banned
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 militarily irrelevant.
No_one
23hr ago
Dunno, trying to farm some quotes you could lob at DNS registries to try to get this place banned? Seems excessive for that, who would care that much?
It is odd behavior.
LazyLongposter
2d ago
Two caveats. Firstly, my thesis was not "the US should strike NOW", but that Israel succeeding here is undoubtedly very very good for us, and if they needed help to succeed, I'd want to do so. I say that as someone with skin in the game.
It seems to me that obviously either nations with nuclear warheads can be threatened, in which case they can be deterred. Or they can't be, in which case the United States (and Israel) has nothing to worry about. But you seem to be trying to have it both ways!
Secondly, allow me to rephrase: Nuclear weapons make you functionally immune to a conventional invasion and will make anyone think twice about even striking within your borders. At any point during a real conventional invasion you can consider (or declare) your existence threatened and use them to great effect, either wiping out entire armies or the invaders' home front. They do not make you immune to internal rot, discord, economic decline, or anything else, as the USSR will gladly tell you. That this is your opening argument is disheartening, because I find it quite intellectually dishonest to feign ignorance of that distinction.
As such, I don't worry about someone invading the United States. If decades of discord and hostile messaging (bolstered by adversaries who are quite happy to watch us tear ourselves apart without firing a single shot) leads to the United States to cease to exist as a political entity, then we would be quite susceptible to invasion, be it by a hostile force or something more covert. A "North American" continent with dozens of individual nation states that are likely at each others' throats would present a foreign actor many potential inroads into allying with, occupying, subverting, or otherwise controlling part of the landmass. As I live on that landmass, I'd like the huge boon that "two massive oceans and only two continental neighbors" to stay that way. We already have Chinese and other agents coming through our weak border to the south. Imagine that ten or a hundred fold. That is why we can be both a nuclear power and vulnerable.
Nuclear powers can also be defeated abroad, as in within other people's borders, without really having the right (in international eyes) to use the nuclear option. We have failed to achieve many military objectives, as has Russia, and neither have deployed nuclear weapons. But it also means no one can ever go to the source. As for Iran, yes, they have weapons that can reach us, but they are not yet nuclear capable. Once they are, you essentially waive all your chances to military deterrence. And from there stems the problem. A nuclear Iran can proxy war to their hearts' content. A nuclear Iran can threaten to retaliate to conventional Israeli strikes with nuclear weapons (whereas now only Israel can), leading both to consider a nuclear first strike necessary to preserve their existence/secure their victory, depending on perspective. A nuclear Iran can lock up within its borders when its armaments are exhausted and refill its stockpiles and have a credible threat against anyone trying to stop them. They go from being a regional power to a fact of life unless some sort of unconventional method deters them or causes their regime to collapse. Once again, see America. I am reasonably hopeful that we won't collapse in the near future, and I am also reasonably sure that a nuclear Iran would also last quite a while. Even if they didn't, those nukes would have to go somewhere once they collapse, and that's a huge security risk. All you need is one powerful higher up or base deciding they wanted to get massively rich, or being insanely anti-Israeli/American/whatever to sell or use them.
These were all real arguments up to the end of the Cold War, and they ring true now. Every single nation that develops its own nuclear weapons increases the risk of some sort of horrible outcome, be it an entrenched regime, accident, or sale to/use by crazies within or without the government. I don't want it to happen.
FIRST, the United States does not have infinite capacity to do things. If we actually want to fight China, which we've said we want to be able to do publicly, that means very specifically that we cannot write blank checks where ballistic missile interceptors, smart munitions, etc. are involved. We are already arguably under-equipped to deal with the very real Chinese threat, which will likely be a more serious threat to American hegemony than anything that Iran can do. And part of the reason we are under-equipped to fight China is because we canceled procurement and research programs throughout the Global War on Terror to fund the Global War on Terror – effectively eating our own seed corn.
