There are weapons that use sensor fusion already, with computer vision being used mostly on the offensive side. The issue for fixed defensive emplacements is that the attack drones are quite fast, and small for their lethality. The fusion is built off radar, acoustic (sound) and visible spectrum, but isn't reliable and only recently portable. Humans (which have excellent sensing capability) have been in the loop with aimed jammers, and this has become standard equipment at the platoon level.
Timely detection is hard, and the interception is tricky too. Costly interceptors work better than bullets, and can protect a larger area, but even a 95% interception range isn't super effective, as we saw with some of the $1b radomes lost by US Forces this year.
Personally, I think we've sadly only seen the start of autonomous, self-guided 'suicide' drones. These are the weapons that terrify me. Not accountable, cheap, and they can easily be turned against civilian infrastructure. Computer vision is robust, but shrinking the sensor + decision maker still needs work (at least, thats what the unclassified info tells me)
The main difference between WWI and Today's trench warfare the the level of intelligence available, combined with the ability to precision-strike.
It's interesting because drones are very mobile, able to be deployed close to the front, and extremely deadly, but simultaneously limited. The heavier payload ones can also be longer range, but counter-UAV technology (mostly jamming) makes these harder to use. In comparison, the shorter-range drones can be sent via cable - impossible to jam, but limited flight distance due to the trailing wire + weight.
The application of drones on the battlefield also favors the defender. The small-payload drones are exceptional at taking out moving vehicles and light infantry, and overhead imagery (via drone or satellite) is nearly omnipresent. With neither side able to secure complete air power, the normal target softening approach of airstrikes followed by troop movement isn't viable, and then drones take out even the most spread-out groups moving forward. The result is that the doctrinal 3:1 attacker ratio that favors defenders is even more lopsided with drones. I fear that we'll see a greatly increased use of autonomous weaponry as a result, which is extremely dangerous for humanity.
I'm convinced this is astroturfing in the same vein as the "Just stop oil" protesters that do all that trolly shit. The goal is for you to view green technologies negatively by association, and to feel like the science and decision-making behind them is suspect.
What were these other soldiers supposed to do that are trained to fight and protect their country?
Just stand there and take some more?
What is the proper response according to you when a group of terrorists bombs a military convoy?
You edited your post so I'll reply again:
The test, which America and China both repeatedly fail, is having professional law enforcement and soldiers kill their own citizens. This is one of the most utter, final failures of government. There are plenty of options besides killing people, and when you take up arms and swear oaths to protect your country, and then kill citizens of your own country, you break your oath.
Your argument fails because there's no need to actually intercede and halt protests. In the case of the pro-democracy movement crushed by the PLA in June 1989, martial law and attacks on protesters had begun en masse 2 weeks before the massacre. There was a steady escalation of violence leading up to the riots in early june. So the idea that the protestors "struck first" (even if that is a justification, which it isn't, is false. The facts, which aren't in dispute, were that the anti-corruption policies implemented to answer the complaints of the protestors were well-received, and further reforms were desired by everyone, not just the student protestors. Everyone except the local officials who were at risk of losing their positions by a government overhaul from authoritarianism to democracy.
The protest could have continued to be disrupted the way they already were before the massacre:
Through wiretaps and arrests
Through planted dissenters sowing chaos in the student's ranks
Through rubber bullets + tear gas, and other nonlethal methods
Instead, even though 300,000 people were protesting that period, the actions of an interim commander who acted on poor discipline and leadership, directly lead to at least hundreds, and possibly thousands, of his own people, in a small section of the city. That is a spectacular failure, and the end of a certain degree of human autonomy in China.
This is coming from someone who actually thinks China is leading the world in many ways. I do genuinely believe that China is actually less corrupt than many other nations, and the high degree of social cohesion in-country is something that gives them strength. Like I said in my first post: lots to admire, but this ain't it.
This is just the other bullet points again! I'm sure if more armed rebels entered the capital it would have been incredibly messy and people would have died. And killing a ton of people, regardless of why, is a failure of government. Conflating one violent protest with another and then saying "America Bad so China Fine" is inane.
Its a long, long border, mostly undefended in the west. A lot of infrastructure undefended, and a very brittle supply chain when it comes to civilian logistics and power. A handful of fighter jets would be a nightmare for rail lines and oil depots.
"Nearly doubling to 100 co-sponsors" doesn't mean shit. Talk to me when it's 60 senators and 220 representatives.
We have the most profoundly impotent democratic "leadership" who are completely comfortable with our slide into fascism, even though it'll almost certainly mean the end of their positions of power.
