voidr

I take Linus's stance on this: how are you going to enforce it? How do you know I didn't just generate this with an LLM?

Why RPM and not DEB or something more modern? Is it for Read Had compatibility?

“We’re entering an era of untrustable code everywhere” - This assumes AI-generated code is inherently less trustworthy than human-written code, which isn’t obviously true.

It's not true if your humans are on controlled substances all the time, it is true if we are talking about real humans.

I've been testing coding agents on real code and I can say without a doubt that they make worse mistakes than humans.

Our 100% SLA ensures uninterrupted services, empowering businesses worldwide to thrive.

Avoid ANY company that makes this claim.

I'm European and European providers need to start by not being dishonest, we can't just give 'em some slack just because they are "ours". I'm not putting my data into a company that can't even be honest about their actual reliability.

Péter Magyar has emerged exactly 1 year and 5 days ago, he went from a nobody to looking more and more like the end to Orbán's reign.

Orbán has been complacent because the opposition was fragmented and useless, but now it looks like it's the end of the line for them and they are scrambling and just digging themselves deeper and deeper. They attack Péter Magyar with all sorts of unprofessional and childish insults, they leaked his medical records, however each time they do this, it usually backfires spectacularly.

A rapper named "Majka" has made a song about a prime minister of a country called "Bindzsistan", of course everyone knew who he was referring to and FIDESZ members made the fatal mistake of reacting to it, thereby confirming that they do believe that they are the corrupt establishment the song is about. We are now at the stage where Magyar Péter is the pop culture cool guy and FIDESZ is the uncool party.

I believe that the best thing Orbán and his party can do is: shut up, but they won't due to their arrogance.

Most Hungarians either indifferent about the Pride parade or they support it, attacking it earns FIDESZ very little.

In Hungary the interpretation of the GDPR is so hardline that it's virtually impossible to install security cameras, I find this move incredibly hypocritical and believe that if the EU values their credibility they will act, otherwise we can conclude that the GDPR was a complete waste of money.

I don't get the obsession with YAML and making things declarative that really should not be declarative.

I'm so much happier on projects where I can use the non-declarative Jenkins pipelines instead of GH Actions or BB pipelines.

These YAML pipelines are bad enough on their own, but throw in a department that is gatekeeping them and use runners as powerful as my Raspberry Pi and you have a situation where a lot of developers just give up and run things locally instead of the CI.

European here: other than people obsessed with certain political events, nobody really cares, people aren't going to throw away their iPhones and switch away from Microsoft.

I also find this very strange, that people did not talk about doing the mass exodus after we found out the US is conducting mass surveillance on us, but just because they don't like the politics of the current president, they start talking about how bad the US is.

The expectation is that especially US tech will be weaponized

That should always have been the expectation, that's why the basic idea of GDPR was a good one, too bad they have botched it in the end.

I know people in the US are focused on DOGE, but over here in Europe, the impression is that the US completely destroyed its soft power this week.

It's just some politicians who are unhappy because things didn't go their way, a lot of ordinary people are just happy to see hope that the economic suicide might be coming to an end, maybe next year my energy bills won't be 3x of what they used to be 3 years ago, one can dream.

Keep in mind that most people don't even understand what current events are about, the vocal minority can be very vocal.

so people are switching search engines

Are people talking about this - do they take it seriously or believe there is no alternative to US tech?

Switching search engines is easy, try switching your whole office from Windows to Linux.

What does it mean for US startups, California and global tech?

It will mean nothing, if I need to build a product that requires US tech and there is no alternative, I'm going to use the US tech, end of story.

I fully understand that you hope to see sudden breakthroughs

I want to see an end of this pointless war where a lot of people died for a lot of nothing and Europe along with other parts of the world just became poorer.

In the early months of the war, we saw large armoured spearheads, such as the one destroyed at the Siverskyi Donets river crossing in May 2022, which consisted of 80-100 vehicles. Advancements in drone warfare on the Ukrainian side and equipment shortages on the Russian side have made it impossible to assemble such spearheads anymore. So even if there are breaches in Ukrainian frontlines, they cannot be (and haven't been) exploited on a massive scale as they were earlier in the war.

