Tag: technology

The Defense Catches Up

As is always the case with technological development, the offense has the initial advantage. But the defense always catches up in time, as we’re seeing with regards to drone and missile warfare:

India has successfully tested a new integrated air defense system consisting of a variety of weapons that shot down three targets at different altitudes and ranges off the coast of India’s eastern state of Odisha, Indian media reported on Monday citing the country’s defense ministry.

A Chinese expert said on Monday that while the inclusion of a laser weapon is a notable feature in this short-range system, its operational effectiveness remains to be proved, as a test conducted under preset scenario cannot fully demonstrate performance in real combat conditions.

The maiden test of the integrated air defense weapon system (IADWS), which is expected to be a part of the bigger national security shield, was conducted by India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) on Saturday, the Hindustan Times reported on Monday, noting that the development comes days after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the creation of a formidable military capability to defend India’s military and civilian installations against aerial attacks and set a 10-year deadline for developing an indigenous air defense shield integrated with offensive weapons.

According to Indian media, the IADWS is a multi-layered air defense system consisting of quick reaction surface-to-air missiles (QRSAM), very short range air defense system (VSHORADS) and a laser-based directed energy weapon.

During the flight-tests, three different targets including two high-speed fixed wing unmanned aerial vehicle targets and a multi-copter drone were simultaneously engaged and destroyed completely by the QRSAM, VSHORADS and the high-energy laser weapon system at different ranges and altitudes, the Hindustan Times reported, citing the Indian defense ministry.

The point is not that India is at the cutting edge of anti-drone and anti-missile technologies, but rather, that even India, a third-rate power, has understood the obvious and is focusing its military investment in areas that are likely to be relevant in the future rather than on tactically and strategically outdated technologies like planes, littoral warships, and aircraft carriers.

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No, You Cannot Tell

I can tell. JDA can tell. But unless you are already an AI-adept professional author who is actively utilizing the latest technologies, you are demonstrably unable to distinguish between AI-generated text and texts written by accomplished, bestselling writers:

Mark Lawrence is a very successful fantasy writer. His PRINCE OF THORNS has sold more than one million copies. He is one of the many professional authors who, while disdaining the use of textual AI, is concerned about its eventual impact on his profession. He recently conducted a very interesting experiment in which he and three other very well-established professional authors wrote short stories on the same subject, and ChatGPT 5 was prompted for four short stories on the same subject.

You can read all eight stories here and see for yourself if you can tell which stories are human-written and which are AI-generated. You don’t need to vote, and you’ll have to keep track of what you thought of each story yourself.

A statistically-significant number of 964 people, who, being fans of Lawrence are much more literate on average than the norm, read the stories and rated them. The results are intriguing and will probably surprise most people who don’t read here regularly. On average, the readers were able to correctly identify the provenance of 3 out of the 8 stories. Not only that, but the story they rated the highest, and 3 out of the 4 highest-rated stories, were all AI-generated.

Read the whole thing at AI Central. And the next time you see someone going on about “AI slop” or how AI just can’t produce the same emotions and feelings that humans can, you’ll know that they’re just posturing in obvious ignorance.

The ironic thing is that AI is actually going to improve the level of writing, because most books are very mediocre and AI is already better than that.

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Spain Drops F-35

Spain cancelled their order for F-35s:

Spain has abandoned plans to buy dozens of F-35 fighter jets, Spanish newspaper El Pais says, citing unnamed sources in the Spanish government. The preliminary discussions for a potential order have been suspended indefinitely, the newspaper writes. The F-35 is made by U.S. defense contractor Lockheed Martin and a number of suppliers including Italy’s Leonardo, Britain’s BAE Systems and hundreds of other U.K. companies.

Switzerland should follow suit. The F-35 is a junk aircraft anyhow, and the era of conventional airpower is already over. National militaries should be spending their budgets on drones, not manned aircraft.

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Convergence in the Home

I shouldn’t have to tell anyone who reads this site regularly to avoid all Amazon Home products, but I have no doubt that more than a few of you have decided that the convenience outweighs the possible risks. You might want to reconsider the matter.

A delivery driver for Amazon misheard an automated doorbell for “racism” and reported it.

Nobody was home.

Amazon turned off all the lights, shut the entire smart home down before it even started its investigation.

Law enforcement via corporation with no due process.

It’s fascinating that it only took eight years to actually arrive at the comedic dystopia about which some were joking back in the day. I think this has also disabused those of us with libertarian inclinations of our previous imaginings about corpocratic rule being any less insidious than rule by government.

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The Price of Takeover

Now the transformation of Silicon Valley into New Delhi Northwest suddenly makes a lot more sense:

A prominent hardline Iranian newspaper has made a shocking claim that Indian software used in Iran were exploited by Israeli intelligence agencies to collect sensitive information on Iranian residents.

