cynar @ cynar @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Nvidia GPUs aren't the only way to run a machine learning type system. They are just the easiest to use, currently. China has also been developing their own AI optimised chips. Though I don't know much/anything about them.

This is a good example of how AI can be used well.

Current AIs are effectively fuzzy pattern detection and matching engines. This one can sift all the data coming in, and spot patterns that previously corresponded to problems. It then flags them for human interpretation.

The AI chunks the vast sea of data. A human is then involved to sanity check what it has found, and react accordingly. E.g. a pattern appears that often precedes a broken rail within a month. A human can check the subset of the data, and schedule a maintenance team a week later. Conversely, a pattern that leads by hours would require an immediate response.

The recommended (and slightly terrifying) advice is to let the car fill first. Basically, use the time and air to prepare yourself. When the car fills, the pressure will equalise, and you can push the windscreen out with your feet.

Unfortunately, unless you've thought it through beforehand, most people panic.

Please show me a built up area where you have clear line of sight for 3 miles. 3-500m would be optimistic. You would have 10s to 100s of 15cm drones. They would flit around bins, cars, buildings and through windows. A racing drone can pull 4.5G of acceleration. It can spin that in a fraction of a second.

3G is enough to cover 300m in around 5 seconds. That's also assuming it is going from a dead start. If it can build up speed before entering line of sight, it would be even quicker.

Even worse, they could easily spend 30 seconds to manoeuvre around you. The sensor package drones (cameras, lidar etc) playing peekaboo, to snatch data. By the time they move, they've built a complete 3D map. They know every blind spot, every area the gun can't target. Your gun will go from nothing to shoot, to too many targets in a second or so. Most will just have extra batteries. They exist to draw fire. A few will have payloads designed to target your defences. Others will have payloads aimed at breaking up your situational awareness.

If you engage the micro drones, then your firing arcs will give windows for heavier elements to engage you. If you don't, then the armed micro drones will damage your defences or block your sensors, to create the same effect.

Gun drones are perfectly viable. They just can't fire well while flying. (At least not more than 1 shot) The current prototypes have to land and anchor themselves. They are currently machine guns, for area suppression, though anti-material would be viable.

The gun drone is also not in the smoke cloud, it's behind it. The smoke, chaff, strobes etc are just to break the ability to counter target it. You don't need to just saturate the cloud, but the whole area behind it.

As for the smoke, it's not 1 cloud. A drone's advantage is hyper mobility. A swarm would easily attack from multiple directions. Your gun is now required to saturate multiple clouds at multiple angles. 1 might be hiding something nasty, or 2 or none. Smoke (or chaff etc) drones would be dirt cheap, as would simple distraction drones.

To fight it, you would either need to put up a wall of shrapnel, which would quickly deplete a mobile weapon, or get accurate targeting data. Both could be viable, depending on the situation, but it's risky.

As for engagement ranges. A drone swarm would be cut down by advancing over a large open area. I fully agree on that. It would also struggle engaging fixed defences. That changes in a city, or forest, or mountainous area. A patrol or convoy could be encircled by a swarm in seconds, engaging from multiple sides simultaneously.

Your gun can fire 10 rounds a second. That's 50 rounds in 5 seconds. 200 micro drones, hitting from all sides could easily overwhelm it. Most don't even need a payload, they are $10-20 decoys. 1 clean hit on your gun however, and it is potentially disabled. At that point the more expensive stuff can potentially attack with impunity.

It's fine till you have an accident. Then your completely fucked.

Those deals, at least over here, are generally aimed at new drivers. I actually agree with them, to a level. It lets the insurance company rapidly sort the safe drivers from the idiots, and so discriminate on prices. It also trains new drivers to be safer. I remember how fearless I was when starting out. The quicker we get new drivers out of that mindset, the better.

While Chamberlain was applying appeasement, he was also rapidly upgrading the UK's military capability.

He then fell on his own (proverbial) sword, to let Churchill take power.

Don't compare these Muppets to a politician who actually did what he could to slow the wolves down enough to fight back.

If it fires big, heavy rounds, then they are slow and of limited numbers. You then bait it at range, or swarm it. If it uses lighter round, to get higher speeds, or more shots, then you use a different platform to soak its shots.

You're also likely vastly overestimating the final engagement ranges.Right now its long flights at relatively high altitudes. A properly designed drone swarm could hug terrain to close, or be deployed early and loiter on the ground in cover.

A good chunk of the swarm would also be small. 10cm would be big enough to carry just enough teeth to not be ignored. They would also be nimble as hell. It would be a numbers game.

As for the use of smoke. You use 3 or 4 types of drone. A smoke bomb lays down cover. Camera drones fly through and around it to triangulate on your gun. Finally a sniper platform drone moves out of cover and shoots blind, using the camera drones feeds. A coordinator might be required to sort the data. Critically, only cheap, disposable drones are exposed to fire.

The key is that you can mix and match drones on the offensive. Your defence needs to be able to react to all of them.

The game will iterate further. A machine gun works against current drones. It can be countered however. E.g. use a ducted drone, with a few layers of Kevlar facing the gun. It doesn't need to win, or even survive. It just needs to soak up the fire. The other drones rush in, either behind it, or from various angles.

Even things like chaff and smoke can mess up targeting for long enough to rush in.