War has changed and that would be a big headache for the US and NATO in general because they know nothing about cheap-drone-warfare and NATO troops rarely faced off against a similar force, they became complacent.

Besides that, any rapid Russian advancements in Ukraine would likely be countered by the deployment of a multinational European force. This seems to be currently in preparation even without any breakthroughs.

Europe's army is pathetic, they organised a meeting in Paris and all they could muster up is 25k soldiers, that's nothing, we have serious issues here.

Europeans are expected to officially announce a 700bn defense package after the German elections on Sunday.

That's great but how long till it actually materialises into something? It takes time to build a military industry.

700bn is many times more than has been provided to Ukraine so far, by the entire world, combined.

Not as much if you research the real cost of participating in this war, a lot of economic productivity was erased as a result of the sanctions.

Money means nothing if there is nobody left to hold the weapon.

The longer the war drags on, the more modern equipment Ukraine will receive to replace the destroyed Soviet stocks and the more closely it will be aligned with NATO countries.

You are making the assumption that "more modern" as always better and that NATO doctrine is superior in a setting where NATO has never fought before.

This is another measure by which the Russian invasion has been a complete failure.

The whole point was to demonstrate that you can ignore deals you make with Russia because Russia is no longer a superpower, well that didn't work out.

We went from Obama refusing to provide lethal aid to Ukraine in 2014, to Ukraine's air force flying F-16s and Mirages in 2025 while Rheinmetall is building arms factories in Ukraine.

Yes and then Russia has built a missile that we can't shoot down that can target anything in Europe, great progress, what's next, do we want to see them test it with actual nukes inside it?

This is far more than any NATO ally has received since the Cold War.

People clinging on to the Cold War need to retire, the world has moved on and changed.

No it didn't, you just need to stop asking questions an LLM can easily solve, most of those were probably terrible questions to begin with.

I can create a simple project with 20 files, where you would need to check almost all of them to understand the problem you need to solve, good luck feeding that into an LLM.

Maybe you have some sneaky script or IDE integration that does this for you, fine, I'll just generate a class with 200 useless fields to exhaust your LLM's context length.

Or I can just share my screen and ask you to help me debug an issue.

We should have seen this post before Hector Martin got so fed up that he decided to resign(to be fair, he probably had other issues as well that contributed).

I was very confused by the lack of an actual response from Linus, he only said that social media brigading is bad, but he didn't give clarity on what would be the way forward on that DMA issue.

I have worked in a similar situation and it was the worst experience of my work life. Being stonewalled is incredibly painful and having weak ambiguous leadership enhances that pain.

If I were a R4L developer, I would stop contributing until Linus codifies the rules around Rust that all maintainers would have to adhere to because it's incredibly frustrating to put a lot of effort into something and to be shut down with no technical justification.

At a rate of less than 1% of territory gained

Capturing Texas wouldn't enlarge Russia too much percentage wise, because it's already massive, not that this metric matters at all.

You keep assuming that Russia needs more territory that's why this war is happening, whereas in reality Russia does not want a powerful Ukraine armed to the teeth with NATO gear right next door, that's it, that's what the Russians have been saying all along, their position has never changed, you can look up the Mins k agreement.

400k+ casualties per year

It's not per year.

Russia would exceed the total Soviet losses for all of Ukraine before even reaching the halfwaypoint at the Dnieper river.

You are assuming that Ukraine has their forces uniformly distributed across it's territory which would make it the dumbest army in the universe, in reality most of it's armed forces are near the front, if they are gone, there won't be much left to defend the rest of Ukraine.

Russia hasn't even reached the hardest part yet: major urban areas like Kharkiv (pop. 1.7m) and Zaporizhzhia (840k), where the heaviest fighting could be expected, remain in Ukrainian hands.

They don't have to, they can bleed the Ukrainian army by dragging them into a meat grinder elsewhere, Russia does not want Ukraine, they just want to destroy the Ukrainian army and permanently make sure Ukraine will never have an army that is a threat to Russia. The crazy thing is Zelensky is doing the work for the Russians with his media stunts like Kursk and Krynky.

