skybrian's recent activity

  1. Comment on France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I do expect Asian countries in particular to reduce dependency on the Middle East.

    I do expect Asian countries in particular to reduce dependency on the Middle East.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on How autonomous drone warfare is emerging in Ukraine in ~society

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article: [...] [...] [...] [...] [...]

    From the article:

    A thorough analysis of the Middle East conflict will take some time to emerge. And so to understand the direction of this new way of war, look to Ukraine, where its next phase—autonomy—is already starting to come into view. Outnumbered by the Russians and facing increasingly sophisticated jamming and spoofing aimed at causing the drones to veer off course or fall out of the sky, Ukrainian technologists realized as early as 2023 that what could really win the war was autonomy. Autonomous operation means a drone isn’t being flown by a remote pilot, and therefore there’s no communications link to that pilot that can be severed or spoofed, rendering the drone useless.

    [...]

    Since then, The Fourth Law has dispatched “more than thousands” of autonomy modules to troops in eastern Ukraine (it declines to give a more specific figure), which can be retrofitted on existing drones to take over navigation during the final approach to the target. Azhnyuk says the autonomy modules, worth around US $50, increase the drone-strike success rate by up to four times that of purely operator-controlled drones.

    And that is just the beginning. Azhnyuk is one of thousands of developers, including some who relocated from Western countries, who are applying their skills and other resources to advancing the drone technology that is the defining characteristic of the war in Ukraine. This eclectic group of startups and founders includes Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, whose company Swift Beat is churning out autonomous drones and modules for Ukrainian forces. The frenetic pace of tech development is helping a scrappy, innovative underdog hold at bay a much larger and better-equipped foe.

    All of this development is careening toward AI-based systems that enable drones to navigate by recognizing features in the terrain, lock on to and chase targets without an operator’s guidance, and eventually exchange information with each other through mesh networks, forming self-organizing robotic kamikaze swarms. Such an attack swarm would be commanded by a single operator from a safe distance.

    According to some reports, autonomous swarming technology is also being developed for sea drones. Ukraine has had some notable successes with sea drones, which have reportedly destroyed or damaged around a dozen Russian vessels.

    [...]

    While uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received the most attention, the Ukrainian military is also deploying dozens of different kinds of drones on land and sea. Ukraine, struggling with the shortage of infantry personnel, began working on replacing a portion of human soldiers with wheeled ground robots in 2024. As of early 2026, thousands of ground robots are crawling across the gray zone along the front line in Eastern Ukraine. Most are used to deliver supplies to the front line or to help evacuate the wounded, but some “killer” ground robots fitted with turrets and remotely controlled machine guns have also been tested.

    [...]

    Today’s Shaheds fly faster and higher, and therefore are more difficult to detect and take down. Between January 2024 and August 2025, the number of Shaheds and Shahed-type attack drones launched by Russia into Ukraine per month increased more than tenfold, from 334 to more than 4,000. In 2025, Ukraine found AI-enabling Nvidia chipsets in wreckages of Shaheds, as well as thermal-vision modules capable of locking onto targets at night.

    “Now, they are interconnected, which allows them to exchange information with each other,” Solntsev says. “They also have cameras that allow them to autonomously navigate to objects. Soon they will be able to tell each other to avoid a jammed region or an area where one of them got intercepted.”

    [...]

    MaXon’s solution consists of ground turrets scanning the sky with infrared sensors, with additional input from a network of radars that detects approaching Shahed drones at distances of, typically, 12 to 16 km. The turrets fire autonomous fixed-winged interceptor drones, fitted with explosive warheads, toward the approaching Shaheds at speeds of nearly 300 km/h. To boost the chances of successful interception, MaXon is also fielding an airborne anti-Shahed fortification system consisting of helium-filled aerostats hovering above the city that dispatch the interceptors from a higher altitude.

    [...]

