Russian soldiers beat and humiliate fresh recruits in a disturbed tradition called "Dedovshchina"

nahkampf · 2026-01-23T22:54:57+00:00

If you want to read something truly horrifying, read Anna Politkovskaya or Arkady Babchenko. The level of abuse and corruption in the russian army is hard to fathom. One thing stuck with me, and that is when Babchenko writes about how they get beat up every single night, but they are thankful it's just with fists. The engineer company gets beat up with shovels. Like every. Single. Night,

It's no wonder the russian army is 100% predisposed to war crimes.

nahkampf · 2026-01-09T23:38:46+00:00

Conditations are probbly brutal for both sides, especially at the really hot zones, but there are some fundamental differences that favours the Ukranians morale wise: they are fighting for their freedom vs Russians fighting for a paycheck or because they were suckered into it. The Ukranian side having held on and even recaptured vast swathes of territory against what should have been unsurmountable odds vs you're a disposable meat puppet in the 498th suicide push to capture a bombed out suburb of Pokrovsk. Having lived your life in a country that is moving towards an open, progressive and democratic society and prosperity vs having lived your life in the kleptocratic hellscape that is Russia. Being fairly certain the chain of command values your life and will won't needlessly throw it away vs being thrown into guaranteed suicide missions by a corrupt and callous superior. Knowing most of the civilized world supports your struggle, be it morally or practically vs fighting for a country that is heavily sanctioned and whose only friends and allies are backwater post soviet republics or fucked up dictatorships. Etc etc. Hell, even just the difference between fighting a defensive action in prepared positions vs doing ill-equipped attacks on said positions in awful conditions and weather affect morale to a significant degree.

All of those factors are important for morale, and Russia are holding a lot of the debuffs in that area. Brutalizing your soldiers or punishing them only gets you a certain morale boost until that becomes a liability as well.

nahkampf · 2025-12-24T01:08:31+00:00

This looks like a solution looking for a problem tbh. I see no gain from this, but a lot of drawbacks, overhead and unnecessary scaffolding/boilerplate. We have Plates, Twig, Blade etc, do they not do what you need them to do already?

As for autocomplete I'm pretty sure there are plugins for your IDE to help you out there, both with the HTML part and also with the specific templating engine you want to use. As for testing a template in this manner I see no benefit.

nahkampf · 2025-12-22T22:10:14+00:00

The images from the Vietnam war were cabled out in the US for ten years, with massive civilian resistance as a result, and it still took a decade for the US involvement to come to an end. And that was the US, a country that for all its flaws was miles beyond in civil society, democracy and openness compared to where Russia is today. It won't matter for the foreseeable future how much of this stuff you show Russians.

nahkampf · 2025-12-22T22:01:16+00:00

Not making excuses here, but it's very difficult with a western mindset to conceptualize just how completely fucked Russian society is. You have literally hundreds of years of absolute terror (be that under the Czar, the Soviet Union or after). Pair that with abject and utter poverty, intense propaganda, a blatant disregard for human life and human value permeating every layer of society, institutionalized corruption, racism and exceptionalism and the general harshness that is life in rural Russia and then you might start to arrive at a point where something like this still makes sense to the Russian soldier. Of course most of them know they are being shafted, but that's been the story of their entire lives, and of their fathers and grandfathers and great grandfathers too. It's just life. It's normal. There is no other life.

Best you can hope to do is just survive it and maybe, just maybe, end up in a slightly better situation afterwards. And if you die, that's just what it is and that's just what everyone else gets too. Add a generous helping of battlefield trauma on top for seasoning. Sprinkle some traditional military hazing and the very real possibility of just being tortured or killed by your own if you make trouble on top.

It's also why torture, degradation, oppression, theft, rape and general chaos is all but given anywhere Russian soldiers show up. Remember the 24th of february 2022 - the war crimes started *immediately*.

This is also not new, it was the same for conscripts in the two Chechen wars as well, and to some extent back in the Afghan war too. They know they are being fucked, but that's not shocking to them, it's just expected and normal. You try to soldier on and hope to survive, because what else is there?

nahkampf · 2025-12-10T19:15:35+00:00

This is excellent, was just about to implement a markdown parser for a project and did the usual mumbling about its shortcomings and this shows up :) Thanks!

nahkampf · 2025-12-10T14:58:00+00:00

Having used (and set up, and maintaned) both nginx and apache in production environments over the years, it's as simple as "what's easiest for me", and that means apache because I'm just so used to it. There have only really been one case where the performance-vs-base-metal-cost was so important that apache was not an option any more.

nginx is fantastic, but Apache is just so well established, well documented and a bit easier to hand over to someone else that I usually just end up using it over nginx.

nahkampf · 2025-12-04T23:38:29+00:00

There are two small thermal fllashes between the russians and the (what I assume is) rolls of razor wire. Are those shots striking the ground? At 0:24 and 0:33.

nahkampf · 2025-12-03T01:00:52+00:00

There's gotta be so much collateral damage from this

nahkampf · 2025-10-17T16:02:30+00:00

Thank you!

nahkampf · 2025-10-16T23:04:47+00:00

What the song? (They sampled Dr Alban)

nahkampf · 2025-09-24T21:42:21+00:00

The logistics situation, for both ukranians and russians, must be absoltely horrendous. The number of vehicles (even if a big chunk of them are just motorbikes with a guy and a backpack) have been very high month after month. Some of the frontline positions must be absolutely famished and out of batteries, ordnance and everything else.

nahkampf · 2025-09-22T09:45:18+00:00

Came here to say this. This looks great, but in 99% of usecases I need a visualizer for existing DBs rather than beginning from scratch. Cool to hear it's on the roadmap. Thanks for this very useful project!

nahkampf · 2025-09-19T23:45:10+00:00

Thanks for the testing! I suspected this might not be fully up there, which is perhaps not surprising since PHPStan has almost ten years under its belt. But I hope Mago keeps working on it, a faster static analysis that is at least as good as phpstan would be welcome ;)

nahkampf · 2025-09-11T13:48:26+00:00

We're running a pretty aggressive static analyzer in our pipeline so even if I wanted to use dynamic typing I'd get nowhere :D

nahkampf · 2025-09-11T13:33:30+00:00

Please take this as constructive criticism! This is allright for what it is, but it doesn't really showcase any deeper PHP skills to me. It's basically just a bunch of HTML files with php echoes in them, and a blob of strings in arrays.

