Aught

Software developer, AI researcher, tinkerer, writer.

Currently working on TypeSensei and writing about the history of AI on

[Aught @aughtdev]

There is a specific archetype of person in the tech community: the one who only does something because someone else told them it was impossible.

🧵1/5

[Aught @aughtdev]

Can Israel manufacture modern tech at the volumes needed to win?
I suppose they probably conquer the Levant and north Africa and try to rapidly develop the industry needed to hold off Germany while conducting strategic decapacitation strikes but depending on how much resistance there is in the intermediate countries, it's a toss up.

If Germany can get strategic bombers doing daily raids over Tel-Aviv with a tolerance for an initially
heavy attrition rate, Israel is screwed. They'd run out of SAMs and AA ammo and their jets and missiles wouldn't be able to be replaced fast enough to recover

[Aught @aughtdev]

I understand why Sun Tzu had to write "The Art of War".
People straight up don't understand logistics and attritional warfare at all. They think war is one big battle where jets and missiles win and then Europe surrenders.

[DoomBoy64 @DoomBoy64]

The whole "modern Africa vs 1939 Europe" discourse has just proven that 90% of "history nerds" are just larpers that think German tanks are cool

[Aught @aughtdev]

@stvr_rl @DoomBoy64 And I keep trying to tell you people that it doesn't matter. Africa will win every battle for the first 1 year and still lose because any form of smart/precision equipment needs microchips that Africa can't produce while Europe can keep manufacturing out of range of African jets

[Aught @aughtdev]

@LainNJD @nothingatalltil Did you use "carpet bomb" as a noun? As if there's a specific bomb made for carpet bombing?
Ffs.. Carpet bombing means using a heavy bomber fleet to drop multiple conventional bombs on a wide area, there is no carpet bomb factory, you have to have bomber fleets

[Aught @aughtdev]

@tsarlet2 It would basically look like a sadder version of Japan Vs America.
A dramatic Pearl harbour type strike, about a year of easy air/naval victories then attrition plus european adaptation hits a critical point and you get a Midway. It's all downhill for Africa from there

[Aught @aughtdev]

@gamer_polymath1 @DukeNukem1996 @LombardGoon "surgically decapitated.."

There are literally more factories in Europe in 1939 than laser guided munitions in all of Africa. You cannot surgically decapitate something that's in every town and city. There is no singular set of hail Mary targets that cripples Europe at all

[Aught @aughtdev]

@tenobrus China doesn't send amateurs

[Aught @aughtdev]

@GergelyOrosz And this is the one guy that got caught. There's got to be other attempts at corporate espionage going on under the radar

[Aught @aughtdev]

@OpenAINewsroom The employee was "terminated"

[Aught @aughtdev]

@anarcho_funk @FugeusRedux Beyond recovery how? In WW2 they were rebuilding entire factories in a few weeks or moving them into mountain bunkers. And Africa doesn't have the munitions for sustained saturation bombing

[Aught @aughtdev]

It's not a matter of race. On an objective level modern industry is incredibly complex, you cannot replicate it in a few months and, no, there's no people sitting around in Africa with this expertise. Anyone who does have it, left to somewhere where their skills are useful. There's no tooling and chip fab engineers sitting around in a place with almost no industry, what would they even be doing there? There's a reason even china needs to poach people from Taiwan to build chips, this stuff is incredibly hard. If it's not happening during peacetime, it's not going to magically happen under wartime conditions.

The industrial capacity and human capital that would be needed to pull this off would make a country rich and developed very quickly. Given that Africa is mostly poor agrarian economies, it won't get much more sophisticated than that under wartime conditions, especially given the fact that there's going to be major food shortages to deal with as well

[Aught @aughtdev]

Well yes, that's one part of it. But also it's just basic PR. There's people who want to support you but also want to have a respectable explanation for it, and there's also people waiting for a good anti bolshevik narrative to latch onto. if you're going around shoving Jews into ghettos and proclaiming eastern Europe your future Lebensraum, those people won't have any legs to stand on. That's why university professors could support Stalin after the purges and collectivizations but not Hitler. Stalin gave them some plausible propaganda to preach at their dinner guests. With Hitler there's no competing narrative, he made it clear exactly what he was doing so there's no respectable debate to be had about him in polite society. These things seem silly but in democracies with idealistic elites, this is what matters, especially if you haven't yet won.

[Aught @aughtdev]

@rkitchencels Yeah, at that point I'd just eat a bullet instead

[Aught @aughtdev]

Waking up in the hospital room

"Did I die"

Doctor: "Well somebody did"

[🔻☫ @ABCDiasporoid]

imagine fucking up this bad

[Aught @aughtdev]

Yeah, it doesn't work like that. It's not a video game where you push a button and destroy a ship. There's thousands of ships and subs from the north Atlantic to the Mediterranean. Each has to be tracked, targeted and hit enough times to cause permanent damage from close enough to be accurate. A handful of coastal frigates cannot do that, they don't even have enough missiles to hit more than 30 and the same applies to submarines that require torpedos. Once missiles are finished and there's no chip manufacturing anywhere in Africa to replace them, all that's left is artillery and guns, for which those frigates would have to get very close and expose themselves to heavy naval guns. Not to mention that these coastal ships are not carriers, they won't have air support beyond a helicopter or two, so you'll have waves dive bombers and torpedo bombers attacking with AA as the only defense, and they do not have the armour to sustain continuous bombing and firing. Within two months all of those ships will either be grounded or sunk. A lot of royal navy ships and u boats will be destroyed yes, but not enough to cause permanent damage. The UK alone was producing a new destroyer every other week during WW2, they'll recover every loss in a few months and hold naval superiority in the Mediterranean.

[Aught @aughtdev]

@BioMathEnjoyer @uisbg1 Modern drones are mostly getting past air defence on both sides. Russia has started using jet powered drones and Ukraine is using massed formations

[Aught @aughtdev]

@GuntherHermann4 @uisbg1 Exactly how would Germany's hundreds of U boats be destroyed without dedicated anti submarine units? You can't shoot a missile underwater and there's more of them than there are African naval ships. And all those ships are already trying to deal with the royal navy

[Aught @aughtdev]

@GuntherHermann4 @uisbg1 Beach head? Lmao
Where? With what landing craft and how will it be supplied across a sea filled with mines and U boats. No nation in Africa has an offensive blue water navy, it's all defensive coastal Corvettes and frigates.
This would be a disaster worse than Hitler's sealion