Note the timeframe too. Both Germany and the USSR rolled through Ukraine in 12 months. In a week, the Russian war against Ukraine will enter its fourth year.

Wonder how well both would have done with drones and HIMARs involved.

I'd say developing "evil" AI is a bad business idea.

You know that quotes have a meaning, a knife can kill people, but it can also be used to make tasty food, the EU wants to ban the knife because it can kill people in this case.

And if you really think that Mistral is not competitive then you clearly know so little about the AI landscape that it's hilarious that you think you're going to go develop some "evil" AI company.

Making up childish nonsense does not advance your argument.

Oh look it's a Trump propagandist. Hello!

If it's propaganda then I guess it would take you no effort to prove me wrong instead of writing nonsense.

I guess you are now going to prove that this didn't happen: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/09/17/governor-newsom-signs-bill...

Guess some Trump propagandist infiltrated California in 2024.

So far I haven't heard any similar plans of censorship from team red, but since I don't have a dog in the race, point it out if I missed it.

I don't believe that hosting in the EU means you need to treat non-EU jurisdictions with EU law.

Let's say to that I want to develop something that uses an "evil" AI and I only want to sell to countries outside of the EU, I just can't do that because during development I would be suffocated by unhelpful regulations while someone in the US doing the same would be not.

Most software businesses operate internationally, so the EU regulation is something you'll have to deal with no matter where you host, assuming you sell into the EU.

Having my whole business being at risk is not the same thing as only having a significant market being at risk.

where you are headquartered as a business is up to you, and there are many choices.

Yes and the problem I was pointing out is that I would unlikely to pick an EU country because broken legislation that would hinder me is not something I want to deal with.

The EU problem is that legislation that is not around manufacturing is very knee-jerky, I don't feel like it would be a safe place for my potential software business, because legislation seems to be driven by headlines rather than rationality and the people making the legislations don't look too competent based on the end results.

In terms of being competitive, some European services like OVH, Gandi, and Mistral are absolutely competitive internationally

Azure, AWS, Digital Ocean, ChatGPT, Meta, DeepSeek are a league of their own.

end up suffering US state censorship at some point.

You had a higher risk for that with the democrats, remember the AI videos that upset Kamala and Gavin?

European countries have a far worse track record of censorship.

Still, I would flag use of US services as a major risk for non-US businesses right now.

Given the current state of things, I think it's entirely plausible that US services are either hit with things like tariffs, or end up suffering US state censorship at some point.

Who made your phone, your computer and the OS your computer is running?

I'm an EU citizen, I would like the EU to be a competitive place in terms of software, however at the moment I have to say that it's a hostile place for software development and software as a service.

They are making too many dumb and potentially dangerous laws, just look at the cookie consent laws that accomplish nothing but erased millions of euros.

They AI laws and aspirations make me not even consider making any software that runs AI in the EU. I don't want to harm people, but it's next to impossible to make the distilled LLM I'm using to not say occasionally dumb shit. Just because an AI is "dangerous" doesn't mean you cannot use it in a place where it poses no real risk.

Sure, it’s not pure CGI, just CGI on steroids. But frankly, it hasn’t gone too far.

It doesn't need to go far, because it's selling point is that it's easy to learn and use.

The way I see PHP is not as a competitor to Java, .Net, NodeJS or Rust, instead I see it as a platform for non-advanced developers to be able to be able to create things and actually have the whole thing be cheap and sustainable.

But it’s not the language itself, as I was advised. True asynchronous handlers are possible, which is promising.

The whole point of PHP is that it's single threaded, blocking and from the developer's point of view: your program starts at the request and terminates when the HTTP request is complete, this is what makes it simple to comprehend, if you want async, I would tell you to use something like Node instead.

File caching is evil—many PHP devs love using the filesystem to store things, which is pretty nasty under K8s.

It's usually just an annoyance or just something you need to configure or just brute force it with a shared mount.

I’ve seen a lot of WordPress plugins with spaghetti code being called on every invoked endpoint.

That's not really the problem of the language itself, the language doesn't force you to run anything on every request.

