Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech and doctrine being in its infancy.
If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?
More autonomy, but MUCH more expensive. Thousands or tens of thousands of dollars per use. The issue is indeed using mass-produced consumer drones. It's a bit like the widespread use of "technicals" in some conflicts: yes, a pickup truck with a .50cal in the back is inferior to tanks or armored cars, but it's also much, much cheaper.
There's a bit of a "Sherman vs. Tiger" thing that's been going on since the dawn of industrialised warfare. Is it better to have a more effective weapon that you can only afford a few of, or lots of cheaper ones?
The US doctrine approach to the problem would simply be a set of B2 bunker buster decapitation strikes on Russian military HQs, but of course that option is not available to Ukraine. They can't even manage Iraq-war-style wave of SEAD strikes followed by unit level CAS. The air war has kind of stalemated with neither side having conventional air superiority and both being vulnerable to the other's anti-air.
Slightly unrelated, but reading the "product" page is crazy to me. So much about lethal radii, kill zones and stuff like that. Wild, couldn't ever picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night
I would. But I would be hesitant to if I got wind that it was being sold to a bad government, or that my government was a bad government/intended then for misuse.
As a quiet gay nerd I'd love for there to be no war, no bullies. But unfortunately we live in a world where our species evolved from monkeys and we still often act like it. If my usually peaceful tribe needs weapons to defend itself when attacked then I'm all for it. But using those weapons to attack another for any reason other than defense is a nono in my books.
In context of working on military hardware, it's more complex than that. Name whichever state you consider evil, there are good chances they've recently received or bought weapons from a state you don't consider evil. Name whichever state you consider good, there are good chances they sold their weapons to parties you find questionable.
You may build tech that helps the good defenders defeat the forces of the stronger, evil attacker, but 5 years down the line, you may discover that same tech is now used to blow up hospitals and refugee convoys - and it doesn't take your country being on the wrong side of a war, it just takes the usual international politics.
UK had a few million protest against the second Iraq war, and still didn't stop it. Do you think the percentage is higher or lower in Russia, with all its propaganda?
Worse, in the context of "picture myself working on something like this and sleeping well at night", consider sub-group modifiers: how many people in the UK resigned from defence companies due to agreement with the anti-Iraq-war protests?
Unfortunately money plays a big role. The US is different, with good paying jobs for engineers being common but believe it or not, that is not the norm everywhere in the world. Sometimes people need to follow the money. I think this plays a big role on the russian side of the war. Their economy isn't very diversified and the state owns the means to a large portion of the economy's production. If you need cash, a good way to get it is to do putin's bidding.
There is also the problem that the military tends to go for the best. In some cases that's a good idea (the cost of getting that laser-guided bomb to the release point is well above the cost of the bomb), but when dealing with unmanned units the zerg approach is very often the winner.
Look at Iron Dome. By comparison to other modern SAMs it's abysmal. But that's by design, Israel wasn't looking for a good SAM. They were looking for the cheapest SAM that could hit a sitting duck. But that's what it's facing--ballistic inbounds that have no countermeasures and no ability to evade.
Because it's practically illegal to do anything of the sort with drones now, let alone strap explosives to one.
For example in the UK flying a drone requires registration.
Though I suppose I could make like most Brits seem to and bend the rules a little. The ailing police force certainly weren't around to help me when I needed it so I doubt they'd be interested in me fucking about with a drone in a field (sans pyrotechnics of course, I'm not stupid).
It's easy to get licenced to fly drones. Sure, there are rules, but if as you claim you can build a business that will make you rich in 6 months, those rules are not an obstacle at all.
Now one could ask: if you don't manage to pass that point, could it be that you underestimated the complexity of building such a business? :-)
I was under the impression that while there is a lot of grift, a lot of that was supply chain cost as well. You or I could build one but it would all be sourced in China without vetted supply chain parts or firmware. These Ukraine drones are all off the shelf parts and running who knows what firmware everywhere.
I suppose that's true but not necessarily. Most of the control hardware would likely come from Taiwan. Structural components can be machined locally, brushless motors or whatever other mechanism can also be machined locally. Sensors etc are available from Japan/Taiwan as well. But tbf I think it would be possible to source reliable Chinese components from reputable companies as well - try do b2b already and they wouldn't get the sales if the product didn't work. Make purchases through a variety of disposable paper companies and the factories would have no idea that it's for defense.
Software for loitering etc would be so easy nowadays too. Hell I can tell a pi zero to track GPS + multiple cameras + loiter/engage target on whatever signatures are available from available sensors.
