Hacker News: mopsi

New comment by mopsi in "Tracing a powerful GNSS interference source over Europe"

mopsi — Sun, 07 Jun 2026 19:45:05 +0000

Because they thought that everything would be over in three days and business would continue as usual, as it did after 2014.

New comment by mopsi in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

mopsi — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 21:01:28 +0000

Millions of Leave voters have died in the decade since the referendum.

Graph: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...

Article: https://www.thenewworld.co.uk/peter-kellner-an-anti-brexit-m...

New comment by mopsi in "EU should expand to 40 states – including Canada"

mopsi — Thu, 04 Jun 2026 20:58:38 +0000

And yet, the US seems much closer to absolute monarchy than Belgium with their actual king.

New comment by mopsi in "The American Missile Crisis"

mopsi — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 12:53:51 +0000

Vehicles, not only tanks. For instance, the mobility of the Red Army relied on Studebaker trucks. The US delivered about 115 000 of them. In total, including other types of vehicles like Jeeps, the USSR received about 400 000 vehicles.

Roughly 50-65% of Red Army's transport pool was US-made.

New comment by mopsi in "MP3s from Google Drive in Music Assistant on Home Assistant"

mopsi — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 00:47:12 +0000

People in arts and engineering can easily fill terabytes upon terabytes. RAW photos, uncompressed audio, 3D laser scans etc consume gigabytes like they're nothing, especially if you store many intermediary files of the same thing.

New comment by mopsi in "In northern Ukraine, it was boy vs. Russian drone. The boy won"

mopsi — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 23:18:15 +0000

Осия 8:7.

New comment by mopsi in "The dangerous delusion of modern warfare"

mopsi — Sun, 31 May 2026 20:56:38 +0000

Andrei Soldatov is not merely "one russian journalist". Since 2000, he has been operating agentura.ru, which publishes information about Russian security services. He is well-connected and widely considered one of the most serious independent experts on the Russian security apparatus.

New comment by mopsi in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mopsi — Sat, 30 May 2026 12:41:39 +0000

  > that is an unsubstantiated claim that's actually false and doesn't even preclude the right of any group of people in sufficient majority to exercise self-govern, by their mere will and manifestation,

There was no majority, no will, no manifestation. Only Russian soldiers and operatives cosplaying as "separatists" to carve off a piece of another country. It's waste of everyone's time to pursue this contrived narrative and try to shoehorn it into something seemingly real.

  > that vote didn't reach the required 3/4 of the threshold required by the constitution for impeachment.

They didn't vote for impeachment, but to hold early elections. Impeachment is an American thing. European democracies replace failed governments through negotiations between parliamentary factions, and if they fail to form a new government or prefer to request a fresh mandate from the electorate, hold elections ahead of the regular schedule.

  > yanukovich had allegedly relinquished his position, which actually means he had to flee the country for his life because of the threat of the nazi nationalists

Yanukovych fled the country after 108 protesters were killed and he was about to get criminally charged for his role in it. His political base of support collapsed overnight, as is evident from the unanimous vote of Ukrainian parliament to hold early elections: not even a single member of his own party voted in favor of Yanukovych. His desperate last-minute attempts to negotiate some deal to save his ass fell through and he ran.

New comment by mopsi in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mopsi — Fri, 29 May 2026 18:01:02 +0000

  > there isn't really a clear definition of what constitutes "a people".

It's true that the wording is open to interpretation, but not in the case of Ukraine. Nobody considers the Ukrainians and Russians living in the Donbas as a separate ethnicity or people; not they themselves, nor anyone else.

  > after the coup in 2014

There was no coup. "Ukrainian MPs have voted to oust President Viktor Yanukovych and hold early presidential elections on 25 May." (BBC, 22 February 2014).

New comment by mopsi in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mopsi — Thu, 28 May 2026 22:05:05 +0000

  >  that ruling completely disregards the right of donbas to self-determination

Because there are no grounds for it. The right to self-determination is the right of an ethnicity to self-govern. The people of Donbas are not a distinct ethnicity, but almost entirely either Ukrainians or Russians. That's a very clear-cut case.

  >   if donbas didn't really want to secede (or didn't know how)

There was no secession movement. Opinion polls placed secession in the "fringe" category. More people in Texas support secession than did in the eastern regions of Ukraine.

New comment by mopsi in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mopsi — Thu, 28 May 2026 21:44:03 +0000

This is an utterly naive take. Russia would in that case forcibly conscript from Ukraine's population for further westward invasions, which serves the purpose of exterminating the local male population to suppress resistance and make room for Russian settlers. We already saw this during the initial invasion in 2014 and the forcible conscription early in the full-scale invasion in 2022.

Russia's ambitions are laid out in the ultimatum presented in 2021.

