63 points by pseudolus 2 hours ago | 22 comments
orthoxerox 1 hour ago
Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.

The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.

zh3 37 minutes ago
Absolutely this will work, it's all over social media.

Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.

[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]

ukd1 1 hour ago
atoav 1 hour ago
Until drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.
ukd1 1 hour ago
Ya, things always evolve, and can't always be perfect, especially against adapting enemies. Strobes; ya - would be interesting to see what these do vs us, not tried.
delichon 36 minutes ago
Disco or death? It's not an easy choice.
tamimio 6 minutes ago
CIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
warumdarum 23 minutes ago
LED display tiles showing the map driven over?
esseph 24 minutes ago
A CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive.

Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.

S1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.

baxtr 4 minutes ago
You mean P1-SUN interceptor drones?
yogthos 1 hour ago
The difference is that a neural network you can fit on a drone is going to be a lot less capable than an LLM you can run on a desktop.
orthoxerox 41 minutes ago
You can fit a Jetson Orin Nano on a winged drone. It has plenty enough power to run a vision model.
tamimio 4 minutes ago
Not just winged drone, we have had jetson on far more smaller 7in multirotors, plus other boards for network etc.
yogthos 29 minutes ago
Given that the drone is going on a one way trip, I imagine you'd want to use the cheapest hardware possible which would mean using the dumbest model you can get away with.
wcfields 10 minutes ago
Depends on the value of the target. Costs Ukraine $918 to kill a Russian soldier[1] but if you’re using a fully offline automated swarm to destroy a petro system worth billions then what’s a few GPUs strapped to each one to run local models.

[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...

esseph 23 minutes ago
Your drone needs to be cheaper than what you're killing, so if your target profile is 50k+ USD and up, a $10000 even is fine (not that it would need to be even 10k).
MengerSponge 1 hour ago
Doesn't a fiber tether give its drone desktop-class computing?
vanviegen 1 hour ago
Fiber tethered drones don't need to be AI controlled.
rjsw 1 hour ago
They can have AI enabled graphics in the goggles of the operator.
trhway 1 hour ago
how else would you control 2M drones at the same time? Mechanical Turk? Or aerial fight with an enemy AI, thus much quicker reacting, drone.
le-mark 50 minutes ago
A starlink tethered drone can have a (orbital) datacenter guiding it.
yogthos 30 minutes ago
1over137 1 hour ago
CIWS?
rdist 1 hour ago
Close-In Weapon System

The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.

orthoxerox 1 hour ago
Yeah, just a smaller version, naval CIWS are designed to shoot down missiles.
1 hour ago
laughing_man 40 minutes ago
After WW II German u-boat captains said they were never particularly bothered by dazzle camouflage. Ten years from now I have a feeling we'll get the same information from drone operators.
davidwritesbugs 1 hour ago
As a bonus it will also repel horse flies.

https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...

delichon 2 hours ago
Twenty four years later I'm still looking for ways to evade the spider drones deployed by PreCrime in Minority Report.
ahartmetz 2 hours ago
Oh, so dazzle camouflage is back. I wonder if the more sophisticated "classic" patterns would work better. They certainly do for human observers.

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

haunter 1 hour ago
You don't

/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)

lelandfe 1 hour ago
A tip from a 2024 Google paper[0]:

> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns

How to Hide from Killer Drones:

It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.

[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...

srameshc 1 hour ago
This title scared me, not for myself but more thinking about how kids will probably need to learn these things next. We are such strange 'intelligent' creatures who have figured out everything but not to be at peace with each other.
19 minutes ago
wa2flq 33 minutes ago
How about lots of similarly painted cheap decoys!?
tcp_handshaker 1 hour ago
echelon 1 hour ago
Prescient.

This film predated the Ukraine war, and it felt like fiction six years ago.

This is absolutely coming.

