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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.
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
The “trick” has been known from the start: Remove the seeds and fertile ground fascism grows in, i.e. capitalism.
To look at people in capitalist society and conclude that this is human nature, is like looking at people in a factory where pollution is destroying their lungs and saying that it is human nature to cough.
The reason for fascism’s existence in every sense of the word is to keep capitalism going with a fool’s revolution when people are desperate enough for an actual one to happen.
Here’s the old guard fantasising about fascism in their DMs while Hitler was a teenager:
In 1905 Milner, one of the more far-seeing leaders of the older British imperialism, described in a private letter the only hope that he could see for the salvation of bourgeois rule:
“Perhaps a great Charlatan-political scallywag, buffoon, liar, stump orator, and in other respects popular favourite-may some day arise who is nevertheless a statesman-the combination is not impossible- and who, having attained power by popular acts may use it for national ends. It is an off-chance, but I do not see any other.” (Milner, letter to Lady Edward Cecil, The Milner Papers, Vol. II, 1899-1905.)
Here we see the bourgeoisie consciously groping for the forms of Fascism long before Fascism existed. The fact that so lifelike a description of Hitler or Mussolini could have been penned a decade before these began to play their role is a striking confirmation of how little it is personality that creates history, and how much rather history calls forth the personality that it requires at a given stage.
I have socialized healthcare and really bad teeth and let me tell you it’s still a huge issue 😩
What about a tool for resistance?
Oh you think oppressed people are going to have drone and chip factories available?
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.
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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
Maybe go bother a drone factory on your way out, in Minecraft
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.
Roads have changed significantly since 1998.
Depends where you are…
The picture they provided literally says “Armed” and “Target LOCKED” in the corners of the screen.
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
It’s not armed. Else would’ve been green not red
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.
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.
Larry Ellison spent millions in an utterly disastrous attempt to fully automate farming and food production, but I guess this would work as a plan B.
Hey look, future Geneva conventions!
You are being rescued, do not resist!
This is a kindness
==Arming Warhead==
This is not a kindness
==Arming Auxiliary Warhead==
wait what
No need. It’s already
Isn’t that top left picture also showing a “Armed” tag right at the top‽
Silly billy, that just means it is armed to rescue you ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡° )
Armed is a common word for a drone that has it’s motors working.
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Welcome to ICE Rescue Center #7806
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.
Healthcare insurance CEOs are not in prison.
Millions of Black people whose worst crime was an ounce of weed or being homeless, however, are.
But at least one of them is dead 😄
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?..
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.
I didnt have kids, and when I die I dont have to pay rent or go to work anymore.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Everyone gonna need portable emp blaster to deal with this nightmare soon.
I’m surprised that mass produced drone swarms haven’t been deployed against populations yet. The economics of it is terrifying.
I remember playing black ops 2 a long time ago and when a friend of mine played, he always used the drone swarm killstreak.
I remember him laughing once about how the map we were on barely had cover from them.
I told him he won’t be laughing when it’s us trying to run from a drone swarm in 20 years for stealing a rich cunt’s clean water.
Then we laughed at just how ridiculous that sounded.
I miss when it was funny 😭
I remember playing black ops 2 a long time ago
I told him he won’t be laughing when it’s us trying to run from a drone swarm in 20 years
Well, CoD: Black Ops II came out in 2012, so if this tech gets commercialized in six years you’ll be spot-on.
Ha, they’d never do that…
btw, Have you noticed camo netting has gotten crazy expensive? Must just be inflation
Who gives a shit about nets those things have infrared heat detection.
And tiny propellers that get snagged in nets.
And sometimes the bigger ones too:
Excellent point I hadn’t thought of that.
That’s why you need to use a survival blanket as an inner layer to reflect the heat, some neutral-colored canvas as a middle-layer, and the camo netting as an outer layer. Preferably with a few inches of separation between each one.
Maybe add in some faraday fabric if you have anything that emits signals
And an SDR on a raspberry pi with some python libraries to scan for incoming threats.
It’s not perfect but it’s better than being a sitting duck
Hmmm. Problem I see with that is the thermal blanket reflects IR away from itself, so if you are inside of it, you still heat up.
Yes, and that keeps the warmth inside the tent, so that it’s not visible to IR from the outside.
You can test it first if you have an IR lens. If you’re handy with solder you can build one with parts from arduino, mouser or similar
Oh, I meant that it essentially gets hotter over time. If you’re on the move, that could become a problem pretty fast
Oh yeah, I was thinking if you had to hide a whole base of operations, command post, resupply depot, or sentinel outpost.
If you’re on the move in a scenario like this, then you’d need to have some means of taking down a drone, and hope to high hell you won’t need to use it.
Mud is a decent insulator so you could smear yourself with that. In the winter you could wear quilted fabrics under a windbreaker. Basically the more insulation keeping the cold off your skin, the more it’s keeping your body heat from being visible to IR.
I also think glass blocks heat radiation to some degree, so maybe using that as some type of parasol or shield, but that might be less feasible. Lining an umbrella with a survival blanket might be possible, but again test it with your own IR lens to be sure
Great ideas imo
Just some good old-fashioned innocent cyberpunk doomsday scenario role play
Nothing to see here!
Emphasis on camo. They have some ir blocking.
To a point. The heat has to go somewhere.
Ideally there’s an air gap between the hot thing and the net. The heat shouldn’t transfer directly to the net.
I’m surprised there hasn’t been casual assassinations outside of war zones with them yet.
There is this YouTube short movie about a future like that. The tiny drone just flies into someone’s face with a small explosion to kill them.
For now they still need connectivity and a person that remotely controls them. It is very likely they jam the frequencies near important people already. Now, the time is near for autonomous seek-and-destroy drones that don’t need connectivity.
