Posts by I ain't Spartacus

It's a bit like using Wikipedia, or even Google search. If you already have a good deal of subject knowledge, they're a good resource to quickly check something, because you'll probably recognise if it's wrong. So it's more a memory aid than anything. But even there, if it really matters, you need to check properly with multiple sources.

if you don't have the right subject knowledge, you have to faff around finding the correct search terms, before you get a result, and then you've not sure how accurate it is, or if it's missing key data, and so you have to find more sources. Which, to be fair, Wiki can often be a good place to find some good starting sources (if you're careful).

So if you know what you're doing, you can direct AI - and generate good prompts, and so have a chance of getting useful outputs. But then you have to check everything, as it's got a habit of inventing stuff. And this is where the problem is - humans are bad at checking. If you have to do data entry it's much quicker and more accurate to enter it all twice, and compare the two to find errors, than it is to enter it once and check it thoroughly. You're slower checking than re-entering, and will miss stuff in checking anyway.

This makes LLM output most useful for people who already have the knowledge - at which point it has to be quick enough to justify them just not doing the job themselves. There's already work you'd like to farm off to an assistant, but can't, because it takes longer to explain to them, than to do it yourself. And if it takes an unknown number of prompts to get a reasonable output and you have to then check it - you could be onto a losing proposition.

It's no coincidence that half of Iran's name is AI. The war in Iran is looking like it's going to cause at least a mild global recession, and that's going to pop the AI bubble by the Summer, as interest rates go up and $600 billion of speculative investment suddenly looks a lot riskier. Especially as the energy use is so vast, just as the global LNG market is grinding to a halt.

A correction has obviously been coming to the AI market - it makes no money and costs fortunes, so things were bound to shake out dot.com bust stylee, but as Trump Leeroy Jenkins-es into Iran with no plan to keep the global energy markets going - suddenly that correction is looking pretty immediate.

As the famous quote says, "economists have predicted 20 of the country's last 3 recessions". But this really does look likely now. Wonder if people like Larry Ellison might end up regretting backing Trump?

Some of the LLM graphics tools are pretty amazing. And can be used by normal users to generate quick art that wouldn't be possible without someone with some talent. I wouldn't want to use it for the main marketing or anything, and you need to check that your pictures have come out right and don't have 7 fingers or 3 legs, but for someone to bang out some quick art for a presentation or a poster or something, it's quite good. Although I don't know how many times you have to prompt and throw away the result, because the people saying how great it is don't tell you how many prompts it took to get anything useable. So when AI companies have to actually make profits, it could be that graphic designers might even be cheaper, but I've not tried so I don't know.

I had a meeting with marketing a couple of weeks ago. They'd generated a bunch of AI reports for us to use as guides to the Water Regulations, for me to comment on. We regularly publish this stuff, as it keeps the customers coming to us for advice, and hopefully buying our stuff. It's been an effective marketing tool we've used for 35 years now. But writing it is time consuming, seeing as it has to be correct. I was told they'd spent considerable time "prompt-engineering" and then produced utter gibberish. In my one test of Google, I gave a specific water regs related question and got a reasonable answer, that didn't quote its sources, but as a summary was longer than the section in the Water Regs it quoted from. Don't know where the extra info came from, but it was helpful more than accurate.

These marketing reports were total crap though. Not only did they get the subject matter wrong, but the structure was a fucking mess. The first page started with an "executive summary" which didn't actually summarise the report - had no actions to be taken (i.e. wasn't an executive summary) but was just some random intro text telling you that the Water Regs are important so you have to look at them. I suspect the marketing people got the prompts wrong, but that doesn't explain the report structure also being bollocks. But because they had no idea, they were pretty proud of their reports and would make a good skeleton to base the work on, whereas they just went in the recycling, as complete gibberish.

That's my limited experience with work AI. Doesn't encourage me to try more, but if I had to do basic art again, I'd definitely try it, rather than raiding the clip-art.

Re: Miss

Fuck knows what Trump thinks he's doing. Having kidnapped Maduro, ostensibly for shipping industrial quantities of Fentamyl into the US, he was immediately charged with... Checks notes: Cocaine smuggling. And Trump's plan apparently being to get the Venezuelan oil industry back up and running, is to leave the current regime in place, the ones that have nationalised bits of the oil industry without compensation, and then ask the US oil industry to invest $50 billion into doing it. At which meeting they said, thanks for the offer but no. I think the head of Exxon had already called Venezuela "Uninvestable" before Trump's special operation - so it's not like that wasn't predictable.

