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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.
This is gonna be a nightmare for cybersecurity. These things are gonna be piss easy to hack.
90% of these things are gonna be left on the default password (admin1234)
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.
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.
With all this dystopian tech nightmare fuel, they’re gonna save money by completely eliminating the need for SERE training (because it will be futile).
Who’s ready for… … … manhacks?!
You get a manhack, you get a manhack, everbody gets a manhack!!!
i have a ton of practice playing baseball with manhacks from hl:alyx and hl2vr, i’m ready.
Lol
Ever watch that show Man tracker? It’ll be like that but with flying shaped charges
What about:
(+) “They fly now!”
???
Mood
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. 🤷🏼♂️
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.”
You can fight all that and still end up working for [redacted] most of our biggest clients are [redacted]…
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!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.
Well those wedding parties aren’t going to drone bomb themselves!
hmmmmmmmmmm what’s that green box in the corner say? squints
Oh look another one…
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.
Jesus fucking christ, I had to go look cause I thought you were just being funny. Nope, clipped straight from the image itself wtf
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.
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
I was assured that requiring humanities courses in science degrees was pointless…
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.
You can see it in action and yes the excuse was pretty weak. That said, this is at the stage that quad drones were in about 15-20 years ago. It might not be useful now but you can see the direction that are looking at.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7d42fAhAXs
Also having a rotational image corrected on a modern SOC is fairly trivial on the GPU, I could see having a specific ASIC on board would be able to do it even easier. The most difficult thing would be having to compensate for a rolling shutter or doing away with that all together.
I said it in a response further up, the technology of making the drone doesn’t have to be perfect it just needs to add enough burden to the opposition that it becomes another vector to correct for. And those that don’t do that will potentially end up being hit.
So, they hired some naive children to develop this SAD thing? Because otherwise, they might have a conscience to stop this shit.
Screamers is a great movie about autonomous killbots
Purdue helping the bad guys. I gotta be honest. I didn’t see this coming so soon.
Isn’t this from Terminator: sarah Connor chronicles?
Yep. Humans are REALLY good at making sci come to fruition
Seems they like the worst parts.
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.
The picture they provided literally says “Armed” and “Target LOCKED” in the corners of the screen.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, for lack of a better explaination, GPS is just yelled at you from space everywhere on earth.
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.
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.
