By “Yandex bot” and “Russian bot” what do they mean?

Do we mean “bot”, like a social media account that pretends to be an authentic human user, but is actually a “bot”, or some other version of something inauthentic? Or do we mean the crawlers that Yandex sends out to crawl websites to refresh its search index?

Yeah. We’re too used to that being the normal thing to do. It vaguely makes sense in some scenarios, like to see if there has been a firmware update. If there’s a security issue you either want the device to update automatically or you want to be able to notify the user. But, even then, there are other ways of doing it that don’t involve the device sending traffic to the Internet. IoT should really be made from devices that are unable to exchange traffic with anything outside the local network.

Even if you come up with a plausible scenario where maybe you’d want a device to be accessible outside your home (i.e. you want to start your coffee maker before you get home) that could be done without the device having access to the outside world. It would be easy to set up a device which can accept outside messages (“make coffee”) and forward them on to devices inside the network. There are ways of making that much more secure. And, if that’s the case, needing the latest security update for an IoT device is less urgent.

I honestly think that some smart devices could be really useful. But, there are 2 major changes needed before they’re worth buying:

1. Meaningful privacy laws. By default any device should be locked down otherwise the companies are in deep trouble for privacy violations. Any agreements you make to allow them to do something should be ones you can easily revoke at any time.

2. Right to repair / modify anything you own without any issues. If you buy a Samsung washer with “smarts”, the same store that sells you the washer should be able to offer you alternative firmware from a number of different vendors. If the washer breaks, you should be able to fix it yourself, or hire someone to fix it, whether it’s a mechanical fix or a software fix. If you want to go in there and modify it yourself, or go online to some standard site to download a new feature, you should be able to do that. It your hardware, you should have full control over it. Same with printers, which would end the expensive ink fiasco. Same with Apple’s app store monopoly.

There may be armour, but does it matter if nobody uses it?

So do their opponents.

The difference is that I don’t think anybody is supposed to believe that the knife fights in West Side Story are anything other than dance.

Also, I’d bet that the reality for knife fights isn’t that one guy gets inside the other’s radius and wins, it’s probably that both take extremely serious knife wounds but one guy is fully dead and the other is just bleeding out.

My point is that slow motion wouldn’t change anything. In fast motion the attacker doesn’t have time to adjust their attack, and the defender doesn’t have time to adjust their defence. In slow motion nothing changes. The defender can adjust their defense, but the attacker can also adjust their attack. Slow motion doesn’t somehow make defending work better and attacking worse.

I learned when play fighting as a kid that the goal wasn’t to win the fight, but to prolong the fight. Whenever I adjusted my attack in slow-mo to avoid my opponent’s block, they got annoyed that I wasn’t doing it right.

This is an insightful comment, but I don’t think you can just ignore the sci-fi part of things when talking about the realism of fighting with “light” blades.

Like, when you talk about ending a fight via thrusting. With a thrusting-only sword, or even a sword with a point and an edge, the amount of damage you can do with a thrust is pretty limited. You can poke a hole in someone, or open a cut, but you can’t easily remove a limb. But, with a light saber it’s different. If the tip wiggles around a bit as part of the thrust, it could easily take off a limb because every surface of the “blade” is a cutting surface.

With a real sword, your slash needs to be aligned with the cutting edge of the blade, and needs to have a bit of force behind it. What they’ve shown us with light sabers is that the merest touch will cut almost anything in half. If it’s something super solid like a massive steel wall / bulkhead, it can require a little bit of pressure.

To me, that says that in a battle against a light saber, if any part of the blade touches any part of your body, you’re probably dead. IMO that massively changes how these weapons would be used.

As for a light-spear, even if a spear isn’t the best one-on-one weapon in the real world, if the point of the spear is this thing that cuts through anything it touches without resistance that might be different, especially if the spear tip is the length of a sword. I’ve never done any spear training, but I did some work with a staff a long while ago. There are a lot of slashing type attacks with a staff, but there are also a lot of poking type attacks. Those don’t leave you very open, and they let you probe at someone while staying well outside their range (unless they’re doing the same thing). With a staff they don’t do much damage, but if the last meter of the staff were this magical cutting surface, that would be different.

