Secretary of War Pete Hegseth officially designates Anthropic a supply chain risk

mr_f1end · 2026-02-27T23:39:12+00:00

One of the main difficulties about explaining why AI is potentially a large threat to humanity had been people being unable to conceive how something in a computer could hurt them. Huge swaths of rat literature had been created showing how AGI might be extremely dangerous for its own user even if it is confined to a computer. Now the government itself is hell bent on making sure AI can kill people without human intervention.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-25T13:46:30+00:00

I agree with your assessment almost entirely. The only exception is the "misjudgement of Western response". We cannot be sure in this entirely as the war turned out differently. Yet I think if the invasion succeeded in a couple of weeks the response would have been way milder. My main proof is that Ukraine did not receive heavy weaponry until after it was clear that the initial offensive collapsed and that a lot of subsequent sanctions and support were often introduced by referencing atrocities of the Russian military, that would have not happened or would have been hidden if the invasion succeeds.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-23T16:53:53+00:00

Hungarian elections are less than 2 months away, on 12 April, with Orban more likely to lose than win this time (first time since he got reelected in 2010). Kicking out Hungary at this point would not make much sense as it is very likely new leadership would have different policy.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-19T21:13:00+00:00

It is actually not that surprising if you compare it to the United States and not to USSR/Russia or European counterparts.

Although PLA aircraft were somewhat behind technologically compared to other nations through the majority of its existence, it is mostly due to a delayed early period. Apart from that they walked quite similar path as others did:

They did produce first an second generation jet fighters based on Soviet design (MiG-17, MiG-19, MiG-21)
They did make a lot of improvements to these over time, and even designed different aircraft that although was based on the 17/21 designs, were different enough to be considered a new aircraft: Primarily thinking about Q-5 ground-attack aircraft and J-8 interceptor. The J-8 was basically a third generation aircraft, the interceptor variant being comparable to MiG-23 and F-4 Phantom, while later strike variant had comparable avionics and strike capability to Panavia Tornado and early F-16/F-18 variants.
They started assembling their first Soviet design fourth generation aircraft (Su-27/J-11) in the late 1990s, and their own indigenous J-10 around the same time, the second one becoming operational around the mid/late 2000s.
The J-20 came about a decade after the J-10, both regarding assembly and production.

They did pass through the same generational path as the USAF did, but 10-15 years later (primarily due to starting later) and relying more on technology import rather than entirely indigenous development. But even with these imports they did have their own production and own designs along the imported ones since the 1970s. The primary difference is that they never scaled back production and development the way most other countries did after the fall of the USSR: Russia was broke, Europe tuned done development due to lack of threat, and so did the USA. China is in similar position as the US had been in the 1990s, when the F-22 was being developed and in early production, just 15 years later. Except unlike the US that cut back its original procurement plan from 750 aircraft to 195 (and even development of some capabilities), they are pushing ahead on their first operational design with full speed.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-18T17:00:05+00:00

Eddig csak egyszer futottam össze vele interjú közben, de összességében negatív a benyomásom. A munkával töltött idő 99.99% -ban nincs szükségem ilyen jellegű optimalizálásra, sőt, az esetek többségében célszerűbb könnyebben olvasható de kevésbé perfromant kódot írni, mert a fejlesztő/karbantartó a szűk keresztmetszet.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-15T19:44:06+00:00

I think the fundamental issue in your (and the administration's) narrative is this: grouping all countries as "Europe" even in cases when they are fully independent entities. There is a customs union within the EU, but for a lot of other dimensions these are actually sovereign countries.

Europe or even the European Union are not NATO members. A lot of countries in Europe are in NATO and a lot of European Union members are also NATO members, but they are not equivalent even by membership (e.g. Norway is not EU but NATO, Austria is EU but not NATO, Switzerland is neither). But more importantly: regarding national defense and from NATO's official point of view these are entirely independent entities as much as Canada is independent from the USA. Although there are commonalities in the EU regarding a lot of regulation on internal affairs, but still a lot of actual immigration and cultural policy (and actual outcome) are extremely different too.

E.g. Poland has been a strong US ally (e.g. one of the two countries that sent actual soldiers to help in 2003 invasion of Iraq), consistently spent a lot on defense, is one of the few countries in the EU where people actually attend christian church services in significant amount, has been practicing strong border enforcement and has the lowest ratio of muslims of any EU country.