I agree with this. I admittedly did not make this clear enough in my post, but I must say I am aware of the looming threat of China to American interests and I don't want to be bogged down in this. I really hope that Israel succeeds or Iran comes back to the negotiating table, as you said. However, there are two issues here. Firstly, Iran has been "at the negotiating table" several times, including with previous administrations, leading to billions of funds going into their pockets in return for them only pursuing civil nuclear reactors... which they then proceeded to ignore completely. Secondly, the inverse of your statement is true as well: Iran does not have infinite capacity to do things either. They have already used a huge amount of missiles in the current exchange, and their IADS seems to be in shambles. They may already be close to their limit as far as projecting power is concerned, and dealing with them now is a lot more appealing than waiting for an armistice where they are able to refill their reserves. If they actually nuclearize, or perhaps state their intent to use those weapons against the US, and we suddenly have to divert resources back to them to stop an imminent threat, it will be a lot costlier, and likely bloodier.
And the only reliable way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is regime change.
I don't know that this is true. There was a lot of fear about Iraq getting one, and after we utterly demolished their ability to make war in the first Gulf War, they were never a credible threat. That's why the "they're making WMDs" justification for Gulf War 2 is a persistent joke.
Second (another commenter posted in response to this but I'm going to put my reply here, as it's relevant and I've received a number of replies) I think the biggest issue with Gulf War 2 (other than doing it) was that we picked the worst middle ground imaginable. We banned every single Ba'ath party member from ever being in government, which is not even a thing we did with the Nazis or Japanese. This essentially left a fledgling government in the middle of a war zone filled with the unqualified, malcontents, and sometimes literal terrorists in power. That Iraq even exists after ISIS is kind of a miracle to me, not that they're somehow doing great. I think we should have either:
- Completely obliterated their military again, ousted their leaders that time, and left.
- Actually worked with the remaining government to allow for some kind of legitimate regime change.
Both of these things are something I would accept, at least on the home front. "Don't fuck with the US or they'll show up, kill all your leaders, and break all your stuff" is at least something we can credibly do multiple countries. We cannot get continuously bogged down in a 20 year nation building/peacekeeping quagmire.
SECONDLY
I somewhat responded to these points above, but I agree partially. I'll explain below.
If Israel conducts the war successfully, they may reduce the cost of a limited US intervention (destroying the buried nuclear facilities with bunker busters – although it's possible that some of them are buried even too deeply for oversized US ordinance!) to near-zero.
As I said above, I want this to happen. As with Ukraine, I like the idea of adversaries blunting themselves against our allies at zero cost to American lives and (relatively) low cost with materiel. As it is, if we're going to have to strike, I want to strike while the iron is hot and their munitions and defenses are depleted. If we're not going to take our hands off the steering wheel of the entire region and withdraw entirely (which I think is a bad idea outside the scope of this already long-winded discussion), then I want it done now when it's going to be the easiest for us to do.
The Iranian regime may not last forever.
I hope it doesn't. The average Iranian is not a lover of their regime, which is why we see regular protests despite the authoritarian nature of their government. While I've mentioned I prioritize American interests over others, I don't want a single life to be lost. But I have to be realistic and consider the fact that their nation will be able to do damage as long as they're in power, even more if they nuclearize.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.
We don't have a record of "How many times someone was banned for a low effort top level post," but it's not common. Pretty much only when someone is a repeat offender after being warned, or being a deliberate jerk about it.
Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.
This is in the general category of requests we receive from time to time to, essentially, codify in minute detail the exact rubric we shall use to decide whether or not someone gets banned in every possible situation, and then consider ourselves bound to it so if someone makes a convincing enough case that "Actually, per clause 3 in paragraph 4, the offender did not meet the necessary threshold for banning" we will be forced to acquit. That's not how it works and it's not how it's ever going to work. "Low effort" is subjective, and it's always going to be subjective. Over time the mods have converged on something like a general consensus (not just on "low effort") such that most of the time, when we ask each other "Hey, do you think this post merits a ban?" there will be general agreement as to whether it does or doesn't. But it's not always unanimous, and depending who mods you, Amadan might decide on Tuesday to just give you a warning, and netstack might decide on Thursday to ban you for a week.
