If you're concerned about collateral damage, the Hellfires in the package are probably desirable, as they are accurate and have a fairly small warhead.

I haven't heard of it, but I guess it makes sense. Like, it's not uncommon in the US to drink hot coffee in the morning when it's cold out if you're camping or in an outdoors environment that's hard to heat up. Delivers a big slug of heat directly to someone. But there's no real reason that it has to contain caffeine.

I don't know about Korea or other places, but Japan traditionally didn't go in for house insulation, aimed to use the kotatsu rather than heating the living space as a whole.

Big picture here, I'm not sure how much point there is to putting heavier bollards in.

I don't believe that we're going to seal off every area that a car can reach or someone can plant explosives at and that has a bunch of people in it in the US.

It's also not clear to me that there is a rash of people intent on a repeat job, trying to physically attack vice in New Orleans. Sounds like the perpetrator had a lot of problems and kinda was lashing out at the world solo.

If we do get more incidents, then we've got more data points, okay, maybe do something then.

There are a lot of ways to kill a bunch of people at once if you're set on it and willing to be creative. You can maybe hit some of the most-egregious ones, but you won't get all of them.

Ah, gotcha. It sounds like it's been provided in aid packages for a while. This was a year-and-a-half ago:

https://defensescoop.com/2023/05/09/commercial-satellite-imagery-services-included-in-new-1-2b-ukraine-security-assistance-package/

The latest U.S. security assistance tranche for Ukraine, valued at $1.2 billion, includes funding for commercial satellite imagery services as well as a slew of air-defense capabilities.

Choosing one commercial provider, Planet Labs in the US stores and sells current and historical images of world land masses every day.

https://www.planet.com/products/satellite-monitoring/

Planet Monitoring provides near-daily, 3.7-meter resolution imagery covering all of Earth’s landmass.

That's just generally-available commercial stuff, not even military stuff, which I suspect Ukraine gets.

A lot of this sounds pretty abstract to me.

It argues that drones transmit data about use to Chinese drone manufacturers, which could leverage that data to provide an edge globally.

Okay, fine. I'll believe that farms have models of when to spray and such, and that these models have value. And this effectively gives drone manufacturers a fair bit of that data.

But...how secret is that data now? Like, is this actually data not generally available? There are a lot of corn farms out there. Did each corn farm go carefully work up their own model on their own in a way that China can't obtain that data? Or can I go read information publicly about recommended spraying intervals?

More radically, agricultural data could be used to unleash biological warfare against crops, annihilating an adversary’s food supply. Such scenarios pose a significant threat to national security, offering China multiple avenues to undermine critical infrastructures by devastating food availability, threatening trade and economic resilience, and destabilizing agricultural systems.

That seems like an awful stretch.

Biowarfare with infectious disease is hard to control. Countries historically have been more interested militarily in stuff like anthrax, which works more like a chemical weapon. I am dubious that China has a raging interest in biowarfare against American crops.

Even if we assume that China does have the intent and ability to develop something like a crop disease, I have a very hard time seeing as how somewhat finer-grained information about agriculture is going to make such an attack much more effective. Let's say that China identifies a crop that is principally grown in the US and develops an infectious diease targeting it. Does it really need to know the fine points of that crop, or can it just release it at various points and let it spread?

As for food security, the US is not really a country at any sort of food security risk.

• It exports a lot of staple food. It's the source, not the consumer.

• It has large margins due to producing luxuries that could be reduced in a wartime emergency -- I recall once reading a statistic that if the US went vegetarian, it could provide for all of Europe's food needs purely from the increased output without bringing any more land into production.

• It is wealthy enough to have access to the global food market. If the US is starving, a lot of the world is going to be starving first. In some cases, one can cut off physical transport access to the global market via blockade even where a country could normally buy from those markets -- as Germany tried to do to the UK in World War II or the US did to Japan in World War II, but that would be extraordinarily difficult to do to the US given the present balance of power. The US is by far the largest naval power in the world. This assessment is that in a defensive naval and air war, which is what such a blockade would involve, it could alone prevail against the combined militaries of the entire rest of the world. And on top of that, a substantial portion of the other major naval powers are allied to the US. China is very unlikely to be in a position where it could blockade the US, and if we imagine the kind of changes necessary to create some scenario where it was, I'd suggest that this scenario would also very probably bring with it other issues that would be of greater concern to the US than food security.

I'm willing to believe that it might be possible to target "university IT systems" for commercially-useful data, but it's not clear to me that that's something specific to drones or to China. There are shit-tons of devices on all kinds of networks that come out of China. I'd be more worried about the firmware on one's Lenovo Thinkpad as being a practical attack vector than agricultural drones.

Now, okay. The article is referencing both American national security concerns and potential risks to other places, fine. It's talking about Brazil, Spain, etc. Some of my response is specific to the US. But I'm going to need some rather less hand-wavy and concrete issues to get that excited about this. You cannot hedge against every risk. Yes, there are risks that I can imagine agricultural drones represent, though I think that just being remotely-bricked around harvest time would be a more-realistic concern. But there are also counters. Sure, China no doubt has vectors via which it could hit the US. But the same is also true going the other way, and if China starts pulling levers, well, the US can pull some in response. That's a pretty significant deterrent. Unless an attack can put the US in a position where it cannot respond, like enabling a Chinese nuclear first strike or something, those deterrents are probably going to be reasonably substantial. If we reach a point where China is conducting biowarfare against American crops to starve out the US, then we've got a shooting war on, and there are other things that are going to be higher on the priority list.