So we don't even know what his plan or intentions were for an operation that finished a month ago - we've no hope now.

My only inkling of an idea, is that Netenyahu is a lot more rational than Trump. It's a low bar I'm setting here... So I'd be assuming he had some sort of idea what he was doing? Though, saying that, there's still no plan for what to do about Gaza. Rubio claimed that the US went for strikes because Israel were going to do it anyway, and so they had to - given Iran were going to retaliate against them. Rubio is the most plausible of the lunatics running the asylum - so I suppose it's possible that's true? Although I find it hard to believe that a strong argument couldn't persuade Israel to allow a bit more time - and the US can always cut off spares and ammo, if they really want to control Israeli aggression. So that could be a straight out lie.

Or Israel could be telling the truth that they'd seen Iran trying to access the buried nuclear material and start work on building the bomb. They don't need as many centrifuges to get 60% uranium hexafluoride up to 80%, or as much time. Most of the hard work is already done. But having called Netenyahu more rational than Trump, I'm not sure he's any more truthful.

This whole situation has clusterfuck written all over it.

Re: Miss

For a third world theocracy Iran seems to be playing this a treat.

MaChatMaCoatGPT 2.0

Firstly, if you're the same person that your username implies, may I congratulate you on your choice of name upgrade pun. For it is truly puntastic.

However, for a regime that 2 years ago had proxies all across the region, all armed with large stockpiles of missiles, and where they'd successfully deterred kinetic attacks on their nuclear weapons program for 2 decades, I'd not call this situation "playing it well". Particularly as large numbers of the people who made the decisions that led Iran to this place are now singing with the choir invisibule. Or more likely given the things they've done, in the other place - burning away merrily.

The point about deterrence, is to deter before the attack, and not to be making threats you're increasingly unable to credibly make happen. I don't know if Iran authorised the Hamas October attack, but if they did it was a massive mistake. Compounded by throwing Hezbollah into it, and once both were mostly defeated, Iran needed to not double down on that strategy by launching a (in fact 2) direct missile attack(s) on Israel, but to recognise the new reality, back down a little, and maybe even make a deal.

I'm also not sure if normal deterrence works on someone like Trump, or any leader who doesn't like being told "no" or being exposed to the difficulties of reality. If you get someone who over-estimates their own abilities and is unable to predict easily foreseeable consequences - plus won't listen to those that can, then you have to be much more explicit with your deterrence, and make it credible, in ways that can't be ignored. But then Iran's leaders were equally unable to foresee obvious consequences, and now large numbers of them are dead, and their country is being bombed. And what led to this situation was them using scarce and precious water to grow crops, to the extent that they were themselves publicly discussing the possibility of having to evacuate their own capital city. And their response to protests was to shoot everyone, and hope for the best. So I hope they're toasty-warm, in whatever hell they believe in.

rg287,

I agree with the first part of your post, but I'm not sure I agree about banning dynamic pricing. While there are circumstances where it shouldn't be used, and we might want to legislate for those, there are also times when the consumer just has to accept that if the price is too high, they shouldn't buy.

If you've a commodity that can only take limited customers, say concert tickets or flights on planes, it's not unreasonable to try to get mucho money from people who want to go. And then to lower the prices later, if you've not been able to sell at top dollar. And then, in the case of airlines, to bilk the passenger who absolutely needs to fly somewhere tomorrow. This is basically rationing. The people who want it more, pay more. The people who are willing to go to any gig, or fly at any time, can wait until the last minute and then see what wasn't as much in demand and take that for cheap a few days before.

I used to regularly check Virgin Europe's site, when I lived in Brussels, and decide if I wanted to come back to Blighty for a weekend if there were cheap flights on the Thursday/Friday. Prices would hit the bottom about Monday, the time I had to get to a meeting the next morning I ended up paying £260 to get to London, while the couple in the next seats to me had paid £250 and were going all the way to LA.

However, I wouldn't allow this for trains, or other public transport, in the UK - as we want to reduce car use so shouldn't penalise people for not knowing where they're going in advance.