I understand this may be frustrating to those who have an autistic need to have the exact decision process mapped out for them, but you're just going to have to negotiate that. We're not a court of law, we respond to general community feeling, our own intuitions, and history, and trying to keep an interesting place running with maximal freedom of speech without letting people shit on the commons is more important than writing rules for autists.
(I am not calling you autistic; I have no idea whether you are or not. I'm just saying that the need to have all vagaries and subjectivity removed from human decision-making strikes me as a very autistic desire.)
ControlsFreak
4d ago
The competitive advantage of the motte is not that it can report what is true faster than twitter, nor that it is better at reporting facts than the news media.
I think you have mistaken what my model was. I agree with this.
A decent current news top level post is basically providing a canvas for takes.
I think a pretty low-effort comment is sufficient to provide the canvas. It seems to me that you are asking for it to paint the canvas.
But all the interesting takes, like ... will only happen after the facts are in and the posters have had a day to think on them and how they tie into their world view.
If the mods believe this, then they should simply impose a moratorium. No breaking news for 24hrs. That would be clear.
I would propose a system of sliding standards. In the first 24h of a news item being reported, I would expect someone putting in a solid twenty minutes of citing multiple news sources. After 36h, if it is an important CW news item (e.g. the first Trump tariff story, not the tenth), I propose top level posters should get away with a low effort post (source+quote+two sentences).
This seems like an unstable equilibrium. An individual actor can defect by putting in only 19min of work. Then the next individual actor can defect by putting in only 18min of work. Rinse and repeat. My proposal acknowledges that it is a useful service to provide a canvas, but only for a small subset of genuine 100% topics. Moreover, it says that this service is valued in that it will not be warned/banned, but in order to maintain incentives for the equilibrium, it will come with a shower of downvotes and significant penalties if you're wrong about it being a 100% topic.
ControlsFreak
4d ago
How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses?
I am qualitatively annoyed by the situation, which is independent of the frequency. However, you have the mod history, so if you'd like to provide numbers to supplement the conceptual-level discussion, that would be appreciated.
You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this."
Technically, even this OP wrote something about it. But yeah, I still have no idea what the actual standard is.
Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue.
Perhaps your numbers from the mod history will bear out that the typical response is just a warning. I still think this is a bad equilibrium. It provides insufficient distinction between typical low effort garbage that we don't want and obvious 100% topics, which we (I) do. Moreover, I prefer a world where this distinction is overt in policy.
For any other mods who might be casually interested in subscribing to my newsletter this meta topic, I would like to note that so far in the responses, I see very little engagement with my conceptual definition of the problem to be solved, the incentives involved, the current or desired equilibria, or valuation methods for what type of resulting posting dynamics we'd prefer.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
4d ago
I am genuinely shaking my head in amazement that you wrote such a long wall of text to defend such an absurd argument and expect it to be taken seriously.
Right now, the equilibrium is that somebody (or their alt account) is willing to take a ban to just do the thing that needs to be done.
What are you even talking about? How many times has someone been banned for this? Any guesses? You talk like this is how it usually goes down, that when a big breaking news event happens, everyone wants to talk about it and someone has "take one for the team" and post a thread-starter they will get banned for.
Of course when big events happen, there will inevitably be a thread about it. Because someone will write about it. And they will, hopefully, write at least a measly paragraph or two that is something beyond just "HEY GUYS SOMETHING BIG IS HAPPENING I WANT TO BE THE FIRST TO START A THREAD SO MY THREAD WILL THE THREAD ABOUT IT!"
Our standards are not high. They are not unreasonable. You do not have to write an essay, a flowery effortpost, or come up with some wildly innovative idea. You just have to not look like an attention whore on Twitter.
