Maybe you’re getting at the one big army concept, but it’s not really politically possible, at this point. In practice, it’ll be a smattering of the large nations, with cooperation from smaller nations. The French will probably be key for satellites in specific, because of Guyana.

Military satellites are almost entirely US right now, as well. There’s a gap in AWACS and similar, but it’s closing.

In theory, it should just be a matter of reorganising for the rest of NATO to do their own military logistics. We have the basic equipment and expertise needed.

Does anyone believe Iran went according to plan, besides the people who believe anything Trump says?

Isn’t there a way to manually whitelist modified software on your AV, if it’s your own machine?

With modern software, there’s also the problem of just learning whatever weird stack the game is running on, to know where to look.

Yes. Assembly is barely abstracted from the actual machine instructions, to the point where the process of translating it is easily reversible. Reading assembly code is a thing all on it’s own, though.

There’s specialised software available for this kind of reverse-engineering now, too, if you’re doing something more complicated than just looking for and cutting out a system call.

Depending on location they can all be illegal. Firecrackers specifically are illegal in my region, IIRC.

Are they really cheap socks, at least?

It’s… just an order. Letters could go diagonally or back and forth, as long as everyone knows how to follow through them. It doesn’t matter where they are on the page, and yeah, you can do that with Latin text as well.

Logographs do carry information more densely, since they’re not constrained by actual speech sounds, but I don’t think that’s what you’re talking about. (They’re a lot harder to learn than a sane alphabetical system, as a tradeoff)

Yep. All of the sudden, the “great satan” stuff seems a lot more credible, and anybody who was calling for detente with the West looks really foolish.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of fresh faces at the top of the hierarchy now. Maybe gradual reform will be more possible, whenever this chapter of history ends. For now, 74 lashes for the celebrity, so nobody forgets who makes the rules.

Yep, it’s definitely not in the American national anthem, and they definitely don’t like calling people redcoats still. /s

74? That seems like an example is being made.

Hey, they never said they had a problem with it. They just asked for a connection back to the subject.

Ah, but the Americans are only there because of the British. And the British, only because of the Normans.

Or were you hoping to stop history wherever supports this conclusion?

It’s been responsible for a lot of unnecessary death, and the splintering of a lot of organisations that could have done good otherwise. Often both at the same time. That’s because everyone has a slightly different idea of righteousness.

Shitty historical events seem to relate to either too much or not enough of it.

You give politicians way more credit than is due. And more malice, honestly. The ones I know like shiny things and a platform, and are comfortable with deceit, but are otherwise just people.

There are no great conspiracies, and nobody’s really predetermining anything. The potential and some of the infrastructure is there for a very abusable surveillance state, but as it is Western governments have mostly accessed it passively, and illegal things are able to happen all the time. Meanwhile, civil rights concerns are heard in the halls of power, and sometimes make progress, like with GDPR.

“AI businessperson suggests the future is AI”

If that infuriates you, you’ll be infuriated a lot.

It seems like “summer child” implies you yourself have experienced any of these possibilities. At the end of the day we’re both making educated guesses about the future.

You need a big, pricey, vulnerable piece of machinery to target your shells.

Are we talking about a dispersed group of guerillas, or a Le Mis street uprising kind of thing? If conflict ever happens the latter way is very debatable, but usually when someone talks about the people against the rich/elites/whatever, that’s what’s in mind.

In the guerillas case, shelling is very situational, you’re right. So is a motion-tracking drone. It’s cheap and portable, but there’s also a lot more countermeasures to it, and they’re both ultimately for area denial (or similar). In the end, a whole lot is riding on some human-level intelligence deciding who to target, particularly if you’re doing COIN, and that brings you back to piloted drones or small arms.

In the Le Mis case, the gun itself isn’t vulnerable, and you can assume every shell kills at least one person. This exact thing has happened, and I’ve never heard it described as a major expense for the government side. It goes at least as far back as Napoleon; being the one general willing to take grapeshot to protesters was his big break.

Now, your revolutionary drone operator saves you the trouble of tracking by broadcasting his location, assuming he hasn’t already been sighted on your universal surveillance cameras or been swept up by irregular purchasing habits.

The safe-er way would involve fibre or wires, either to an attritable antenna or to the drone itself. Maybe just getting TFO before a counterattack can arrive would work. It sounds like that’s frequently the situation in Ukraine, even though it seems really risky.

The surveillance networks could be bad, if the many gaps fill in. That’s not about drones though.

So when you stack up any belligerents [state vs state/non-state], the key math is who can deploy more drones from better positions with better range/targeting, better tactical intelligence and keep pressure over a longer period. A state actor will always have the advantage there.

That can be the logic of a fight with guns or muskets as well. Clearly, sometimes the ability to blend with the population beats better positioning.

There’s officers who think drones are entirely overblown, and Ukraine is the way it is because of the kind of battlefield and the exact asymmetry between the sides. Maybe they’re wrong, but the next big thing in warfare has turned out to be vapourware before.

Weapons have been banned before, but nukes are the only things that actually don’t get used.

Well, you don’t hear a lot about blinding weapons or biological agents these days.

You could have looked at the first muskets and said "definitely an advantage, but not an insane amount compared to seasoned archers and siege equipment.

That’s a great example. You know what happened after muskets fully took over? The age of absolutism gave way to the age of revolution.

Like, both drones and muskets are real, game-changing innovation, but how they effect the geopolitical equilibrium is a complicated question. I’m reminded of some of the WWI-era designers who though a more deadly weapon would mean a shorter, more humane war. In practice it meant a very different, long-standoff battlefield, and a much slower war.

To that point:

These are cheaper to create, easier to run in undetected, and do far far less collateral damage.

Shells are really cheap, like as cheap or cheaper than a drone, undetectability is valid, but actually favours the little guy, and collateral damage depends. Some shrapnel marks on one hand vs. a localised explosion on the other. You don’t want to shell a big thin-walled tank or pipe, but on a normal building the drone may actually be more destructive.

So basically, this is an interesting development and different from a shell for sure, nobody’s denying that. But, that it favours central, autocratic power does not directly follow.

Hey, weapons have been banned before. (And continuous genocide is kind of just the normal situation globally)

That being said, yes, a fully autonomous, self-supporting army would have massive, terrifying social implications. Few people are talking about it, but it has to be the biggest existential threat we’re facing over the next century or two.

This sounds like it’s just a drone that chases anything that moves wherever it’s deployed, though, not something more nefarious. Against a known, unarmed target shelling would achieve the same thing.

TBF land mines that deactivate themself after a few weeks are a thing now as well.

I guess a market killbot field wouldn’t be too much different during the conflict. It has the same indiscriminate nature for sure, though, and soft targets with no point defences like civilians will be extra vulnerable.