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US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

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Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#301

Post by dinfinity »

pjc50 wrote: post #10
freedomben wrote: post #2

I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…

cf the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48845442 ; Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work . If it doesn't succeed, there is no Ukraine, and everyone involved in making the drones is dead, fled, in a POW camp, or sucked into the internal Russian displacement system away from their family. By comparison, if the US products fail, there's no real negative effe…

> Ukraine has a hugely inventive and effective drone industry because it has to work.

Well yes, that and the fact that cheap drone guerilla tactics have fairly recently become a technological possibility. Remember that Ukraine is actually a bit late to the party here, with Hezbollah and ISIS having used cheap drones with cameras and/or explosives tied to them years before Ukraine or Russia did. The asymmetry in cost between those cheap drones and the existing "more hightech = more better" militaries were (and are!) used to was already established. That a party such as Ukraine faced with a more advanced and much larger opponent would lean towards such an approach makes a lot of sense. Ukraine did not (and does not really) have significant amounts of the traditional stuff.

Now given that they chose that path, they have been very effective recently, but note that the tethered fiber-optic drones were a Russian invention. So even that deeply corrupt, large dinosaur of an institution innovated significantly. It is also important to note that a significant part of the recent successes of Ukraine are due to them having Starlink access and Russia no longer having it.

I'm not saying the sheer will to survive or the inventive organisation of the Ukranians did nothing (far from it), but I do think it is a mistake to think that their success should only be viewed through that lens.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#302

Post by godwinson__4-8 »

scottyah wrote: post #267
cloverich wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO its a useful populist slogan because it solves a different problem: The power that comes with being a billionaire. E.g. its all well and good to focus on fixing democracy instead, but if (some specific) billionaires are focused on deploying their wealth to destroy democracy, then what? I've generally come around to believe that we need to limit wealth from a purely power / control point of view.

I think it's a great system of checks and balances- billionaires are only created by dealing with a lot of people and successfully solving a lot of problems. Once they have it, it's work to hold on to the money though. Politicians don't really produce anything measurable to show if they've helped or hurt society, and so they work to devalue the meaning of the dollar. If you get rid of wealthy people's power, what tak…

Hi again. You are definitely correct on the first point. But the second point shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how the economy works. Our economy highly favors capital over income. The only way to make billions and then lose it all is to be a complete degenerate. They will always be wealthy. The amount of money these people lose on a given day as the stock market bobs around demonstrates that once achieved, money in the hands of the wealthy operates on a level the average American really can't fathom. Over time, they will always continue to do well. Deploying capital, once earned, is not hard. If it is work, it must be one of easiest things to do in the world. It's like saying trust fund babies have to work hard. If it was hard to hold onto wealth our society would be an extremely different one. It's in fact so easy that a lot of the economics around startup investing comes from the phenomena that rich people get bored with their own money. Why settle for boglehead style returns when you can yolo millions of dollars into a potential > 10x return. How do you even spend a billion dollars? You really can't. The only way is to put it into things were again, it is far more advantaged than actual income. Yes there is some work involved in vetting and talent etc. But don't buy into all the hype. A lot of it comes down to luck and getting to the point where you have the capital to spread your bets, knowing the economics mean that even if you lose, you will still win. It's the getting there that is hard. Not the staying there.

It's very important to acknowledge this. Because this wealth is retained long after w/e the societal problem addressed that created the wealth is solved. It is an open question how to deal with that problem, which becomes a societal issue in its own right. I however also share your hesitancy to turn over said gains to politicians, who don't seem to solve any problems or produce any solutions. Unfortunately we shouldn't also forget that they are society's elected proxies. Perhaps we can strive for a system were both politicians and billionaires are weakened in furtherance of some notion of the common good. The idea of "reinvestment" need not be either a wholly public or private enterprise. Most successful societies understand the checks and balances lie somewhere in thinking less in terms of a public/private dichotomy and more like a public/private partnership. The United States used to operate more like this, before the Reagan era ushered in a time of pronounced deference to capital [1]. It would really not take much to bring things back into a more reasonable balance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaganomics

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#303

Post by ACCount37 »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #270
ACCount37 wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NASA's failures as of late are less "dramatic explosions" and more "delays", "cost overruns" and "lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal". The last time NASA caught any serious flak was what, the Starliner shitshow? And that was just splash damage from Boeing getting dunked on by everyone at once.

> lack of ambition so severe it borders on criminal I'm not sure what timeline you're thinking about, but JWST was launched pretty recently and it's pretty ambitious. But more to the point of my earlier post, NASA's "lack of ambition" is probably directly attributable to the "small government" people who penalize ambition in the public sector and praise it in the private, government contractor sector. The incentives…

A big part of the reason for useless Gateway was that NASA wanted post-ISS missions, but was too afraid to roll with a permanent Moon base instead. The other big part was that Orion sucked, and somehow, neither "get Orion to suck less" nor "roll with Orion, provision for HLS to do more" was in the cards. This only changed under Isaacman.

For every Curiosity and JWST, there's ARM and Artemis. It seems like it's getting better now, but very slowly.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#304

Post by lenkite »

sph wrote: post #222
setgree wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.