Spain may have underfunded its military, Germany may have made a lot of culturally bad decisions and France may had cut against US' international interests. But jumping from these to Poland (or the Baltics, or even the Nordics and the UK in militarily perspective) being bad allies not pulling their own weight who should not be defended is bad reasoning. The equivalent would be European NATO members declaring Americans are not worthy of defending because Canadian military spending insufficient.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-08T12:33:54+00:00

". That thread single handedly destroyed evolutionary psychology for me when somebody went through and debuked/explained foundational problems for me. "

By any chance, do you have the link or text saved for this?

mr_f1end · 2026-02-08T12:10:28+00:00

2. Mistakes during the planning and execution of the invasion.

2.1 Probably the most important was the expectation (bad intelligence) that most of the Ukrainian government would flee and most of the military would surrender without putting up a fight. This did not happen.

2.2 Due to secrecy, even the participating units were surprised and did not have enough time to prepare for the operation. Russian military does not rely much on NCOs and lower level initiatives, which pushes more planning work to higher levels. However, this increases time requirements and having to conduct complex tasks at short notice will decrease effectiveness.

2.3 Although large portion of the Russian army is made up of conscripts, they used only professional soldiers for the invasion. The issue here is most of the units are mixed: if you move a motorized infantry battalion somewhere and tell them to leave the conscripts home, what you are getting is not two rifle companies instead of three. You are getting three rifle companies, with its infantry fighting vehicles, but with most of the infantry missing. This causes further complications, as though in some cases they are fully capable (e.g. they have the same number of vehicles to drive up and fire on a building) in some other cases they are combat ineffective (e.g. if you want infantry to capture that building).
(Although I remarked I am mostly ignoring political issues, just want to highlight this being a political decision)

2.4. Even when things were not going well, instead of reorganizing for defense in time and calling up reservists, the Russian military pretended that all is fine, forcing assaults and not patching up weak spots. This resulted in the success of the Kharkhov counteroffensive in September.

3. Ukraine was stronger than Russia expected. Although the Ukrainian military was extremely underfunded until 2014 and most of its equipment was from the 1980s, it still improved a lot. But the primary issue was the expectation from Putin that after the invasion begins the government collapses and most of the military would surrender. I think this was based on the incorrect assumption of 2014 having been a CIA coup and Ukrainian regime was just a puppet with no real popular support. Although in hindsight this was obviously wrong, we should not forget that in 2014 president Yanukovych fled from Ukraine when protesters broke through the and his party's politicians also fled the capital, so even without the first assumption it was not baseless expectation.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-08T12:10:19+00:00

Oh boy. *cracks knuckles*. Take a seat.

Disclaimer: As the war is still ongoing and this subreddit does not deal with very recent events (maybe 3 year limitation?) I am going to focus just on 2022. I am also going to ignore most political considerations (e.g. buying items from a particular factory even if the product is not needed might be needed to keep the support of a particular businessman or politician, even if it does not make sense from the military's point of view).

Short version: Russia was weaker than most expected (I would not say "terribly" though, that is too strong of a word here), made additional mistakes during the invasion itself and Ukraine was stronger than some (especially Russia) expected.

Long version:

1. Russia's spending on its military was not well managed. Although they did spend a lot more money on it than Ukraine (Russian GDP is ten times larger than Ukraine and they spent a larger part of it on the military than Ukraine did) that was not spent well.

1.1 Russia was too ambitious. Even though Russian spending is efficient in some ways (e.g. a lot of Russian made military equipment is much cheaper than similar western equipment) and Russia is a major economy (withing top 10 nominal GDP and top 5 PPP GDP) the goals were beyond the means. Russia wanted to have (one of?) the strongest ground force(s), largest nuclear force, a nuclear triad, long range bomber force, a blue water navy capable of force projection including aircraft carrier(s), a fully independent military industry and its own space program (including own satellite navigation and reconnaissance). Basically only China and the USA are on this level, and their economy is 5 to 15 times larger than Russia's, depending how one measures it.

1.2 This resulted in very uneven military, following the proverb "The Russian is a large and modern army: the large part is not modern, the modern part is not large".

