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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • Sure, and they’re talking about that like something they might add to it down the line, because at the end of the day these systems are usually just android apps, so you can theoretically add anything.

    In practice, what’ll most likely happen is that they’ll try that capability out, decide that it sucks, and quietly ditch it. Or, they’ll roll it out anyway in order to keep the government happy, and then commanders will just tell their troops not to use it. Militaries have always known how to work with and around bad equipment.

    If they have to shove in a dumb AI app to get the funding for some actually very useful military equipment approved, well, that’s military procurement for you. Would be nice if the current UK government weren’t so hell bent on shoving AI in everything, but the realistic alternatives currently are “Nazis” and “Sparkling fascists.”


  • Smaller armies benefit more from tools like this. Not the AI part - see my other comment for why I think that’s not even real - but the ability to quickly and effectively communicate orders and information. A soldier being able to point a webcam on their helmet at the enemy position so that HQ can instantly see their disposition and entrenchment is super helpful. The ability to draw orders on terrain maps in real time is super helpful. Most of war is communication and intelligence gathering. Part of the reason the French army collapsed in 1940 is that they were using signal flags while the Germans were using radios. That stuff matters.

    And for smaller militaries this matters more, because you can’t simply drop the hammer on every threat you meet. You have to judiciously and precisely consider when to engage and when to fall back. You maneuver your enemy into situations where you have the upper hand. You defeat in detail. You plan every engagement to minimize your casualties and maximize theirs.


  • Yeah, we’re currently having discussions at my company about how we’re going to respond if potential clients starting asking about AI or putting it in their RFPs.

    And this isn’t a new problem. We make a product that can be hosted in a cloud server if you want to. Because of the nature of the product, this is the stupidest idea imaginable. We straight up tell people not to do it. This is something that absolutely needs to be on-prem. But we made it able to run remote, because sometimes buyers will put out an RFP that says “System must be cloud native.”

    That line gets put there by a CTO who can barely open their email, but keeps seeing the word “Cloud” in Business Insider and WSJ, and thinks it must be the future because that’s where their photos get backed up to. No one in their right mind wants it, but we have to offer it or else someone else gets the sale.


  • I think what you’re getting at here might be better expressed as “Moral choices are more interesting than morality systems.”

    Life Is Strange doesn’t have a morality system of any kind, but it has, easily, some of the most interesting moral choices I’ve ever experienced in a video game. One of them doesn’t even affect the ending or later story beats (to my knowledge), and yet I literally had to put the controller down and walk away because I couldn’t make that choice… Both options were so unspeakably horrible, and yet the choice was obviously and urgently necessary.

    Mass Effect actually has some really interesting moral quandaries, but they’re massively undercut by the need to force them into the game’s binary moral code, instead of just allowing them to be the complex problems that they are. Morality systems boil every choice down to an arbitrary position on an arbitrary axis.

    The Witcher works because it simply presents you with situations and allows you to judge them for yourself. It doesn’t present you with a score card afterwards.



  • So, as far as I can see, this is basically just the same networked soldier tech that every modern military is using. Canada has had this stuff in the field for a while (mostly with 3RCR, and I think 3PPCLI), with plans to expand to the entire reg force once we work the kinks out. It’s pretty much just a way of giving soldiers a map screen where commanders can draw orders, and also giving them a camera so they can directly feed back visual intel. Helps cut back fog of war.

    In the article itself the only hint of AI is the note that these devices will be “AI capable” which is kind of a no shit Sherlock. Literally these systems already use off the shelf smart devices connected up to a hardened comms system. The Canadian one is built on Samsung S22s. Of course its “AI capable”, anything with a CPU is.

    My suspicion is that the UK military just really wanted this networked soldier capability (its a good program, that’s why everyone is doing it), and knew that they could get the funding more easily if they snuck the word AI in there because the current UK government has an absolute raging hard on for anything remotely AI related.









  • At work we use Meshcentral. It requires you to host your own server, but it’s very powerful, and very reliable. We’re managing something like 400 remote systems with it currently. We also use Netbird as a secondary access layer (I prefer it to Tailscale for the simplicity of setting up ACLs, and the really easy deployment).

    For most home server usage though, I wouldn’t bother with Meshcentral. It’s a lot of overhead if you’re only managing a couple of systems. If you really need remote desktop (why do your servers even have desktops?) use RustDesk instead.