That applies everywhere. You’re commenting on a forum for startups that compete against established players. David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

"Some" David will always in the long run, win against Goliath. But many, many millions will be buried.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#305

Post by xienze »

khriss wrote: post #236
budsniffer952 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sexual assault allegations and literal Nazi symbolism tattooed on his body. Those things are acceptable now? These were the exact things that Democrats went after Hegseth for (who, for the record, is also a doofus like Platner). The left's hypocrisy knows no bounds.

You can guess where the bar is when the guy in the white house was literally convicted of sexual assault in a court of law, and he still won the republican nomination. Now compare that against a credible accusation being enough to derail a senate hopeful in a must win seat for the Democrats. Sorry, I don't see the hypocrisy. Actually, I do see it, just not on the side you insist it's on.

> literally convicted of sexual assault in a court of law

It was a civil case, not criminal, and had included no physical evidence. And the claim was so old the statute of limitations had run out, but no worries, New York temporarily extended it so she could bring her lawsuit against Trump. It was bullshit, like most of these cases of women crawling out of the woodwork after decades during very critical times are.

When your standard is "believe all women, no matter how long it's been, no matter how politically convenient the timing is, no matter that there's nothing but anecdotal evidence", well, don't be surprised when it's used against your team.

> You can guess where the bar is

Have you considered that maybe people don't believe these political stunts rather than tacitly approve of what the person was accused of? You're even doubtful of the Platner one. This trick has been played one too many times for people to take them at face value anymore.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#306

Post by quickthrowman »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #132
quickthrowman wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would guess that DoD procurement rules have more to do with it than Congress, but perhaps Congress defined DoD procurement rules. Milspec is expensive and process heavy, see what a B52 replacement trash can costs, for just one example.

If you think Milspec is expensive, you should see the cost of not having a Milspec supply chain while still being risk-averse.

That’s a damn good point, probably more costly and more of a hassle to adopt off-the-shelf products to work reliably in a military environment while minimizing risk.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#307

Post by Lomlioto »

CMay wrote: post #291
Lomlioto wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

? It was a coordinated air strike from USA and Isreal. Isreals only power to doing so, was knowing USA was behind it.

Can't name any strikes Israel did that the US didn't support?

The USA Military strategists are/were quite aware that Iran is not an easy target.

They knew already that Iran might not belly up just because their leadership gets killed. And they knew very well how Iran is fighting (in the mountains) and that they will close the strait of hormuz

Trump overruled it. He thought it was as easy as venezuela and he might have assumed that the civil unrest helps.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#308

Post by aidenn0 »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #296
aidenn0 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't work on this project, but I've been involved with similar ones. There is a process for getting a change into version control. Each change needs to have a (virtual) paper trail: motivation, risk analysis, sign-offs &c. If you can't get something into VC quickly, you can't really do CI. The obvious solution would be to have an integration branch that doesn't need the process to get in, do CI testing on that br…

That sounds odd. The way it was done in every place I worked, is that a set of changes were approved for a release before they were planned and implemented. We organized the work as expected: each bug/feature on its own branch, with its own set of unit tests, etc., and automated testing applied on each commit. These branches are then merged to the integration branch once they are known good. Before the release proces…

What I described was for bugfixes, not features. Features were set in stone way before this.

I also maintain that it is impossible to know which changes depend on other changes. In one case, applying a bugfix that changed the order of allocations at startup caused vtable corruption somewhere else because it changed how much padding a particular malloc() call was returning, and someone was writing past the end of their allocation.

[edit]

Also note that what you described is not CI; things are developed on their own branches and not integrated immediately.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#309

Post by dzonga »

in as much what I'm about to say might be unconstitutional -

but free speech anyways -

the U.S military i.e West Point folks & officers from drawn from the army & other branches need to take over. they're smart & get things done.

politicians and corruption from the military industrial complex have taken over.

it's no longer pragmatism, problem solving but about who greases who.

Re: US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

#310

Post by overfeed »

ACCount37 wrote: post #167
freedomben wrote: post #2

I worked on the control systems for Predators and Reapers back in the mid and late 00s, and the inefficiencies around process were enormous. Safety is extremely important, so you expect some slowness as a result, but it got pretty extreme. I remember one time having to do 6 weeks of testing around a one-line code change because a "helpful" dev fixed a small bug that had no practical impact. Yet because it changed the…

In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory. The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough. I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation. I'm not sure if "AI for re…

> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

Regulation - or more generally - formalization comes with scaling up. A skunkworks project can innovate really fast, and has no integration and scale needs. When you want to scale up any project (hardware or software), integrating and scaling become a real bitch, and you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page or face costly "silly" mistakes that history is replit with.

You can't magick away coordination challenges by labeling the process "red tape." This happens every single time any small nimble organization grows beyond certain thresholds. On a personal level, organizing a trip for 3 friend is process-free, but for 10+ people requires checklists and heavier processes, for 30 people it becomes a nightmare requiring professional assistance. Low probability events become regular occurrences when you scale, and you have to plan and/or mitigate them adding "red tape".

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