There is a very simple solution for a major event worthy of discussion: write something about it. If it's too low effort, we'll probably clear our throats and say "Low effort, don't do this." Sometimes we will create a mega thread, like for elections and other predictable events. If next week, World War III has started, we will probably create a mega thread for it (you know, if we're alive and the Internet is still up and stuff).
@ABigGuy4U ate a ban because he was so blatant, so deliberate, so "Tee hee ain't I clever guys!" about it. I explained this. Normally if someone rushed to be FIRST! we'd just warn them not to do it again (as I said!) and let the thread continue. But someone who goes out of his way to be obnoxious about it, yeah, he's going to eat a ban. Don't tell us "I'm breaking the rules on purpose because the rules are stupid and I want attention." Of course I'm going to be inclined to respond harshly to that.
FarmReadyElephants
5d ago
Sexual nihilism is considered harmful. There's a reason why the rationalist community has a very low TFR - I wouldn't be surprised if it were as low as 0.1.
There was a rationalist adjacent group in a certain city that banned Aella from their events, and I remember her complaining about it a few years ago. But that subgroup had a TFR of closer to 2.0. They didn't want someone throwing sex parties, being an open prostitute, and debating whether-or-not pedophilia was really that bad around their kids. She felt hurt, her friends felt the need to defend her, but its an unavoidable side-effect of basic social hygiene.
Sex is an incredibly powerful psychological force. People kill for sex, people die for sex, people throw away their careers for sex, they lose a fortune for sex, the commit crimes for sex, they bully people for sex. Jeff Bezos pissed away ~$40 billion to upgrade his lay. The best we've been able to do is cage that energy and channel it for pro-social and pro-civilizational ends.
People like Aella are smart enough to reason through the second and third order consequences of their actions. They just don't. Probably because they are directly benefiting from lighting civilization on fire. Cool. The rest of us don't have to put up with it.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
5d ago
What consistent moral traits has the US had over the last 100 years?
The US used to be a racially segregated, eugenicist, male-dominated, highly industrialized, colonial power with a small state apparatus. Sodomy was banned, along with miscegenation and pornography. In all reasonable senses America has changed hugely.
And yet elements of the US character are preserved over the centuries due to the people that make it up, though this is changing. There's a certain level of non-conformism, religiosity, optimism, innovativeness, individualism...
It's the same with Germany. There are certain German traits that remained consistent over the century. The high status of technical research for one thing, prestige going more towards engineering and hard sciences compared to (in the UK) classics. Even that is a relatively surface-level cultural difference, compared to underlying matters like relationship between citizen and state, class v meritocracy, systematic thinking...
It's extremely reductive to view a state's character solely by the most obvious features of its government.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5d ago
—Inb4 “low effort post ban” Additional facts and my thoughts will be added as the situation develops
You know, without this passive-aggressive snidery, I would have just warned you and pointed out why we don't want people to rush to post "BREAKING NEWS" just to be the first person to post about it.
But since you clearly did it knowing the rules, and really did just want to be FIRST! Banned for three days, so this discussion will be happening without you.
2rafa
5d ago
Guest workers as used in eg. Saudi Arabia and the UAE are non-viable because - 60 years later - everybody knows that they don’t go home. The Turks in Germany were “temporary”, they were promised to never receive citizenship, the German public were told clearly that they would work for 3 years and then go home, every single one. Even renewals were initially banned.
Of course what happened is that businesses that employed “guest workers” didn’t want them to leave at the end of the 3 year period because recruiting new guest workers was expensive and required training them. So the periods were slowly extended, then in-country renewals were allowed, so the Gastarbeiter didn’t have to go home in between stints which was disruptive (and most stopped following the rules after a while anyway).
Then, they were slowly allowed to benefit from the growing postwar welfare system, and to bring over more and more relatives. Lastly, to avoid “social unrest” as a consequence of having a huge non-citizen population that was clearly not going to leave they were granted citizenship.
