• mad_lentil@lemmy.caEnglish
    0·
    2 hours ago

    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.

    • mad_lentil@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      2 hours ago

      It’s like one of those technologies that you can’t ethically develop until the threat of fascism is rooted out.

  • anewfox@lemmy.zipEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    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.

  • 58008@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    3 hours ago

    Palmer Lucky exemplifies this terrifying phenomenon for me. Completely incapable of foreseeing the profound negative outcomes for all of us, just fixated on the tech and the challenges involved and the excitement of being on the cutting edge and being “patriotic”. It’s not even sociopathy, it’s like a complete blindness to the lives of others and the knock-on effects of their actions. The most pure, unadulterated naïvety it’s possible to achieve with a human genome, exploited and monetised by people who probably really are evil cunts. I’m sure Palmer’s lovely to talk to, not remorseless or sadistic, able to feel sadness on behalf of others, etc. Just physically incapable of taking his eyes off his job for long enough to notice anything else. I think this is why “evil tech guy” accusations don’t really land, because they know they’re not evil and so dismiss our concerns and just keep on truckin’ towards Armageddon. People like Musk and that twisted little moonfruit Peter Thiel are the ones I could comfortably execute in a ditch for the good of humanity, but Palmer Lucky would be too interested in the backhoe we used to dig his grave to realise he was about to die. It’d be like shooting a dog or something, no point, just rehome him and retrain him.

  • shalafi@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 hours ago

    Would you look at that. One more reason to fight to the death against anyone oppressing you.

    The ICE situation in American befuddles me. They going to kill you anyway, FIGHT. Meh. Maybe that’s easy for me to say after hitting middle-age having lived an interesting life. 🤷🏼‍♂️

    • FoxAlive@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      5 hours ago

      Armed is not what you think it means. Its referring to the motors. Typically when you go to take off you have to arm the drone before you can use the motors. You press a button on your radio and then can lift off.

      Target locked is 100% what it means though.

    • MrShankles@reddthat.comEnglish
      0·
      5 hours ago

      Jesus fucking christ, I had to go look cause I thought you were just being funny. Nope, clipped straight from the image itself wtf

    • Donkter@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      3 hours ago

      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.”

    • SaharaMaleikuhm@feddit.orgEnglish
      0·
      6 hours ago

      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!

    • CultLeader4Hire@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 hours ago

      I wonder how these things work when the target is still and camouflaged. I’m sure adding infrared would be trivial but infrared can be foiled by a tarp, I’m sure we could figure that out, a tarp with camouflage on one side seems pretty easy

      • NovaVeles@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        5 hours ago

        I guess it is like most things. There is always a work around but what is the cost of said work around. Even if you can camouflage yourself from things like this, you still take on additional burden of having to address this.

      • NotAnOtter@lemmus.orgEnglish
        0·
        6 hours ago

        They’re light weight optic models. You’re right that infrared and other wavelengths are trivial to train on but the compute becomes expensive and the combined battery + chips become very heavy for these drones that also need to carry an explosive payload AND remain nimble to function. Flying through a forest means rapidly adjusting course constantly for branches and whatnot.

        We’ve had the technology to do this for over a decade. The reason we haven’t seen these in war yet is because they don’t work especially well and there are cheaper + better options.

  • Danitos@reddthat.comEnglish
    0·
    8 hours ago

    I hate modern tech. When I was naiver I would see this project as incredibly cool and fascinating; I still think is very cool from a technical perspective. But knowing where and how it’ll be used, is just sad.

    • NovaVeles@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      6 hours ago

      This is why we should be teaching the humanities to engineers from the beginning. We should be questioning what value these things can bring and how said tech can be used to do the opposite. Don’t just focus on the technical achievement, a flex of ego driven technique.

      I’m not saying, don’t do something because it might have blow back but you have to weigh up the cost-benefit ratio.

      Recently there was a demo of a drone that spins in place so that it looks like a faint smudge rather than, well a drone. Their justification was that it could be used to do wildlife watching without interference with the animals… almost everyone else saw this as a near invisible bomb.

      Every day I see something new that makes me realize that there are too many in that field that do not think about these issues until it is too late. That they do not realize or do not care that their work will be leveraged into the next hell on earth until it is too late.

      Alas this is nothing new, Wernher von Braun by Tom Lehrer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjDEsGZLbio

      • NewSocialWhoDis@lemmy.zipEnglish
        0·
        5 hours ago

        I don’t know how they were trying to observe the drone, but there are image processing techniques in the visible spectrum and signal processing techniques in the radar domain to detect rotating objects. Do you just mean a smudge to the naked eye?

        Also it makes no sense how a rotating drone would be good for wildlife watching. Wouldn’t your sensor on the drone be rotating the whole time? That’s another step of processing to continuously correct for a rotating reference frame.

    • heartSagan5@lemmy.zipEnglish
      0·
      6 hours ago

      So, they hired some naive children to develop this SAD thing? Because otherwise, they might have a conscience to stop this shit.