing team.

Thankfully Ukraine is winning and while that absolutely pisses Trump and Vance off, in the end when it becomes too apparent Putin is a loser Trump will undoubtedly betray him, Trump is literally incapable of committing to being on the losing team, pathologically.

To be frank one of the reasons things won’t be the same going forward is Ukraine has one of the highest production capacities for high pressure 155mm artillery barrels on earth, before the Ukraine war Ukraine had a prototype or two for the Bohdana, now Ukraine can pump them out in a way that categorically shuts the door on russia being able to militarily push Ukraine around.

I like to use my french fry stealing metaphor here. When Ukraine was denied the magnitude of artillery and artillery shells it needed by partners (who couldn’t necessarily produce them anywhere fast enough for war time levels anyhow) earlier in the war russia could poke Ukrainian defenses and “steal french fries one at a time until they have eaten the whole basket.”

What 155mm artillery does when properly supplied is make it so every time russia tries to “take a french fry” they get punched in the face by shells as big as your torso from 30 kilometers away. Taking one french fry at a time suddenly becomes a winning prospect for the french fry defender not the french fry stealer… this is why russia still must resort to concentrated mechanized armored assaults, the strategy becomes try to steal the whole basket of fries in one go so they get punched in the face a minimal amount of times per french fry…

Of course, that doesn’t work either because even if russia’s armor was properly armored even a basic 155mm shell shreds almost any armor… which in some ways is probably why russia didn’t bother to make proper armor for their vehicles, they knew it wouldn’t matter when the 155mm shells started raining down… and now they are amid a swarm of drones…

Better than being a fascist!