No, in the limit where everyone has lidar they end up stepping on each other too. Being a totally passive sensor system is a major benefit for mass deployment, on top of the cost advantages.
Lidar is cool when you want to get a point cloud from a fixed location, or dealing with perfectly uniform surfaces (which cars don't because humans can't do this either), but beyond that there are better ways to do things.
Parent is referring to snow in the environment, not on the lidar itself.
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
Street parking in the core makes what would be a manageable amount of snow into a disaster like 2 weeks a year minimum because plows can't get down older streets.
You just drive over it until it becomes a thick, flat sheet of ice... and hopefully not rutted, or else you'll get stuck trying to move your car in the morning.
It had hands free operation (still needed someone in the seat to control the plow) and lane assist in whiteout conditions when the outside edge of the lane had a cliff (much worse than driving into the ditch).
> This project is one of the first real-world applications derived from PATH/Caltrans research in the area of automated vehicle control. A modified snowblower with add-on sensors, actuator, computer and driver interfaces was developed, and initial field tests were conducted along the 8 guardrail sections between Kingvale and Soda Springs on the shoulders of Interstate-80 near Donner Summit.
> Various lateral sensing and referencing technologies were investigated for this
application; what was found was that machine vision does not penetrate snow, and that
the GPS system does not provide sufficient reliability under possible multipath and
blockage scenarios. A magnetic-marker-based sensing system was chosen for the initial
implementation primarily because of its high reliability and accuracy (better than 1 cm) under all weather conditions. The mountainous highway I-80 near Donner Summit (close to Lake Tahoe) was chosen to be the first field test site. In 2001, magnets were installed along the eastbound and westbound guardrails of I-80, at 4 feet apart and 4 feet away from the guardrail. Binary coding of the magnetic markers was designed (north pole up vs. south pole up) to provide information about guardrail characteristics, such as the shoulder side (right or left of the blower) and the end of guardrail. Eight sections of the guardrail were equipped with magnets for the initial feasibility operations with a total length of 1.46 km (0.9 mile) between Soda Springs and Kingvale.
The problem is not plowing the streets, it is moving the snow away from the streets. After heavy snowfalls, plows create huge piles that block a significant part of the road. This is a difficult problem that simply takes a lot of resources to address.
I don't think US companies are much appreciated in the EU. It
has to do with a certain orange guy, Mr. Krasnov. Just see how
he sold out Ukrainians to Putin recently (again!) aka no info
sharing. (Though, EU countries also suck here - why can they
not compensate for the USA? This is deliberate sabotaging
going on from EU countries as well, though Krasnov far
outperforms them all combined, in a negative manner. He must
get a lot of financial kickbacks for his family dynasty.)
Munich has been a long-standing operational base for many US companies in EU, so they might try just a pilot, but it's not only waymos I see here, also some bmw self-driving test vehicles, also nvidia(?) test vehicles etc. And trust me as a ukrainian myself I know what people think about orange man both here and back there. And europeans are largely sceptical about US companies not because of him but mostly because they're just american.
This was the result of what unfolded after regional electricity prices spiked (550%) after a corporation decided to take a lot of local power for itself.
After local opposition began forming, Shiawase Corporation made a false flag attack against itself to influence a future ruling where it could then defend itself similar to a sovereign nation in a foreign land. So full corporate “extraterritoriality”, to where maintaining its own regulated militia/defense force would be legally free and clear.
In some countries maybe, but in west where all the valuable infrastructure is there is absolutely no way you could get a permit to shoot down anything.
> Drone attacks on US soil are (hopefully!) not happening anytime soon.
The continental USA has not yet been threatened by drones.
The USA is, however, the sovereign power controlling the smouldering ruins of military bases in Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, and the recently evacuated airfield in England. Some might say those constitute US soil.
Ukraine showed you can deploy from shipping containers delivered inside hostile lands quite successfully. As much stuff gets smuggled into US ports on a daily basis, sneaking a few of these into the US isn't impossible. Honestly, I'm surprised it hasn't been done yet.
I'm talking about as a response to already being attacked, not just someone sitting around looking to poke the bear. Iran has the drones, they've been attacked, and would make sense to be looking for a plan like this.
When the US gets directly attacked they do not play around anymore with little factories here and there getting tactically bombed. You will get boots on the ground, the government will fall, and the country probably occupied for 20+ years after. Japan is still basically occupied 80 years later.
Where have you been? Shock and awe is so twenty years ago. Ever since the shameful capitulation in Syria, American boots have been on the retreat, globally.
