Just want to say that I moved from Kyiv to Lviv on Feb 13 /entirely/ thanks to this prediction thread and the Metaculus estimates. (Still in Lviv but leaving Ukraine later today.)

It’s hard to estimate the impact, but at the very least I have saved myself an enormous hassle trying to move all my possessions, finding an apartment in Lviv, etc on very short notice — which would have happened otherwise. Of course, worse outcomes were possible too if things had played out a bit differently.

Thank you, everyone.

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@(TeeJayKay) I am personally at 40% (and I'm in Lviv right now, although planning to leave very soon). Lviv is very close to Poland, far from Donbas, far from Crimea, far from the Russian border. Not 100% sure but I think the major buildup of troops in Belarus is much closer to Kyiv than to Lviv, too. I don't think Lviv will be invaded unless the rest of Ukraine is close to defeat — or unless the Ukrainian government decides to relocate to Lviv, thus making it much more valuable. I don't think Ukraine will come close to defeat because I recall reading ...

Updating upwards after

• https://twitter.com/idreesali114/status/14968… (and reports about "kill lists" previously)
• the news that Russians are going through Chernobyl instead of around it (Chernobyl being the shortest path to Kyiv)

@(alwaysrinse) I'm already in Warsaw! Getting out of Lviv wasn't particularly hard yesterday but AFAIK today it's significantly worse. Day-long queues at the border crossings. My sister was stuck in a train on the Polish border for nine hours. @CaptchaSamurai if you're also in Warsaw I would actually love to stay with you for a few days till I find an apartment here. My email is artyom@artyom.me. UPD: or if you're located elsewhere you can still email me your city/town/approx location and I will keep this in mind in case anybody I know has to flee to Po...

@doromix1.6 btw questions about specific people dying aren’t allowed on Metaculus

When will an official bilateral ceasefire be signed by Ukraine & Russia? (E.g. for the Georgian war, the war begun on Aug 8 and the ceasefire was declared on Aug 16.)

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@ry.duff Updating upwards based on this. I assumed disconnecting SWIFT wasn't discussed as a serious option anymore, but this tweet's phrasing suggests otherwise.

https://twitter.com/KyivPost/status/149693308…

Ukrainian government sources told me that 18 IL-76 transport planes took off from Pskov towards Kyiv and will arrive in the capital in an hour.

Would be good to see better sources for this, though.

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https://twitter.com/JackDetsch/status/1496958617945317377 > Russia has assembled troops, armor, artillery, and more than 50 heavy equipment transporters a training area in Brest, near the Polish border. > > Russia has also added more equipment at a nearby railyard in Belarus. Brest is the closest to Lviv big Belarusian city. Between Brest and Lviv there is also Lutsk. At the moment I can't come up with a good reason to assemble more forces in Brest other than "prepare for attacking Western Ukraine" — if those are indeed new forces and not the ones sta...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33701371 — a recent post by a Twitter SRE talking about a part of their infra, plus a HN discussion.

How many European countries are currently buying gas from Russia?

@ClayGraubard It just occurred to me that SWIFT isn't a US system. Technically the US can't cut off Russia from SWIFT, it can only ask/pressure SWIFT to cut off Russia — and then SWIFT can decide to comply. I'm assuming this still counts as a "yes" resolution?

Another source (in Russian) re/ DNR and LNR being recognized as the whole Donetsk and Lugansk regions respectively: https://meduza.io/news/2022/02/22/putin-rossi…

A map from Wikipedia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_o…

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**My prediction: 40%.** In 2017, Twitter had "hundreds of thousands of servers" and stored "over 500 PB of data" (see [here](https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale)). Here is a nice list of outages and postmortems: https://github.com/danluu/post-mortems. After scrolling through it briefly, my impression is that it's mostly config / network / database / hardware outages. The latter two are not fixable simply by rolling back to the previous version. For the "network" category, I'm not...

@(deKlik) It looks like it’s a mix of AWS, GCP, and on-prem. Here’s a post from the end of 2021 talking about self-managed Zookeeper: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2021/how-we-built-twitter-s-highly-reliable-ads-pacing-service Their analytics is also split between on-prem and GCP: https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2022/powering-real-time-data-analytics-with-druid-at-twitter This said, “it runs in the cloud” doesn’t negate almost anything of what I have listed in my comment. In some case...

@(johnnycaffeine) > Twitter was never going to have the scale to have its own data centers and infrastructure at a lower cost than what they would get from simply putting it on AWS. Admittedly I don't have experience here, but I've seen it stated on various places (HN, etc) that the cloud markup is enormous and running your own servers is much much cheaper. Dropbox switched from AWS to on-prem in 2016. They also [say](https://dropbox.tech/infrastructure/magic-pocket-infrastructure) "[...] we knew we’d be building one of only a handful of exabyte-scale...

Will Ukraine be admitted into the EU by 20XX?

Alternatively, will there be some [legal resolution thing] in 2022 that strongly indicates that Ukraine will join the EU in the future? (I don't know enough about the EU process to say what that legal resolution thing might be)

Zelensky said “we are not afraid to talk about neutrality” in a video address today. Previously, Russia demanded guarantees that Ukraine will never be in NATO.

In 2022, will Ukraine sign any treaty, pass a constitutional amendment, etc that would prevent it from joining NATO for at least 25 years? (Possibly should exclude a puppet government to make the question more precise.. or perhaps shouldn’t.)

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@TeeJayKay NB: apparently the Ivano-Frankivsk airport has been hit by a missile — I didn't know that. Ivano-Frankivsk is even further southwest than Lviv. So at the very least my assumption a week ago that "eh, they probably won't care about Western Ukraine at all" is wrong.

@EJ btw there’s already a question about SWIFT.