- cross-posted to:
- flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- flippanarchy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Hey look, future Geneva conventions!
I love that we as a species choose to focus on this instead of helping people…I mean, wait, this is for helping people…ermh, I think?
Ok but there was recently that one murderer guy who escaped from a Tennessee prison & was running free for awhile, I don’t know if they ever caught him, he disappeared from the news after the first couple days he was running free 🤷🏼♀️ Anyway this technology would be handy for catching escaped prisoners, because when murderers are in prison, the rest of us are safer.
I’m always relieved to hear that all of the nefarious bullshit done in the world today is for my safety. /s
The slaughterbots will not be used to slaughter you, we promise.
The Death Ray is for peaceful purposes only.
So when these drones start murdering civilians in war zones and ‘securitised’ zones who are hiding in the bushes from fascists and genociders these developers are going to be sent to jail for their share of those murders and crimes against humanity right? Right?..
Everyone gonna need portable emp blaster to deal with this nightmare soon.
In the Ruso-Ukraine war they just use shotguns. It’s more resilient against RF shielding. And shotguns are a lot more available.
And I always thought my clay pigeon skills were useless since I don’t hunt. Ends up I was just training for a future horrific task!
ha shooting rocks and metal to solve issue with flying bot huh
That tracks
I always say that the issues with tech is nothing that can’t be solved with something as simple as a board with a nail in it. Just direct at Andresons egg dome
It pretty.
Israel: GIMME GIMME GIMME!
I mean it would certainly be a better alternative to their current tactic of dropping a 2000lb bomb on the 14 floor block of flats they’re currently living in.
Their current tactic is much better at achieving their true objectives (of getting rid of all Palestinians) than a robot that pursues single individuals ever would, so from their point of view the latter isn’t at all an alternative for the former.
They just stop the deliveries of food and water, no need to overcomplicate things.
As someone who has done real search and rescues a few times, y’all do stupid shit like this. Alzheimer patients wander about without pattern. Try tracking one of them in a forest. I got 2 of those tee shirts.

I already see drones being used in broadcasts of ultraruns and triathlons. So at least that is a legitimate non authoritarian usage.
Every single piece of drone research I see makes me want to scream in someone’s face. I don’t believe there is a single drop of research that won’t be turned into a tool for oppression within my lifetime.
Drones are a result of DARPA partnerships. Almost every new or exotic technology is a result of DARPA’s selection of drones as a focus. LiPo, carbon fiber, even hydrogen combustion, and neural nets. They are all intentional precursor technologies for better drones.
In fairness, literally anything can be turned into a tool for oppression.
Especially tools developed specifically for oppression!
No need to be fair. The more sophisticated the technology, the more it’s likely to be used by the man instead of plucky upstarts, rebels, or terrorists.
It’s like one of those technologies that you can’t ethically develop until the threat of fascism is rooted out.
The threat of fascism can’t be rooted out. It can just be made more and more unlikely/unattractive
Yah it’s part of human nature I’m realising. But maybe some trick like how socialised dentistry makes cavities a non-issue so candy isn’t that harmful
I have socialized healthcare and really bad teeth and let me tell you it’s still a huge issue 😩
I already decided to off myself if things get too hopeless so eh, they can have their hellscape.
I already see the 7-4 thing as bullshit.
Same, we got about 5 years tops.
Maybe go bother a drone factory on your way out, in Minecraft
I already decided to off myself if things get too hopeless
It’s vital that we all keep this option on the table in these troubling times
What about a tool for resistance?
Oh you think oppressed people are going to have drone and chip factories available?
Look at Ukraine
They are at the mercy of everyone and lucky that China sells to them
You underestimate how much they produce themselves.
I hope so! Got any insights? Articles or somethjng? I’m highly interested
Not at the moment, but a few weeks (months?) ago there was an announcement of a collaboration with the Germans and they showed a factory (subterranean) where they manufacture the things. Look for fp1, fp2 and fp5, something should pop up.
