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How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

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Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#21

Post by user568439 »

flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#22

Post by jasonjayr »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #3
Oarch wrote: post #2

Beyond jamming, I imagine some kind of autonomous laser system could also be pretty effective at downing large numbers of drones within a given radius.

I'm thinking the same thing. You don't even need to fully destroy the drone, if you manage to damage the camera sensors or the exposed lithium cell it's game over for the drone.

How close are we to making a system that can have multiple counter measures autonomously deployed?

(1) if prop based, launch something to snare the props (2) if reflective, pre-launch something to spray black non-reflective paint at it, and followup with laser (3) if evasive, approach with random manouvers (4) if unknown, launch everything and see what works, and feed it back to the training data ... etc, etc.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#23

Post by [deleted] »

pixl97 wrote: post #17
mattashii wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More powerful than what? If StyroPyro can build handheld 200W+ LED laser device in his workshop [0], why wouldn't a sufficiently funded military be able to build an anti-drone laser with the same (or higher) power output? Note that his laser burns through various reflective materials, including mirrors, copper, aluminium, and steel. [0] https://youtu.be/UBVlL0FNbSE

Burning stuff at 20 feet is much easier than burning stuff at thousands of feet in distance.

[deleted]

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#24

Post by sorcerer-mar »

flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

The thing you're missing is that the decision isn't actually made by a machine. It's made by a person much much higher up across a much broader effective surface area.

That is, historically to wage war you had to ultimately convince/coerce millions of people to wage that war for you -- continuously for years -- along with millions more to support the effort politically and economically. In the highly automated world, you literally only need a lot of money (which also tends to concentrate outside of any semblance of democratic control).

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#25

Post by hoseja »

flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

This is flawed thinking. Human decisions scale worse - this is a feature.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#27

Post by yaris »

user568439 wrote: post #21
flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

The stressed private might still have a bit of empathy and humanity. Meanwhile millions of drones can be programmed (or hacked) to kill millions of people without excluding civilians or anyone

My understanding is that a drone will make decisions that are reproducible (same data - same decision), so if anything goes wrong then it should be possible to investigate (to some extent) and fix. A stressed private is in this sense ”undebuggable” because much more not-easily-reproducible factors influence decisions. Also I’m afraid that stressed and tired privates at war tend to err towards ”just kill them all” because it looks much more like a videogame.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#28

Post by nthingtohide »

jjice wrote: post #18
flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

This issue is too complex for me to really have a good thought at the moment, but I will say that this reminds me of that classic story of the Soviet who didn't launch the nukes during a threat came in from the US. The threat ended up being a false alarm, and that human judgement saved a lot of lives. A machine, assuming it would have launched when seeing that signal, would've ended differently.

Imagine an AI system is programmed to poison the well incase of losing scenario. So it takes advantage of Kessler System to make sure no one else has advantage if it doesn't too poisoning the whole of earth orbits for centuries to come in which satellites could reside.

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#29

Post by perihelions »

jjice wrote: post #18
flave wrote: post #15

I really don’t get all the fretting about drones making kill-no-kill decisions. You’re telling me that you’d rather this was done by a stressed, emotional, tired front-line private? Reminds me of the debate about a self driving car that might need to mount the curb to avoid hitting a car - and therefore endangering a pedestrian. It’s not an easy decision but I’d rather a machine made it than a stressed person!

This issue is too complex for me to really have a good thought at the moment, but I will say that this reminds me of that classic story of the Soviet who didn't launch the nukes during a threat came in from the US. The threat ended up being a false alarm, and that human judgement saved a lot of lives. A machine, assuming it would have launched when seeing that signal, would've ended differently.

In 1962, the US sent out a valid nuclear launch order with correct launch codes, by mistake.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/former-us-airman-tells-un-an... ("Former US Airman Tells UN an Accidental Nuclear War Was Narrowly Avoided in 1962")

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10452983 ("The Okinawa missiles of October 1962 (thebulletin.org)", 71 comments)

Re: How Ukraine’s killer drones are beating Russian jamming

#30

Post by bamboozled »

Ciantic wrote: post #19

The latest attack deep inside Russian borders were apparently using ArduPilot [1], it is mentioned in the Atlantic article [2]. ArduPilot also has C++ source code in Github [3], also adding an article specifically about ArduPilot and Ukraine [4] [1]: https://ardupilot.org/ [2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/06/uk... [3]: https://github.com/ArduPilot/ardupilot [4]: https://www.404media.co/ukra…

"He said that each of the 117 drones launched had its own pilot."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1ld7ppre9vo

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