I think something most people don't consider is that war is still about logistics. Every single soldier needs food, water, basic consumables, ammo, and more. And each group of soldier will need comms, fuel, and so on. With even a relatively small group of soldiers you rapidly enter into the domain of tons of supplies needed every single day. And in general the majority of an army isn't out there fighting, but participating in supply and logistics. It's called the tooth-to-tail ratio. [1] In WW1 it 2.6:1 logistics:combat, in the Vietnam War (with its lengthy logistics pipeline) it was 12.9:1!
Operating, maintaining, and expanding these logistics pipelines is essentially what war is. Drones can play a major offensive (and defensive) role, but soldiers remain the most critical component in war, and probably will for the foreseeable future.
>the attack employed a combination of FPV (first-person view) kamikaze drones and ground robotic complexes (GRCs) to penetrate and neutralize fortified Russian positions that had previously repelled human-led offensives.
I think that assumption will quickly need to be reevaluated. Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them and they are so doing their thing for long enough. People can't eat concrete and plants don't grow without the sun.
>> Drones definitely can empty a city if there's enough of them
As well as dumb WW2 era bombs. But even if the city is leveled to the ground you need a lot of ground troops to capture it. We've seen this recently in east Ukraine as well.
Clearly you need more than one drone to hold a city. But do you need more like one drone per thousand people, one drone per ten people, ten drones per person, or a thousand drones per person? Clearly at some point you cross the threshold.
It's true just about anywhere. Maybe if a militant group was really cut off from global markets it would be an exception.
But, even in the lowest-GDP countries like Micronesia, the GDP is about a drone per year per person, and from my experience with Micronesia, that number is so low not because people are actually that desperately poor but because most of their wealth and productivity is outside the money economy. So, even in Micronesia, if you sacrifice a single soldier who could have been building drones instead (or producing goods to export to get foreign exchange earnings to buy drone parts), you lose their potential productive capacity of dozens of drones per year, even from a purely psychopathic perspective.
More specifically, it is very clearly true in Russia and Ukraine that human soldiers are valued much more highly than drones, and they are not Western countries.
"focus on blocking the app itself instead of the addictive feed"
" the "healthy" and "social" features"
maannn, this totally resonates with me, I totally agree and I always thought about this too
social media/instagram has positive parts (connect with friends) and extremely negative parts (reels)
I will try that
I just don't understand the appeal of reels for the average user posting them (eg, not a "creator"). All comments come through as DMs which feels weird/creepy. The social/engagement is out the window; your friends can't comment on your content and reply to each other. It's just an effing weird one-way broadcast medium that's painful to deal with (might randomly play sound, might show photos for too long/too short, video with no easily usable scrubber, etc). The only "advantage" I see is that it's limited to 24h so you don't feel like you're making as permanent a record of your content. I'm sure some "younger" folks (who are probably 35 now) thought this was a good antidote to the generation before them being embarrassed by their old FB content, but man. I just hate reels.
Thankfully I don't doomscroll or otherwise sucked into the content generated by randos; I mostly only see stuff my friends post, but man, I would pay good money to never have to see a "suggested" anything again.
I actually built an app to do that for iOS. It’s called TimeCap, and it creates a web view of Instagram without reels and the explore page.
Then I use Beeper for the DMs. My daily social media use is less than 20 min per day now.
I'm curious. I don't use social media and am very extroverted. All of the communication, including sharing media, I do through WhatsApp (because it's most popular and widespread) or Signal (preferred).
Does Instagram have any advantage in communication or media sharing over standard widely adopted messaging (and group messaging) apps?
Counter Strike is legendary. I spent so many hours playing with friends. That's when I developed my reflexes the most. Games are sometimes an overlooked way of training your mind while having fun
ufff, this resonated with me
"It's okay to sacrifice some productivity to make work enjoyable. More than okay, it's essential in our field. If you force yourself to work in a way you hate, you're just going to burn out. "
