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Ironically, the way to change this is by voting. One election at a time, we can trend towards the better or worse.

We have to remove the power the current political duopoly has had for generations.

Fuck the Republicans. Fuck the Democrats. Rally behind a third-party candidate and blow up the establishment with your vote


Hell yeah. And disregard anyone who says you’re “wasting your vote” or “splitting the vote”; they’re part of the problem and their defeatist thinking will get us nowhere.

With exceptions. Linux being the most obvious example.

Linux is no EU project, but very much global. It just happens that its originator (who, quite tellingly, has been living and working in the US since the mid-90s) is Finnish.

I was using Linux for work while Linus was still in Europe.

All the large US tech companies are also global. Cuts both ways.


We spend upwards of $15B a year globally on cancer research. About half of that is funded by government and charities, half by pharmaceutical companies.

If spending billions was the main trick, we’d know it already.


Do we actually spend it, or do we raise that much money while only a fraction of it goes to research? <looksAtPinkRibbons>

Sorry you both experienced that. We did too.

We relax ‘do no harm’ quite a bit when the alternative is certain death. People like to try stuff in order to hang on to hope. Towards the end I became convinced that she made the wrong choice to do aggressive interventions. Quality of life was very bad.

On the other hand, she gave it her all trying to survive. Hopefully that was satisfying for her.


I’m pretty sure non-human tigers have been killing humans for ages.

Tigers can initiate global thermal nuclear war?

What a comment


Drones can’t either.

Take Drone. Attempt assassination of nuclear armed leader.

Leader fires nuclear weapons.


Same can be achieved with a tiger.

The last-millennium solution to me-only installs is to put stuff in $HOME/bin, $HOME/lib, and $HOME/etc, and put those in the appropriate paths. Build the package with e.g. CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$HOME. At some point I switched to putting those dirs all in $HOME/opt for tidiness.

It's worked for me since workstations were shaped like pizza boxes.

I'm sure there are some things it can't do, but it goes a long way. When you're installing distributed binary packages you have less ability to control the baked-in install dirs, but if the package honors the conventional $(env) it can work.


We've had loitering munitions that choose their own target autonomously for a long time, for example anti-tank weapons that climb up after being released from a plane or helicopter then sit on a parachute until spotting one or more tanks and firing warheads at them.

The superficial new thing here is the exact quadcopter form factor, but the significance is the new price point. You bet the loitering anti-tank weapon costs a fortune. These drones are very cheap.

Of course, mines can be even cheaper, but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.


I think the difference between a targeting a specific piece of military hardware compared to training an AI model to target humans and infrastructure is quite different. This explains why drones that get misdirected will target oil infrastructure in friendly countries.

Agreed. Even some of the latest IR missiles (AIM-9X I believe) also include a visual seeking component to compliment the IR seeker, and try to identify aircraft types based on their outlines (presumably for orienting the missile for maximum damage).

You just can't make that distinction with people, especially not if just using IR or the likes. The guy with a rifle slung over his shoulder just happens to look like the guy with carrying a rake. Hand gun in hand happens to look the same as a power drill. Someone wearing a beanie looks suspiciously like a soldier with a helmet.

This all feels like a really bad idea.


The US has made it very clear that they're going to be targeting Iranian water infrastructure. Israel have flattened most of the hospitals in Gaza along with the university. They just don't care about not targeting civilians any more.

There are limitations to the technology, but in right scenarios it is perfect.

One should not use it on attack, when people need to distinguish between a soldier and a civilian.

But on a defence, when you need to keep a certain area empty from enemies (and there is nobody else but enemies incoming), then it resembles the usage of mines, only better (both in terms of efficiency and safety/callback/disarm).

Another scenario or cutting the logistics. If you know that a road is only used by military, then letting the automatic drones watch and engage is a great idea.


> but you unwittingly engage them rather than them engaging you.

Directional anti-tank mines are a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARM_1_mine


Or the Russian POM-3, scattered by aerial deployment, detects vibrations before bounding and detonating in the air.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POM-3_mine


I think autonomous drone mentioned in the article used some sort of "kill all targets" mode indiscriminently much like traditional munitions.

Right. The novelty is the cost.

the innovation was in the unit economics

That's because for NATO or the USSR cost was irrelevant.

The Ukraine war is a concept that was thought to be abandoned: an industrial war between near peers.


Anti ship missiles also need to search for targets once in the area

In the article there's no mention on the targeting works, self guided munitions have machines as targets, usually. A drone by itself might kill civilians and even allies if ot misidentifies a person or animal.

'I never liked writing tests' is not the same as 'I don't write tests'.

Parent said "I'd really like to know a solution that doesn't have at least some part of the amount of code that scales with N."

You're arguing the inverse: that at least some parts of the code are independent of N. Sure. But the topic is the part that isn't.


Chrome still has a way to go until Zawinski's Law is satisfied natively.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/Z/Zawinskis-Law.html


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