Last time i looked PHP still had no generics, and the "typesystem" is mostly a joke.

So is Python's yet the language is enjoying great success.

All the builtin functions still have no namespaces, and no forced types.

And no PHP developer cares, because neither does C and yet it's doing just fine.

PHP still coerces strings to ints and vice versa.

Which is great for beginners, because they don't need to worry about it, unlike me when I program in Rust and have to deal with 8+ number types.

PHP still has serious bugs with its (only) collection, the frankenstein ARRAY.

So does JavaScript, yet it's not enough to stop the language.

IIRC doing a array_filter is still broken on PHP8 for key val arrays.

There is some odd behavior if you try to do certain things in a functional style that is actually true.

PHP still had no unicode in 2023, im not sure how the latest version fixed this or not. IIRC you had to use the weird mb_real functions to get anything closely functional, and it was a mess.

That can get annoying in some use cases, I have developed many international web apps in PHP, it rarely got in my way, but I do acknowledge that it's not great to not have Unicode by default, I suspect they are afraid to resolve this after seeing what happened with Python 3.

Nobody runs PHP in CGI mode, either they go with libapache2_mod_php, where Apache itself does the work or PHP-FPM with Nginx.

Either way you are not going to pay for the PHP process startup cost.

PHP can also cache the interpretations of files so you avoid that cost as well.

And frameworks usually have their own usually file-based caching mechanism.

At the end of the day it's still going to have some costs compared to a single application server model, but for most web apps it's not going to matter, however it greatly simplifies the programming model.

No, certainly not.

I think we can agree to disagree on that one, we are talking about a country that started wars for far less.

Russian losses are totally insane. The US lost 107 903 killed in action and 208 333 wounded in the entire Pacific theater of WWII, over four years that saw massive aerial and naval battles, unrestricted submarine warfare, large-scale amphibious operations, and savage fighting in the jungles across Southeast Asia.

You don't have as many men on the ships as you need to cover ground.

You should check the Russian losses in WWII, compared to that, this is just a walk in the park.

There have been no strategic gains.

If they keep categorizing all Russian gains as non strategic then of course there are none. The problem with this narrative is that it makes the Ukrainians look incompetent for sacrificing so much for these unimportant places.

Either the Ukrainians were complete morons for defending these places for so long or they were actually important and the media just likes to spin it the other way when the truth is inconvenient for their narratives.

US did for fighting its way across the Pacific to Japan and forcing its surrender

You kind of forgot to mention one other player in that game and a certain type of weapon.

Warfare has also changed a lot since WWII.

If you want to optimise for SEO you might want your content to be rendered on the server, however: rendered on the server is not the same as being sent down in the initial HTML payload. Server components are not convenient to use, because they cannot be interactive, even code that you would expect to work does not work on the server.

There are good parts like server actions, however they are plagued with very strange limitations making them not so useful.

If you want to statically generate websites and want to use React, NextJS can be a good choice, however for complex web applications I find that it's not ambitious enough to justify even the extra compile time that I get from its tooling compared to Vite.

A lot of teams using NextJS end up creating things that are effectively SPAs where some part of the code run on the server, they gain no benefits but end up dealing with relatively long compilation times and have to deal with the confusing issues around client vs server components.

its still relevant

Relevant in what way? Relevant as in they are factual or relevant to the day to day of a real PHP developer, because I can tell you the latter didn't hold up even when this was written.

even a decade has passed

We got more optional typing and better error handling, and I'm still able to run the awful code I have written a decade ago.

Java is an almost 30 year old language and I can still do this:

String foo = null; System.out.println("hello" + foo.length());

Make you wonder what the hell php devs are really doing?

Incrementally improving the language without breaking too much.

60% true still. Most of the issues are in "wontfix" mode.

Most of those are quirks that you can safely ignore, and "fixing" them would result in breaking a lot of the existing code, which is not worth it.

A lot of the points were bad even when this was written for example "A language must be consistent." is probably not true for any of the top 10 languages.

PHP is inconsistent: strpos, str_rot13

I used PHP for two decades and the naming issues while being annoying didn't really bother me in real life, nobody would tell you not to use C because you have 10 bad implementations of the same string method with weird names.

