Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
"Behind our efforts, let there be found our efforts."
User ID: 83
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
21m ago
The dream of Richard Gatling, realized at last? Maybe to some extent.
Autonomous drones will still be tasked with killing people, will have false positives in identifying targets, will sometimes attack large areas with a high probability of collateral damage. And as @BreakerofHorsesandMen said, they may be used just as well to effectively carry out variably-discriminate mass killings.
OTOH, like precision-guided munitions reduced the usage of carpet bombing campaigns, the ability to use drone strikes precisely tailored to a given target may also work to reduce collateral damage like you say.
We'll see.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1hr ago
Fair points.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Thanks.
What about EMPs?
As mentioned, this might be possible. AFAIK - which isn't very far, I'm just an armchair theorist with a very cursory knowledge of physics and engineering - meaningful EMP requires some pretty big explosions to generate, so you can't just sustainably deny a large area. Even assuming that someone will invent a sustainable, powerful large-area EMP, then it will only delay the development towards ubiquitous, scalable, autonomous drone swarms. EMP hardening through metallic shielding will make drones heavier, slower, more expensive and easier to spot and target, but they will still be exceedingly useful and powerful and nobody will be able to afford not using them.
I'd expect hardened and unhardened drones to be used simultaneously. You deploy both, assuming that enemy will probably not use EMP, but just in case they do you have the hardened drones to continue the mission if the unhardened one should get fried. If they do not, then the cheaper and more agile unhardened ones can complete the mission while the more expensive and cumbersome hardened ones hang back and don't risk themselves.
EMP also comes with the caveat that, well, EMP doesn't discriminate. You will shut down your own unhardened electronics as well as the enemy's if you use it. So it becomes necessary either to employ a lot of hardening, which is expensive and heavy, or to accept that EMP is a weapon of last resort that will harm yourself, or somehow synchronize the EMP with a sort of hunker-down protocol of your own drones in which they retreat into prepared shelters before the pulse and reemerge after. The latter obviously doesn't work for stationary electronics.
And in the very long run, who knows, someone might just develop hardware that doesn't rely on classical electronics at all. I absolutely expect someone to grow organic CPUs at some point.
Or strikes at drone control centers?
Drone Control Centers are a relic of our transitional age, in which you need a horde of humans to babysit a small number of drones that they manually control in real-time. The drone "control center" of the future will be a command-and-control drone flying slightly behind the frontline drones. At most you will have, let's call them "drone doctrine programming centers" sitting safely at home, in which the missions and rules of engagement are defined before being handed off to the drones themselves. EMP may not be viable as a general countermeasure to drones, but jamming is already used to great effect - but radio jamming can at most prevent drones from communicating, not from operating autonomously. This massively reduces the value of real-time manual drone control (as done today), while the autonomous drones of the near future are only affected in their ability to share information with each other (via radio; other means still work) while retaining the ability to operate individually.
The gist of all this is that there will be no sufficently good reason to have big control centers in one place in striking distance of the enemy. Maybe some operations will require a human operator to observe through the drones' eyes as far as possible to make judgement callls, but I'd guess that those will be increasingly rare as more and more authority is transferred to the drones themselves for reasons of practicality and scalability.
I broadly agree with your linked post. But I think the damper that drone warfare puts on power projection (conflating this with interventionism for now) is only temporary. Big miltiary bases won't be necessary for gunboat diplomacy when the drones are smart enough to deploy themselves from shipping containers, or fired to the target location via cruise missile, or just creeping from home to there on solar power. And if boots on the ground are strictly required, then it's still our drones versus their drones. Drone-on-drone warfare will be a thing, and I find it entirely conceivable that you will have military bases surrounded by dozens of miles of drone-patrolled perimeter, or entire towns kept free of enemy drones by flooding them with your own technologically superior drones, which can then be occupied by your human troops.
Please disagree with me on this. The topic is fascinating, IMO. I've been waiting for decades to see this stuff happen and it seems to finally be just around the corner.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3hr ago
Neither do it, at face value, but you and I are a vanishingly small minority.
And OTOH, let's dig deeper: I don't want there to be gibs, but since the gibs are already out of the box, why shouldn't they go to myself as well as to the less deserving? With that framing in mind, I too want gibs.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4hr ago
Not sure. This seems like a fairly evident instance of moderating the post and not the poster. Hadad's was rule-compliant even if it was bad, whereas Chris' contained a personal attack and thus broke a rule even if it correctly identified Hadad's post as bad. Pretty much just like Amadan's modpost said. If this actually encourages Hadad (and/or others) to post more screeds and discourages Chris (and/or others) from arguing against them, then...well, that's not good either, of course, but it's by no means certain that that will even be the effect. Whereas ignoring the rules to play favorites with this or that poster just throws the foundations of the motte out of the window, which is certain to have negative consequences for everyone.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4hr ago
Is there an actual justification for this anywhere or is this just "women can do no wrong" crystallizing into law?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5hr ago
Nursing homes are containment areas.