Ukraine is left to fend for itself. The Taliban runs Afghanistan. Iraq is still in bits. A new ceasefire with Iran is announced every other week.
No, the current policy is to shout loudly and carry a small stick.
Lots of "surgical" airstrikes, each lasting one media cycle and accompanied by a truckload of bluster and spin.
The current occupant of the White House appears to think foreign wars are principally a communications problem.
Yes they don't, mostly because it's a relatively small group of individuals dispersed in a huge country. The same cannot be said of the Iranian government.
Wiping out the Iranian government will only strenghten the IRGC and other rabid anti US Iranian groups politically. As demonstrated by the recent US strikes that killed Ali Khamenei, wiped out senior Iranian leadership and that girs' school.
Given how quickly this technology is proliferating I think that could change. Numerous non-state groups are using drones offensively in Africa and Colombia. If a drone hit something like a refinery and there was significant impact, don't you think the status quo could change quickly?
I don't think it issue is selling in the current climate, producing seems like the major roadblock. If Russia, the supposed number one in air defence can't even protect their military bases, ramping up production might be hard.
The air defense systems for merchant vessels will need to be modular and portable. Many countries have legal prohibitions on armed civilian ships entering their waters. Which is stupid but won't change quickly.
Someone can probably drop $10m/unit money to a third world ish defense company to have a fully automated, radar slaved, generator backed autocannon in semi trailer or 40ft container form and have couples on the deck, and that is going to recoup in like few years rather than multiple decades, But then there will be risks of the offensive side escalating into coastal defense guns and SRBMs, which are going to be more challenging to shoot at, so peace would be cheaper if attainable, but if that is not an option...
Nice strawman argument there. No one here is proposing changes to school or aviation security rules.
Merchant vessels typically used to carry a variety of artillery and small arms for defense against pirates and hostile navies. That practice largely ended when the UK and then the USA established global hegemony and secured the sea lines of communication for everyone. But now the USA is no longer willing or able to play that role, so either merchant vessels have to be able to defend themselves using deadly force again or else trade will largely cease along routes within range of shithole countries.
You are perhaps mistaken here. The FAA allows passengers to take guns on planes provided they are documented and secured and checked into the hold. What the FAA is concerned about is people being personally armed on planes and there are obvious reasons for that.
They are largely unrelated to the reasons countries might have for being nervous about merchant vessels packing anti aircraft weaponry.
You are I think getting lost in your analogy and in the process conflating two different things:
- the reasons countries might want to prevent people from entering with weapons
Vs
- the reasons countries might have for being nervous about armed merchant vessels in their navigational waters
You can always exhaust anti air defenses faster than they can defend if sufficiently prepared. Decoys help, just as you would with an intercontinental ballistic missile. Defender has to succeed 100% of the time, attacker needs to succeed once.
If your strategy assumes you can succeed against Iron Dome (which, I argue, is the state of the art for available air defense system), you should always be able to win as an attacker. Just have to test defenses ahead of time to understand level of effort required (munition capabilities, cadence, and quantity required, broadly speaking).
The fundamental challenge is that it will never be economically feasible to provide the necessary defense hardware at scale. Iran beat back the US military (“most powerful military in the world” quote unquote) and Ukraine Russia’s military on a shoestring budget. You can protect some targets some or most of the time, you cannot protect all potential targets all of the time.
If someone wants to take out a data center, they will likely succeed assuming they have the resources (probably military drones, but perhaps more traditional ballistic artillery). The world has become a more dangerous, volatile, and unpredictable place, for gestures broadly at everything reasons.
(thoughts, opinions, and threat model always my own)
Will we get degraded performance notifications when the DC's power suddenly prioritize the lasers over the GPUs? At 15:34UTC, we noticed degraded performance due to an incoming drone strike. Normal performance was restored at 15:42UTC once the strike was defeated.
Russian suicide drones are still like minimum $10k each. That's probably like ~1k rounds in 12.7mm/14.5mm or ~200 rounds in 20mm. Missiles are a lot more expensive, but the defense side cost can be substantially lower than the offense side if you could make it work with an auto turret rather than guided missiles.
Modified cropduster AEW drones for detection and coordination, airburst howitzer rounds for initial sweeping, camera controlled Gatling guns for the ones escaped it, and conventional warhead SRBM for launch sites. Should be both budget and methods proportionate.