Side observation: I loooove Python. I will also happily talk your ear off complaining about it, if you really want me to. I don’t claim it’s perfect; I’ve just weighed its benefits against its problems and concluded it’s the best fit for things I want to do.

You should check out the moment you reach this paragraph because Python has similar and sometimes worse developer experience issues.

There’s no clear design philosophy. Early PHP was inspired by Perl; the huge stdlib with “out” params is from C; the OO parts are designed like C++ and Java.

Exactly, the language has a lot of old cruft, just like most old languages, but that does not matter, what matters is how well you can use it to build something useful today.

There is no threading support whatsoever.

Neither in JavaScript and nobody developing JavaScript is missing horrors of threads, if you need that level of performance, there are more suitable languages out there.

In PHP, these functions return false. If you use FALSE as an index, or do much of anything with it except compare with ===, PHP will silently convert it to 0 for you.

Just like in JavaScript, yet people are still able to build big things.

There is no way to declare a variable. Variables that don’t exist are created with a null value when first used.

This is coming from someone who loves Python.

PHP is dynamically-typed, so variables generally have no type… except references, which adorn function definitions, variable syntax, and assignment.

Not true anymore.

Constructs

Full of nitpicks and statements that are wrong or don't mean anything.

echo is a statement-y kind of thing, not a function.

This is a problem because?

There’s redundant syntax for blocks: if (...): ... endif;, etc.

Because it used to be a templating language, don't use it or do use it, nobody will care either way.

Error handling

It's configurable and you can configure it to meet your needs, moving on.

PHP errors and PHP exceptions are completely different beasts. They don’t seem to interact at all.

They do now.

But you can’t require that an argument be an int or string or object or other “core” type, even though every builtin function uses this kind of typing, probably because int is not a thing in PHP.

You can now.

The procedural parts of PHP are designed like C, but the objectional (ho ho) parts are designed like Java. I cannot overemphasize how jarring this is.

It's not, you read the docs, you get the job done.

clone is an operator?!

What does it matter if it's an operator or a function that is in the standard library?

There is no module system.

There is Composer and you get an experience similar to Java.

There are thousands of functions in the global namespace.

And this will destroy my productivity because?

PHP basically runs as CGI. Every time a page is hit, PHP recompiles the whole thing before executing it. Even dev servers for Python toy frameworks don’t act like this.

Person writing this is not very experienced, because this hasn't been the norm for a long time.

PHP is naturally tied to Apache. Running it separately, or with any other webserver, requires just as much mucking around (possibly more) as deploying any other language.

Author doesn't know what they are talking about, you can use whatever webserver you want.

Similarly, there is no easy way to “insulate” a PHP application and its dependencies from the rest of a system. Running two applications that require different versions of a library, or even PHP itself? Start by building a second copy of Apache.

This is coming from someone who likes Python which has the same problem.

The “bunch of files” approach, besides making routing a huge pain in the ass, also means you have to carefully whitelist or blacklist what stuff is actually available, because your URL hierarchy is also your entire code tree. Configuration files and other “partials” need C-like guards to prevent them from being loaded directly. Version control noise (e.g., .svn) needs protecting. With mod_php, everything on your filesystem is a potential entry point; with an app server, there’s only one entry point, and only the URL controls whether it’s invoked.

You use a framework and all of these problems go away.

You can’t seamlessly upgrade a bunch of files that run CGI-style, unless you want crashes and undefined behavior as users hit your site halfway through the upgrade.

Has this person heard about containers or symlinks?

No template system. There’s PHP itself, but nothing that acts as a big interpolator rather than a program.

Twig, Smarty etc.

No XSS filter. No, “remember to use htmlspecialchars” is not an XSS filter. This is.

Use a framework.

No CSRF protection. You get to do it yourself.

That's what frameworks do in any language.

No generic standard database API. Stuff like PDO has to wrap every individual database’s API to abstract the differences away.

PDO is the standard database API.

-------

As someone who actually used PHP to get real work done I find this article very nitpicky and get the impression that it's mainly taking potshots rather than looking at things that actually matter day to day.