5G infrastructure is, I agree, critical. TikTok might be from an information warfare perspective. You can mitigate some of the worst risks. But you cannot just run down the list of every product that China sells and block every way in which one might be leveraged. Do that and you're looking at heading towards autarky and that also hurts a country -- look at North Korea. Sanctions might not do much to it, but it's also unable to do much.

To quote Sun Tzu:

For should the enemy strengthen his van, he will weaken his rear; should he strengthen his rear, he will weaken his van; should he strengthen his left, he will weaken his right; should he strengthen his right, he will weaken his left. If he sends reinforcements everywhere, he will everywhere be weak.

You have a finite amount of resources. You can use them to mitigate some threats. You cannot effectively counter all potential threats. You have to prioritize. If we want to counter agricultural drones as an attack vector, then we accept greater vulnerability elsewhere to do so. The question is not simply "does a potential vulnerability exist", but "is this the optimal place to expend resources"?

The problem, apparently, was that the Serve robot wasn't a pedestrian. Waymo told TechCrunch that its driver system had seen the delivery bot and correctly identified it as an inanimate object — and such is the disdain the autonomous vehicle harbors towards its Fellow Robot — so it didn't exercise the level of caution it would around human beings as it's programmed to do.

And so that was why all the robots made after 2024 were made to look like humans.

The longest recording centers on Jabbar’s interpreting scripture to mean that “poetry, like rapping” could gradually lure people “into the things that God has made forbidden to us: the intoxicants like marijuana, alcohol, sedatives, opioids, stimulants and others”.

“Then there’s the way that music entices us to illicit sex, vulgarity, violence, betrayal, arrogance, burglary, cheating, ingratitude to our spouses or others in general,” he continued. Suggesting music was “Satan’s voice,” he added: “It drives us to waste our wealth, sever the ties to kinship – and even idolatry by calling us to worship … the artist themselves.”

The music is enticing people to violence. This must be stopped. The only thing to be done about this is to try to kill as many random people as possible.

I'd choose one at least somewhat near yourself. It'll improve latency, and it's your window to the world, so you'll always feel that latency when browsing.

There's probably some webpage out there that will measure load times, if you don't have tools yourself.

https://lemmy.fediverse.observer/ or https://mbin.fediverse.observer/ will geolocate your IP and try to show a list of geographically-nearby instances; not quite the same thing as network latency, but correlated.

Well, Ukraine's going to need its population and their economic output back, and while the war is not over, the fronts have considerably stabilized -- most of the country is not at risk of attacks aside from the occasional drone or ballistic missile, and there aren't deep penetrations into Ukrainian-held territory any more. I think that winter 2024 may be the last electricity crunch; population being outside of Ukraine helped reduce demand at a time of scarcity.

https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-12-24/ukraine-seeks-return-of-up-to-10-million-refugees-and-migrants-fleeing-russias-war.html

Ukraine seeks return of up to 10 million refugees and migrants fleeing Russia’s war

The government has created a Ministry of National Unity that hopes to attract residents abroad and ease the demographic crisis to address the reconstruction of the country

Kyiv is considering all sorts of solutions. It is in favor of EU member states cutting aid to refugees as a means of exerting pressure

While I don't at all think that this is the most-diplomatic way for Slovakia to do this, I suppose that it might be something that Kyiv could live with insofar as it aligns with Kyiv's concerns.

Media aiming to influence isn't a new phenomenon, so an easy answer is "look at generations in the past".

Gorelkin said that Russian consoles aren't being designed only to play ports of hundreds of old, less-demanding games. He added that they should primarily serve the purpose of promoting and popularizing domestic video game products.

The fundamental problem here is that software is an example of a product that has high fixed costs, low variable costs.

For products like that, scale matters a lot, because you can spread the fixed costs over many units.

Russia just isn't that big.

Maybe it'd work if they can find something unique that Russian video game players really badly want that other people don't care about much, so that desire is being unmet by production elsewhere.

Honestly, foreign sanctions might be the most-helpful route to make domestic production for the domestic market viable, since I don't know how many official Russian localizations of foreign-made games will happen as things stand, and I assume that there are a substantial number of people in Russia who are going to need a game in Russian language to play it. I mean, people might be able to do some fan translations, but...

Foreign sanctions are also, I'd think, going to make it harder to get a successful export product working for Russian developers. I don't know to what extent it impacts them, but it can't be helpful.

If you look at this list:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_games_developed_in_Russia

It's not massive, and a lot of what's there isn't really top-notch stuff. There are some Russia-originating games that I like. Il-2 Sturmovik: 1946 is a world-class combat flight sim. But it's part of a family of military simulation games that, from my past reading, benefited from a sorta unique situation. When the Soviet Union broke up, a lot of military spending got sharply cut, and a lot of military experts were suddenly looking for a job. There were a number of video game companies that picked some of them up as consultants to make military sims. That's probably not going to show up again.

And I cannot imagine that the fallout from this conflict will improve Russian consumer spending capability over time, so it's probably even harder to do a game oriented at the domestic market than would otherwise be the case.