I don’t know what exactly a fight would look like with a real light saber, but I strongly suspect that the fighters would spend as little time as possible with any part of their body within the range of the other person’s blade. I also suspect that dramatic big movements would be suicidal. Any second you spend without your sword pointing directly at the other person and keeping them from closing the distance allows them to close in and lop off your arm with the slightest flick of a wrist.

I haven’t seen anything about light sabers on HEMA, but I have watched a little bit of it. But, even before that, I thought light saber fights looked stupid after having watched olympic fencing.

So it begs the question, what does a fight look like with that kind of meta?

Whatever the director decides the audience will like best. Yeah, you can handwave away anything if you just use some mysterious force stuff. Maybe you only have ultra-quick reactions if you are in mortal danger, so if you’re beyond the range of the other guy’s light saber you can’t act/react as quickly.

Still, I just prefer it when a sci-fi / fantasy author fully thinks through a weapon, its implications, etc. and something interesting falls out of that analysis, rather than “rule of cool” stuff that then has to be retconned with something ridiculous.

I’d watch that. Sounds like Andor.

If you always knew exactly which angle to parry at, and had the reaction speed to execute this in time, then you could fence for a long time without anyone getting hit

Only if all your knowledge and reaction speed was defensive rather than offensive. If you gained an equal amount of offensive reaction speed and knowledge you could adjust strikes as you saw the opponent begin to parry.

Yeah, it was a lot more probing at long distance. They basically established a style, but it wasn’t flashy enough, so with each new movie it becomes even more bullshit.

Except a saber is basically a cavalry sword, and they’re not cavalry (or even dragoons).

Think of the force like Jedis being able to anticipate movements and react ultra fast and it becomes less bullshit

Not really because eventually you’re still going to take a hit if you’re inside the other guy’s striking range. If you stay outside and lunge in like a fencer you don’t risk that eventual injury / death.

because the force prevents them from self injuring with a lightsaber

That’s fine, but they keep putting themselves in the range of their opponents’ light sabers. If they’d made the lore that a Jedi / Sith can exude a force field that allows them to take a hit with a light saber and that only a certain, powerful type of hit can do damage, then maybe they can be justified in getting within the other’s striking range. But, really it’s just that they want these extended slash and parry sequences with these light-up devices so they end up with these silly, unrealistic fights that are badly filmed to show the action and instead just show twirling glowy things.

But it isn’t even good, stylish dance fighting because Hollywood is so bad at filming action scenes.

Yeah, good point. People make essentially suicidal attacks in modern sport fencing because as long as they touch their opponent first the fact they were run through a tenth of a second later doesn’t matter. But, a lot of fencing is staying at least one blade’s length away from the opponent and probing and poking, so up until that final suicidal attack they’re giving the opponent’s weapon plenty of respect.

The light saber has the ability to be as good or better of a “slashing” weapon as a thrusting

Sure, but that’s unnecessary. To be able to cut / slash you have to get closer than you need to get to just poke, and why risk it? Really, just tape one to the end of a long pole and you have a spear that you can use at even longer range with even less risk to yourself.

Light Sabers are the core of Star Wars, and they’re some of the stupidist BS imaginable.

You have this device where the blade is made out of “light” so has no weight to it, and that can cut through virtually anything, and you’re swinging it around like a maniac instead of just doing foil-style fencing moves to poke holes in your opponent from a safe range? In a world where there’s no armour and the merest touch of the blade cuts instantly, duels should be over in seconds of intense action like an olympic fencing duel instead of involving lots of big dramatic parries.

Fighters should do virtually everything possible to stay outside the range of their opponent’s blade. Any part of that blade touches you and you lose a limb or have a hole straight through you. There isn’t even a safe part of the sword, like the flat of a real sword’s blade, and there are no handguards or protective hilts, so parrying is even more dangerous.

But, no. Big swings of lightey-uppey things look “cool” so there are these extremely long fight scenes with glowy things hitting other glowy things and actors striking dramatic poses, plus guys with twirly double-sided weapons and other bullshit.

Compare that to the fighting in Dune, where a personal shield can only be penetrated by something moving slowly. There’s a good concept that leads to an interesting style of fighting.