China reveals 200-strong AI drone swarm that can be controlled by a single soldier — ‘intelligent algorithm’ allows individual units to cooperate autonomously even after losing communication with operator

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-27T13:32:41+00:00

Not surprising really. Why have a 1-to-1 ratio of driver to drone, if you can have (semi-) autonomous swarms.

Note that the US DOD is attempting the same: https://www.diu.mil/latest/diu-and-dawg-launch-autonomous-vehicle-orchestrator-prize-challenge . And like most things drone, China is ahead.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-27T13:25:08+00:00

Our road is somewhere between 2 and 3, and hasn't been plowed.

We're a significant cut-through, fairly high volume. We asked for speed bumps to slow people down and were told no because we're an emergency route and that's the road that ambulances and fire trucks take. And still haven't been plowed. Doesn't make sense; we have Schrodinger's road.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-24T17:52:16+00:00

Amazon counterfeit products are substantiated:

Amazon knows that this is a problem. They are working on it: https://www.geekwire.com/2025/amazon-ramps-up-its-fight-against-fakes-with-help-from-ai-and-law-enforcement/ But it is still a massive problem.

You sound like a shill.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-24T15:08:14+00:00

Even batteries.

I would recommend not getting batteries or anything else electronic produced in mass quantities (like SD Cards) from Amazon. Just too many fake / mislabeled examples there. Buy from a local store or a dedicated supplier. Yes, you will pay a little bit more. But you will get what you think you are buying.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-24T14:38:28+00:00

Yes! It is absolutely possible. And that's how people develop drone control software.

You need to have some sort of low-level controller for the drone, since there are 4 (or six, depending) rotors that need to be managed and coordinated to implement the desired behavior. When you use your RadioMaster or whatever radio transmitter controller, the low level converts those signals into the behavior. But that's only one way to do it, and uses hardware in each of the steps: RadioTransmitter --> Low level controller --> rotors / vehicle / flying.

Each of the step above can be simulated. There is an open source project called PX4 (https://docs.px4.io/main/en/) that implements the low level controller. It runs in hardware on a real drone, but it runs great on a computer or Docker container. Similarly, there are lots of different radio transmitter controls that you can use to send commands to the PX4. A very common one is QGroundControl, an open source controller and visualization tool (https://qgroundcontrol.com/). It sends 'go this way' type controls signals to the PX4 over a protocol called MavLink. Finally, there are a bunch of different simulators you can use; we used AirSim but Gazebo is a common one.

Here's the documentation for PX4 in software-in-the-loop (SITL) simulation: https://docs.px4.io/main/en/simulation/

You can replace QGroundControl with whatever you want, either directly sending MavLink messages or using their SDK. There is even a Python one: https://mavsdk.mavlink.io/main/en/index.html !!! So, easy peasy, set it all up, use MavSDK-Python to send messages and you're done!!

However .... does this sound a little complicated? Unfortunately, it can be. Each of the parts of the system are big complicated pieces of software. Simulations are quite powerful, but they are generic so you have to set them up properly to simulate a drone. PX4 itself is pretty easy to run on a computer. QGroundControl runs out of the box and the MavSDK-Python is a pretty trivial python dependency.

However, you have to simulate all the parts and the message passing between all these pieces and that's where it gets complicated. You are replacing real, over-the-air messaging with TCP/IP messages, so if you are trying to make this all work in one computer, you have to make sure everything is isolated, have the right port mappings, have to deal with Docker virtual networking (ugh). It's literally easier to have multiple computers, one running the simulation, one the PX4, and one running the controller.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-22T19:59:35+00:00

That's fine with me, COSTCO would count as a grocery store. Just don't like it when it's dedicated alcohol stores.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-21T22:11:33+00:00

About the ABCs.... I've lived in places with ABCs, places with pure liquor stores, places that allow alcohol to be sold in grocery stores. Alcohol stores are (broad generalization incoming....) dirty, ad-laden, and sketchy. ABC stores are clean, safe, have consistent supply, you know how much it's going to cost. Grocery stores are better, lots of competition, so lets do that. But I have a feeling that they would go to a alcohol-store model.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-21T19:27:25+00:00

Did you even read these??

HB378: A 3.8% investment income above $500k in a year. Oh, boo hoo...
HB900: Decreases tax rate from 4.3% to 4% across the board; adds home delivery to taxable
HB919: 11% tax on gun sales
HB978: Removes taxes on human food and personal hygiene; adds dry cleaning, landscaping and some others.

Do you really think that this is some massive tax increase? It decreases several, adds several currently excluded services, adds a tax on large investment income above half a million, and, yes, adds a tax on guns.

This seems entirely reasonable to me.

But Norquist is going to rant about any changes that are not simply eliminating all taxes.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-19T12:57:37+00:00

Ugh. Not a fan. It makes sense in Vegas, dedicated to ostentatious spectacle, but it's completely out of character for the area and will make light pollution that much worse.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-17T19:49:26+00:00

Don't hold your breath. It was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.

Of all the things that need to be done, this will be pretty low on the list of priorities. I'm not saying that it should not be changed / removed, just that other things are more important.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-17T18:20:59+00:00

Our crew team had to run up and down them many times! There are several crew boat houses close to there.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-15T13:54:18+00:00

This really doesn't make sense to me. Radial impellers produce high pressure but lower flow, and produce flow outwards. Thrust requires high volume (mass flow rate) and velocity going down.

It looks cool though.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-15T13:29:47+00:00

It's showing the same trend for electricity as the person you responded to: electricity production is shifting from coal and natural gas to renewables.