    Despite the progress on both sides, analysts say that the kind of robotic warfare imagined by Azhnyuk won’t be a reality for years.

    “The software for drone collaboration is there,” says Kate Bondar, a former policy advisor for the Ukrainian government and currently a research fellow at the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Drones can fly in labs, but in real life, [the forces] are afraid to deploy them because the risk of a mistake is too high,” she adds.

    3 votes

  4. Comment on France confirms oil crisis, says 30-40 percent of Gulf energy infrastructure destroyed in ~society

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    There are some changes that can happen quickly, but we saw during the pandemic that supply chains are less flexible and have more dependencies than one might naively expect. Some investments take...

    There are some changes that can happen quickly, but we saw during the pandemic that supply chains are less flexible and have more dependencies than one might naively expect.

    Some investments take time. If a factory takes two years to build, and you don’t know what prices will be like in two years, should you build it? Maybe the crisis will be over and there will be a glut?

    Consistent policy encourages long-term investments. When people do the calculations to figure out if an investment will pay for itself, that gives them solid numbers to work with. Short-term shocks, not so much.

    7 votes

  6. Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech

  7. Comment on Reddit will implement human verification to tag and combat bots in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    A fundamental problem is that a human and a bot can share an identity. The simplest way would be to cut and paste AI-generated text. That can easily be automated.

    A fundamental problem is that a human and a bot can share an identity. The simplest way would be to cut and paste AI-generated text. That can easily be automated.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on US regulator bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Maybe some vendors would stop selling their existing models, but that means more market share for those that stay in the market. And if they’re still selling them, wouldn’t they keep supporting them?

    Maybe some vendors would stop selling their existing models, but that means more market share for those that stay in the market. And if they’re still selling them, wouldn’t they keep supporting them?

    1 vote

  9. Comment on US regulator bans imports of new foreign-made routers, citing security concerns in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    From: The FCC's Wi-Fi Router Ban Explained I doubt that access to the latest models of routers will matter much, at least for consumers. They're pretty mature tech.

    From: The FCC's Wi-Fi Router Ban Explained

    The FCC order targets all foreign-made consumer-grade routers, but existing models are not banned from use or sale. "Today’s action does not impact a consumer’s continued use of routers they previously acquired,” the FCC said on Monday. “Nor does it prevent retailers from continuing to sell, import, or market router models approved previously through the FCC’s equipment authorization process.”

    I doubt that access to the latest models of routers will matter much, at least for consumers. They're pretty mature tech.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Doesn't have to be. The simplest way (far simpler than what rich people actually do) would have been to put her book royalties over the years into an index fund, and then the index fund makes...

    Doesn't have to be. The simplest way (far simpler than what rich people actually do) would have been to put her book royalties over the years into an index fund, and then the index fund makes money like any other investment, even if the original source of funding is gone. Once people are wealthy enough, they don't need to own a business directly.

    There's a New York Times article from 2016 that estimated that she was a billionaire then, and the S&P 500 has tripled since then.

    From a brief search, though, she's reportedly still earning hundreds of millions from royalties, on top of whatever investments she has.

    Financially, this is pretty much untouchable no matter what happens.

    7 votes

  11. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    You can say it's simple and maybe it is symbolically, but I was asking about the financial connection, and nobody seems to know the answer. Saying it's simple or direct doesn't mean it necessarily...

    You can say it's simple and maybe it is symbolically, but I was asking about the financial connection, and nobody seems to know the answer. Saying it's simple or direct doesn't mean it necessarily is.

    This is just a guess, but it seems likely that by now she makes plenty from other investments that have nothing to do with the Harry Potter franchise? Any good financial advisor would recommend investing profits in a diversified portfolio. So that's potentially another level of indirection, which likely means the funding for whatever hate groups she wants to fund doesn't have much to do with the success of the TV show, unfortunately.

