DDE

I think they were beaten by Mail.ru. Edit: and by three years. https://vc.ru/media/141889-mail-ru-group-predstavila-besplatnyy-servis-dlya-sozdaniya-virtualnyh-vedushchih-na-osnove-ii Anyway, artificial intelligence and organic stupidity.

TIL that Roscocmos has a mascot of the Skif-D satellite https://t.me/skifenok Skif is the low-orbit Internet element of Sphera. But all I'm hearing when it's mentioned is Skif-DM.

Sber continues its sad trend-chasing. Their new ChatGPT equivalent is called... GigaChat. Lost opportunity there.

I think it's going to be as simple and silly as, unless SK announces they're going for a sovereign human launch capability, NK aren't going to make a meaningful push either. There is reason and method to their bluster.

'Rock Island Auction Company' How long until Ian McCollum photobombs The Chieftain by sheer accident? At least we know Drach and Rex aren't going to show up. Hopefully. Unless someone decides to auction off USS Midway.

I N T E R N A T I O N A L P A L L A S C A T D A Y

https://www.topworldnewstoday.com/ai-is-taking-the-jobs-of-kenyans-who-write-essays-for-u-s-college-students/

Some sort of a Yars ICBM fairing

Meanwhile, Austria be like...

Sorry I'm a little late to this battle of vessels.

This was definitely the rationale cited within the US when the decision was made not to raise a ruckus over the Soviet FOBS.

Reminds me of the type of guys who go around social media comment sections posting "incriminating" screenshots from add-ons that identify other users as bots.

OTD 50 years ago, the operators of Lunokhod 2 scooped up regolith with the solar panel, which would lead to mission loss via overheating the following lunar night.

A bit of an orphaned piece of junk here. According to Ukrainian authorities, NASA's RHESSI has reentered over Kiev tonight, right as Russian drone attacks pick up after a lull. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/22096665/meteor-explodes-kyiv-air-raid-nasa-satellite-crash-fears/ Apparently this is physically impossible due to orbit's inclination (off by 12⁰), but this is an explanation multiple official sources are by now citing. And it looks like a legit reentry. Basically I see no reason why they would forego Occam's Razor and just say it was a Kinzhal - they had no trouble claiming half a dozen Kinzhals used on March 9 - but the variable flashes don't seem to be an indicator of a robust, man-made reentry vehicle. At the very least, we're looking at an amusing case of information contagion.

Thus spake Ludd. This is hardly the end of work, but it does present an interesting turn of events for an economy that is, at this point, heavily focused on dishing out paperwork.

The US in WWII had a lot of various very different M1s. During WWII, Soviet lend-lease stevedores spread the myth that every Sherman came with a bottle of whiskey stuffed down its (plugged-up) barrel.

Most military buffs know that the Israelis made a Kalashnikov rifle derivative (twice removed, having studied the Finnish Valmet) called the Galil. However, not everyone knows that the eponymous Yisrael Galil was born Yisrael Balashnikov, and only decided to change his surname midway through the rifle's development. His employers were reportedly relieved, having been rather cross to release a Kalashnikov-derived Balashnikov rifle.

The French would call it dirigisme. It's a lot softer than German Gleichschaltung and privatization. Mussolini relied heavily on the trade unions (fascio) as the sources of 'social' control. [snip]

This is easily parried by many planned economies retaining corporate structures for ease of management.

T-90's turret is slab-sided with an ERA wedge. While Burlak was criticized for being a bone thrown to the increasingly hapless plant at Omsk instead to the one actual factory at Nizhniy Tagil, I don't think they'd go completely off-kilter and ignore the design of the tank they're trying to improve.

Hey, maybe they want a lawn decoration. Given that it may be all it's good for, since it's reportedly one of the 27th Brigade's tanks captured in September '22, and the whole 1st Guards Army notoriously turned out to be in a state of atrocious disrepair. The countryside all around Izyum was dotted with overfilled open-air vehicle salvage depots. And if they've sold this one, AFU probably didn't manage to fix it up, which is... unusual. T-72/T-90 are relatively familiar to them, unlike BMP-3s that they're having problems repairing due to an outright weird design.

Russia's Sber has rolled out a free platform of their own. https://fusionbrain.ai/en/

So there I was, having gotten my crocodile out of the wash...

A quickie. "Burlak" was an abortive early 2000s Russian project for a new common T-72/T-80/T-90 turret. As you can see, it looked rather distinctive. The question: why the inverted faux-glacis of ERA blocks?