CapricornNoble

> Ukraine is gaining some ground, but very slowly. It's basically a stalemate.

Ukraine has been gaining some open fields, while losing major urban areas. Kostyantynivka just fell and Russian troops are securing the high ground overlooking the Slovyansk-Kramatorsk urban conglomerate. Pokrovsk also fell faster than expected, suggesting that Ukraine increasingly lacks the infantry manpower density to defend urban terrain.

> As long as the EU keeps supporting them, I think Ukraine will be better able to maintain the current situation than Russia.

European support doesn't rectify Ukraine's critical vulnerability: manpower...or a lack thereof. Although Euro governments seem like they might start deporting military-age Ukrainian males back to Ukraine so they can be forcibly conscripted....because sending men to their deaths against their will screams "Western liberal values", or something.

> I think a European coalition sending real practical ground and air support would help a lot

Russian analysts have been coming on Western alt-media outlets warning that Russian hardliners are increasingly advocating for striking logistics and military production sites in Europe. HistoryLegends has a good video about how France, one of the more experienced and expeditionary European countries, absolutely struggled to even get a brigade into Romania for an exercise. Europe could definitely send air support.....but do you think European citizens are ready for their cities to eat Oreshniks (at a minimum) as a response?

> I suspect sufficient support could force a breakthrough in southern Ukraine an liberate a very large chunk of land very quickly.

There isn't enough combat engineering vehicles in all of Europe to clear lanes through the Surovikin Line. The Ukrainians already learned this the hard way in summer 2023.

>>Probably the biggest learning from the Ukraine war alone is the effectiveness of cheap drones. It was suspected for years but hadn't been put to the test yet.

Some of us were paying attention as early as the 2016-17 Battle of Mosul, when ISIS was using DJI drones to drop grenades into the turret hatches of Iraqi uparmored Humvees. Others started to notice during the Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020, when Azeri UAV superiority dominated Armenian ground forces. But all of these professionals were like the military officers who observed the Boer Wars, and the Russo-Japanese War, and then wrote in the military journals of their day about how machineguns were gonna change warfare in a very bad way.

Flag officers still slept-walked into the carnage of WW1 trench warfare....shrug. "History doesn't repeat but it rhymes."

I haven't seen this GPU mentioned on HN. 24GB DDR6 @ ~$500 USD. Can we finally stop buying used RTX3090s if we wanna run LLMs at home at a reasonable price?

Any Chinese HN members able/willing to benchmark one of these with some open models and share the results?

I actually completely agree on all points. #47/DJT2 is uniquely disastrous for the American Empire. I think Kamala is a narcissistic sociopath but DJT is that PLUS a bully with a fragile ego and the most ridiculously overconfident pathological liar I've ever seen in high office.

>You don't hear american expats or expats from any other western country talking about how much they hate their regime.

As an American expat this is laughable to me, plenty of my peers shit on the US government in general and Trump's administration in particular.