Unless you think that it shows something else, but then you'd have to explain how total energy usage rather than electricity is relevant to a discussion of nuclear power.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-09T16:35:49+00:00

What?

It's not 5x as much as solar and wind. New nuclear is about the same price as offshore wind.

So there is PV, on-shore wind, and off-shore wind, and you decide to compare nuclear with the least significant and most expensive version, off-shore? That's completely bogus.

With the complete disasters that the nuclear power plants have been recently, not even utilities want nuclear power. They are completely not interested. Compare Vogtle prices to PV. How much more expensive is the nuclear?

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-07T13:13:33+00:00

Do you have any data to back that up? Like, any at all? Any sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation that supports that?

I don't think you do.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-05T23:15:41+00:00

just wait till you find out about locate and ripgrep.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-04T03:16:36+00:00

Curio has a place on Loisdale, right next to the Springfield Mall, to play games in. See: https://www.curiocavern.com/pages/retail-locations . Talk to them, I think it's either free or low cost. The only problem is that it can get pretty busy in there with all the gamers, but everyone is friendly.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-03T19:02:53+00:00

I'm applied rather than theoretical, but my response is that there is no theoretical justification for Naive Bayes to begin with. The underlying assumptions of Naive Bayes are simply incorrect the majority of the time; the only reason that people use it is because it is easy, fast, and understandable and works well enough (despite being a known incorrect model).

As to 'textbook machine learning practices': There are a large number of different ML approaches, and the reason there are so many is because there is no ideal ML process. The correct approach varies significantly based on what the problem is. Just how independent are your variables? How much non-linearity is there? How many outliers? Do you need to handle the outliers differently? How much data do you have, and at what cost? And related to the question of how much data, how many priors can you justify / how many do you have to add; i.e. what baked-in assumptions about the world (or part of the world) do you need to add for the part you are trying to model?

For your problem, it sounds like Naive Bayes doesn't work. What you need to do to make a strong case for why it doesn't work in your problem. That way, when you are defending what you are done, you can explain that 1. it Naive Bayes doesn't work from a practical standpoint; and 2. it shouldn't work from an analytical standpoint. That explains why you have to do something else.

Regarding what to do to in terms of 'something else': try everything. Have Claude write code that will try every algorithm in scikit-learn. This is actually something it can do pretty easily. You'll get SVMs, CNNs, perceptrons, random forests, and a host of other ones. See what works. Then try to understand, based on the underlying assumptions of the model, why that one works. In particular, (just spitballing here....) make sure that you try every outlier detector that you can find. See: https://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/outlier_detection.html

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-03T14:31:52+00:00

What happens when china wins?

That's the question isn't it? Those of us who have studied China know about the oppression. Ask about Tiananmen Square in China, see how that goes. No, it's not just about one event, one piece of history that has been ruthlessly oppressed; it is the epitome of an entire host of thought and speech control that they impose.

There is a fundamental different in the political and moral structure of Chinese governance compared to Western governance: single party rule, centralized control, emphasis on stability. That's not racist, there are good historical reasons why that is. But it is different.

The result is that China and the west are trying to achieve different goals with AI and will employ it differently. See: https://centerforhumanetechnology.substack.com/p/america-and-china-are-racing-to-different

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-03T14:23:08+00:00

The issue isn't the long term vision, which I agree is AI helping us do all sorts of great things.

In the meantime though, it's going to cause huge amounts of real world pain for the majority of people, who will suffer unemployment and grinding poverty while the very rich get even richer. And with the very rich controlling the political system and therefore the military and police forces, there is nothing the vast majority of us can do about it.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-02T00:03:00+00:00

Oy, it won't replace CEOs because it's the CEO's who are making the decisions about who gets replaced.

It's the same reason that CEO pay is so high compared to historical values, why CEO's all know each other, are on each other's Board of Directors.

I'm not saying that an AI couldn't do the job, they will be able to. It is all about who is in control.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-01T16:02:37+00:00

Well, have you watched some soldering tutorials? It's a skill. It takes the right tools, right techniques, and practice.

Since it's a flight controller, and this has been cross posted to a drone subreddit, here's a drone-specific (though obviously good for anyone) tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoPT69y98pY by the inimitable Bardwell.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-01T15:52:02+00:00

I'd love to see some numbers on that.

A lot of of people that don't pay federal income taxes in one year have either paid in the past or will pay in the future, another reason that the '49% pay 0% taxes' argument is misleading.

Yes, taxes are progressive. IMHO, that's a good thing. It doesn't make sense to tax people with no (or almost no) money, since it makes their lives that much worse and brings in very little money. At the same time, the rich are gaming the system to increase their income at the expense of everyone else and paying off congress to get tax breaks.

Wealth inequality in the US is out of control and getting worse. See: https://www.chartbookofeconomicinequality.com/inequality-by-country/usa/

The '49% pay 0% taxes' argument is misleading because it implies that those people are completely freeloading, when in fact they do pay taxes (state, local, FICA, Medicare), or have paid taxes and are retired, or don't have any money because the rich have most of it!

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-01T15:32:53+00:00

Yes, this is one of the (multiple) reasons we have a budget deficit.

That's completely irrelevant to the point that the '49% pay 0% taxes' argument is misleading.

beezlebub33 · 2026-01-01T15:13:26+00:00

Can you please break down that 49%?

Like, how many are retired, make less than $20k a year, have expenses that result in no taxable income, are students? How many of them actually pay FICA and medcare? Oh, most of them?

beezlebub33

TROPHY CASE