EDIT: Ukraine was one of the biggest military manufacturers in the Soviet union, Russia was unable to keep their carriers on their own (made in Ukraine) for instance.
That’s open warfare, so they’re being supplied as weapons of war specifically because Ukraine has international support (the hottest drone testing and advertising ground right now). Imagine if Russia, or any other country, wanted to use drones on their own people. It would be very hard to stop them.
They started with dji drones (and still use them for things like scouting).
also, “mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on chip” is all pure marketing built on top of the current LLM hype, it’s not remotely impressive anymore for a high end university. every autonomous drone (and your roomba) already does all of that. they didn’t develop something novel.
unless he meant that perdue actually built a chip specifically to do it with no support hardware which i doubt, since everything needed for this can be built with fairly cheap off the shelf components.
also, i googled it. they did not build their own silicon. several articles call it “from scratch.” it runs on a regular old intel nuc. so, no, it’s not even in the same ballpark as “from scratch” like they claim.
this is all so clearly some marketing bullshit built around a drone meant to hunt people.
Your Roomba and the majority of autonomous robots rely on pre mapping the environment to navigate reliably. That’s why you have to let your Roomba map out your house the first time you set it up. It’s also obviously much slower than a drone, and I don’t think they’re using any kind of AI for motion planning anyway. They also don’t keep track of a moving target. So no, not “every autonomous drone” does this.
Of course they didn’t make their own silicon. That’s an insane and stupid standard to qualify as “from scratch”. If a bakery claims their bread is made from scratch, do you ask where their wheat fields are? They’re obviously claiming the software and AI model they trained are their own original work. (I have no idea if that’s true or not, it seems like they may have “taken inspiration” from an existing open source Chinese drone.)
Running an AI model (which is not the same thing as an LLM) to do object avoidance at speed on the device in an unmapped environment is impressive and difficult.
I mean… if they have LIDAR… why would they need an obstacle avoidance stochastic parrot?
All LIDAR does is map an environment. You still have to actually do something with that data to avoid obstacles. Usually this was done with traditional control software but writing that software for something like this is really really difficult, and it wasn’t really practical to run an AI model on device like this until relatively recently.
also, “mapping and obstacle-avoidance AI entirely on chip” is all pure marketing built on top of the current LLM hype, it’s not remotely impressive anymore for a high end university. every autonomous drone (and your roomba)
Are you seriously comparing this with a roomba? Have you even seen a roomba working? They move so slowly you could implement their obstacle avoidance in Python. And they bump into things all the time! Doing this in real time, in 3D, at the speed of a runner is a completely different problem. Doing this on a drone’s own chip is actually quite impressive.
Your roomba never chased you through a forest?
The “snail that will kill you” scenario is getting more plausible every day.
Doomba

As a mechanical engineer it was horrifically saddening when I got a chance to talk with the smartest, highest achieving engineer in our cohort, ask him where he wanted to go when he graduated and he shrugged and said “I dunno, Raytheon or Boeing? Whatever pays the most haha.”
I talked to an engineering student who wanted to work on fighter jets so actively pursuing jobs for the MIC
You can fight all that and still end up working for [redacted] most of our biggest clients are [redacted]…
Yep, I know several people like this. They try not to think about what their end product is for and just focus on the engineering problems.
If this is you:
You are a bad person, you are evil. I sincerely hope there is a hell and you go there once you die. Murderer!Well those wedding parties aren’t going to drone bomb themselves!
I like to think I have a strong sense of moral justice, but let’s be real, if licking boot had a significant chance of paying off my debts, I’d do it and not lose much sleep about it.
The catch is, if you have this skill set, there are lots of jobs that allow you to live really comfortably without having to design murder robots. Some of those jobs even help humanity. So most of the people working these jobs either sold their morals to make $150k instead of $120k or they never had any to begin with and just went for the biggest number.
… yeah, that makes sense.
I’ve been telling Anduril recruiters to fuck off for 2 years and it’s very frustrating to hear my (well compensated!) peers make excuses as to why its actually totally fine to take a job designing Mr.Lucky’s latest death machine.