In 1982 Kohl told Thatcher that he would deport at least half the Turks in Germany. But then it seemed like a lot of effort, his ‘self deportation scheme’ (paying them to leave) led only 100,000 to return, and the military coups of the 1980s doubled the Turkish German population as they brought over wives and children and brothers and cousins (who promptly declared asylum) even though Turkish guest worker recruitment ended in 1973.
In 2000, Kohl’s own son married an (upper middle class, but still) Turkish woman and the Germans slowly started amending nationality law to essentially hand out citizenship to Turkish migrants and their children in an effort to assimilate them.
The point is simple: Western countries are incapable of approaching a guest worker workforce with the necessary maturity. The only way they come and leave is if their home country is at least 60-80% as prosperous as the country they move to (which usually means they are unviable as guest workers unless you’re like Switzerland hiring German doctors).
Since 2000, the Republican majority in congress and very careful lobbying by those on the right of the congressional party has successfully killed another amnesty bill that would hand out citizenship. Eventually the dam will break and a Democratic president will pass another amnesty, though it has been a valiant effort. But it doesn’t actually matter, because as Trump’s capitulation shows, the vast majority of migrant workers will never actually be deported.
If Americans don’t want to do ag work, then the fields can rot. It’s OK. Robotics and multimodal AI are progressing at breakneck speed. In less than a decade robots will pick our strawberries (and all the people we might import still won’t leave). In the meantime we can import them from overseas (and in the event of some kind of truly catastrophic global crisis, ex-PMC Americans will pick them diligently rather than starve, I assure you).
Most furry spaces have largely gotten pretty strict rules about aigen, sometimes aligned to the points you've highlighted and sometimes not, and the end result is pretty goofy.
E621, for example, prohibits AI excepting use for "backgrounds (treated like using a photo as a background, quality rules apply); for artwork that references, but does not directly use, AI generated content; and for audio in video posts such as WebM." The moderators will explain, when pinged, exactly how a particular piece falls, and from my understanding are pretty clear and direct about things. I don't know of any sfw examples, but leeto's 4930019 (cw:M/M and M/F) is an example where AI had been used to create pose references, but the final file had never been touched by any AIgen program, and moderators said it was at the very border but still acceptable (though this scared the artist off enough to move to conventional digital pose generators). The rules are workable!
But they end up in a situation where half of the pixels in a particular artpiece are AIgen and it's okay, including a lot of stuff that's setting the stage, and then another piece where AIgen was only used to add some shadow or shading and that's unacceptable. More critically, serious enforcement is dependent on self-reporting. Rick Griffin got a piece banned from FurAffinity (and, presumably, would not be allowed on e621) for some tree renders and shading that I don't think anyone would have noticed had he not spelled it out. Obvious errors in logic or consistency can sometimes point to AIgen when an artist doesn't disclose it (or show other faults that trigger other quality rules), and there's a certain look to some of the most common AIgen, but you can and I have put out hundreds of pieces in an hour with wildly different styles and pretty good image quality consistency.
((And, on the flip side, a bad actor can actively use AI for what AI proponents would still consider stealing. Img2img with someone else's art can have far less actual effort than direct reference or even hand-tracing on a lightbox, but can be different enough to bypass a lot of conventional phash checks or even eyeball tests for 'novelty' and 'uniqueness'. If a small-name account starts doing it, it's hard to catch and harder still to persuasively demonstrate.))
But you can also just kinda have counterintuitive and inconsistent results, and just that's how things are. I'm not even sure some arbitrary rules would be bad -- an art gallery that allowed some limited number of upload per account per day (and restricted alts) using AIgen could avoid a lot of the spam and quality control problems that places which haven't banned the stuff often run into. The rules and points being made up is pretty common.
My thoughts? I think think they're not "a necessary evil" only because they're insufficient. I think Neema Parvini has a point when he asks:
and calls for the Democratic Party to be banned, and replaced with a left-wing party that isn't "mental":
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