I say this while eyeing up the Carvera. I want to justify it so badly. Perhaps the Air...not for aforementioned purposes of course, unless some defense contractor wants to pay me ahaha.
China is partially blocking export of drone parts. More so for Ukraine, so their drones have 50%+ of domestic parts. Custom firmware, even with auto aim for the last 10m where jamming can hit the signal.
> Many of the issues sound like issues coming from using improvised civilian hobbyist tech
I don't think it's improvised civilian hobbyist tech. They run autopilots that also fly professional drones and can fly planes.
I think it's mostly that it has to be super cheap, otherwise it doesn't bring value (because other weapons are more efficient if you have more money). If your one-way drone costs 10k dollars, maybe it's too expensive even though it can fly during the night.
And then there are fundamental limitations, like flying in bad weather.
> obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone
But a reusable drone won't go inside a hangar (because at this point it probably won't come out). If your drone can go somewhere, drop something and come back, doesn't it mean that another class of weapons could do this job?
$10,000 can be cheap for a one way drone. Bombs often cost for more than that. The real question is value, if hitting the target is worth more than the cost of what you hit it with then you have a good value. Taking out a $1000 drone with a $100,000 missile is a good value if that drone is headed for a $1,000,000 building, but if the drone is headed for a cow probably not worth it.
And the reusable drone has a serious battlefield limitation that it's extremely vulnerable while positioning to drop it's munition. Very good against something that can't defend itself (we have a lot of video of them dropping stuff into tanks that the crew bailed out of for some reason), but the cost mounts quickly if a soldier with a shotgun can engage it.
Sadly I think that AI will make a very large difference here. And AI hardware that can control weapons is already hundreds of dollars and dropping fast, because a cell phone can do it.
Given that the drones he talks about are even less equipped than a standard hobbyist drone (no GPS, no compass), I suppose it's more a "tradeoff" between keeping the drone cheap enough to be disposable vs having enough functionality to be practically controllable by the operator.
I think Third Republic France is a more apt comparison. Political fights about religion and content of education, check. Diverging media landscape aligned with party political identity and ideology, check. Major changes to civil service personnel after consequential elections (1879-1884), check.
Sounds sensible, bu the major unasked question it avoids is, was the current funding and organization structure of science in place when the past scientific achievements were achieved.
the impression I get from anecdotes and remarks is that pre-1990s, university departments used to be the major scientific social institution, providing organization where the science was done, with feedback cycle measured in careers. Faculty members would socialize and collaborate or compete with other members. Most of the scientific norms were social, possible because the stakes were low (measured in citations, influence and prestige only).
It is quite unlike current system centered on research groups formed around PIs and their research groups, an machine optimized for gathering temporary funding for non-tenured staff so that they can produce publications and 'network', using all that to gather more funding before the previous runs out. No wonder the social norms like "don't falsify evidence; publish when you have true and correct results; write and publish your true opinions; don't participate in citation laundering circles" can't last. Possibility of failure is much frequent (every grant cycle), environment is highly competitive in a way that you get only few shots at scientific career or you are out.
Yeah, the title is a bit hyperbolic. I have not used selection methods that much, but not too surprising they would have similar results to LASSO as selection or predictive method for people who think of it in terms of "feature development".
The distaste for step-wise selection comes from its typical use. If one reads Harrell's complaints quoted in the blog post carefully, quite many of them are less about the selection method but what analyst does with it, namely, interpretation of inferential statistics. When you see step-wise in the wild, practitioner often has used step-wise or other selection method and then reports the usual test-statistics and p-values for the final fitted model ... that are derived with assumptions that don't usually take into account the selection steps. It is quite unfortunate in fields where people put lot of faith in coefficient estimates, p-values and Wald confidence intervals when writing conclusions of their paper.
With LASSO and its cousins, the standard packages and literature strongly encourage the user to focus on predictions and run cross-validation right from the beginning.
>Although modest bivariate associations were detected with educational attainment (r = .17) and body mass index (r = −.17), almost all regression-adjusted coefficients were nonsignificant. No clear pattern of moderation was detected between delay of gratification and either socioeconomic status or sex. Results indicate that Marshmallow Test performance does not reliably predict adult outcomes.
I guess the question is whether the covariates that were adjusted for in the regression are true confounders and not, say, something caused by ability to delay gratification.
That’s what I thought too. For example if they “control” for factors like IQ or social economic status, then the correlations will be reduced.