Yes aging to death in there is horrible for everyone involved, but it involves fewer people and keeps the horror away from anyone who isn't professionally obliged to deal with it.
You degenerating in your home means neighbors, landlords and everyone nearby need to deal with your increasingly disagreeable behavior and appearance, if you still drive then you may also endanger other people in traffic, and even if not everyone around needs to be on their guard lest you burn the house down.
It's horrible either way, but making you die under controlled conditions is somewhat more pro-social. Except for you of course, but you aren't really part of society anymore by that point.
God, I hope I just die from lightning strike.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
5hr ago
blackmail enough American politicians (with child rape)
Are you serious?
Sun Tzu said to be subtle to the point of formlessness. I feel like the current developments in terms of drones are simply taking that old advice seriously. Instead of having a small number of very expensive assets concentrated in one geographic position for ease of communication and handling and to leverage overlapping areas of influence (phalanx, encamped Roman legion, turtle ships, line formation, star fort, grand battery, battleship, tank brigade, transport convoy, carrier group, bomber wing), we're taking another step towards uniquitous, distributed, affordable and flexibly deployed assets (skirmishers in general, zealot sicarii, flying columns, organic artillery, guerilla tactics, a rifle behind each blade of grass, minefields, man-portable anti-tank and anti-air weapons, nuclear triad). The means of destruction are to be omnipresent, always available, always replaceable, and as unpredictable as possible. The entire theater of war is to be flooded with them to the point where you're no longer able to seek out and destroy a discrete enemy at all, or able to hold and lay claim to a specific place, because the enemy is not obliged to present any vulnerabilities in order to attack and all places are equally undesirable to occupy.
Historically the limit on such technologies has been that you need one at least one human to actually be the weapon, wield the weapon, or direct the weapon. The weapon would not be able to go places where humans cannot go (at least not without using vehicles, which makes the weapon a lot larger, more detectable, less flexible and less affordable), cannot be deployed in numbers greater than the number of available and qualified humans, and will never be cheaper than the price of one qualified human + the technology involved, and will be at least as detectable as the human wielding it.
With sufficiently advanced drones, those constraints go out of the window. All of a sudden your weapon can be arbitrarily small, arbitrarily cheap, arbitrarily numerous and arbitrarily dispersed. We're sill at the early stages of what will one day be swarms of millions of miniscule drones mapping out the contested space, being eyes and ears for hundreds of thousands of anti-personnel drones, backed up with tens of thousands of anti-armor drones. They will fly close to the ground if not crawl outright, utilize cover and concealement, infest all your nooks and crannies, be so cheap as to be freely replaceable, operate completely autonomously, and if they find you they'll shoot you with an embarassingly small zip-gun right in the dick.
At least that's the way things are headed right now. As so often, attack precedes defense. Maybe there are low-hanging fruits for countermeasures - some kind of electromagnetic weapon that prevents drones from functioning in a large area but that doesn't affect humans. And then, since we've already tasted the forbidden fruit, you can bet someone will develop organic circuitry. Maybe human soldiers will huddle in fortified bases surrounded by miles of completely denuded flat country, protected by some kind of automated RADAR and LASER system that zaps anything that moves their way. But honestly, it's wishful thinking either way.
More realistically, the countermeasure to infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms will be infinite omnipresent autonomous drone swarms of our own. It's practically guaranteed. I'd be willing to take bets on this if I had money to spare. I don't feel like there's any more to explain here because it seems so very obvious. With autonomous drones, we will have uncoupled warfare from the human frame and mind. The current human-controlled drone phase is just a clumsy first step towards honest-to-god man-made horrors beyond all possibility of comprehension. From that point on it will barely matter whether the drones kill us with jury-rigged mortar shells or by dropping polonium in our coffee cups or by buzzing near our ears until we go insane or by shooting a tiny laser from the horizon that neatly severs our neck arteries. It will not matter much wether they're built in a dozen factories, in a million living rooms, or self-replicating right here and now. Either way, us humans will be obsolete as combatants.
But that's future music, of course. For the more immediate future, near-term developments will depend on what the lowest-hanging technological fruits are and who's picking what. Just making drones cheaper, making them smarter, and making them more easily controllable in large numbers (i.e., giving them limited autonomy) will significantly increase the numbers deployable en masse. Short of that, we may see more drones integrated organically into existing human and vehicle formations, like the Americans are already known to be experimenting, where they will probably work much like they already do in Ukraine, mostly for reconaissance and as loitering munitions, only everywhere and used by everyone and employed even more liberally.
This goes hand-in-hand with the development and proliferation of weapons that defeat existing defence systems for large, concentrated and valuable assets that have the unfortunate attribute of being in one place. Famously, hypersonic missiles. These and similar traditional weapons make life very hard for humans and large vehicles, but are largely uneffective or wasteful against drones. Drones drones drones. It's all drones from here on out.