But I really don't see why anyone has an absolute right to a cheap Oasis ticket. Let Oasis take the reputational damage for pricing their fans out of tickets. That was a choice they made, though they denied it - and even then there are ways round it - to let fans with less money have a fair crack of the whip. Many UK attractions have Universal Credit tickets available for £1 (you have to prove your entitlement), for example. Manchester United used to have a scheme where you could queue up on a Tuesday morning to buy discounted tickets for Old Trafford matches, to guarantee that local supporters could get in, when prices suddenly jumped up to £70. Bet they don't do it now. Most football clubs limit scarce Cup and European ticket sales to people who've got season tickets or have bought a certain number of tickets in the last season, so the "real fans" get first dibs on the limited resource.

If more consumers would just say no, we'd do better. Look at Walker's crisps. They used to cost about 20% more than supermarket own brand. In the last ten years, when inflation has probably averaged 5%, they've gone from £1 for a 6 pack to £2.50 - at time when the supermarkets have gone from 80p to £1.20. That's a 250% rise against a 50% rise. Supermarket ones are of a similar quality nowadays, if we all made that switch, then they'd learn a lesson and take less outrageous profits. But I don't think we should legislate for it. How do you define quality? Are Apple 3 times better than Nothing Phone, or Google Pixel twice as good? I didn't think so, and got the cheaper phone. But the camera really isn't as good, although it's no worse than the cheaper Pixel models.

I'm all for better consumer information. Martin Lewis is bloody brilliant, for example. But I also think we should be responsible for our choices and we should only legislate where market power trumps consumer power. Or where a sports stadium is charging a week's salary for water, but won't let you bring your own.

Re: RFI?

Quick answer to my post, to add a thing I forgot. The RN have ordered the Schiebel Peregrine, a small drone scout helicopter and the Malloy T-150 drone for moving cargo between ships. Both could be used to carry some kind of anti-drone drone, or operate and/or Martlet or Seastreak (Starstreak and Martlet share a common launcher).

Both are in small-scale operation now.

Re: Martlet

Anon,

Funny theory: All modern ones use optic fibre for control signals and they can't 'jam' those.

Apart from the radio and satellite controlled ones you mean. Or the semi or fully autonomous ones. You can't have it both ways. You can't have un-jammable drones that also cost £100. Your swarms get smaller, as you increase the cost of your drones. Your swarms also get smaller as they approach a warship fitted with a medium sized medium range gun with explosive ammunition, 2 5-10km range 30-40mm guns with smaller explosive rounds - all of which can be guided by radar and/or thermal sighting systems - followed by 20mm close in weapons using radar guided 20mm shells.

That's a lot of lead going downrange. Not to mention the ship is equipped with chaff, various other decoys, and the ability to create a smokescreen, which it can see through.

Hundreds of small quadcopters will be very vulnerable to electronic warfare. They will show up on decent radar, and they will also show up on thermal imagining, even if they're hard to track visually. That's what electro-optical means, both visual and IR spectrum and ships have IRST (infra-red search and track). In fact that's how the Danish Iver Huitfeldt shot down incoming Houthi drones when their radar and missile management system fatally disagreed with each other last year - they switched to IRST and did it that way, with guns.

Also, quadcopters are very small, and very short ranged. Ships are relatively fast and live in the sea, which is quite big. So they're only really a threat around ports and choke-points.

The bigger threat is larger, more capable, drones. More expensive means smaller swarms. Which makes them easier to deal with.

Re: RFI?

Simple: Because their short list is literally empty: No-one is selling such systems

The US are already deploying a system called Coyote to their destroyers, llinky to Wiki page. It's already been deployed by the US army and marines, but I'm guessing has to be navalised.

They're also waiting on Anduril to deliver an upgrade / replacement called Roadrunner - which the US Navy may also have ordered, or be about to order?

Re: RFI?

Could you then please explain why the Navy is requesting an anti-drone system for it's ships with such a short desired delivery time, as the article covers?

Pete Sdev,

It's all down to cost and range. This system is not primarily designed to defend the ship itself. The ships already have 3 or 4 different types of guns that can engage drones, they're procuring Dragonfire for extra pew-pew and they have electronic warfare systems and decoys. But all of that good stuff only defends a small bubble around the ship. Say 10km around you. Fine if you're in convoy or a naval task group, but bugger-all use if you get a call from an oil tanker 50 miles away that's under attack.