I suspect it will be more subtle even if it's only battery life limited. Huge swarms will also struggle against fixed defences. More likely it will be used in ambush. E.g. air deployed near an enemy convoy, or swarming from rooftops and windows onto an infantry unit. Counter deployment will have to be seconds to stop the lead elements. Potentially with heavier reinforcements flying in.

I've personally got visions of a Boston dynamics dogbot with a harness full of drones. 1 button press and a few dozen micro drones swarm out, with larger ones launching as needed.

I could also see facial recognition drones being deployed from a predator drone, like cluster bombs. A little akin to the bots used in the film minority report. They swarm a building or block, and try and identify all the faces they can find.

The key thing however will be battery life. Multicopters are power hogs. You need around 40% battery to get maybe 5-20 minutes flight times (depending on how the manoeuvre). Longer times can be achieved , but requires larger systems with higher costs. Is 1 system with a 2 hour flight time worth 20 smaller systems only good for 10 minutes?

I've worked with drones of various sizes. Bigger and more expensive ones are more capable, but hard to make bullet proof. If you can remote off their sensors and weapons into cheap, more disposable systems, it makes sense.

A big drone, like a predator, drops a package into an area. Mid sized multicopters provide local computing power and coordination. Small planes provide fast loiter surveillance. Small multicopters with cameras give more accurate coverage. For attack, you have what amounts to a hand grenade with props. Protection takes the form of similar disposables. A flying strobe light to mess up optical tracking. Chaff bombs to mess up radar tracking. Smoke to obscure the high value units.

A lot of these I could throw together myself, given a few weeks, and a few grand. What part wouldn't be easy, for a large and well funded military r&d team?

It's worth noting we are at the start of an arms race. It will iterate all over the place.

For example, smoke and chaff deploying drones would make defensive fire harder. Anti air can be either baited (and so depleted) or rushed. Lasers can be shielded against, at least for a time. Jamming can be countered with line of site communications.

In turn, each of these can be countered.

A key thing of note is that your solutions are heavy. Fine for defending a static target, but problematic when dealing with defending a mobile unit etc infantry of transports. In those situations an extremely rapid, focused highly dynamic response would be required. The obvious way to deploy those fast enough is to have them automated and airborne, aka a drone swarm.

I might be completely wrong, current drone warfare is akin to the invention of the smoothbore musket. How it will develop remains to be seen (for better or for worse).

Apparently I'm an idiot. I saw a modified version, mixed in amongst other legit videos.

As you read deeper, it's more and more obvious. Light is neither. It's a quantum mechanical object that has no direct analog in classical physics.

Under some conditions, the wave properties are dominant. In others, the particle. In most quantum mechanical problems, both are present.

My main point is that you get log jammed if you try and add the wave properties to a particle concept. There's nothing it can properly connect to. However, a wave can look like a particle, if you set it up right, and squint hard enough. In graph form, it's normal distribution with standard deviation close to zero. Basically a spike, with some slight rounding. It's far from perfect, but it gives our limited brains an anchor to work from.

I'll try and remember to dig it out later. It was a sales demo from a weapon's company. I can't remember exactly which one it was, but the implications scared the shit out of me.

Considering how little conflict we currently have, compared to our population size, we are doing extremely well. Unfortunately, the conflicts remaining are spectacular enough to counter that.

I'll admit, I'm willing to pay a couple of £ for the convenience of having them available on steam.

I was curious and looked it up. Apparently it mostly happens between trees of the same species, with several causes.

Most are mechanical. The tips brush against each other, and damage new branches and leaves. Both trees divert growth away from the area.

Some also sense shading via red light. They focus growth away from shade. This means neither tree grows into the gap, since they are partially shading each other.

It also helps limit the spread of leaf eating parasites. Again, particularly useful in a forest of the same species.

So yes, the trees are social distancing, to avoid the spread of disease.

Its source is known. Unfortunately, it requires a different way of looking at everything. (It's all waves, even if it looks like a particle most of the time). Wrapping this up as simple pop science, that can be digested by most laymen, is difficult.

What we don't actually know is why everything is made of waves. We know the rules it follows, but not the underlying cause. Figuring that would would likely require an understanding of quantum relativity, something we only have a very weak handle on.

Light (in fact everything) is a wave, with some traditional particle properties added in. It's relatively easy to wrap your head around the weirdness from that point of view. It's almost impossible to make sense of it from a "particle with wave properties" view.

It's also worth noting that it is not observation, but measurement that matters. All observation is measurement but not all measurements are observations.

Basically, to measure something, you need to hit it with something else. Using a particle analogy (since the wave version is FAR less intuitive), imagine a pool ball, rolling down a table. You can only detect balls hitting the cushions. To measure where it is, in between, you need to roll additional balls across the table. In traditional physics, these balls can be thrown as lightly as you like, as accurately as you like. Unfortunately, the wave nature of the system imposes lower limits on this. When you throw a ball, it changes the ball it hits. To gain information, you end up damaging or destroying the system you are measuring.

In quantum mechanical terms, the wave function is collapsed. In fact, it's combined with the new particles you used to measure things.

In the original post. When you're not looking, the wave of the photon passes through both spits, it then interferes with itself. Only when it reaches the detector is it collapsed (by interacting with the atoms of the detector). When you try and measure which slit it went through, you introduce a new wave. This changes the shape of the original, and makes it appear like a particle.

This is quite a fun way of making yourself think in terms of waves. https://www.andreinc.net/2024/02/06/the-sinusoidal-tetris