The big cracking point will be drone autonomy. One might think that this is not going to happen, that it'll be unethical and banned by some convention or treaty, but I posit that it's entirely inevitable. Unlike with NBC weapons that are either useful mostly against unprepared civilians (BC) or have incredibly high requirements of the situation before their use becomes at all practical (N), autonomous drones will be universally useful and practical due to their scalability and flexibility, from high-level strategy down to tactical nitty-gritty. No military force will be able to afford not employing autonomous drones. The killbots may not be right around the corner, but they are coming for sure. Anyone refusing to use them will be military irrelevant.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Personally, I'm not sure where these parties are or who's going to them. I haven't been to a single party outside of work events after college
When I was younger I hooked up with multiple women at the local club, which is kinda like a party that regularly happens in one place. Or used to be, about twenty to ten years ago. No idea what it's like now.
There are also music parties (usually techno) that are petty much designed for taking drugs, showing off your physical abilities through dance, and then hooking up.
University parties were also a thing, but I was too busy studying.
Actual house parties, I'll admit, I haven't seen since school.
Office parties exist, but hooking up there, as you said, can be tricky.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Why is this all pony literature?
Andy Weir is a good point though. I should get around to reading one of the books; I quite liked The Martian film.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
Well, yeah - that's what my first paragraph above was about. This seems like a parsimonious explanation.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
1d ago
I somewhat doubt Unreal will let me do that, but will look into it. Thanks!
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
A guess: Sunnism?
Possibly, but if they see a nuclear-armed Iran as an existential threat, then their actions are borne of a desperate need that obviates any consideration of other consequences. A fight that needs to be fought, no matter the odds or outcome, because the alternative is certain destruction.
Whether that is actually the case and the way Israeli leadership sees things, I don't know. Maybe deescalation would have been possible but was seen as too risky, or undesirable for reasons that elude me, or perhaps it is as many tinfoils claim and war is the best distraction from internal problems.
As far as Iran itself goes, I don't see the regime as particularly unstable. Compared to Israel, both have their internal tensions and and external pressures, and I'd argue Iran actually comes out slightly ahead in a direct comparison of stability. But that's from my very limited understanding. Take it with handfuls of salt.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
People seeing sex as an end unto itself to be engaged in at the earliest convenience and with no further implications instead of an act that used to be expected of married couples and nobody else with the expectations of children to be raised by that couple.
The consequences include but are not limited to demographic decline for obvious reasons and loss of social cohesion because of extreme relationship fluidity and the battle of the sexes resulting from unclear gender roles.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
That's absolutely fair, but also reinforces my opinion that rationalist fiction is just feel-good fantasy literature for autists.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
I'm rather dissatisfied with the entire rational fiction genre, because it all seems to be fantasy that hinges on magic or "magic" systems that just so happen to be navigable by autists with a modicum of rules lawyering or vidya minmaxing skill.
Is there any rationalist fiction that takes place in a completely mundane setting without video game logic or outright ass-pull magic?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2d ago
Finished my reading sample of Ninti's Gate, and ended up not buying the book. Pierce seems to have attempted a show-don't-tell approach to worldbuilding and characterization, but ended up moving the plot along too fast. The characters' motivations were completely opaque and the action made no sense.
So I'm still re-reading The Worm Ourobouros. I dunno why. Maybe the pretentious language gets me. Maybe I'm just a sucker of chivalric romance. I don't regret it.
Also picked up the Cyropaedia, but taking it slow.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3d ago
German is very permissive with compount neologisms, but the constituent parts must be valid. "Kritikal" is not. Maybe for nuclear physicists, but I don't really think so. Try "judenkritisch".
But also, please explain yourself. Why German in the first place?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3d ago
judenkritikal
No such Word in any German dialect I know.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
3d ago
Dug a little deeper into why procedural generation in Unreal didn't work out for me, found out about a bunch of fundamentals that I had managed to ignore, but haven't really gotten around to applying that knowledge yet.
Also once again find myself chafing at C++ and the need to make every structural change twice - in .h and .cpp files. It's just so very inelegant, as far as the workflow goes. Those header files haven't really justified their existence yet, to me.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
4d ago
In addition to what all the others wrote, and keeping in mind that leftists are an increasingly rare but still essential resource on the motte, why not leave?
You can enjoy living in a bubble where you're right and everyone around you is right, everyone agrees on everything and there needn't be any controversial debates in which, god forbid, there might not be one side that is clearly correct and another side that falls in line after being shown the obvious truth. Instead, if your American bubbles are anything like our German bubbles, you and the well-aligned people around you who already know what is right and what is wrong can heap fire and brimstone on the outgroup with impunity. Not, mind you, that discourse on the motte is always better than that. But it'll feel good. It'll feel good to be right, and among other right-thinking people, and to hate the wrong-thinkers together. You can bond over your shared hatred, and if that ever gets boring, have a little purity spiral and ostracize some of your former own who didn't stand sufficiently far on the right side of history. And when you're done hating, you can go back to educating those around you, teaching them the latest and greatest in sociopolitical innovation.
Leftists do this. Rightists do this. Apolitical people who stumble into political bubbles and just try to fit in do this. Why shouldn't you do it too?
Fair. But what is the ideal way for a practical egoist to deal with Alzheimer's?
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