This is parroted a lot by commentators online but I'm increasingly convinced it isn't true. I think showing pity or understanding for these kind of braindead bigots actually encourages the rare braindead bigot reading social media to hold on longer. I'm old enough to remember these statements made in 2016, pleading to gently convert conservatives into liberals. Instead we see a continual ratcheting of bigotry and hate against the left, because it appears not compassionate, but weak.
I think that if instead people went online and saw universal derision and scorn for these people, they would quietly revise their worldview. As it is, it seems like each MAGA voter needs to experience consequences personally before they revise their stance. Folks need to remember that conservative media is telling these "low-information voters" that minorities and "liberals" desperately want to destroy them. So when we say "oh no, come on over!" it seems like a trap, or like we are disingenuous.
You also need to consider that social media is so ideologically fractured by algorithm and media preference, you need to go out of your way to find a dissenting viewpoint. Basically all political punditry is performative at this point, with zero minds being swayed by logical arguments.
This is why I've stopped feeling or expressing remorse for any MAGA folks who suffer under the regime.
And sadly, despite how horrific it is- at the end of the day, it is legal. He didn’t hunt these people down and end them. He denied them coverage. This needs to change, but vigilantism clearly isn’t going to do it, and this is evident in the fact that it’s still happening. In fact, I believe it’s even worse now.
In the aftermath of the killings, approval of claims skyrocketed. If CEOs kept getting deleted for their horrifically immoral actions, then I've no doubt we'd have a different healthcare system right now. Your bootlicking is exactly what they rely on to literally keep killing people. You are enabling them to kill people.
It's a trolly car problem. If I'm confronted with this moral dilemma, I'm choosing the lever that kills the CEO to save millions of lives.
Where do we draw the line where murder isn’t okay just because we don’t like what someone does?
In this case, this person was so vile, so directly contributing to the misery of society, the slope aint slippery at all.
There is a reason we have laws in place to stop slippery slopes like this from happening. And we are better than these assholes. They got to do what they do using our system of law- so we will need to use that system of law to stop them.
The reason is that law enforcement is a tool to protect capital. The police and politicians will never step in for this issue, because they are captured by the capitalist class. Nothing you can do (well...) can change that fact, and they want you to waste your time on performative protests and attempts at legal reform.
If Luigi had killed his health insurance claim worker instead, you'd never even have known his name. You don't need to remind me that I'm better than CEOs. I'm completely certain of it. Because I don't make my daily work harvesting money via the suffering of millions of people.
A huge portion of social media is from bots. Twitter removed millions of bots this week and it doesn't even dent the bot population there.
Foreign countries target American media because its military + nuclear arsenal is unbeatable in a full-scale war. No country would ever consider a war with America, so as a result efforts are dedicated to weakening it from within through psyops. Hence, lemmy.ml exists.
Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.
On the subject of "Free as in Freedom" - I don't agree that a site is 'not free' if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that's not the main thrust of your argument so let's set that aside.
Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation "doing very little," and concerns about fairness, doesn't seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia's scale impractical to produce in-house, it's also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I'd still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.
Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don't need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you're wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.
Lastly, I'm very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you'd be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.
Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the "IP" is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn't exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I've never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That's why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That's humanity for you. We fuck things up. It's up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that's a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn't that, and it's old enough to have proven it won't be captured in that way.
I think maybe you're confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
From the (very long) NYT article that dropped today about this:
Epstein was likely money laundering for quite some time, Bank ignored red flags because the penalties would almost certainly be less than the profits from moving that much money around. This is the big reason why he didn't get cut loose. I'm sure JPM was taking a cut on all the transfers of non-cash deposits (securities, etc) and also making money on the balance of accounts as they moved through their system (being laundered). Getting to trade on $1B while it's being disbursed is a lot of why these "market makers" are so powerful. Critically, they're supposed to be reporting on large cash withdrawls - if you or I pulled out $180k in a year in physical cash the feds would be coming by to see what was going on.
Despite the potential bad optics of bankrolling a pedophile money launderer, They continued lending & consulting him because he got them add'l whale clients, including the CEO of Google (4B+ Customer) and business with highly profitable hedge funds
When things became untenable (tried + convicted sex offender, serving 18 months in FLA) the senior exec who had been covering for him (and profiting from his referrals and money laundering) lobbied to keep him because he, himself, had been entrapped in Epstein's sex trafficking operation (as a customer, obv).
Once word of one of their seniors being Epstein's pal became public JPM cut everyone loose. This is pretty routine behavior by wall street tbh. Crime until you're caught.
