Dazzle camouflage doesn't work on killer drones. Even civilian LLMs recognize that the object on the photograph is a military truck, except they can't explain why it's been painted to resemble a zebra. Most dedicated machine vision models easily lock in on a boxy shape moving along a road. If anything, the stripes make the trucks easier to see.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Until drones deploy counter-blinkenlights. As someone who has built a realtime people tracker art installation in a disco: Stroboscopes are highly effective at confusing these models.
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
Ya, things always evolve, and can't always be perfect, especially against adapting enemies. Strobes; ya - would be interesting to see what these do vs us, not tried.
CIWS might be effective against fixed wing since they fly mostly in straight lines, it won’t work effectively against multirotors that can quickly change direction and maneuver around, now add swarm of them, and it will overwhelm CIWS. That of course, assuming it was detected which is a whole process by itself.
Given that the drone is going on a one way trip, I imagine you'd want to use the cheapest hardware possible which would mean using the dumbest model you can get away with.
Depends on the value of the target. Costs Ukraine $918 to kill a Russian soldier[1] but if you’re using a fully offline automated swarm to destroy a petro system worth billions then what’s a few GPUs strapped to each one to run local models.
Your drone needs to be cheaper than what you're killing, so if your target profile is 50k+ USD and up, a $10000 even is fine (not that it would need to be even 10k).
A CIWS can only fire at one direction at a time, so 2+1 drones has an extremely high chance of taking it out for around $2500 or less. CIWS is multiple magnitudes more expensive.
If only it was simple rage bait. As a member of this thing we call "civilization" I can't help but wonder how the hell we got to this point. #rhetorical
Very few voices were complaining about flying killer robots in and around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and more and more people seem comfortable with the status quo.
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
This title scared me, not for myself but more thinking about how kids will probably need to learn these things next. We are such strange 'intelligent' creatures who have figured out everything but not to be at peace with each other.
After WW II German u-boat captains said they were never particularly bothered by dazzle camouflage. Ten years from now I have a feeling we'll get the same information from drone operators.
Back in the day, I had an early pre-release Xbox One Devkit and mouse and now I realize it was likely outfitted with Dazzle camouflage - but we just called it zebra.
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
Half the time it is the nighttime and the things are in IR https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000051 . You may still try to camouflage and decrease your IR visibility - stealth planes try to do it, and there are some IR-decreasing covers for tanks and people.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
If you're really interested in this kind of thing, Grand Thumb on YouTube has a couple of videos about it. I think it was Dirty Civilian on YouTube that had a good video on how to prepare hide sites and the impact of using the right laundry detergent as to reduce or eliminate IR brightener chemicals, etc.
> The probable result will be an arms race pitting increasingly sophisticated machine vision systems against cleverer and cleverer methods for fooling them.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
This is an odd article that tries to elevate some random grunt in the field painting their truck white stripes to grand battlefield strategy in the face of autonomous AI killer drones. Neither are the latter real nor is the former actually in widespread use, and it obviously is not effective, not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
>not least because the drones it's talking about barely have the resolution at altitude to resolve that detail.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
You are mixing more things. There's lots of ISR drones flying around, from DJIs at 50-150m altitude to bigger fixed wing platforms at 1000-1500m. Their point is to find targets, do BDA and monitor, but not autonomously; it's guys sitting in Discord calls and entering data into BMS.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
If anyone here is into drones, manufactures, ideas, or wants to either use their drone piloting skills or learn how to pilot drones. Ukraine is recruiting for positions.
Just beware that being part of the drone team isnt some comfy safe job far from danger, they are the most hated type of unit currently since they are deciding large part of this war (and any future war it seems). I see videos of ie glide bombs used by both sides targetting specifically positions of drone teams.
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
> fighting evil in this world is highly commendable
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
My evidence is waking up in the night from the sound of explosions in a city 150 km from the active front line, and then reading about a civilian building, or multiple buildings, hit in the morning. Sometimes even walking in person to see the aftermath.
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
> Is there any evidence suggesting that Ukraine is targeting civilians?
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
Russia emptied the prisons years ago. The able bodied men of Donetsk and Luhansk were rounded up and fed to grinder years ago as well. The wanton slaughter of their own people has been startling and depraved for their unending exuberance.