Majority of what is in this article doesn't matter in real life, a lot of the things that do matter have been fixed, there are some legitimate points that do impact you and have not been fixed yet, but they are few and far between.

This article compares core PHP with a framework from some other language, which is unproductive because most of the time you should be using a framework but at the same time it's impressive that you can actually write real applications just by using the standard library, I would not recommend it though.

PHP is incredibly stable, scales horizontally by default and has amazing documentation. I have applications I have built 13+ years ago and I can still get them to work with minimal effort on the latest PHP. PHP has a very low barrier of entry which can be incredibly helpful.

Is PHP without flaws? Of course not, some of the syntax is quirky and it's full of legacy code.

I always recommend: pick the framework not the language, if the way the framework works suits you, then choose it, otherwise find another one that is better suited to your exact needs, if I were to have a beginner write something, a PHP-based framework would be a good entry point, because they can learn the basics without worrying about typing too much.

I do not recall saying that Russia has seen 400 000+ casualties for each of the three years.

Thought you meant to say it was every year, my bad, I had no intention to misinterpret it.

I do not recall saying that Russia has seen 400 000+ casualties for each of the three years. Quite the opposite: in the initial weeks of the invasion Russia made large gains with relatively tiny losses, estimated at low thousand a month. That progress has stalled and casualty rate has now grown tenfold to 48 670 dead and wounded for December 2024 (worst month of the entire invasion). January 2025 is narrowly behind with 48 240. The running total is estimated 850k+. The first year contributed 85k. The second year 300k. The third year 400k. Even if the pace of losses stops growing and remains where it currently is, Russia will lose another 12x48=576k this year.

How is this not a disaster? I'd appreciate if you answered with a coherent paragraph instead of sniping every single sentence with a oneliner.

Not sure what your source is, but in general it's only the Russian Ministry of Defence that know the actual casualty numbers, but they aren't telling, other than that it speculation and depending who you ask you can get wildly different results.

Casualties include wounded and typically you have 4 wounded for each dead, which with your numbers would mean 170k deaths over 3 years, considering what they are up against this is to be expected, so in military terms I would not call this a disaster because if both sides are well equipped, it's just unavoidable. You can look at the Vietnam war for comparison.

Is it bad for society to lose this much of the male population? Of course it is, but one possible alternative scenario is that they get into an Israel - Gaza situation, which one can argue is even worse.

Do you think the US would have been willing to absorb similar levels of casualties if Mexico decided to join a military alliance with Russia or China?

All of these channels are blatant Russian propaganda. They're also full of blatant lies. All 3 of them.

Can you point out examples of lies or do you just label every source that does not align with your beliefs as propaganda?

The Military Summary Channel sources Deep State (pro-Ukraine) and videos made by Ukrainians, are you telling me that these are also lies?

There was that video of a bradley(IFV) managing to defeat a Russian tank on History Legends, why would the Russians make such propaganda?

Avdiivka was literally visible from the windows of high-rise apartment buildings in Russian-occupied Donetsk.

That's why it was so critical to capture it because the Ukrainians were able to comfortably shell the separatists from there, that's why it was important.

Avdiivka, the "greatest success" of 2024, was a small town with pre-invasion population of 32 000

It was one of the most and best defended strongholds of Ukraine that was in range of the separatist capital, getting rid of that was huge.

Being important economically is not the same as being important militarily, a village of 1000 people can be more important than a town of 10 000 if it's in the right place.

All other listed are even smaller: Vuhledar 14 000

It had high rise buildings and it was surrounded by flat terrain, incredibly difficult to approach, was blocking the Russian army for a long time.

It took three years to get there.

Because it had an insanely high concentration of Ukrainian forces and some of the best defences.

losing 400 000+ a year

War started in 2021, we are now in 2025, that's 4 years, estimated size of Russian army is ~1 500 000, which means they should have a minus 100 000 soldiers, that does not add up. You could argue that maybe the Russians are just that good at recruiting people at this horrible survival rate, however you would need to account for contracts not being renewed, which makes it very hard to make the numbers add up.