Obviously trustworthy banks don't enable money laundering, so he should really have been dropped in the 90's/00's. Certainly his '11 conviction should have been the end of it. Incarcerated white-collar criminals usually lose big after the first conviction because the revenue stream has dried up and the justice-averting lawyers can't be paid. In this case, his contacts kept the money moving because they were embroiled in the same schemes.
Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that's what these CEOs are relying on.
It's a bad day to be a Putin apologist. How's the weather in St. Petersburg today?
None of what you said is relevant or coherent. 9/11 was an attack against civilians by terrorists. This was an attack against military targets by state actors at war. NATO exists for soft and hard power projection, and to discourage intra-state conflict within Europe. Further, the weakness of the Russian Military as contrasted by their posturing has been stark. I don't personally believe Russia remains a superpower, with their ability to project power now restricted to digital battlefields and hard power only adjacent to their borders.
There are weapons that use sensor fusion already, with computer vision being used mostly on the offensive side. The issue for fixed defensive emplacements is that the attack drones are quite fast, and small for their lethality. The fusion is built off radar, acoustic (sound) and visible spectrum, but isn't reliable and only recently portable. Humans (which have excellent sensing capability) have been in the loop with aimed jammers, and this has become standard equipment at the platoon level.
Timely detection is hard, and the interception is tricky too. Costly interceptors work better than bullets, and can protect a larger area, but even a 95% interception range isn't super effective, as we saw with some of the $1b radomes lost by US Forces this year.
Personally, I think we've sadly only seen the start of autonomous, self-guided 'suicide' drones. These are the weapons that terrify me. Not accountable, cheap, and they can easily be turned against civilian infrastructure. Computer vision is robust, but shrinking the sensor + decision maker still needs work (at least, thats what the unclassified info tells me)
The main difference between WWI and Today's trench warfare the the level of intelligence available, combined with the ability to precision-strike.
It's interesting because drones are very mobile, able to be deployed close to the front, and extremely deadly, but simultaneously limited. The heavier payload ones can also be longer range, but counter-UAV technology (mostly jamming) makes these harder to use. In comparison, the shorter-range drones can be sent via cable - impossible to jam, but limited flight distance due to the trailing wire + weight.
The application of drones on the battlefield also favors the defender. The small-payload drones are exceptional at taking out moving vehicles and light infantry, and overhead imagery (via drone or satellite) is nearly omnipresent. With neither side able to secure complete air power, the normal target softening approach of airstrikes followed by troop movement isn't viable, and then drones take out even the most spread-out groups moving forward. The result is that the doctrinal 3:1 attacker ratio that favors defenders is even more lopsided with drones. I fear that we'll see a greatly increased use of autonomous weaponry as a result, which is extremely dangerous for humanity.
I'm convinced this is astroturfing in the same vein as the "Just stop oil" protesters that do all that trolly shit. The goal is for you to view green technologies negatively by association, and to feel like the science and decision-making behind them is suspect.
You edited your post so I'll reply again: The test, which America and China both repeatedly fail, is having professional law enforcement and soldiers kill their own citizens. This is one of the most utter, final failures of government. There are plenty of options besides killing people, and when you take up arms and swear oaths to protect your country, and then kill citizens of your own country, you break your oath.
Your argument fails because there's no need to actually intercede and halt protests. In the case of the pro-democracy movement crushed by the PLA in June 1989, martial law and attacks on protesters had begun en masse 2 weeks before the massacre. There was a steady escalation of violence leading up to the riots in early june. So the idea that the protestors "struck first" (even if that is a justification, which it isn't, is false. The facts, which aren't in dispute, were that the anti-corruption policies implemented to answer the complaints of the protestors were well-received, and further reforms were desired by everyone, not just the student protestors. Everyone except the local officials who were at risk of losing their positions by a government overhaul from authoritarianism to democracy.
The protest could have continued to be disrupted the way they already were before the massacre:
Instead, even though 300,000 people were protesting that period, the actions of an interim commander who acted on poor discipline and leadership, directly lead to at least hundreds, and possibly thousands, of his own people, in a small section of the city. That is a spectacular failure, and the end of a certain degree of human autonomy in China.
This is coming from someone who actually thinks China is leading the world in many ways. I do genuinely believe that China is actually less corrupt than many other nations, and the high degree of social cohesion in-country is something that gives them strength. Like I said in my first post: lots to admire, but this ain't it.
This is just the other bullet points again! I'm sure if more armed rebels entered the capital it would have been incredibly messy and people would have died. And killing a ton of people, regardless of why, is a failure of government. Conflating one violent protest with another and then saying "America Bad so China Fine" is inane.
Its a long, long border, mostly undefended in the west. A lot of infrastructure undefended, and a very brittle supply chain when it comes to civilian logistics and power. A handful of fighter jets would be a nightmare for rail lines and oil depots.
