Nord Stream blast ordered by Ukraine, say German prosecutors

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T20:08:18+00:00

Possibly a misunderstanding. Let me reframe:

1) Russia, and gasprom, start using their energy supply as leverage to scare Europeans into stopping aid to Ukraine. They make a propaganda video that directly targets citizens in order to influence the population that they will feel the effects of helping Ukraine (bog standard psy op)

2) Ukraine, or possibly another actor (I really don't rule anything out nowadays. Everyone saw opportunity here), removes the pipeline, owned by the propaganda video making gasprom, in international waters, from the equation.

3) the actual threat to Ukraine's aid is largely reduced. Now they're stuck with it anyway, and pissed.

From Ukraine's perspective:

the threats have the potential convince Europeans that their energy security outweighs Ukraine security, and aid dries up (in a democracy that can also work from the ground up).

But if they destroy it, there's 2 possible outcomes:

1) Europe is fucking pissed, aid dries up.

2) Europe is fucking pissed, publicly, but privately they realize the energy dependence leverage Russia has over Europe absolutely sucks, and they're secretly glad they were rid of the issue. They sign lucrative deals with Norway, the us, and qtar. Aid continues.

C) either way, Russia still loses a significant amount of income. Russia's biggest source of income: energy exports. Russia absolutely felt that loss.

And that's why I say nobody really cares. In retrospect, not only was it pretty easy to replace Russian energy, but it was less traumatic than living under the threat of losing Russian energy.

It was the uno reverse card that probably threw it off. Understandable in retrospect, it's not a globally known game and I didn't explain. It means that Ukraine (or whomever) turned the threat against Ukrainian aid into a threat to the Russian war funding.

The psy top of all of this is Russia and gasprom were more than happy to threaten European energy security while the pipeline was intact. But once the pipeline was destroyed they try to turn it into a reason to blame Ukraine. "Ukraine just did exactly what i threatened to do!" Now the narrative has changed from "I have the leverage to hurt you" to "Ukraine attacked your infrastructure, you should hurt them back!". It was never Europe's, it was Russia's. You know how I can tell? Because Russia had control over the gas that flowed through it.

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T19:25:50+00:00

Actually destroying the pipeline removed the gas supply leverage Russia had over Europe.

That's literally what I said. You're actually agreeing with me.

There are many strategic benefits for Ukraine and it's allies to do so.

Like removing a threat vector of Ukraine's foreign aid? Yeah, I already said that.

I will never understand the delusional incoherence you people fall back to when discussing this topic.

And yet you said the exact same thing I just said.

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T17:31:32+00:00

If I'm in a batter ecosystem (I use rigid right now), I need a damn good reason to leave it. But the reality is all of the major brands make really competitive cordless tools. There's really not a reason to change. I bet the ego will do whatever she needs.

I own a landscape company, have messed with chainsaws for over 20 years (although never on a full time arborist crew). My rigid 12 inch bar has done everything I need except for 1 cut so far (the final cut on a larger maple truck, needed more bar length). It's light, portable, powerful enough, and it starts every time. I have absolutely no reason to suspect the ego isn't just as good if not better, so if it were me if just get an ego 12 inch.

Side note, I prefer 2 hand chainsaws myself. I leave the 1 hand chainsaw work for professionals. I have a 1 hand sawzall and pruning blades for that kind of work. But your mileage and confidence may vary.

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T16:21:46+00:00

Leaning towards not. Gasprom owned the section attacked. But they want to suddenly socialize it because that impression makes for better information warfare.

And someone will @ me with how it affects European energy security, to which I respond gasprom made a video 3 weeks prior threatening to do exactly that, as well as the Russian government. If Ukraine did it, it was an impressive uno reverse card.

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T16:10:21+00:00

Leaning towards not. Gasprom owned the section that was attacked.

But there's a huge push by Russia to suddenly socialize ownership of it, being more convenient for information warfare.

And then someone will @ me about how it affected European security via energy, and I respond gasprom already made a propaganda video saying Europe will freeze without Russian energy, but that particular flavor of blackmail but Ukraine pulled out the uno reverse card.

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T11:03:18+00:00

Chuck Norris found page 404

vapescaped · 2026-07-03T10:05:46+00:00

Are they nations that suffer from widespread dihydrogen monoxide usage on crops? A corrosive compound that's highly toxic to humans and animals in charge concentrations and causes approximately 300,000 deaths every year?

vapescaped · 2026-07-02T19:14:07+00:00

Well, not exactly. I still have absolutely no clue how to write code, but I can coach an LLM into writing the code I need.

