Flat memes are the best

I just realized we’re having a “serious” discussion on /c/memes right now. I’ll just leave this here then

Wow you’re still just as funny as you were last time I talked to you

Taking territory is only meaningful if you can hold it

Correct. And they absolutely can hold it. On the first try it took Russia months to take it, and I don’t see how they can do that again, given all the troops that were involved are now in Kherson. But I guess we’ll just have to see.

orderly and strategic withdrawal.

Lol no. Literally just take a look at https://twitter.com/UAWeapons and you’ll see tons of abandoned and destroyed Russian vehicles. They were completely overwhelmed in Kharkiv and did not plan this. Of course it’s not all precisely geolocatable but it has to come from somewhere.

This is a war of attrition

Correct. And majority of the Russian army is in Kherson with their back towards a river with no bridges. Supplies are limited and they are unable to move a meaningful amount of vehicles in or out of Kherson. This is completely unsustainable in the long term.

Even western media admits that the fighting is far more expensive on the Ukrainian side

It sure is expensive. But Kherson has tied so many russian resources that Ukraine now managed to steamroll through Kharkiv. It doesn’t matter whether Kharkiv was just an orderly retreat (it wasn’t) or a “sign of goodwill” (it wasn’t) or a rout (it was), Ukraine just wants their territory back. And there is “steady” progress on Kherson too, at least more steady than LDPR progress on Pisky and Bakhmut

zero evidence that HIMARS have made any strategic impact

HIMARS is the reason Russian logistics are completely fucked in Kherson. It’s also the reason for the rise in “smoking accidents” in ammo dumps on Russian occupied territory.

Russia has […] MLRS systems comparable to HIMARS

So in Russias hands they do have strategic impact? Also please tell me the name. I’m looking for something with about 80km range, less than 10m deviation at max range, and which is actually used by Russia. So far I have only seen them use Kalibrs for comparable targets, and those are much more expensive than HIMARS rockets and easier to intercept. It’s also questionable how many of those are still left.

I’m done with this thread, we both know this discussion won’t reach a conclusion. I’m interested to see where our points will stand in another 6 months

The Kharkiv offensive won’t decide the outcome of the entire war of course. But with how little the front has moved in the last two months, this sudden change is pretty big. It was also very unexpected because everyone kept talking about Kherson before. Every bit of territory matters to Ukraine, and I guess they saw this was the most lightly defended part.

You’ll have to elaborate on what exactly makes Izyum and Lyman strategically important in this war

Izyum and Lyman provide an additional axis to attack Sloviansk and Kramatorsk. (Successfully) attacking from that direction and from the east could have allowed Russia to encircle and therefore conquer a large part of Donetsk Oblast. Now they can only attack from the mostly heavily fortified east. Taking Donetsk Oblast was one of their big plans, right? Well it just became much harder. Also Luhansk is now open to attack from the west, with the only big defense being the Oskil river. That’s where the main front is, right? Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast, the Donbass region?

Also there was a lot of equipment left behind. Russia still has a lot of tanks at home, but it still hurts, especially when the enemy is able to make use of it. Lots of POWs as well.

LPR and DPR making steady gains

What did they gain in the last two months? Pisky? With all 6 inhabitants? Their area gains are miniscule compared to what just happened in a span of days.

Kherson

Russia had no gains in Kherson for a while now and some small area losses. The fight there is extremely expensive for both sides, but Kherson is currently in a similar situation as Severodonetsk was a few months ago, just with the sides switched. There are no working bridges over the Dnieper, making supplies extremely difficult because they have to be ferried over the river. And those ferries are constantly harassed by HIMARS strikes. With no hope for properly supplying the area, it is basically already lost. It’s just a matter of time, and Ukraine has the logistical advantage

Kupyansk is a critical node to supply Izyum and Lyman. Russia did heavy fighting for weeks to take these two cities and constantly launched attacks from there, binding a lot of Ukrainian troops. With Kupyansk gone, Izyum is fully cut off (and already confirmed taken) and Lyman is now very difficult to access for Russians (rail access is gone and the major roads lead to ukrainian held territory) as only small side streets are left for the Russians. Proper logistics to Lyman are pretty much impossible now and it’s a matter of time until Russia has to leave it too. Rail access to Severodonetsk is also gone, but it can still be supplied through Svatove, so I don’t think it will change hands soon (unless the rumours of Russians abandoning Svatove are true, which I doubt at this moment).