We’ll see these kinds of things in the next war. Russia and Ukraine would be there already if they had time to stockpile the drones rather than needing to deploy them as fast as they can be manufactured.
With a few years of peace to build a reserve, there will more than enough drones and cheap spring-assisted launchers to serve as a terrifying new arm of MAD.
I’m not sure. Wars are won by costing the enemy’s money these days. So they are using drones on infrastructure, becuase that costs more than soldiers.
Regardless of how wars are won, they are prevented by altering the risk picture for the enemy.
This is also why many smaller NATO states are scrambling to procure long-range missiles outside of US control. In a hybrid war with Russia, they would control the escalation ladder - I.e. be able to yeet some high explosives at powerplants and fuel depots - rather than relying on Washington to grant permission.
Ukraine has been doing similar with the flamingo and other cruise ‘missile drone’ projects. Iran as well - look at their response to US aggression.
The trajectory is clear, mass precision strike is cheap and corresponding defense is not. Having a stockpile of millions of flying problems for your enemy to consider is the best deterrent short of nuclear weapons.
Right, but I thought you were saying we would see these things to the posts drones that can follow humans through the forest, not the general drones for hitting nonhuman targets.
Ukraine built 8 million drones in the first half of 2026. Many different types, but the majority of them are designed to directly attack humans and light vehicles.
The limiting factor in their deployment is the number of operators - currently the most common operating model is 1 drone per operator at a time, which means there are only so many drones in the air at the same time. These kinds of hunting algorithms will allow the scale of drone warfare to increase by loosening the operator bottleneck.
There is force generation (recruitment, manufacturing, organization, etc.) and force employment (actually using those resources to achieve goals). Force generation for unmanned systems is already mature - again we are making millions of these things already - further advancement will come in force employment.
And what a fresh hell that will be.
Got any source for those numbers. I am fine with being wrong, but my impression from things I have read was that they were focused on drones that hit targets farther away. And that human targeting drones were the lesser of the production focus. The stuff I read talked about fiber optic cable for controlling the smaller ones becuase the jamming was too good. But it took a lot of cable. And each one required a circuit board and all that. The electronics were the harder to get part, so a bigger drone made better use of it. But like I said, I could have gotten the wrong impression.
There aren’t sources that directly confirm the exact numbers of drones across types, as that is sensitive information in the middle of a war.
There are sources that put the FPV drone number in the millions annually, with long range strike being in the thousands. Source
By spring 2026, Ukraine produces an estimated 1–4M FPV attack drones per year across hundreds of distributed production facilities, 500–1,000+ long-range strike drones per month, advanced naval surface drones, and growing categories of reconnaissance and electronic warfare UAVs.
Statements from the Prime minister and defense minister agree Source
Ukrainian defense companies intend to manufacture nearly 3,000 cruise missiles and drone missiles, as well as at least 30,000 long-range drones. Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal stated … Defense Minister Rustem Umerov said on 21 September 2024 that Ukraine plans to produce several million drones in 2025
Millions manufactured with thousands planned to be long-range strike, the balance is short-range drones. Source
Small FPV drones: Annual production target of 6 to 7 million units, equating to roughly 500,000 per month.
Manufacturing base: Approximately 450 to 500 drone enterprises operating on a distributed model across the country. At theoretical maximum capacity, this network can push 19,000 aerial vehicles into the battlespace per day.
Long-range strike drones: The FP-series (long-range fixed-wing strike UAVs) has surpassed 100,000 units in cumulative production.
And then there’s the coming swarm technology to increase force employment:
On 17 February 2026, Minister of Strategic Industries Herman Smetanin announced the successful trial of AI-based drone swarm technology. Seven teams of manufacturers demonstrated a single-operator system capable of controlling dozens of drones in an autonomous network. These swarms plan their own actions and predict the behaviour of others within the network, allowing the operator to focus solely on target authorisation. Source
Ukraine built 8 million drones in the first half of 2026.
What the fuck
Can we just have world peace instead?
No. No peace for you, only being hunted by autonomous drones. Now please kindly start running so we can test our latest movement prediction algorithms. You may feel a small pinch as the drone catches you, but don’t worry, it’ll soon be over.
I feel like the nightmares I started having several years ago are starting to become real.
People said I was having psychosis but no, I was looking into the future and seeing the most likely conclusion of the road the world is going down if we don’t change course.
It’s not like I saw it in a crystal ball or anything like that. Just basic sequential cause-and-effect. But people would rather blindly step off a cliff because “well we haven’t plunged to our demise yet, so clearly it must be safe to continue without adjustment.”
What are you willing to give for that?
Would anything I offer be enough?
If you dedicate your life to it, it could be.
Fuck it, string me up on a cross then. If it means enduring world peace, sufficient climate action, and ecological restoration. Oh and also restorative justice, an end to poverty and hunger, and universal healthcare and education. Worldwide of course. Forever.
I will however require binding and actionable guarantees first. Once the paperwork is in order I shall meet you in Gethsemane. Or shall we skip straight to Golgotha?
No skipping, no quick solution. World peace may take the rest of your life and there is no guarantee.
A few world leaders like Putin
The only way we can fight back is in tunnels. None of us know how to build tunnels.
Don’t worry! They have ground-penetrating lidar for that. Specifically developed based on the US military’s experiences in Vietnam, where the Vietnamese used a lot of tunnel systems.
The expertise might be out there somewhere. The harder part is the equipment. If you’re talking hand tools, it’s going to be laborious and time consuming.
If a net can trick the lidar though, you could set up a wall of net with a small opening to run through, and hope to high heaven the drone gets stuck in the net.
It would require some precise planning though.
