I like this. It's an inversion of the old addage, "a poor craftsman blames his tools" and the corollary, "use the right tool for the job" (because a good craftsman chooses the appropriate tool).
You don't get to bang on a screw and blame the hammer.
Reading between the lines of the article it seems advanced but not too surprising.
I assume that at night when it "withdrew to a covered location" there was opportunity for maintenance, battery swaps, etc.
The article says that it successfully carried out "multiple calls for fire." That sounds like over those 45 days there were multiple missions to provide suppressive fire. They're not explicit about what that means but it sounds like, "if you see anything moving in this arc, take a few shots at them". Presumably there's some AI to prevent it from wasting ammo on really dumb decoys.
A "simple" mobile automated turret has been around for a while. The novelty they would be demonstrating is essentially battlefield robustness. They aren't claiming that this machine can operate completely autonomously for 6 weeks but the incremental pieces are still hard.
I don't understand how it doesn't just get hit by a drone? Is it because the Russian drone pilots all operate from out of theatre and the loss of starlink disabled this?
As I said elsewhere, Deepseek injects Chinese characters into responses. Anecdotally, that seems to happen when the context gets longer. That suggests that they're primarily trained in Chinese and I would expect them to use fewer tokens for Chinese than English.
Deepseek will regularly spit out Chinese (汉字）during English sessions. They generally seem to be syntactically related but it makes me think that there's some overhead of using English with an engine that's primarily trained in Chinese.
There's certainly an interesting question here, even if Tokenstree doesn't provide a solution or even define the problem well.
The broader questions are still interesting.
If an AI is trained more on language A than language B but has some training in translating B to A, what is the overhead of that translation?
If the abilities are combined in the same model, how much lower is the overhead than doing it as separate operations?
ie is f(a) < f(b) < f(t(B,A) ? where a and b are in A and B and f() and t() are the costs of processing a prompt and the cost of translating a prompt.
Then there's the additional question of what happens with character based languages. It's not obvious how it would make sense to assign multiple tokens to a single character but there's the question of how much information in character based vs phonic based words and what the information content of sentences with either one is.
I love the idea, in principal, but I think it's impossible in practice.
A good strategist makes the outcomes of individual battles predictable. That makes it terrible for unit players.
I used to play Planetside 2 with a very organized group. Winning was fun at first but you were ultimately a cog in a well oiled machine so it got old fast. It probably got old even faster for the other players who were just trying to play a regular fps.
If you want: motors, ESCs, flight controllers and radios those can be sourced from outside of China, and competitively priced too (if you're in Europe, outside you'd still have to add taxes).
As near as I can tell, the vast majority of the parts are made in China. When I look at the few alternatives, they're full of Chinese circuitry. If I look at circuit components, they're all made of Chinese raw materials.
Both Ukraine and Russia are planning to deploy (and use up) several million drones over the next year. Iran just joined them as a major procurer.
While they satisfy the technical requirement of, "there exists an alternative" neither of them is generally available as a viable alternative to China.
I perused the links that you provided in another comment.
How much of these products are sourced from EU materials? Like is the copper in the wires from the EU? Is the wire made in the EU and coated with insulator there too? Are the motors wound in Europe?
The top copper producer in the EU is Poland so that's a possible source of copper. They're pretty far down the list though so it's likely that a large part of the copper is coming from places like Chile (top producer in the world).
Well, we could counter that and say that the whole thread here is exactly about how the US is losing its soft power position and the import situation you are facing is an integral part of that.
And 'some rich guy in the Netherlands' is a nice target for you but I know plenty of people that are in other parts of Europe that seem to have no problem ordering from both of these. You asked for alternatives, you got them. You could have just left it at that but you feel the need to explain why those alternatives are not the alternatives you wanted. What did you expect? A 1-900 number and someone taking your credit card?
You could counter with that or you could read what's actually in this sub-thread.
"Some rich guy in the Netherlands" isn't about being a nice target. You keep saying it works for you but you can't demonstrate any way that works for others.
I can point you to a number of places that sell any number of Chinese drone parts that don't involve a "1-900 number". You can find them on Amazon. Any number of drone vendors sell them through normal sales portals. The manufacturers will ship them directly.
A handful of companies that require a bespoke procurement process and are operating at a tiny fraction of the scale do not have any appreciable impact on the market for drone parts today.
Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine. That's totally understandable but for anyone outside of Ukraine, they effectively don't exist.
Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info. It seems they just raised 2.6M in seed funding 3 months ago. It's great that there are startups in NL but that's not even close to a replacement for China's scale yet.
Both of these may change the landscape in the future. For now, neither of them is a practical way to get drone parts without China.
> Motor-g doesn't seem to ship outside of Ukraine.
They absolutely do.
> Arctus asks you to contact them just for product info.
You can order as much as you want from them, the price is right and the quality is extremely high.
Indeed, they're not on AliExpress, but that's roughly the difference between being a producer in Europe and in China, and that is precisely the difference that you should be happy with.
Can you show me?
Is this some privileged access that you get as an investor?
Its easy to verify that Motor-g does not ship outside of Ukraine. I just put 4 of their motors in a shopping cart and tried to check out. The drop down menu for destination country has a single option, Ukraine.
Arctus does not list a single price on their website. That's also easy to verify. Every single product on their website only says, "request product data", or "coming soon".
I have both their products quite literally on my desk in front of me.
All I did was mail the manufacturer, asked for a quote, got a mail in return, they sent an invoice, I paid the invoice and they sent me the goods. Just like I would expect.
You don't get to bang on a screw and blame the hammer.
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