The claim, without any evidence, was published by Kayhan, one of the most-read conservative newspapers in the country. In a special news article titled “How did the infiltration software enter the country?” Kayhan said many Iran is dependent on Indian software and programmers due to India’s dominance in the sector.

“Investigation into the Mossad infiltration in Iran revealed a shocking truth. Many of the Indian software used in Iran are actually Israeli and contain backdoors that send live data to Israel. This includes sensitive information such as civil registration, passport data, airport systems, and the like,” Kayhan said.

While there is no evidence for it yet, I would bet that there is a direct link between this program and the installation of pajeets in all the major US tech companies, most likely through the good offices of the big financial companies like Blackstone.

No wonder China and Russia have been determined to keep Big Tech outside their borders. I very much doubt their intelligence services are unaware of the way in which they are little more than massive surveillance machines.

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Five Generations of Modern War

Military history buffs and fans of William S. Lind should recognize the form of this AI-generated lecture, which updates his famous Four Generations of Modern War lecture with the latest transformations in warfare. Read the whole thing at AI Central. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to observe that this is probably in advance and more up-to-date than what is presently being taught at most military colleges today, if the actions of various militaries, including the US Navy and the IDF, are any guide. And I think you’ll agree that this is an absolute tour de force of applied AI in action.

The Fifth Generation of Modern War: Drones, Attrition, and the Collapse of the Logistics Sanctuary

A lecture examining how unmanned systems fundamentally transform the nature of warfare by eliminating the distinction between the front lines and the logistics space.

Introduction:

Ladies and gentlemen, what I’m going to present to you today builds directly on the intellectual framework that William Lind laid out in his groundbreaking lecture entitled the Four Generations of Modern War. As Lind emphasized, we cannot determine the consistency of a system from inside itself—we must stand outside it to see clearly. Today, we must step outside not just our current military thinking, but outside the entire framework of the first four generations to understand what is happening in conflicts from Nagorno-Karabakh to Ukraine to the skies over Israel and Iran.

We are witnessing the emergence of the Fifth Generation of Modern War, and like each previous generational shift, it represents what the Hegelians would call a dialectically qualitative change—not merely an evolution in tactics or technology, but a fundamental transformation in the nature of warfare itself. This transformation is driven by the proliferation of unmanned systems—drones—which have done something unprecedented since the Peace of Westphalia: they have eliminated the sanctuary of the logistics space.

For the first time since modern warfare began, there is no safe rear area. The combat zone has expanded from what was traditionally a 5-kilometer depth to 25 kilometers and beyond. This is not simply longer-range artillery or deeper penetration by special forces—this is the permanent, persistent threat of attack against every element of military force, from the frontline rifleman to the supply depot hundreds of kilometers from the front.

But before we examine this revolutionary change, we must understand what came before. Lind’s framework of the Four Generations provides the foundation upon which we must build our understanding of the Fifth.

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AI Text is Fair Use

It’s not at all surprising that a Federal judge – a particularly good one who has tried to rein in various corporate abuses of the arbitration system – has recognized that AI training and AI text generation is protected under the fair use doctrine in a landmark pre-trial decision.

A federal judge in California issued a landmark ruling that protects the development of artificial intelligence and creative freedom by determining that training AI systems on copyrighted books constitutes fair use under copyright law. U.S. District Judge William Alsup’s decision in Bartz v. Anthropic represents a crucial victory against attempts to stifle technological innovation through overly broad copyright claims.

Judge Alsup ruled that Anthropic’s training of its Claude AI on authors’ works was “exceedingly transformative,” and therefore protected under the fair use doctrine as specified in Section 107 of the Copyright Act. This decision correctly recognizes that AI training represents a fundamentally different use of copyrighted material than simple reproduction or distribution.

The judge’s reasoning demonstrates a sophisticated understanding of how AI works, comparing the training process to human learning rather than mechanical copying. “Everyone reads texts, too, then writes new texts,” Alsup wrote. “To make anyone pay specifically for the use of a book each time they read it, each time they recall it from memory, each time they later draw upon it when writing new things in new ways would be unthinkable.”

This analogy captures why attempts to restrict AI training are flawed. Human authors read thousands of books, absorb their techniques and ideas, and incorporate that knowledge into their own writing without paying licensing fees for each influence. AI systems operate similarly, learning patterns and techniques rather than copying specific content.

It absolutely makes sense. How can copyright protect something that isn’t copied? How can the use of a copyright text as nothing more than a reference and a style guide be illegal in any way? And as I have pointed out repeatedly, an author’s literary style cannot be protected given the “look-and-feel” decision in favor of Microsoft when Apple tried to protect its graphic user interface.