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
If Russian civilians stopped sleeping and took up arms against their government, then maybe this war could end. The people responsible are all members of the Russian government, and Russian people's apathy (or in many cases support for the war) enables them.
Let's see how you'll manage to stop your own governments from implementing total digital panopticon via Chat Control etc, from mongering wars half the equator away from your country, and everything else you won't like in what future holds for the West and the world in general.
Yeah, sure. Gaza is a place of first massive AI and semi-autonomous drone deployment during a conflict, and so we already know how it looks due to that.
AI army leadership will set a target of 5% of victims being combatants, and press go, and the result will be as expected from that.
The real answer to killer drones is a CIWS that can cover 2pi steradians and attack multiple drones at the same time, because otherwise it will be just swarmed by drones that quietly glide towards it, engines off, from several directions before entering the final dive.
Remember, in WWII Carrots were the secret weapon used to defeat the night fighters.
[Todo: Add link to Poe's Law]
A military system is being launched at an area to destroy a target that is presumed to be trying to hide (hence AI).
Absolutely nothing stops a secondary, much simpler identifier system of "home on bright flickering lights".
Any system where you try to confuse an image recognition model by loudly doing something unexpected suffers from the fact that regular tracking systems have been good at finding those for a long time.
No AI model confusion tech is worthwhile if it otherwise makes something much more visible by other means - it's a scifi trope that people want something "obvious" to be invisible to the machine. It's not how reality works though.
The Phalanx defense systems you see on naval vessels.
[1] https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/ukraine-s-drone-chief-reveal...
Also can't use CIWS near troops and fpvs.
P1-SUN and equivalent are the answer there.
You can't hide from drones. Attach quadrf to your drone and now you can see through walls.
https://www.science.org/content/article/zebra-stripes-confus...
I guess things like fire-and-forget anti-tank missiles led the way. The future is Skynet.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage
> It's important to note that the risk of misuse is significantly lower for individuals who have never had typical speech patterns
How to Hide from Killer Drones:
It's important to note that that the risk of being riddled with drone bullets is significantly lower for individuals who have never had human physical characteristics.
[0] https://research.google/blog/restoring-speaker-voices-with-z...
/r/CombatFootage (NSFL)
This film predated the Ukraine war, and it felt like fiction six years ago.
This is absolutely coming.
The government is concerned about who might print a 3D gun, but this is the real danger.
The night time hunt using IR is widely practiced today in Ukraine and even was widely practiced by US and USSR in Afghanistan and Iraq as surroundings gets cooled down and cars, people and say donkeys used to transport weapons in mountains become highly contrast against the surroundings and thus easy to spot visually and to lock IR seeker of a weapon. Saddam used USSR anti-ship missiles, old even then, to attack Iran oil storage tanks at night as the missiles were easily able to lock on that large bright IR emission of the tanks still hot from the day against the cold night desert.
FPV drones are a thing. In, fact, I suspect most drones in the NATO-Russia war are FPV rather than fully autonomous.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/ukraines-one-time-test-us...
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdjp0n7rn41o
See it for yourselves: https://x.com/RALee85/status/2071537561059692956
Some object detection and (human triggered) terminal guidance. It's essentially there to solve latency and control issues for a fixed wing platform with a spotty data link.
the drones are used in groups. That is for example how we have a lot of footage of the drones hitting targets. The drone observers or especially the intelligence drone guiding the group would frequently carry much better camera than the actual kamikaze drones (especially when it comes to high-resolution IR cameras which are expensive). In the fully autonomous AI mode the drone is usually given small target area where to operate (in particular because they aren't yet smart enough to differentiate Ukranians from Russians, so you'd like to confine their operations to a limited area and not letting it into the totally free hunt) and regular 4K camera is sufficient there. Again, there is a lot of footage on YT an TG.
Most kamikaze drones are FPVs. They can not do anything autonomously because at $300 a pop in a totally GNSS denied environment, after 10 seconds past takeoff none of them have the faintest clue where they are. That's why you see all that footage, they just skip the part where for the first 20 minutes some guy with goggles is navigating them. The bigger fixed wing kamikaze drones like the Hornet above might have better onboard options like VO or triangulating radio beacons, but by all the evidence they are still guided by operators and triggered to dive manually. The biggest issue for all these systems is maintaining their video data link; if they were truly totally autonomous, nobody would bother.