I also doubt Russia will counterattack anything in Kharkiv in the near future. They announced fully retreating from Kharkiv oblast and there’s already confirmations of ukrainian troops in cities/villages north of Kharkiv even though they shouldn’t be really affected by the attack on Kupyansk. They might hold on to the east of the Oskil river though, in an attempt to keep Severodonetsk

Yeah snap firefox always took a while to launch for me. My real problem though was that it just seemed to ignore my systems DNS settings so I couldn’t use it to access internal websites in my VPN, and there was no simple fix for that. Just installed native firefox from some sketchy repo instead

Or it was yet another pump and dump

Just tried finding some lemmy posts in DuckDuckGo. Doesn’t seem like they’re indexed

French has dedicated words for numbers 1 to 16. The numbers 17, 18, 19 are just “ten seven” “ten eight” ten nine". After that there is a pretty sensible pattern until 79 (“twenty”, “twenty and one”, “twenty two”, etc.). 80 is “four twenty”, and the pattern above 80 until 100 is saying “four twenty” followed by what number has to be added to 80 to get the desired result. For example 85 is “four twenty five”, 90 is “four twenty ten”, 94 is “four twenty fourteen”, and so on. Above one hundred you just start counting from zero but prepend the number of hundreds/thousands/millions to the word, like in English. 104 is “hundred four” (not one hundred four), 398 is “three hundred four twenty ten eight”, 7425 is “seven thousand four hundred twenty five”

Yes, it leads to a lot of good art criticizing censorship

The git urls are always ssh and always require authentication. The https urls don’t require authentication (if the repo is public)

This has unfortunately been going on for decades. They bulldozed many many places. There’s a Wikipedia list. It also says over one hundred thousand people have been displaced just for brown coal mining in Germany. Here’s a map of the largest brown coal mining area. The grey villages have been destroyed and the orange ones will be next. It’s sad how this destruction can go on while everyone else is much more concerned about luxury issues like speed limits

Someone should make a ProtonMail<->IMAP proxy that works for free users

They’ll possibly even need two tons :P

If I click on “Announcements”, “News”, “About Us”, or “Donate”, the links back to “Home” and “Get Started” lead to a 404 page.

Cool project though, could be really useful to indie game devs and animation studios

Thunderbird does it too

If you have a water stream nearby, using excess energy to pump the water upstream (so it passes through your generator again when there is no excess) is the greenest thing.

Do you have some resources on how to do that and what performance this could provide on a small scale?

Refurbished standalone batteries would be great too.

I generally wouldn’t want to do high power applications when running on battery. In an optimal case the use of washing machines and other heavy stuff could be timed so they mostly run while the solar panels are overproducing

Yeah feeding back into the grid has the least conversion losses and doesn’t take additional material.

Local energy storage can be useful though for complete self-sufficiency (at least in summer), but with the currently available options there will be no return of investment, both financially and environmentally, or they just don’t have enough capacity/power to keep a family powered over night. I hope EV manufacturers will continue experimenting with using EV batteries as storage for solar power, it could be a nice combo for people who need a car.

That picture is not from Mariupol. It’s in Irpin next to Kiev. And I have seen it before in the context of civilians using the bridge to hide from shelling. There’s a video of it too from some reporter in a language I don’t understand: https://twitter.com/La_SER/status/1500053681273724931
This does not look like civilians being held hostage at all.

As for the telegram video, it’s hard to verify. It’s not terribly hard to let some random woman say something in front of a camera. And looking at the rest of the channel, it seems to be an extremely pro-invasion channel as well. I guess we will have to wait until there are more details, but I highly doubt nobody was informed of the corridor.

And let’s not forget the most important part: If Russia simply didn’t invade, all of these humanitarian crises wouldn’t have existed in the first place