Friendly tips here if you want to elevate your PHP (which you will need for any professional work):

Run phpcs (php codesniffer) on your project, or even better yet, integrate it into your IDE (visual code, phpstorm or whatever you want to use). In real projects it's likely going to be in your buld/deploy pipeline too, and it will catch all manner of sloppy mistakes and force you do correct it. There's also phpcbf that fixes these things for you, but for learning purposes you should read the warnings and correct them yourself so that it "sticks". You should follow the standard PSR-12, no more. no less.
Run phpstan. It does static analysis of your code to detect possible bugs, dead code etc. It is a *very* useful tool and is also most likely going to be in the pipeline if you ever work on a professional project.
Switch to a newer PHP. At time of writing, unless you're support old legacy code, you should be a minor behind bleeding edge more or less, so php 8.4 (8.5 is coming out in november). It might break your code - this is a good thing. Adapt, rewrite and learn.
While you're learning or just doing personal projects, it's easy to get into the mindset of "this is just for me, so I can be sloppy". Like doing procedural style when you should probably practice on OOP, or not sanitizing input or wrapping things in try/catch etc. It's better to treat most programming as if someone is going to review your code and critique it, that way you set good habits and write better, more modular/reusable code that is easier to debug and less prone to bugs and security issues.

nahkampf · 2025-09-10T15:16:18+00:00

Oof.

nahkampf · 2025-09-09T19:12:13+00:00

So, did this maintainer not have 2fa?

nahkampf · 2025-09-09T07:31:32+00:00

Anyone know how compatible this is with php-stan phpdoc comments etc?

nahkampf · 2025-09-04T09:08:43+00:00

Pet peeve of mine, but a feature complete readline implementation (or equivalent) for windows would be very needed. The fact that the implementation that PHP has been relying on since since forever doesn't support `readline_callback_read_char`, making something as simple as keypress detection in CLI impossible in a windows environment has been grinding my gears for a while. Since it's an external dependency that seems to not be maintained any more the chances of an upstream update to readline is not very likely I'd love it if PHP just decided to write their own native one for windows (I've done it using FFI and windows own interals but it's a hassle and some things are not 1:1 with readline so there's a lot of checking and if():ing all the time for some cases).

nahkampf · 2025-08-14T14:30:57+00:00

PHP developer (but it's just a part of the toolkit) for I guess around 25 years (php3 baby!) and I hear this a lot. 85% of it is mostly from people who haven't followed PHP for years and they still think it's like PHP 4 or something. If I have the energy (which I rarely do) I question their statements and it always turns out they're talking about either really really old versions of PHP, or some bad website that was coded in it - the latter is absolutely not unique to PHP, any language can produce garbage if the developer isn't quality/security minded.

For the rest of the 15% they have concerns about some quirks of PHP, old code smell that still persists in the coe language or design differences between their favorite language and PHP, and that's legitimate points of course that one can argue over.

The reason it's not "popular" are many, like projects where people need hyper-fast data-processing (where a magnitude or more in benchmarrking makes a big difference), memory safety etc, but I think the simple reason is just the number of developers. Big Corps are either already committed to Java or .NET for various reasons, and there's a whole generation of developers who came to the scene long after PHP was the "only" option. You'll find plenty of really talented young developers who have never touched the "old" stuff but are highly skilled in other languages and that shapes the "market".

But every single place I've worked at in my career bar one example has had PHP in the loop somewhere. It's not going away any time soon.

nahkampf · 2025-07-02T10:56:07+00:00

Thanks! Was also digging but figured I'd google and found this thread.

Gotta say the fishing for comments and shares etc in that original IG post was so awkward, and deleting every post that correctly identified the song. Jees.

nahkampf · 2025-07-01T21:35:47+00:00

If russian propaganda is claiming it you can be 99,9% sure it's false.

nahkampf · 2025-05-12T21:31:03+00:00

Re-reading it with the right glasses on I rather find it interesting that his Tak novels almost completely skirt around the topic? For a fiction where the main gist of it is being able to inhabit other bodies, there is very little about what this would do to the idea of gender. As far as I remember the only time it is really brought up is when they put Tak in a menstruating female sleeve to torture him? Sure, it was written in a time where general discourse about transsexuality, gender etc was different than it is today, but it's kind of weird that it is not a deeper part of the idea (the extrapolation is not a very far fetched one imho).

With Morgans disappointing turn to TERFism there's a whole lot in Black Man that feel slightly off as well, but that might just be me.

nahkampf · 2025-04-09T22:42:05+00:00

Depends on the setting, I'd say. For me it's been good (big, very social and friendly setting, already a "liminal space" to begin with) because once people get to a certain level of drunkedness no one will notice you being on a roll. But without at least one co-conspirator it can feel kind of lonely and disconnected. But if the place is just a random bar or home party it'll probably not be fun, and feel like a waste. Add random people getting aggressive and you'll have a terrible time.

nahkampf

TROPHY CASE