It's great for working on vintage equipment, stuff that might need (and warrant) that kind of repair. Less so if you run a cell phone repair shop.

There are a surprising number of Indian cell phone repair shops with YouTube channels that do feats of soldering, like repairing torn flat-flex cables… I bow down at their craft. If I ever get a sabbatical I’ll go to India and ask to be an apprentice.

I suppose you meant SNR is getting lower.

Did anyone of them die?

Is unaccountable government legal overreach an issue for you only when you die by it?

To me death sentence has very specific meaning.

Starlink was never available in Russia due to the sanctions regime. It's only use by Russians was via grey import terminals on the frontline in Ukraine (made possible due to complications of geofencing).

I guess I was misunderstanding. I thought that Starlink was deliberately ignoring the sanctions because they were able to shut it off real quick once Musk got that tweet https://x.com/sikorskiradek/status/2016221397396168995

It wasn't easy to geofence due to fluid nature of the frontline and lack of single official supply channel to Ukraine. A huge part of Ukrainian terminals were also procured abroad by volunteers.

However a recent development was Russian use of terminals on attack drones. Out of that Starlink was able to block terminals with certain velocity (and possibly bearing) in the region. In addition Ukraine got around to making internal registry of all frontline terminal allowing Starlink to white-list. So no it was a bit more than a tweet involved.

You did misunderstand:

https://x.com/FedorovMykhailo/status/2017932529882296706

SpaceX worked with Ukraine together to register authorized Starlinks.

You obviously can’t simply geo-fence because the usage is not in Russia, but Russian troops using it in Ukraine.

And you can’t simply blacklist Russian use, because lots of devices with legitimate Ukrainian use cases were imported in privatly or by third party.

That is why legitimate Ukrainian devices must now be cumbersomely whitelisted.

You might be thinking of Ubiquiti, who were exposed as blind eyeing the sanctions

Let's keep it real. No union would save your jobs against a manyfold productivity gain of machines.

EUV lith would have absolutely been achieved if LHC wasn't ever built.

Lhc mastered high vacuum, high precision lens from zeiss, precision lasers, specialized magnets which are needed by euv lith.

So would have been delayed.

High vacuum in enormous volumes maybe. Otherwise it was certainly a problem solved decades ago.

Not sure what role of EUV optics was in LHC. But Zeiss would develop you anything on the frontier of optics if you have deep enough pockets.

The rest I don't know enough to comment on, but as far as technology goes both LHC and EUV lithography are bespoke systems. Seriously doubt there is any path dependency. Huge part of LHC cost were earthworks and precision construction of complex machinery at enormous scale.

EUV uses mirrors rather than lenses, and the precision surfaces on those are something that more likely came out of space programs. But honestly, I have no problem with throwing a few billion at basic science that might go nowhere. It's a drop in the ocean compared to war and corporate welfare.

On the scale of decades that's an incorrect assumption, unless you mean running the compiler within an emulated system.

If you do a somewhat bad thing with no pushback it becomes possible to do a somewhat worse thing with no pushback. Gradually you end up doing really bad things with total impunity.

Devil’s advocate: you should still have a reason to do the bad thing in the first place. I’m not a good enough politician to understand how this benefits anyone’s interests (don’t get me wrong, I do suspect Russia to be behind this, but still don’t get the objective - but then again I don’t get the objective of their special bullshit operation either)

Indeed many people who subscribe to Rational Actor theory of politics are stupefied by this. However the thing about personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though the media still refers to them as if they are real countries with collective decision-making. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider.

Say some dictator lived through a trauma that he projects onto some group of people. Or that he considers himself a spiritual successor (perhaps even the reincarnation) of Ivan the Great, the Collector or Lands. Once you ease yourself into this mindset you see the logic.

"personalistic dictatorships is their foreign policy and aggression are all subject to the whims of one person, even though the media still refers to them as if they are real countries with collective decision-making. And they indeed may be acting rationally just not in the axiomatic framework any sane person would even consider." Hmmm...why does that sound so familiar with a major western country??? ;-p

The reason is resentment rooted in an inferiority complex. Russia's state ideology is that they're being oppressed by "the West", and they really believe it up to the highest levels of government. They're quite convinced that hurting their "enemy" this way amounts to securing their interest, because by damaging "the West", their own relative power is elevated and that makes them a serious player on the international stage.

I think sabotage is at least partly signalling: "Don't support Ukraine too much, or more bad things will happen to you."

The point of the "special operation" was that there would not be a culturally-adjacent functioning democracy next door, because that might give the Russian people ideas.

For signalling you need the signal. You need to break the train track and then say if you keep supporting Ukraine we'll do worse things. If you stay quiet, it doesn't work.

For the record, it was me. I committed terrorism to bring awareness to Rust's excessive use of punctuation marks.

No, (apparent) ambiguity works fine, as long as the recipient of the message understands it. The Mafia can put a brick through your window, and you know what's going on, even without them signing the brick.

If I'm a government in Europe that has given any tangible aid to Ukraine, I have in fact done something that I know this particular Mafia hates.

If I've attacked Russia and Gaza how do I know which mafia threw the brick?

Russia is desperate for leverage. Apart from China, they are severely isolated from rich markets. Targeted violence is an attempt at generating leverage, in the same way some racketeers would hit shops that refuse to pay "protection" money.

Creating chaos in democracies is forcing the elected politicians to focus on the interior, thus leaving them less resources (or public interest) for stopping remote invasions.

The Winter Olympics, wrecked the train system it’ll take the edge off of the Olympics.

Or frustrate people who travelled across the world to see it.

The Olympics to some extent is soft power, and this goes some way to curdle that.

Isn’t USA hosting the World Football thingy in a few months, I’m guessing most people would be flying for that.

I’m guessing that the flip side is some countries being prepared for this, and extra security deters any attack.

Strangely there was a missile battery placed on top of my local council building to safe guard the Stratford Olympics back in 2012.

I feel like commenting on the article without reading was really vindicated with the advent of AI slop.