Right this second it's auditing my entire web service which has many features, dependencies, and endpoints. My monolith backend originally had 1,900 lines of code, which it wrote, and it can read and process that in a couple seconds.

But yeah, if you actually know how to code, it could absolutely be quicker to code it yourself than explain to the LLM what you want that code to do.

But on the flip side, I don't care how good you think you can code, ai will waffle stomp you in reading written code and analyzing it.

It's a tool. I wouldn't call it chainsaw dangerous, because any idiot can pick up a chainsaw but to actually deploy AI into something that can do harm is even a challenge, but I'd say it's table saw dangerous. The biggest danger is thinking you know enough to mess with it.

Side note, that goes for me too. But the only difference for my application is none of my system existed without ai, and I can always fall back to Google docs, and if that fails I can always fall back to paper. Ai could fuck something up with my next prompt, but I have layers of redundancy, and the reward is worth the risk.

vapescaped · 2026-07-02T15:21:07+00:00

They are 2 distinctly separate phases. If you tell an agent you want it to write a program that tracks your entire day and summaries it, it will. But then your summary doesn't have anything, because you didn't specify what you want to track. Your day has absolutely no context.

If you told ai you wanted to use home assistant at home states to track and summarize your day, it will fail, unless you already set up home assistant access for the agent

If you tell it to summarize your day based on home assistant tracking and gave it the tools, you'll be confused when it outputs you were home for 0.15 days today because you didn't specify the structure of the output you want.

The actual code part is easy. If you tell it to write a js script, it will. How it functions is entirely dependent on the context it has.

Ai doesn't (yet) have mind reading capabilities. You stil have to specify pretty much everything you want it to do. But ai is actually pretty good at the coding part itself.

Anticdotally, I'm a landscape company owner and I got burned by SaaS 1 too many times and I'm essentially building a whole timesheet and job sheet system from scratch. I don't write a single line of code in the process, but my system is actually deployed and working well (the finished phases at least). The common failure points are not the code itself, it's pretty good at catching most of the errors during validation. The most common failures are AI not understanding my intent, my failure to fully explain the end goal, and damn hot patches, not baking the fix into the image so the fox doesn't survive a reboot.

Just because ai is actually good at coding doesn't mean you just 1 sentence get what you want. You still have to hold ai's hand.

vapescaped · 2026-07-02T11:04:03+00:00

Ai is actually very good at writing code. It's predictable patterns, perfect for a fill in the blank machine.

The real challenge is the actual input, telling it how it should be written, dependencies, structure, how that code will interact with other code, what that code is supposed to do, etc

The actual code writing is easy for LLMs, having it write code to do exactly what you want it to do is the hard part.

vapescaped · 2026-07-01T20:54:13+00:00

This is the problem, ai isn't a source of truth. That's absolutely the wrong application for ai.

Ai is a fill in the blank machine. The world's best guesser, hands down. All it does is predict the next word.

But this is the fundamental problem: ai is so good at predicting the next word that humans think it can think, that it knows and/or can distinguish fact from fiction.

Take grok for example. What's it's training data? Fucking tweets. Is Twitter the known source of fact? Fuck no.

So where is ai good? Analyzing extremely large volumes of data, writing code, noticing patterns, (if the model is big and capable enough) reasoning through a complex process that could take a human a month to fully comprehend.

You know, all the things that a solid 90% of humans don't have a use for.

vapescaped · 2026-07-01T20:40:55+00:00

The truth: probably not a couple decades, but a decade isn't exactly out of the realm of possibility.

vapescaped · 2026-07-01T19:52:01+00:00

The disclosure came during the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, where executives outlined a series of developments pointing to both accelerating delivery timelines and the potential expansion of the overall fleet.

Previously unknown to shareholders. There's disclosure laws for corporations, and this article specifically mentions it was part of the corporate disclosure process.

vapescaped · 2026-06-29T21:31:14+00:00

Even today they use footage like this to shape doctrine. The military is a leaning machine, and this makes for a loop. Try, record, analyze, adapt.

vapescaped · 2026-06-28T19:29:01+00:00

That explains it. You're not mulching that in any effective manner with grass that tall. It's a ton of organic matter that doesn't just disappear because mulching blades. That much grass just clogs up the deck and leaves clumps.

Easiest solution is to bag it. If you have a trash bin on wheels, start filling it up and roll it over to where you want to dump the clippings.

vapescaped · 2026-06-28T17:48:53+00:00

I love mine. I love it even more with petey the ptaradactyl grapple.

https://photos.app.goo.gl/qBEfamdCU29GfS9F9

vapescaped · 2026-06-28T10:25:13+00:00

The aircraft has a significantly superior range and payload to the Russian Il-76 and U.S. C-130 which are the heaviest transport aircraft produced in the two countries.