New comment by mopsi in "Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers"

mopsi — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:57:27 +0000

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has established that there was no genuine separatism in Eastern Ukraine in 2014. From the get-go, these were operatives of Russian military and special services, or people under their direct control. Girkin, one of the main leaders of Russian forces in Ukraine, has confirmed the same: there was no grassroots action; it was them who started the war in 2014. Removing insignia from uniforms does not make it any less of a foreign invasion.

ECHR's lengthy verdict on the responsibility of the MH-17 shootdown lays out all the relevant facts.

New comment by mopsi in "Russian Troops' Fear Grows as Ukraine AI "Slaughterbot" Drones Headhunt Them"

mopsi — Tue, 26 May 2026 22:11:46 +0000

I fail to see how absorption into Russian Federation would do anything other than significantly worsen the human rights situation in Donbas, given that freedom rankings place Russia near North Korea, Somalia and Iran.

New comment by mopsi in "Russian Troops' Fear Grows as Ukraine AI "Slaughterbot" Drones Headhunt Them"

mopsi — Mon, 25 May 2026 12:52:04 +0000

There's a way to end it all in a single phone call. Putin picks up a phone, calls Belousov and orders the withdrawal from Ukraine.

New comment by mopsi in "Russian Troops' Fear Grows as Ukraine AI "Slaughterbot" Drones Headhunt Them"

mopsi — Sun, 24 May 2026 22:17:10 +0000

1600+ schools have been damaged in Ukraine and several hundred have been completely destroyed. Outrage? This is not even news anymore. People, too, die every day under Russian attacks. Hundreds of thousands are permanently disabled or dead. This is the normalcy that Russia has created. The whole country of 140 million people is too afraid or indifferent to stage even a single large protest over it.

I found the panicked reactions of Moscow's inhabitants amusing when a few Ukrainian drones recently hit the oil plants in the suburbs of Moscow. For years, Putin's propaganda machine had convinced them that the war is "somethere there, far away." They were genuinely confused why the things around them were going up in flames: "Why are we being bombed?! The war is in Ukraine!"

It reminded me the words of Arthur Harris, the chief of Britain's Bomber Command: "The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind."

New comment by mopsi in "Russian Troops' Fear Grows as Ukraine AI "Slaughterbot" Drones Headhunt Them"

mopsi — Sun, 24 May 2026 15:12:18 +0000

  > By the way, nowhere I see a report on the very recent ukranian attack on the school in Starobelsk which left 10 (known for now) adolescents killed.

It's everywhere: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y74lwx395o

BBC and others add a bit that you left out: that it was one of three pilot schools of Rubicon, the most capable Russian drone unit. In the same night, Ukraine also demolished the FSB HQ of counterintelligence for the entire occupied Ukraine. Very painful hits. This explains the unusual hysteria and impotent rage in Russian media today, even Putin himself is whining on the telly about the strike, a rare sight.

New comment by mopsi in "Putin Can No Longer Hide His Catastrophe"

mopsi — Sun, 24 May 2026 10:47:45 +0000

Yes. He will definitely find more ways to make things worse for Russia in 2026 as well.

New comment by mopsi in "Russia is starting to lose ground in Ukraine"

mopsi — Mon, 18 May 2026 18:01:48 +0000

Zeihan is a strange guy who seems to take a lot of his information from online discourse, which is a poor substitute for first-hand knowledge. The ground truth is very blunt: Russia has not bothered to install even a chain-link fence along its European border. Some sections have a sand strip to detect crossings, others not even that, most of it looks like this: https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~hughwallis/misc/FIRU/DSCN237... Mushroomers and other foragers often get lost and end up walking into Russia (and vice versa) without even realizing it. This is such a regular occurrence that it receives only warning or a small fine, and a few sentences in local newspapers.

A counterexample comes from post-2022 Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland: every single one of them is digging anti-tank trenches along the border with Russia, installing everything from surveillance systems to reinforced bunkers and pillboxes, preparing minefields to be laid and bridges to be blown up. Things have gone so far that some of them are discussing dismantling railway lines connecting with Russia to prevent them from being used by invading forces.

No such preparations can be seen on the Russian side of the border, because in the post-Cold War world, everyone recognizes that an attack from Europe is a delusional fantasy. There's no will and no means for that.

New comment by mopsi in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

mopsi — Sat, 16 May 2026 12:52:22 +0000

What do you mean by "that far back"? Russian territorial expansion and eradication of the native populace are on-going events, not distant history.

New comment by mopsi in "Details of the Daring Airdrop at Tristan Da Cunha"

mopsi — Sat, 16 May 2026 11:31:23 +0000

> My point is that when we compare the two, one is vastly more megalomaniac and expansionist.

The one that grew through conquest and oppression from a small city-state to the largest country on the planet that spans 11 timezones and still lusts for more?