The US State Department will throw everything at you if you dare tried to build or possess your own guided guns and rockets, even if you were not from or in the US - because there was a US ally that exported a near-orbital solid motor sounding rocket to a Balkan nation with full factory setup and manufacturing training services without asking anybody in particular, which resulted in the recipient nation achieving prototype production and successful live fire tests of an indigenous surface to air missile system comparable to Soviet S-75 strategic SAM that was eventually selected.
If it weren't for those pile of laws and leverages... building a SAM was doable since 1950s.
How many $200 quadcopters delivering blow after blow to reach the equivalent damage to a single MOAB? Is it an impossible number to reach for those unable to deliver MOAB?
We're talking about bunker-busters - the MOAB is not a bunker buster. It's an airburst weapon designed to clear out large open spaces, and isn't effective against hardened bunkers.
No reasonable amount of quadcopters could match a bunker-buster. Surface explosions are not very effective against buried targets.
The weight and density of the bunker-buster is extremely important to its operation. When dropped from a high altitude, it breaks into the bunker with sheer kinetic force, and then explodes once inside.
Yeah, I'm not a military expert and confused the ordinance nick names. To be sure, the kinetic force is definitely something that cannot be recreated with drone swarm attacks.
Those are entirely different missions. A GBU-43 MOAB is used against soft targets on the ground. A GBU-28 is used against hardened buried targets. It's simply physically impossible to dig a big enough hole with a bunch of small drones or bombs: the only way to penetrate deeply enough is with a hard object moving really fast.
A MOAB apparently has the equivalent of 11tons of TNT. A drone carrying a grenade has up to 180 grams. So you need about 61 111 drones to deliver the equivalent explosive. At that point it might be cheaper to just bring the MOAB.
A MOAB can only blow up one target, 60000 drones can do a lot more damage. Just ask Russia how many tanks they have today, from the thousands they had a few years back.
61111 * $200 is only a little over $12million. The plane to deliver the MOAB is more than that. Also, why does it need to be a grenade? Why not deliver C4 or other explosive material?
The 200$ drones have a couple of kilometers range at best. You won't deliver them from 400 km away. You still need a delivery vehicle. But this discussion went off the rails, it's obvious fantasy land at this point.
The current crop of "cruise missiles" are cheap and low penetration. Burying things is not 100% safe, but it certainly increases the attack difficulty.
You don't dig a hole deep enough that Bunker Busters can't penetrate. You drive up to the root of a mountain where it meets flats and drill sideways. Getting your men out in case the entrance was bombed can be tricky though.
The genie is out of the bottle, over the next 100 years this is a real problem US, China, and Europe will face.
Though someone like Amazon will have to calculate, is the 50-year cost of protecting all facilities less than the 50-year cost of rebuilding the ones that are destroyed?
It's already happened to Amazon once, and they were not able to recover the data from the destroyed data centre, so they have already experienced this and have some data on which to make those decisions.
If you are referring to the recent UAE datacenter attacks, AFAIK Amazon's services worked as advertised, but obviously a redundant resource is only as good as the number of copies you have left, and eventually 3 of 3 datacenters were hit.
Apparently not all AWS resources/services are redundant - some are advertised as single location, and then it's up to the customer whether they choose to pay to make backups elsewhere (e.g. in a different region) or not.
This is one of the factors driving the development of orbital satellite data centers. While satellites are also vulnerable, they are at least somewhat harder to hit than a stationary terrestrial data center. For now it's questionable whether such constellations are feasible due to concerns over launch costs and cooling but some people are taking it seriously.
The difference is that to hit stationary terrestrial data center in the USA you'd need to go through multiple layers of defense systems, not to mention it would probably be an act of war.
As for the satellites they can be jammed and there's not much you can do about it.
Nah. There's no practical way to jam tight beam satellite data links unless you place the jammer near the ground terminal. And the US government has already stated that they would consider kinetic strikes on US-owned commercial satellites as an act of war.
Yes, striking a data center in the US would also be an act of war. But deterrence isn't very effective against hybrid or "gray zone" warfare. Let's say a drone swarm launched from a random shipping container destroys an Amazon data center in Virginia. US intelligence analysts determine with 80% confidence that the attack was carried out by a terrorist group sponsored by Russia. Would that justify kinetic retaliation against a nuclear power?
There is value in hardening critical data centers. Whether that means placing them in orbit or underground or equipping them with air defenses remains to be seen.
Oh I'm pretty sure if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike of some massive orders of magnitude of higher cost - I doubt it would be tit-for-tat, but more like sinking a navy/submarines/airforce, or something in the likes of that.