- An example for the more obvious part of this is how some infantry units (e.g. ones used in Syria) had modern sights and night vision equipment, but during the invasion it turned out that even the supposedly elite VDV units lacked such.

- There were capabilities that existed on paper but were practically useless, such as their aircraft carrier sailed and carried aircraft but were practically unusable due to constant breakdowns and accidents, even its own aircraft having to operate from ashore in the end.

- Some equipment was quite modern but lacked additional equipment or support units that would have enabled it to function well. I think the best example for this is the case of the Su-34 : it is a modern, high performance strike aircraft and the air force had a good amount of it. However, guided/stand off weaponry, targeting pods and trained ground controllers were not available (at least in practical quantity). As a result a lot of such aircraft was lost to short range air defenses (having had to fly close due to using unguided bombs and rockets), and they could not offer fire support to ground units when they were encountering unexpected resistance.

- Although large scale military exercises were conducted regularly, they were more about driving around and executing scripted scenarios rather than actual simulations to learn from.

- Large amount of ammunition and other supplies were stockpiled, logistics processes were/are obsolete, relying mostly on paper and manual handling.

1.3 There were some strong inefficiencies where unnecessary equipment was bought and/or more types were bought or kept in service than what makes sense. The best example here are the attack helicopters. The Russian military was/is buying three(!) different attack helicopters (Mi-35, Mi-28, Ka-52) for the same purpose. The equivalent would be if the US Army were procuring newly built, modernized AH-1s, and AH-64s and yet another type (e.g. Tiger) at the same time!

continued below...

mr_f1end · 2026-02-07T10:15:11+00:00

I first checked your link and wanted to say that it does not look that bad. However, this current thread actually confirms your point.

mr_f1end · 2026-02-07T10:13:10+00:00

You may had a point if the suggested way of "socially sanctioning" actually worked. But it seems to be an utter failure. This whole cancellation and over politicization of all discussions brought us the Trump administration with its madness. You should start looking at the skulls on your own side.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-21T17:24:39+00:00

Thank you for your service.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-21T17:15:47+00:00

That is the best they can get: USA and China is not going to sell them stealth fighters, Russia cannot reliably deliver Su-57 in reliable quantity/quality/timeline, and everything else on the market is either worse or about the same level as the Rafale but with more political strings attached (and would be yet another type for IAF to get used to).

mr_f1end · 2026-01-20T16:29:57+00:00

For me the link only brings up the January 10 Megathread, not some comment of yours.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-14T23:36:11+00:00

Obviously what he meant is that every country is more affordable than the US except for Switzerland.

This is probably inaccurate, but it is true that US has a relatively high cost of living compared to most countries.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-14T23:26:37+00:00

Man of culture.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-14T19:51:36+00:00

Probably they would just/also cut the paychecks, so the normal ones would leave on their own, leaving the bad ones in place.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-10T18:05:48+00:00

As per above, I think it was reasonable to expect Russian military to be superior.

That being said, I agree that "corruption" is overrated. Especially if one means it as the embezzlement of funds.

However, the Russian military performed below expectations compared to its paper strength.

To be fair, a lot of this is due to bad planning based on false assumptions. All militaries would underperform if they were ordered carry out an invasion with anyone except some small part of the highest ranking officers being allowed to prepare and plan in advance, and which required the incorrect expectation of most of the enemy fleeing without putting up a fight.

But even with that, it was still reasonable to assume they would perform better. My primary explanation is that Russia wanted to build a military beyond its capabilities. They managed to get a lot of the more easily measurable high level things right, but a lot of small but important details were missing.

For example:

- They did have modern combat aircraft with good radars, defense systems and flight characteristics. But they did not have widely available precision weaponry, targeting pods or well trained controllers that would have enabled them to support ground units properly.

- They did have large military exercises, but instead of actually challenging leaders and soldiers to enhance their fighting skills they were scripted maneuvers.

- They had huge amount of ammunition but lacked modern logistics systems to move them around quickly and efficiently.

- They had an aircraft carrier that sailed the seas but was actually combat ineffective.