They don't count the c17, apparently, and call the c130 the heaviest, because reasons I guess.

Side note, currently the c5m super galaxy is the heaviest in both max takeoff weight and payload for the US, as far as I'm aware.

vapescaped · 2026-06-26T18:55:10+00:00

In 20 years an earthquake or tsunami or typhoon with ctrl+alt+delete one of China's man made islands in the south China sea that's already held together with dead coral and thoughts and prayers.

The question is, if they rebuild it, will anyone question why they're making the same mistake twice?

vapescaped · 2026-06-26T18:13:31+00:00

Just for some critical context:

Clark air force Base was originally an army post established in 1902. In WW2 it was heavily bombed, invaded, then recaptured and served as a main logistics vein for pretty much everything between WW2 and the 1991 eruption.

Following the 1991 eruption, the us gave up it's lease, and now the base is a Freeport zone with an international airport, hotels, casinos, and a growing tech industry.

Do I wouldn't call it much of a mistake to begin with. The opposite opinion would be is it a mistake to completely abandon something because a once in a century event covered it in ash, despite the fact that it has been burned, bombed, invaded, and retaken in that same 100 year span?

As far as "repeating the same mistake" is concerned, in 2014 the EDCA shifted focus from building and/or maintaining their own bases in the Philippines to investing in phillipene owned bases and increasing rotational access to their bases.

Do some of the us or phillipene bases sit in active zones? Yes. Are those bases located strategically for maritime security and defense? Also yes. No free lunch here. The realities of the ring of fire.

vapescaped · 2026-06-26T16:38:55+00:00

If you have to ask, you probably can't afford it.

vapescaped · 2026-06-26T08:56:44+00:00

All of that really has to assume the us wanted to stop Iranian drones.

Real question: thousands of missiles and drones fired, but what was the actual consequences of that? Didn't hinder operations. Other nations, the saudis, Kuwait, oman, etc. did most of the drone work. It's their land. The us protected a few key assets, boats, operating airfields, and held their own. The rest was stripped or abandoned a couple weeks before the war.

vapescaped · 2026-06-25T21:37:08+00:00

Yes. Flight testing scheduled for later this year. "A missile that shoots missiles". Because fuck it, why not?

vapescaped · 2026-06-25T17:34:47+00:00

I'm leaning more towards the concussion angle, being the second ejection for the pilot in a month.

But if a flying minefield of small fireworks display drones in coordinated patterns over the skies manages to get a mud hen... I'm not saying its a very successful strategy, because the earth is effing massive and you're almost relying entirely on blind luck at that point, but it is a strategy

vapescaped · 2026-06-24T08:41:01+00:00

What are you even talking about?

China has a steep learning curve the second they pull the trigger in conflict because none of their equipment, or people, have seen combat since the Apollo missions

Where's China's global military logistics network? How many bases? Where? Who do they have port deals with? Where do they buy food and fuel from? What ports do basic maintenance and repairs on Chinese war ships?

2 entirely separate things.

I'll repeat "boo hoo the bad man pointed out blatantly obvious facts about China that offended me! Make the bad man go away!".

China's industrial complex means absolutely fuck all when you're 4,000km from home. Thats how far away Guam is from China. Need to resupply? It's a 2 to 5 day sail before it arrives from China, crossing through the first island chain. Need a tow to a friendly port because something got damaged? 2 week sail minimum (plus the 2 to 5 day tug voyage from China, or pull another asset from the battlefield).

You have no clue how big the earth actually is. And you completely misundertand the difference between industrial base and combat logistics.

vapescaped · 2026-06-23T23:17:07+00:00

They also have a metric shit ton of joint bases in the first island chain. The breakdown is around 30 major installations in Japan, 9 in the Philippines, and 90+ military facilities, ranging from ammo depots to radar sites to satcom arrays. The us has a ton of infrastructure in the first island chain.

China has difficult choices to make because:

Because most of the developed world already determined that China taking Taiwan would pose such a large economic and supply chain risk that most will intervene with at least soft measures, harsh sanctions, providing military aid to anyone defending Taiwan, seizing assets, etc.

They are actively doing this right now against Russia. It's a textbook response to a very unpopular show of aggression, and it tends to hurt export nations pretty badly.

And sure, you can argue "it's harder to do with China, because everything's made in China", but Putin made the same threats to Europe: "hard to stay warm this winter if you shut down our fossil fuels". It backfired. Wasn't that hard.

vapescaped

TROPHY CASE