> There had been multiple YEARS of Western Special Operations inside Ukraine leading up to and during the opening phases of the war.
That is why Russia quickly reached Kiev, and Ukraine still can't win the war? Because there were inhales, screams MULTIPLE YEARS OF SPECIAL OPERATIONS?
> Without UK SOF and their initial deployments of anti-armor weapons, there is a good chance Russia would have gotten much further.
No one denies that there were Western Weapons in Ukraine. What is bullshit is that they were somehow airlifted 24/7 during initial phases of the war. They decidedly weren't. Neither before the invasion, nor during the first days. Nor, indeed during any phase of the war.
There's a difference between "airlifted 24/7 since the beginning of the invasion" and:
- the two packages promised in March were delivered by April, all pushed via conventional transport through Poland and Romania (IIRC deliveries didn't start until at least mid-March, and by that time Ukraine was already suffering heavy losses, logistics collapses etc. )
- there's a nebulous commitment to <list of weapons> which we know barely trickled in as US committed, then withdrew, then commited, then withdrew support, then claimed Ukraine was too stupid to use these weapons, or that it would lead to escalation, or...
Yup. Because a country attacking another with nuclear weapons in its mad genocidal occupational war it started under false pretenses will definitely sit back and do nothing once it showed it can and will use nuclear weapons for any cause.
Yup. A country that starts nuking other countries in a genocidal war of conquest will not ever be seen as a threat by any other countries and will not suffer any consequences ever.
Russia has already entered this war on the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody and nobody was going to bomb them.
> In a China/Taiwan conflict, China's not getting TSMC output either
China has enough domestic electronics production to not care. Also, in the event of a war they would probably stockpile necessary parts.
> we could get older process node stuff. We could still build say, 2015-era chips.
If the factories producing those chips are still operational. Otherwise you end up in the exact same situation as Russia, for example. They have some barely functioning old factories producing extremely outdated chips on foreign equipment.
> situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do?? Sit and accept while those countries work hard to kill its soldiers and destroy its economy
Oh no, the poor innocent Russia that is currently in year 5 of its totally innocent blameless war it's waging. "Hitler did nothing wrong" vibes.
All Russia has to do to stop its soldiers from dying and its economy from being destroyed is to get the fuck out of Ukraine.
> and 24/7 airlifts of critical weapons and equipment that beat them back?
There were no 24/7 airlifts of criticql weapons and equipment at any point in this war.
Ukraine was expected to fall quickly, and any help it needed started arriving very reluctantly, very slowly, in small batches stretched over months and years of deliveries much much later.
It's not detailed, at all. It's all unnecessary verbiage and some meaningless graphs around "trust us, only we know what is safe". Meanwhile people run into these stupid "safeguards" on the most innocent queries. See e.g. this thread of discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48837404 Or indeed the very article these comments are under
> The EU's own government websites have these same cookie banners.
Most of them decidedly don't have the same cookie banners. E.g. in vast majority of cases they don't prevent you from seeing content, and have an easy opt-out mechanism without dark patterns.
https://dmitriid.com
You may know me from these:
- Everything around LLMs is still magical and wishful thinking(2025) https://dmitriid.com/everything-around-llms-is-still-magical-and-wishful-thinking
- Prompting LLMs is not engineering (2025) https://dmitriid.com/prompting-llms-is-not-engineering