I could definitely understand if taking the job quadrupled your income and allowed you to take care of your family or something but most of the people who qualify are not in that position.
One cannot eat internet upvotes.
Exactly. Everyone has a price, and the more desperate a person is the lower it gets. The fact that I know exactly what mine is doesn’t make me a bad person.
It’s a moot point though, nobody’s offering that number for my skillset.
They don’t advertise anything about rescue of anyone in the post, obvious use case is marathons and other sports.
For military uses it’s semi useless. Lidars are expensive, can be easily seen by intended targets. Actual combat single use drones are flying without any gps most of the time, you can easily achieve last meters where you can’t see or control a drone with raspberry pi and a camera (easy, cheap, requires little expertise, triggered by switch on a radio).
Seems pretty useful for assassinations to me. Unless you leave prints on the drone, I can’t imagine how you would get caught.
They can be useful, but you won’tbe able to buy hearrt of this hardware offline with cash, mentioned lidars for example. Also it needs to be big-ish, while training or recreational drones barely bigger than tiny whoop with small battery and <50 grams of explosive and some shrapnel can do the trick. They can be printed or made locally from sheets, motors are common, with correctly configured PIDs and other parameters they can be not very loud, flight controllers cost almost nothing and can be found locally, etc., etc.
This one tracks and sends coordinates to the killbots. simple as.
This is gonna be a nightmare for cybersecurity. These things are gonna be piss easy to hack.
Now we just put a Claude on it, and tell it to help us with a videogame where everyone richer than 80 million is bringing down our score.
Give it some explosives, and wish it a happy hunting.
EDIT: Roughly 150,000 to 160,000 people worldwide have a net worth above $80 million.
ah, interesting. That is about roughly the same as a small wave of Russians attacking Ukraine right now.
Wow, that’s almost as many people as are buried under the rubble of Gaza
90% of these things are gonna be left on the default password (admin1234)
That’s super insecure. We need something better, ideally something that would change every day. Almost like today’s date, no one would ever figure that one out.
That sounds like a lot of work, let’s just make it 4 and call it a day.
In GPS and RF denied environments too. You know, your typical search and rescue scenario.
In the very mild defense of this application, in a natural disaster situation, communications often are interrupted. Not GPS, though.
Yeah, for lack of a better explaination, GPS is just yelled at you from space everywhere on earth.
Yelled is a very loud word for what it is, it’s barely a whisper.
Yet it reaches every surface on earth, certainly every forest surface.
Not really, gps isn’t all that reliable, when you are using consumer gps modules. When used in conjunction with other navigation systems in places where there is no gnss spoofing or jamming (which can be done by average individual and require little expenses) it works great.
That’s a great way to put it. Your personal device probably can’t show a map without network because it doesn’t have that map downloaded, but it does know your coordinates. I doubt that’s a problem S&R has, though.
My tomtom from 1998 has its maps downloaded locally.
The picture they provided literally says “Armed” and “Target LOCKED” in the corners of the screen.
It’s not armed. Else would’ve been green not red
Armed means the arms are ready to give a reassuring hug.
And Target LOCKED means that the drone is securely carrying the gift delivery from Target that it’s about to kindly drop off
Look, I agree that there’s a vanishingly small reasonable use for this. No argument there. I’m just saying that communications being down is not exactly a bizarre circumstance for S&R.
Hm depends maybe for caves
ahh yes, for those search and rescue scenarios where someone is running away from you in a dense forest in a cave, in case you end up needing to perform rescues on the Terraria planet
Or maybe … Under water!
But for real caves are a very problematic area and having something self driven solves many of them. I am not talking about big caves here but small ones that are liked by cave divers to die in.
The RF is presumably from the drone controller, so if there is a drone operator, there will be RF in the area. Unless the victim is jamming it…
Yeah, but honestly, whether you have the AI model on the drone itself or on the controller is really an immaterial difference to either a legitimate use case (such as S&R) or warfare use cases. Something like 40km is about the best range you can hope for with a drone, so for all intents and purposes the drone and its controller are going to be in the same place.