"Nearly doubling to 100 co-sponsors" doesn't mean shit. Talk to me when it's 60 senators and 220 representatives.
We have the most profoundly impotent democratic "leadership" who are completely comfortable with our slide into fascism, even though it'll almost certainly mean the end of their positions of power.
This is parroted a lot by commentators online but I'm increasingly convinced it isn't true. I think showing pity or understanding for these kind of braindead bigots actually encourages the rare braindead bigot reading social media to hold on longer. I'm old enough to remember these statements made in 2016, pleading to gently convert conservatives into liberals. Instead we see a continual ratcheting of bigotry and hate against the left, because it appears not compassionate, but weak.
I think that if instead people went online and saw universal derision and scorn for these people, they would quietly revise their worldview. As it is, it seems like each MAGA voter needs to experience consequences personally before they revise their stance. Folks need to remember that conservative media is telling these "low-information voters" that minorities and "liberals" desperately want to destroy them. So when we say "oh no, come on over!" it seems like a trap, or like we are disingenuous.
You also need to consider that social media is so ideologically fractured by algorithm and media preference, you need to go out of your way to find a dissenting viewpoint. Basically all political punditry is performative at this point, with zero minds being swayed by logical arguments.
This is why I've stopped feeling or expressing remorse for any MAGA folks who suffer under the regime.
In the aftermath of the killings, approval of claims skyrocketed. If CEOs kept getting deleted for their horrifically immoral actions, then I've no doubt we'd have a different healthcare system right now. Your bootlicking is exactly what they rely on to literally keep killing people. You are enabling them to kill people.
It's a trolly car problem. If I'm confronted with this moral dilemma, I'm choosing the lever that kills the CEO to save millions of lives.
In this case, this person was so vile, so directly contributing to the misery of society, the slope aint slippery at all.
The reason is that law enforcement is a tool to protect capital. The police and politicians will never step in for this issue, because they are captured by the capitalist class. Nothing you can do (well...) can change that fact, and they want you to waste your time on performative protests and attempts at legal reform.
If Luigi had killed his health insurance claim worker instead, you'd never even have known his name. You don't need to remind me that I'm better than CEOs. I'm completely certain of it. Because I don't make my daily work harvesting money via the suffering of millions of people.
https://www.cybercom.mil/Media/News/Article/3895345/russian-disinformation-campaign-doppelgnger-unmasked-a-web-of-deception/
Huh?
A huge portion of social media is from bots. Twitter removed millions of bots this week and it doesn't even dent the bot population there.
Foreign countries target American media because its military + nuclear arsenal is unbeatable in a full-scale war. No country would ever consider a war with America, so as a result efforts are dedicated to weakening it from within through psyops. Hence, lemmy.ml exists.
Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.
On the subject of "Free as in Freedom" - I don't agree that a site is 'not free' if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that's not the main thrust of your argument so let's set that aside.
Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation "doing very little," and concerns about fairness, doesn't seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia's scale impractical to produce in-house, it's also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I'd still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.
Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don't need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you're wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.
Lastly, I'm very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you'd be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.
Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1123763881#Comment_by_Selena_Deckelmann,_Wikimedia_Foundation
I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that's marketing, not politics.
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: "There's no such thing as a free lunch."
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the "IP" is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn't exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I've never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That's why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That's humanity for you. We fuck things up. It's up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that's a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn't that, and it's old enough to have proven it won't be captured in that way.
I think maybe you're confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
From the (very long) NYT article that dropped today about this:
Obviously trustworthy banks don't enable money laundering, so he should really have been dropped in the 90's/00's. Certainly his '11 conviction should have been the end of it. Incarcerated white-collar criminals usually lose big after the first conviction because the revenue stream has dried up and the justice-averting lawyers can't be paid. In this case, his contacts kept the money moving because they were embroiled in the same schemes.
Not that I agree, but if you believe that the LLMs will continuously improve, then in 5-10 years you may only need 1/3rd the seniors, to oversee and prompt. Again, that's what these CEOs are relying on.
Aren't the people ICE kidnaps being deported to concentration camps regardless? So the frying of an ICE machine is purely a value-added service.
It's a bad day to be a Putin apologist. How's the weather in St. Petersburg today?
None of what you said is relevant or coherent. 9/11 was an attack against civilians by terrorists. This was an attack against military targets by state actors at war. NATO exists for soft and hard power projection, and to discourage intra-state conflict within Europe. Further, the weakness of the Russian Military as contrasted by their posturing has been stark. I don't personally believe Russia remains a superpower, with their ability to project power now restricted to digital battlefields and hard power only adjacent to their borders.