I'm not saying there's no value in hardening data centers (which I'm assuming many already are against fires/earthquakes...), but their location and distribution are as safe as they can be - as in, any attack on them would probably be a declaration of war.
In space you will always have to deal with deniability.
> if there was a terrorist attack sponsored by a state in the USA there would 100% be a retaliation strike
How do you know that this has not happened yet?
How many NATO forests had burnt to a crisp in the last two years. How many Americans lose their homes or their lives on those? Why so many disposable local idiots wake up some day with the same idea to provoke a wildfire near their city just now? Or to riot in Europe just now?
Any response from USA or Europe yet?
All that they need is to detect, isolate and groom a local moron from the other coin of the planet, And if is caught, is not their problem.
You're really missing the point. Retaliation is uncertain if the USA can't reliably determine which state sponsored a terrorist attack. Russia in particular has gotten fairly good at this lately. We think they have sponsored a series of arsons and assassinations in other NATO / EU countries but so far there's no hard evidence that would stand up in a criminal court (or at least nothing publicly released). They seem to be trying to stay just under the threshold that would trigger NATO Article 5.
Kinetic attacks against satellites would be less deniable. All major launches and orbiting objects are tracked so it would generally be possible to trace any weapon back to a specific country.
In addition to all the engineering problems associated with cooling those data centers and the shields that you'd need against cosmic rays, those things would only accelerate Kessler syndrome.
Yeah, it still is. You might not get a permanent runaway Kessler effect, but you could still have an event that denies access to LEO for several years before it clears.
An event at one orbital altitude is also not confined to that altitude; debris can reach higher altitudes and affect satellites in those orbits.
No, only Wagner. Redut is controlled by GRU, but its not financed by the russian state. And beside fighting in Ukrain they still provide security for the russian oil industry. Like how US mercenaries in Iraq and Afghanistan took orders from MOD, while being private entries.
Wouldn't work. They would just send enough drones to overwhelm it or run it out of ammos or Russia out of money. This is the lesson we are learning the hard way in the Middle East.
I'm extremely surprised that isn't already a thing. I'm similarly surprised that all the datacenters which get press for the negative impact on the surrounding communities have remained untouched.
Releasing drone swarms wrapping in chaff with IR lamps or laser diodes to account for different guidance methods. They cluster around predicted trajectory. Could be more cost effective than a Patriot battery
They don't all have to be drones in the conventional sense. A subset could be a set of balloons with different amounts of helium, an arduino/servos that control one or more fans for directional and limited altitude control, and a box/release with chaff inside.
Whatever isn't used/destroyed could be recovered wherever it lands after a day or two.
It should be less expensive a possibly more effective in certain circumstances because of increased carrying capacity.
I look forward to anthropic drone swarms defending against AWS mounted infantry and OpenAI cruise drones. SpaceX is at war with Pepsi. SpaceX had always been at war with Pepsi.
This is your regularly scheduled wake-up call on HN that (1) Dyson Spheres are built around stars, not planets, and (2) it is way way more difficult and energetic, in our Sun's gravity well, to launch inwards than outwards. Just ask any comet.
I saw a video the other day advertising AI-powered a anti-air/drone gun. Seems to be part of a defense trade show, but also seemed to indicate that it was available to certain "qualified" citizens, but I'm not sure what that means exactly
The last thing we need is more Silicon Valley funded military startups. This means the ecosystem is now profiting off of war, suffering, war crimes, and human death. What we need is startups focusing on peace and diplomacy. That solves way more problems in a net positive manner.
That said, I’m in agreement in principle. A lot of what you’re asking for is statecraft, and doing that with a profit model is brittle to corruption. But I’d greatly prefer to see folks trying to build things on hope then on bloodshed.
You could do a ghaza and park human shields over military relevant infrastructure? Introducing Host.Age housing the only housing with free heating, free warn water and free leftover tokens .
The service works just fine and it is a decent way to get the latest news.
For example, rumors about latest AI developments are available there, but not here on HN.
X also works well for media, which on HN you can only see after navigating to an external website.
Many comment sections are rough, but usually not worth visiting apart from the top comments anyway.
I don't like that Ads are hard to distinguish from regular posts.
I believe the main reason for not using X is a political boycott. Many disagree politically, or don't entertain certain delusions about Musk that are popular with progressives.
I'd be more interested in your concrete alternative recommendation on where to get the rumors/insider news about AI rather than your opinion on how I should use social media.
There isn't much TBH. All newswires are even propaganda by selection mostly. I'd say the newswires that still sort of pretend to be news and usually are only biased through selection: AP and Reuters.
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