She should have been given life, she played with other people's lives and livelihoods for personal gain.

the emphasis is on Holmes as a mother, and how hard it is for her to be away from her children.

Many mothers are in prison for far less, don't believe she should get a free pass.

They have not.

Russia captured some 22% of Ukraine

Ukrainian counteroffensives in 2022 reduced this to 17-18%

Percentage of territory in terms of a war is not a good indicator of progress, especially taking into account the objective and the context here, if the Russians would capture Kharkiv that wouldn't be a big territorial gain, but it would be game over for Ukraine.

The Russians have captured Avdiivka(which was probably the most important victory), Vuhledar, Chasiv Yar, Toretsk, Niu-York, Kurakhove and many others, they have also rolled back all of the small gains made by the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive. Just remember that before it took like around 11 months to capture just Bakhmut and now I can't even count how many comparable victories they are having.

militarily super-duper-important landfills, as you put it

I did mean actual waste heap, it might be funny to us, but for military purposes a waste heap can be important because it gives elevation same way as worthless fields on hills.

For a country with an aging society and already one of the lowest birth rates in the world, this is pure suicide.

The Russians probably think that allowing Ukraine to become a NATO military power is even worse, if you look at it from that perspective it makes a bit more sense.

They will literally run out of young men before reaching Kyiv.

Progress and casualties is not linear.

The most cynical people in Washington must be real pleased with the way the war is going.

They were, until it started affecting them as well and when they realised what it's like to fight an opponent that has a military industry and all the natural resources it can ever need.

It was also an embarrassment for NATO.

Russia is losing people and permanently crippling itself, while the US population has grown by almost 100 million in the last 30 years.

The US can grow 200 million this year if it wants to, that's not a good indicator of progress. Russia has also gained people from the territories it has annexed so far.

-------

For easy consumption I highly recommend the Military Summary Channel[1], they make daily videos and cite all their sources, you don't have to agree with their interpretation, you can check their sources instead. History Legends[2] is also good if you don't want the level of detail you can get from the Military Summary Channel.

For a different interpretation of what is the Russian perspective I highly recommend looking at John Mearsheimer, you can check out talks he gave before the war even started and see how well it holds up today[3].

Reason I believe my sources are better than the mainstream media, is because they managed to stay consistent all these years, whereas the mainstream media fumbled and flip-flopped on things that were easily verifiable.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/@militarysummary [2] https://www.youtube.com/@historylegends [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

In what sense is half a percent of territorial gain for 400 000 casualties "beating" anyone? It is textbook Pyrrhic victory.

Maybe gaining territory was not really the objective, maybe not all territory is considered equal.

Also they gained 20% of Ukraine along with some of it's population, if they gained more than 400 000(or whatever the actual number is) people, then the exchange was profitable.

It would have been interesting to see how many people would the US have been willing to sacrifice had the Cuban Missile Crisis would not have been averted.

Russia has no armour left to exploit breakthroughs

They might be fighting with clubs, slingshots and shovels, but they are still gaining ground, so either this is not true, or the Russians are so good that they don't need armour. Since I have seen Ukrainian videos with recent dates that show columns of Russian armour, I would say that it's probably not true.

territorial gains have stalled

They have actually accelerated, remember how long Bakhmut lasted? Now they are speedrunning it, they capture something militarily important almost every month.

no end in sight

There is: Ukraine wants to recruit 18 year olds, clearly they are at the end of their rope.

being stuck in unwinnable war like this is a nightmare scenario

They can freeze the conflict whenever they want, the Russians don't want to because they feel that they have the initiative, that's why it's so difficult to negotiate with them.

abandoned village in rural Ukraine

In military context small villages can have significant importance. Landfills can be incredibly important as well even though they don't have much intrinsic value.

exchange tens of thousands of lives

Maybe that's a win for them, maybe they just want to erase military power and even if their exchanges are less efficient it might still be worth it for them because they can absorb the higher cost in lives due to their larger population. I do believe that because the Russians are more numerous and have their own military industry, it's the Ukrainians that suffer more casualties, however it doesn't matter because if it meets their objective, it's a victory.