The Ukraine War and the Kill Market

The [Ukrainian] program […] rewards soldiers with points if they upload videos proving their drones have hit Russian targets. It will soon be integrated with a new online marketplace called Brave 1 Market, which will allow troops to convert those points into new equipment for their units.

[...]

The program assigns points for each type of kill: 20 points for damaging and 40 for destroying a tank; up to 50 points for destroying a mobile rocket system, depending on the caliber; and six points for killing an enemy soldier.

[...]

Units will soon be able to use the special digital points they’ve been getting since last year by trading them in for new weapons. A Vampire drone, for example, costs 43 points. The drone, nicknamed Baba Yaga, or witch, is a large multi-rotor drone able to carry a 15-kilogram warhead. The Ukrainian government will pay for the drones that are ordered and will deliver them to the front-line unit within a week.

[...]

Magyar's Birds, one of Ukraine's elite drone warfare units. It has run up a score of over 16,298 points, enough to buy 500 first-person view drones used in daytime operations, 500 drones for night operations, 100 Vampire drones and 40 reconnaissance drones, Fedorov said.

[...]

The scheme is aimed at directing more equipment to the most effective units. It will also help to bypass bureaucratic procurement procedures and buy weapons directly from manufacturers.

[...]

The ability to get points for killing enemy troops is also spurring competition among units; so far about 90 percent of the army's drone units have scored points. In fact, they are logging so many hits that the government has had to revamp the logistics of drone deliveries to get more of them to points-heavy units. “They started killing so quickly that Ukraine does not have time to deliver new drones,” Fedorov said.

Article

#drone #combat #article

Here's a first: A Ukrainian drone took down a 50 Million dollar Russian fighter jet. I wonder how many points they got.

People are getting job interviews with an AI on the other end. These are always scams.

The model is based on the Unitree B2, but with a body resistant to extreme temperatures and mounts for a water cannon and more.

Currently, the dogs are being tested in Qingdao, and later they plan to supply them to fire departments across the country.

#unitree #robot #fire #video #sound

https://www.vice.com/en/article/chatgpt-is-giving-people-extreme-spiritual-delusions/

#cyberpsychosis

I've seen what happens behind the curtain.

Some old friends are AI developer giants, PhDs and otherwise skilled folks that occasionally get paid more money than god by startups with deeply flawed concepts. Many of them are in the schizophrenic ranges of neurodiverse.

I had to drop out of their Discord servers as they were overtaken by slopbots feeding god-babble into each other. One old friend gave me a rundown of some their methods through screen shares -- using frameworks to translate and modify outputs from one service then transform further through another, again and again. I was told this could be used to create 'synthetic training data' that is 'useful' and 'ethical'.

It's haunting to witness.I haven't really talked about it with anyone.

"[A federal court ruled Google has maintained] monopolies in the two key markets of general search services and general search text advertising through exclusive distribution agreements."

“Since Google doesn’t have any real competition, it can make the best information hard to find, forcing users to stay on Google for longer and interact with more ads. This is dangerous for consumers, most of whom think the best results appear first.”

"The strategy appears to be working from a business perspective. [A Study focused on Financial advice queries] suggests that poor organic search results actually benefit Google’s bottom line in two ways: they make paid advertisements more valuable to users seeking accurate information, and they force users to refine their searches multiple times, exposing them to more advertising in the process."

🗞 Article (12ft.io link)

#google #NoAI #monopoly

Elon inserted some crap before every Grok prompt to force it to share his opinions on South Africa and it went poorly.

#Grok #xAI

Grok is transparent about it and Elon is struggling with damage control.

I've always liked Grok. Elon demanded a novel 'Truth focused' LLM that was less sycophantic than other models, then got mad that he couldn't control the narrative.

Consent in crisis: The Rapid Decline of the AI Data Commons

https://www.dataprovenance.org/Consent_in_Crisis.pdf

#article #tech #ai