I’ll second a couple of other things that people have mentioned, like SmarterEveryDay and CGP Grey.

Hmm. What would I consistently watch new material on?

• MontemayorChannel

General-audience military history. It’s not especially flashy, and you’ll see typos and such, but it consistently shows maps, which is somewhere that I think a lot of military history stuff falls over. And the guy has read the material for the stuff he covers, at least the stuff that I’m reasonably familiar with. There are much larger military history channels out there, and much blingier ones, but I’d rate this well for actually helping someone accurately understand the material covered. He does a good job of highlighting what I think decent books on the subject matter consider the important, salient bits. I’d say that he’s probably reading – and understanding – the major recommended books on a battle prior to doing a video on it. I’d recommend his videos on battles over any commercial documentaries that I’ve seen.

There are other military history channels that I do watch, but I think that of them, that’s probably the one I’d recommend being worthwhile as a watch the most.

Drachinifel – does naval history, especially gun-era stuff and British stuff – but while Drachinifel is pretty prolific, I wouldn’t rank his output as highly; he’s basically taking some high-level stuff from a quick read and putting it in video format. He’s not doing all that much reading per video. But he’s got a lot of stuff.

The Operations Room also favors maps, but I feel like they tend to pull more of their material from personal accounts from individuals than I’d like.

Kings And Generals has covered a lot of different conflicts, is flashier, also puts stuff on maps, but I’ve definitely seen stuff on there that I’d call erroneous. I’d watch something from them due to the scope of their material, but take it with a grain of salt.

Hmm.

I don’t really follow channels much, repeatedly intentionally come back to anyone. Like, to have a Web analogy, there are websites out there that I like, but very few to which I’d subscribe to an RSS feed, because even for places that have good content, I rarely want to watch a high proportion of anything that they’ve done.

I can’t think of anyone that does software that I’d recommend watching (or, honestly, in general, video for that). I haven’t been all that blown away by video for international affairs stuff, not to the point that I’d explicitly recommend someone.

• theslowmoguys does a lot of well-filmed very slow motion stuff. I wouldn’t go back to see something just because they’ve put it out, but they’ve got some of the better slow-motion footage of different things that I’ve seen. Fun watch.

• Oh, forgottenweapons. This is pretty well-known in the firearms world, so it’s probably not a huge surprise to people who are interested in firearms. It originally focused on unusual firearms mechanisms, but I think that they’ve done a video on darn near every firearm out there now, so it’s kind of a nice place to get a video overview from an informed person of most firearms, short bit history, highlights unusual mechanisms of the thing. I definitely would not go out and try to watch through this whole thing unless you are some kind of absolutely rabid firearms mechanism person, but it consistently has good-quality, informed material. There’s a !forgottenweapons@lemmy.world community on the Threadiverse.

• PerunAU is also probably pretty well-known. Guy in defense economics, good for a level-headed, high-level look at the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Shows a series of Powerpoint slides. If he comes out with a new video, I’d watch it; he generally doesn’t waste viewer time, and insofar as my knowledge extends, the information he puts out is pretty solid. I don’t have the knowledge to evaluate the validity of his opinions, but he’s pretty good at explicitly stating that something is or is not his opinion. There’s been a lot of people making a lot of videos on the conflict, and I think that he’s one of the more-worthwhile people to pay attention to.

I feel kinda bad to heavily list military- or weapons- related stuff, as I certainly watch plenty of other stuff on YouTube, but honestly, while I watch other material, most of the cases where I think I’d watch new material from a particular individual falls into those categories. Like, there are channels spanning a wide range of things, that have put out great content, that I think is interesting, but they also put out a whole lot of other stuff that I’m not interested in. I might recommend a particular video, but not the whole channel.

EDIT:

• primitivetechnology9550. Guy goes out into the woods with nothing but his shorts and just using what’s available, constructs a “technology tree”, starting with something like a stone axe and moving up to iron production and increasingly-sophisticated structures. Pretty well-known, but I’ve enjoyed every video I’ve ever seen on there.

watches video

What the heck is that gigantic thing attached below the barrel of that rifle?

kagis

Hmm. Apparently about a decade ago, North Korea was showing off a helical magazine. Dunno if the video footage DW is using is current, though, so no idea if it’s still in use.

The North Korean military uses a 100- to 150- round helical magazine in the Type 88 assault rifle.

https://armamentresearch.com/north-korean-helical-ak-magazines/

Damn, that must be heavy as hell, moves a bunch of the weight on the rifle way forward.

looks further

It sounds like they aren’t using them in this deployment, though, that Russia has provided arms:

https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/first-north-korean-troops-come-under-fire-1730706704.html

According to Defense Intelligence data, Russia has equipped the North Korean military with:

• AK-12 assault rifles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-12

The timeframe is pretty short.