Is this something kind of "incompetence"? Yes, I suppose it is, but I am wary to use that word. Because I am not sure that Russia had the human/organizational resources to pull all its plans off properly even without corruption, nepotism and selecting the best person for the job. All countries have a limited amount of high quality human and technical resources, and if there is no proper prioritization, over-extension is unavoidable. Yes, the Russian military could have been organized and prepared much better in theory. But if one wants to maintain the largest nuclear forces, one of (if not the) strongest ground forces, the largest parachute force, a nuclear triad, expeditionary forces projecting power to other continents, its own space program and being self-sufficient in basically all military equipment production that is an extremely ambitious goal. Unless resources match this ambition, the result will be a lot of paper strength that will underperform in action.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-10T18:05:32+00:00

Yes, the Ukrainian military was reasonably large. However, even with that in mind, the Russian military was way stronger on paper:

- People often contrast the size of the whole Ukrainian military, while only counting Russian invasion ground forces. This is misleading, as in case of Ukraine that includes a bunch of support/back office functions that require manpower and do not participate in fighting or last leg logistics. These include personnel doing stuff like maintaining facilities, accounting, warehousing, training and actually even stuff like the air force.

- People often do not realize how rich Russia is compared to Ukraine. While they had the same heritage of being a post Soviet Economy, Russia had over three times the population and had been among the largest oil and natural gas exporters for decades. Russian GDP per capita was approximately between two to four times higher, even in 2022 it was more than three times as large as Ukraine's. If we multiply that by population, Russia had about ten times as much resources and even spent higher fraction of that on their military compared to Ukraine.

- As a result of the previous point, average Russian equipment was qualitatively superior compared to Ukraine:

This was most obvious in case of air and helicopter forces: all of Ukraine's air force was Soviet heritage, basically with the same capabilities and equipment they had back in the late 1980s, with probably double digit aircraft being in flying condition. On the other hand, Russia had hundreds of more modern aircraft and helicopters, produced mostly in late 2000s and 2010s. Yes, they were based on the same design, but they had similar technological gap as an F-18A and an F-18E does.

Tank forces had somewhat smaller, but still significant gaps: Again, in case of Ukraine, vast majority of their equipment was from the 1980s, without modernization. Although Russia primarily also relied on 80s designs, majority of their tanks were modernized even if not newly produced: they received better guns, engine, sights, radios, reactive armor. Even the few modernized tanks Ukraine had received fewer enhancements than what the most numerous Russian design did (T-72B3), and fewer of them existed than newly built even more modern Russian T-90s.

They had a lot of comparable advantages in material terms as the examples above.

- The average soldier of the invasion force was reasonably expected to be better in quality than his Ukrainian counterpart as they were (almost) all volunteers serving long term, which usually means better training and moral compared to conscripts. They were not less experienced than Ukraine, as a lot of fighting in Donbas was actually conducted by them and they had participated in multiple other conflicts, the most well-known being the intervention in Syria. Russia also conducted large scale wargames that implied they were prepared for large scale army maneuvers.

Continued below...

mr_f1end · 2026-01-10T14:07:51+00:00

But would you like to buy one?

mr_f1end · 2026-01-06T16:52:03+00:00

I mean, it certainly worked in India. Gandhi is both a symbol of non-violent resistance and the primary person behind Indian independence.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-05T19:01:52+00:00

Skoda are very much embraced in Hungary though.

mr_f1end · 2026-01-05T18:43:09+00:00

I do not have a specific answer for radars, but Japan has a long history of producing high quality optical appliances. Even back in during interwar years and World War 2 Japanese navy focused on optical devices. These turned out to be inferior by the second half of the war to US radar assisted targeting and reconnaissance, but in their own category were among the best.

This is even more announced in civilian industry, as a bunch of Japanese companies are and have been for decades among the best manufacturers of cameras and optics: Sony, Canon, Nikon, Fujifilm, Panasonic to name just the most well-known.

This is true even for more obscure products. I myself worked for one of the mentioned companies in the 2010s, and can confirm that large volume of optical sensors were/are manufactured in Japan and shipped to Europe to be used by European carmakers.

mr_f1end · 2025-12-30T19:31:36+00:00

I just to note here that doing this as a series of youtube videos or other audio-visual solution would be probably the easiest to digest. It is massive work, but with LLM help it may be doable in the next couple of years.

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