> It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
> In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
https://usforces.army/en
These [1][2] are the websites for Ukraine's military.
[1] - https://mod.gov.ua/en
[2] - https://www.zsu.gov.ua/en
It's a Ukrainian site with English selected. You couldn't figure that out?
Who is that? What is their official page under gov.ua?
If all this is clear and you go ahead, all the power to ya, fighting evil in this world is highly commendable.
Except more often than not it is fighting not evil but sleeping civilians who don't support this war, which is not even war in the strict sense of the word, but a deliberate meatgrinder set up to devour as much human beings on both sides as its orchestrators can get away with, for as long as possible.
And what 'orchestrators' exactly do you think benefit from sending their soldiers through a meat grinder? Yes, Russia (not Ukraine) has done a lot of that, but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
I don't have any hard evidence that drones that hit Russian civilian buildings are even launched from Ukraine. What is known for a fact, is that they often belong to the same waves of attacks that hit industrial and military facilities. And for a fact, certain remote operators are responsible for that.
See, most will find my POV heavily tinfoil-headed, but try to understand it: I don't consider Russians and Ukrainians as two sides of the conflict. The real sides are some third party in control of military forces and narratives of both sides vs the populace of both countries. This is a war of false flag operations that are always blamed by that 3rd party on either Russian or Ukrainian side. A war of psychological terror, resource and manpower exhaustion.
For example, I don't see any plausible explanation how drones with a radar cross-section of a Cessna are able to fly from Ukraine 1500-2000 km deep into Russia, other than either being turned the blind eye to by the Russian air defense, or straight up launched and controlled by entities within the country.
That it is pretty possible, can be understood by in depth reading on 1999 explosions in Moscow and Volgodonsk which inaugurated Putin's rule, and peculiar details like that slip when Zhirinovsky spoke about the Volgodonsk explosion before the event proper. Also, the prevented explosion in Ryazan (look up "Ryazan sugar"). And by mere living in Russia and noticing things around.
There is always an SMS warning in advance of every wave of attacks, but drones fly unimpeded and it is only in the vicinity of towns and cities that the air defense kicks in, often sending "the debris" neatly into residential buildings.
No attacks on key infrastructure were ever made that would cut war logistics on both sides, both sides never attempted to attack any key (like, really key, not some sacrifice rooks or bishops) figure of its "enemy" Khomeini or Maduro style, in fact, nothing is ever made that should have been made in a real war. Only slow, deliberate, controlled smoldering. Fighting over strategically meaningless villages and towns with losses in many tens of thousands, only to back down and then try to recapture with same losses multiple times.
All in all it takes living here and boiling in it, nothing I wrote could be obvious or even entertained as possible to a foreigner who doesn't follow the news daily and only sees the broadest strokes presented by foreign mass media.
As to what the orchestrators benefit - it's multifaceted, but goes along the lines of slaughtering the battle-worthy passionaries who would otherwise prove dangerous to the globalist plans for CBDC, total digital control and surveillance in slavic countries, displacing them with meek migrant workers, terrorizing the remaining populace into complete apathy and acceptance of whatever new normals those plans set, training military AI on real-world bloody datasets, limiting the freedom of movement by deliberately created fuel shortages, which makes well for 15-minute cities, etc, etc per WEF, IMF, World Bank, Blackrock and whatever scum there is still in the shadow.
Don't you know that big bad Ukraine forced innocent little Russia into this war?! (Do I need to add the sarcasm mark?)
> but you seem to think that getting their own soldiers killed was their goal..?
Actually, to some extent, that is the case. Russia has been conscripting violent criminals (generally murderers and rapists), who, unlike normal prisoners getting conscripted, don't have a way to "earn" their freedom and are instead sent into the proverbial meat grinder.
I’m so fucking embarrassed to be Polish and hear this populism bullshit from Nawrocki and any other compromised russian shill.
You know who killed our people? The fucking russians. Remember when the bad guys came from Berlin? The other bad guys came from Moscow. Don’t forget that.
AI army leadership will set a target of 5% of victims being combatants, and press go, and the result will be as expected from that.