That might be doable down the line if there were serious aims at long-run cooperation, but I’ve also read some articles making a case that due to divergent interest, Russia and NK probably won’t stick tightly together post-war.

Guess we’ll see.

I’m guessing that they’re gonna either try to have NK forces operate together, or gonna put them in roles that involve minimal interaction with other forces.

I expect that it’s some degree of problem, no matter what.

One element that’s kinda important in US military theory is the idea of the OODA loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop

The OODA loop (observe, orient, decide, act) is a decision-making model developed by United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd. He applied the concept to the combat operations process, often at the operational level during military campaigns. It is often applied to understand commercial operations and learning processes. The approach explains how agility can overcome raw power in dealing with human opponents.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%2Booda+site%3Amil

The basic idea is that the smaller that loop is, the more-quickly you can react to your opponent while they’re still trying to react to your prior actions, the greater the advantage. In some cases – think the Battle of France, where at a high level France had slow response time – it can lead to staggering differences in outcome.

Language barriers exacerbate that sort of thing.

In US military history, I remember that that was blamed for a lot of problems surrounding the Battle of the Java Sea, a serious Allied naval loss.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Java_Sea

The Allies had a scratch force of American, British, Dutch, and Australian ships.

Unfortunately, these didn’t use common cryptographic mechanisms to encode communications, and the operational command was with the Dutch, who at the time didn’t work in English.

As a result, you had stuff like American reconaissance planes who would encode and transmit encoded data in English to a ship, which would decode the information, which would – assuming no extra relays were involved, which would involve more decoding and encoding – hand off the information in plaintext to a translator who knew English and Dutch, who would relay the Dutch to the person in command, who would make a decision on response, which would hand that back off to a translator, who would translate that to English, and encode and send the orders to, say, a British ship, who would decode those and relay to the ship commander, who would order people to then do something.

One of the things NATO did was establish common communication hardware and standardize on a subset of English for operational stuff to cut into the length of that loop.

These projects would hinder Sweden’s defense by disrupting radar, sensor systems, and submarine detection, important for NATO’s newest member given nearby Russian threats.

Hmmmmm. Haven’t seen discussion on the radar or other sensor implications there. Be interesting to see The War Zone or similar run an article.

If one can viably use offshore wind farms as radar cover, that seems like it might be something to look into developing counters for more-generally, because those are probably going to become more widespread.

That’s probably especially true for Europe and some places in Southeast Asia, as they’re surrounded by shallow seas, where there may be a lot of offshore wind infrastructure showing up.

EDIT: Going the other way – China might be building offshore wind, and we probably have an interest in having subs be able to operate without being detected in the South China Sea, I wonder if it’s possible to synchronize submarine prop RPM to turbine RPM or something to maximize stealth.

EDIT2: For radar, might be able to use aerostat-based radars, see over turbines. Won’t help with microphone arrays or whatever, though. Could maybe stick sensors on the wind turbine bases, though. Add some cost, maybe, but then instead of a veil obscuring your view, you’ve got a lot of eyeballs.

EDIT3:

V Adm Didier Maleterre, the deputy commander of Nato’s allied maritime command (Marcom), told the Guardian in April: “We know the Russians have developed a lot of hybrid warfare under the sea to disrupt the European economy through cables, internet cables, pipelines. All of our economy under the sea is under threat.”

Yeah, that’s a whole 'nother ball of wax. As I pointed out back during discussions around Nord Stream 2, there is literally not even legal protection for pipelines, as things stand.

The only protection for cables today is a treaty negotiated in France in the 1800s intended to cover telegraph cables (like, they weren’t running HVDC lines then).

kagis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_for_the_Protection_of_Submarine_Telegraph_Cables

That does not limit coverage just to data cables (despite the phrasing in the WP article I link to).

Dates to 1884. That’s the state of the art legally in the world in 2024, which is kinda mind-blowing.

My guess is that the US never had a strong reason to drive this, because the US is mostly surrounded by deep seas and doesn’t have anything important nearby across water, so not a whole lot of reason to build submarine infrastructure in relative terms or for it to be really critical for US security.

But the legal status is probably a lot more important for Europe, which has the Scandinavian penninsula, is mostly made up of penninsulas surrounded by shallow seas, has Africa across the Med, stuff like that. I think that there’s a good argument for the EU to have internal legal rules, like, Brussels-level powers to facilitate things like building pipelines and power lines overland rather than submarine. You had Spain trying to build critical infrastructure submarine around France to link the Iberian energy island to the rest of the EU rather than through France because France didn’t agree, which is a clusterfuck, but even if they do that, there are still some inescapable geographic realities – they’re probably going to still have more incentive for submarine infrastructure. So my suspicion is that Europe is likely to drive any change in the legal situation.