“Legal experts expect the decision to be appealed.”

That’s not going to happen. They simply don’t have a case, and Alsup is a smart, thoughtful judge who knows what he’s doing when he writes his decisions. He’s the judge whose decision prevented corporations from indefinitely delaying their responses to the arbitrations their terms of use required.

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Abandon the Platforms

YouTube has adopted a strategy of slow strangulation of popular channels of which it does not approve.

YouTuber Jeremy Hambly, known as The Quartering, has revealed the devastating impact YouTube’s algorithm manipulation is having on his channel, exposing a coordinated soft censorship campaign targeting creators who challenge progressive narratives. His breakdown of the platform’s systematic suppression demonstrates how Big Tech companies are weaponizing their algorithms to silence dissenting voices without the transparency of outright bans.

“I don’t know if many of you have noticed, but I’ve been a lot more shifty and weird breathing lately,” Hambly admitted in his recent video. “And it’s because I’m having near-daily anxiety. There’s been something going on with my YouTube channel over the past couple of weeks that I have been spending almost every single night trying to figure out.”

The numbers tell a stark story of algorithmic manipulation. Hambly explained how “over the past several weeks I have noticed videos that used to get 50, 60, 70, 80,000 views were starting to get 10,000 views, 15,000 views.” This dramatic drop isn’t due to content quality or audience interest – it’s the result of YouTube’s deliberate throttling of channels that don’t align with the platform’s ideological preferences.

Even more concerning is the subscriber hemorrhaging Hambly has experienced. “For the first time in three or four years, I have started losing a lot of subscribers. Hundreds, thousands a day,” he revealed. This pattern suggests YouTube isn’t just limiting video reach but actively manipulating subscription feeds and notifications to starve channels of their established audiences.

The financial impact has been severe enough to threaten Hambly’s entire operation. “These numbers are if it continued like this past these two weeks, which it has been, I would have to fire everybody that works for me. Everybody,” he explained. This reveals YouTube’s soft censorship strategy – rather than creating martyrs through outright bans, they slowly strangle channels economically until creators are forced to change their content or abandon the platform entirely.

We’re now laying the foundation for the 4th Stage of UATV, which will be the best, strongest, and most stable yet. I alluded to a few of our plans for the next stage in last night’s Darkstream, but you’ll see the new features and content being added gradually over the summer.

And in the meantime, be sure to tune into the Big Bear and Dark Lord show tonight at 7 PM Eastern.

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Iran Has Nukes

Let me get this straight. Atomic/Nuclear weaponry has supposedly been around since 1945. It’s very old, very basic technology that has been acquired by countries as underdeveloped as India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Israel.

Hypersonic missiles are so technologically advanced and difficult to manufacture that only four countries in the world have deployed them: China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran. The USA hasn’t successfully developed one yet, neither have Japan, France, or the UK.

And yet, we’re supposed to believe that Iran doesn’t already possess nuclear warheads to install on those hypersonic delivery systems?

I don’t buy it. If nuclear weaponry actually exists – and there is very good reason to doubt that it does – then Iran has it. If Iran doesn’t have it, then no one does because it doesn’t actually exist. The fact that nuclear weapons have been held over humanity’s collective heads for generations and used to justify globalist organizations for decades is sufficient reason for them to have been among the foremost myths perpetrated by Clown World.

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Your Own Private AI

Markku has helpfully instructed the good people of AI Central on how to set up your own local version of Deepseek, thereby permitting you to control the data being utilized by it.

Until recently, training an AI on a set of research data has been so resource-intensive that it has been entirely out of reach for home users even for smaller (“distilled”) models intended for ordinary gaming computers. However, these days there is a methodology called Retrieval-Augmented Generation, RAG for short, that can achieve something very close to the effect of training in a relatively tiny portion of the time. The trade-off is that the understanding of the data is not as deep, and the data has to be processed every time the AI is launched.

With an average gaming PC with an NVIDIA GPU that’s in the RTX 3000 -series or newer, you can expect it to spend about 10 minutes, assuming you use a modest 7 billion parameter model. Parameters can be thought of as virtual brain cells. With a better computer, 14 billion is also realistic, especially if you are asking just a few but important questions. Since you are having the AI focus on a set of data that is extremely limited compared to cloud-based AI’s, the normally expected half trillion parameter counts aren’t important. You need them only when the AI has to essentially know the entire contents of the internet. For one set of books, 7 to 14 billion is sufficient. If you choose to get serious about using a locally installed AI, then you’d install it on a dedicated Linux server and keep it constantly running, which mitigates the problem to essentially zero.

It’s not for everyone, to be sure. Not yet, anyhow. But I’m sure there are a few hardcore programmers here who are more than up to the challenge, if interested.

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