    6 votes

  12. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Rawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a...
    • Exemplary

    Rawling can believe what she wants, no matter how insane, but it doesn’t make it true that people who buy Harry Potter stuff endorse whatever else Rawling believes. And even if the TV show is a flop, that seems unlikely to have much effect on her?

    You can make your own choices, but I think it’s mostly for personal satisfaction.

    19 votes

  13. Comment on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone | Teaser in ~tv

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    How does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying...

    How does that work? I’m guessing HBO subscribers pay the same for their subscription whether they watch it or not? And since there are a lot of other expenses when making a TV show, like paying the actors and writers and the army of other people who are needed, how much of that would go to Rawling?

    8 votes

  14. Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    I assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with. The question is what model of emotions it...

    I assume training on that sort of data is how it learned what the words mean and what sort of personas those kinds of expressions are associated with.

    The question is what model of emotions it might have derived and what that might do for other behaviors.

    2 votes

  15. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    Still working on my personal link sharing website, off and on. I added a way to pin tags to the sidebar on the front page. (They are just buttons on mobile unless you switch to landscape mode.)...

    Still working on my personal link sharing website, off and on. I added a way to pin tags to the sidebar on the front page. (They are just buttons on mobile unless you switch to landscape mode.)

    https://skybrian-links.exe.xyz/

    4 votes

  16. Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link Parent
    Yes, it's pretty wild. I think that bit is pretty speculative. The only evidence they have of "emotion" is the output, so perhaps they really did fix it? Mechanistic interpretability research...

    Yes, it's pretty wild. I think that bit is pretty speculative. The only evidence they have of "emotion" is the output, so perhaps they really did fix it? Mechanistic interpretability research might find something, though?

    2 votes

  17. Comment on Gemma needs help in ~comp

    skybrian
    Link
    From the article:

    From the article:

    Investigating this, we found that:

    • Gemma and Gemini models reliably produce distress-like responses under repeated rejection. All other models tested produce them at rates below 1%, compared to 35% for Gemma 27B Instruct.

    • These behaviours are amplified in Gemma’s post-training. Post-training increases depressive behaviours in Gemma, but decreases them in both Qwen and OLMo models.

    • A small DPO intervention near-eliminates the behaviour in our evaluations. Direct preference optimisation on a narrow dataset of just 280 math preference pairs reduced high-frustration responses in Gemma 27B from 35% to 0.3%.

    We think that LLM emotions, internal or expressed, are worth paying attention to. Most concretely, Gemini's depressive spirals are a reliability problem: a model that abandons tasks or takes destructive action mid-crisis is straightforwardly less reliable. More speculatively, if emotion-like states come to function as coherent drivers of behaviour, they could lead to alignment failures: models may act to avoid or change emotional states, as humans do in their training data. Finally, if there is any chance these states correspond to something like genuine experience, this seems worth acting on even from a position of deep uncertainty.

    Here, we present simple evaluations that track depressive behaviours, and show that, in a narrow sense, they can be 'fixed'. In the paper, we also present finetuning ablations and interpretability results that indicate that the fix reduces internal representations of negative emotions, not just external expression. However, we emphasize that post-hoc emotional suppression is a problematic strategy. In more capable models, training against emotional outputs risks hiding the expression without addressing whatever underlying state is driving it. It also remains genuinely unclear what emotional profile we should actually want models to have - and this seems unlikely to be 'none at all'.

    7 votes

  19. Comment on The Candlemakers' Petition by Frédéric Bastiat (1845) in ~humanities.history

    skybrian
    Link
    This web server has encryption turned off for some reason. That's pretty rare these days.

    This web server has encryption turned off for some reason. That's pretty rare these days.

  20. Comment on cq: Stack Overflow for agents in ~tech

    skybrian
    Link
    It's a tempting target for bots spreading misinformation. They have countermeasures, but keeping quality up seems hard.

    It's a tempting target for bots spreading misinformation. They have countermeasures, but keeping quality up seems hard.

    4 votes