EDIT4: Potential areas of improvement might include:

• Legal requirements on where ships, or maybe large ships, can anchor. Anchor-dragging, “accidental” or not, can damage lines.

• Some mechanism for providing legal protection for infrastructure in international waters, especially pipelines.

• Some mechanism for quickly detecting and localizing damage to infrastructure. Possibly also detecting mechanical disruption, like dragging.

• Possibly the means to defend infrastructure. Part of the problem is that you can take out a lot of infrastructure at the depths they’re talking about with a COTS UUV from a surface ship that, last I looked around the Nord Stream 2 thing, was like $20k. That means that counters to something like a submarine, like lining your infrastructure with the equivalent of CAPTORs, isn’t gonna be economically effective; you can’t counter a group of 10 of those showing up at some point along the infrastructure. I have no idea if it’s even possible to reasonably counter attacks using current technology, even if they can be detected. Being able to attribute attacks to an attacker and deter them might be more realistic.

Resizeable inline images. At least some way to show them enlarged, the way one can with images that are posted. Kbin had it, and I’m sure mbin does, but the Lemmy Web UI does not, which means manually adding a link beneath the image if you want people to be able to conveniently view images full-size, particularly on touch interfaces.

I mean, no disagreement, but having a community like that doesn’t require setting up an instance local to the place. Like, there’s an !bayarea@lemmy.world community, though the lemmy.world instance isn’t located in the San Francisco Bay.

The post you’re responding to is explicitly asking for things that don’t involve content on lemmy, but rather functionality in lemmy.

more and better discoverability of communities anywhere.

If you haven’t yet, you may want to take a look at lemmyverse.net’s community index/search. They run a spider that crawls the whole Threadiverse and builds an index of all communities on all instances.

https://lemmyverse.net/communities

It’s an option on lemmy.today when doing an image post.

My guess is that it’s probably just in a newer release, and it’ll show up at the next update your home instance does.

lemmy.today is running 0.19.5.

lemmy.world, your home instance, is presently running 0.19.3.

Not the primary image, though I’d bet that you can stick an image inline in the body in spoiler text. You couldn’t get a thumbnail then, but I think that might be undesirable anyway if you’re wanting to hide the image by default.

EDIT:

Looks like it.

In frontends, I’d like to have the option to not show displaynames, or at least show real usernames next to displaynames.

If you want to reference a user using @username@instance syntax, you need to know their username, and while the displaynames can be cute, I’ve just never seen a really compelling argument for them. I also haven’t seen anyone abusing them yet, but they seem likely to be trouble from a “trying to impersonate someone else” standpoint.

Reddit Markdown lets one use italics inside links, like so:

I like [the author of *A Game of Thrones*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_R._R._Martin).

However, Lemmy does not presently support this syntax, renders it as:

I like the author of A Game of Thrones.

I frequently want to have partially-styled links like this, particularly italics.

EDIT: Okay, I just discovered that apparently this has been implemented since the last time I tried it. Thanks, devs!

IIRC kbin/mbin have that, but I don’t recall whether it applies to all posted material or just a user’s microblog.

I never used it myself, as I really prefer the Reddit-style “community-oriented” structure to the Twitter-style “user-oriented” structure.

Such as?

That can be done client-side. I don’t use the feature, but from a brief glance, it looks like the Android client I use when I’m on a phone, Eternity, supports it.

Probably slightly less efficient than supporting it at the API level.

RES is huge. Any specific must-have features?

I got tempbanned for 48 hours in a community recently after not noticing that a mod was objecting to some posts and had deleted a couple until after the ban went in place.

I’d kind of like to have some way to have a higher-priority indicator that a post was deleted or “message from moderator” or something. Preferably a different indicator from just “waiting regular messages”, and a way to view mod warnings or messages from moderators.

There’s a last-edited time, which I think should provide a superset of that information.

considers

Maybe have clients/Web UI more-clearly highlight if a response predated the last parent edit, which is I think the case where that really becomes an issue.

Honestly, I haven’t actually seen anyone involved in bad-faith edits in conversations here. I’ve even seen people regularly thank people who provide corrections before correcting their post to credit the correction. Obviously, that doesn’t mean that it’s true everywhere or will last, but from a community standpoint, that’s one area where I’ve been pretty happy with people here.

I whitelist rather than blacklist. I browse Subscribed normally. I think that under the existing system, that’s the only realistic way to scale. Hit lemmyverse.net or similar periodically to look for new, interesting communities, but the whole thing is gonna be a firehose.

I do understand that BlueSky has some sort of “curated lists” feature that sounds interesting, and I’ve thrown around some ideas around having curation decoupled from community/instance bans and global voting.