This isn’t a surprise unless you think the delay of gratification is itself the cause of success (seems like a straw man so they can claim to “challenge” the original study)
>Well. You have to exist, which means you compete, which might mean you grow.
Why growth? At some point you would eventually hit perfect saturation anyway, the steady state where everyone already is buying your product to the extent anyone can buy it. I get that losing business is bad, and it's better to "overcorrect" to growth, but as long as you compete enough to keep approximately same market share against other competitors, selling inflation adjusted $30 buckets of bricks to each generation of kids with profit sounds like perfectly good business. Owner of the business would receive steady income selling the inflation adjusted $30 buckets.
I'd imagine you'd hit problems when the buckets of bricks you are selling are ~eternal and number of kids is no longer growing, so nobody needs new ones.
"it honestly comes from a place of ignorance, and I say that as basically a layman myself"
Here is an added complication: succinct technical communication can be efficient when communicating to peers who work on the exactly same domain, similar problems as you, and want digest your main ideas quickly.
On the other hand, for any particular paper, the size of the audience to whom it is directly relevant and addressed to can be small. The size of the audience who got to reading it anyway may be vast. (Maybe I am reading your paper because someone cited a method paper that in lieu of a proof or explanation writes just two words and citation to your paper. Maybe I am a freshly minted new student reading it for my first seminar. Maybe I am from a neighboring field and trying to understand what is happening in yours. Maybe I tried to find what people have already done with particular idea I just had and search engine gave your paper. And so on.)
During my (admittedly lackluster) academic career I recall spending much more time trying to read and understand papers that were not addressed to me than papers that were and where I enjoyed the succinct style that avoids details and present the results. (Maybe it is just an idiosyncratic trust issue on my part, because I am often skeptical of stated results and their interpretation, finding the methods more interesting). But that is not all.
I also noticed that genuine misunderstandings coming from "brief" communication of technical "details" were quite common; two different researches would state they "applied method X to avoid Y/seek Z[citation]" in exactly so many and almost exactly same words, where X,Y and Z were complicated technical terms, yet the authors would have quite different opinion what the meaning of those words were and what would be the intended reading and how and why X should be implemented.
In conclusion, I think many a scientific field would benefit from a style where authors were expected to clearly explain what they did and why (as clearly as possible).
However, I wouldn't then use version control software like Git for versioning analysis objects, as it is designed for text file source control and diffs.
(How one does a diff of a data object look like? If there is a natural text format to save it in, it still is usually quite messy, and Git doesn't really like Gb sized csvs.)
My preferred workflow is to version the source files in Git and store the associated data objects in a separate archive directory with meaningful name and the hash of commit of generating code as metadata attribute.
Now if you had a version control "IDE" software that would render changes in figures and other blobs nicely, then it would make sense to build a workflow around it.
In my experience, the trick is to move them without disassembly or with minimal disassembly (removing only moving parts like shelves that are planned to be removed) like any other furniture. Nothing weird with that: Most traditional furniture items made by a carpenter would be equally incompatible with disassembly.
> I guess it's referencing the fact that education today is largely about having textbooks shoved in front of you until you're able to recite enough of it.
I would argue contrariwise, the education today is bad because the textbooks are devoid of content and nobody can recite any of the little they have. For my parents' generation it was not unexceptional for people to cite poems from memory. I have bunch of their middle school books, and it appears they read more and longer texts for middle school than some university students today. During my grandfather's time kids were expected to recite a chapters of textbooks aloud in front of class, and he also remembered good bunch chunks from the Bible.
Compared to that, fill-in textbooks we used when I was in school seem a bit underwhelming -- and I am in my 30s. Kids today use e-learning environment (makes direct comparisons difficult).
Today, very few people appear to read anything, let alone books, even fewer remembers anything. Thus conversations about anything factual seem often pointless. But it is not like one can blame anyone for that, it only makes sense: Why truly should I remember anything when I can flip out a smartphone and hit query to a search engine? But people reading the same Wikipedia article or repeating the same news cycle talking points at each other makes for a boring conversation.
If current FPV drones are bit lackluster, it doesn't preclude 'next generation' that are purposefully developed for military use won't be useful. Also it sounds like the designation of "FPV drone" is specific to particular family of drones specific in current day and time, which may be something quite else next year. Like, obviously the next stage is a FPV drone with some capabilities of "reusable" drone or loitering munition author complains of (capability to hover easily)? Or "reusable" drone with FPV camera?