You don't get to bang on a screw and blame the hammer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

His videos on Euler's formula inspired me to make a silly toy so I could play with it myself.

https://gitlab.com/aprentic/complex-viz/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II

The magnets are almost certainly from China.

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).

"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.

Can you demonstrate a process that others can follow?

If "for me" is limited to some rich guy in the Netherlands, that doesn't solve the problem "for anyone else."

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".

While they satisfy the technical requirement of, "there exists an alternative" neither of them is generally available as a viable alternative to China.

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.

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.

Where are all the US and EU component factories?

On those specific parts:

Motors: T-Motor F90 1300KV - $119.60(incl shipping) + Tariff

ESC: Holybro Tekko32 F4 50A - $88.97(incl shipping) + Tariff

FC: Matek H743-SLIM V4 - £88.12(incl shipping + VAT) + Tariff

Radio: Radiomaster M2 $95.99(incl shipping + sales tax)

The FC was from a UK store but it originated in China. I already had the radio so I don't have current prices on it.

I'd love to find a list of vendors that have comparable parts, in stock, and without being insane multiples of those prices.

edit: formatting

Unless we go full evilmode and just run them with slave labor.