The government is concerned about who might print a 3D gun, but this is the real danger.

corky_buchek 1 hour ago
The Ukraine war started in 2014.
Terr_ 1 hour ago
True, but I think OP's core message is that the movie pre-dated the broader invasion and subsequent drone-heavy combat.
NDlurker 1 hour ago
Predated the widespread use of small drones in Ukraine
lifestyleguru 1 hour ago
"stay inside" scare... from late 2019...
trhway 2 hours ago
Half the time it is the nighttime and the things are in IR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000051 . You may still try to camouflage and decrease your IR visibility - stealth planes try to do it, and there are some IR-decreasing covers for tanks and people.

The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.

esseph 2 hours ago
If you're really interested in this kind of thing, Grand Thumb on YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I think it was Dirty Civilian on YouTube that had a good video on how to prepare hide sites and the impact of using the right laundry detergent as to reduce or eliminate IR brightener chemicals, etc.
stefan_ 2 hours ago
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
joezydeco 1 hour ago
stefan_ 1 hour ago
Yes, media see a snapdragon running a YOLO and go off writing "AI apocalypse autonomous killer drones" articles.

See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956

Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.

joezydeco 1 hour ago
If it works, who cares how it's made?
trhway 1 hour ago
>not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.

the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.

stefan_ 1 hour ago
You are mixing more things. There's lots of ISR drones flying around, from DJIs at 50-150m altitude to bigger fixed wing platforms at 1000-1500m. Their point is to find targets, do BDA and monitor, but not autonomously; it's guys sitting in Discord calls and entering data into BMS.

Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.

1 hour ago
sleepyguy 2 hours ago
If anyone here is into drones, manufactures, ideas, or wants to either use their drone piloting skills or learn how to pilot drones. Ukraine is recruiting for positions.

https://usforces.army/en

barrenko 16 minutes ago
This seems like it caters mostly to Ukrainians no?
kakacik 1 hour ago
Just beware that being part of the drone team isnt some comfy safe job far from danger, they are the most hated type of unit currently since they are deciding large part of this war (and any future war it seems). I see videos of ie glide bombs used by both sides targetting specifically positions of drone teams.

If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.

yogthos 1 hour ago
And drone operators aren't taken prisoner either as a rule.
trhway 1 hour ago
Like sharpshooters, the drone operators are usually executed instead of being taken POW.
wartywhoa23 1 hour ago
> fighting evil in this world is highly commendable

Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.

rwyinuse 0 minutes ago
If Russian civilians stopped sleeping and took up arms against their government, then maybe this war could end. The people responsible are all members of the Russian government, and Russian people's apathy (or in many cases support for the war) enables them.
vanviegen 1 hour ago
Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?

And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?

Pay08 1 hour ago
> Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?

Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)

> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?

Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.

le-mark 40 minutes ago
Russia emptied the prisons years ago. The able bodied men of Donetsk and Luhansk were rounded up and fed to grinder years ago as well. The wanton slaughter of their own people has been startling and depraved for their unending exuberance.
warumdarum 16 minutes ago
The minorities from the regions came next. Then came the allies from the antiimperialist block days. Now they reach for the gullible of the world.
yakshaving_jgt 58 minutes ago
Only the russians are targeting civilians.
ButlerianJihad 2 hours ago
Machine Learning CAPTCHA https://m.xkcd.com/2228/
mananaysiempre 2 hours ago
Username checks out :)
2 hours ago
proshno 1 hour ago
[dead]
jesuswasjew 2 hours ago
[flagged]
input_sh 1 hour ago
> Are paywalls ok?

> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.

> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

karim79 1 hour ago
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1 hour ago
karim79 1 hour ago
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leptons 1 hour ago
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therobots927 1 hour ago
Censorship is alive and well on this cursed site
Pay08 1 hour ago
How so?
therobots927 1 hour ago
Any comment about Gaza getting flagged in under a minute
Pay08 1 hour ago
Flagging irrelevant comments isn't censorship...
megous 20 minutes ago
Yeah, sure. Gaza is a place of first massive AI and semi-autonomous drone deployment during a conflict, and so we already know how it looks due to that.

AI army leadership will set a target of 5% of victims being combatants, and press go, and the result will be as expected from that.

1 hour ago
xurxyrxyrxe 56 minutes ago
Shalom!