Sea Ceptor (CAMM) is reasonably cheap, more expensive than Shahed, but close enough. But that's not going further than 30km. Your helicopter can deploy with Martlet, but it can only stay on station for a limited time. That leaves only 2 systems available to the Navy. If carrier present, put up an F-35. If not, Type 45 has Sea Viper (Aster 30) - which can reach out to around 100km. But they're bloody expensive, and you don't want to use them on cheap crap drones - or even medium price ones. They're for cruise missiles and ballistic missiles.

Hence they want drone interceptors, or something like. That can extend the bubble of protection that the ship can exert over the horizon and out to 50-100km. Or in the case of Type 45 (which can already do that) - do so at a much cheaper cost. We used Aster/Sea Viper against Shaheds while fighting the Houthis and other navies used SM2s and the like for similar purposes, in order to expensively defend other ships at distances their guns couldn't reach. That's $1-3m SAMs against $100k drones, not a good swap.

Re: You owe me a new keyboard!

Wellyboot,

While I agree with you that Type 31 should have 3 x 40mm, maybe even 4 (to account for failures), you should also remember that they're equipped with 2 x Phalanx 20mm as well. Plus they also have several .50 browning heavy machineguns - but I don't know if they've got the anti-drone sights for those. Plus they should get Dragonfire as well. And CAMM / Sea Ceptor is cheap enough that firing it at Shahed drones is a reasonable thing to do - which you might do if there's lots of them. Also Sea Ceptor minimum engagement range is only 1,000m - so you can even afford to fire at a bunch of drones, knowing you can lob missiles at them if they start getting uncomfortably close.

I also think we should equip the Navy with Martlet and Starstreak (Seastreak apparently has been designed but we didn't buy it).

Re: Simple answer

Kevin Johnston,

The RN have already got either 30mm (Type 23, Type 45, carriers and Type 26) or 40mm on Type 31. I believe they all also have Phalanx. Which is a bit short range for modern fast missiles, but pretty good for the slower drones. Plus they all have heavy machinegun mounts, and at least some of them have automatically operated ones as well.

This program is not about self-defence. The ships can already do that. It's about long range anti-drone systems, so that air defence ships can protect a wide area, i.e. a convoy, base, shipping choke-point or whatever. Hence they're asking for systems that range out anywhere from 25km to 150km.

Even the 40mm guns are only effective to 5-10km from the ship. The surface to air missiles go much further, but cost a lot - and this is about shooting down drones, so you don't have to waste an expensive SAM on a cheap target.

Re: Martlet

The RN have chosen Dragonfire to fit to our warships. The US Navy have gone the Microwave route. At which point you simply switch on the giant microwave and 1,000 drones fall out of the sky. It may be that the US got that decision right, as our army look to be deploying both.

However, the radar on Type 45 can independently track 1,000 targets. Modern radars are also backed by computers, so you can also set your target discrimination higher, so that it will ignore targets doing less than say 50mph. That takes your £100 drones out of the equation, so you can look at which ones you have to worry about. Admittedly, ships with less capable radars will be easier to overwhelm., but drones aren't magic. There are many counters to them, those counters can be layered, and the cheaper the drones you use, the less effective they are.

The Royal Navy specialise in electronic warfare, in a way I think our army and air force miss out on. So they could also jam the control signals to those £100 drones at a decent distance, and again, only then have to concentrate on any more capable ones.

Not that I'm saying this is all going to work perfectly. You only find that out when you get into combat. But the Navy have been in combat a bit with the Houthis, and have exercised and trained against this threat for over a decade. They're not looking for a self-defence device here, they seem to think they've got that covered. What they're looking for is something for area defence, to protect ships and installations that they're guarding or convoying.

Re: Martlet

TDog,

A Shahed drone is estimated to cost anywhere from £30-£100,000 a pop. So the same as a Martlet.

You can't easily sink a warship with a £100 drone. They don't have the range, they don't have the payload, and they can easily have their control-signals jammed.

The Mavic drones used at the beginning of the Ukraine war, weren't even all that effective then. They were just what people had. They're now much less frequently used, and drones are much more expensive than that. They're either using Starlink terminals for comms, or fibre-optic cable, or they're semi-automatic. Otherwise they'd be jammed. You also need a bigger payload to carry your sensors and warhead.

Normal front-line drones cost thousands. As you make the drone's job harder, you increase the cost you have to pay in order to be effective, and by doing so you make allow more options for interception that are now financially viable.

This is little to do with Ukraine. They've been building drone defences into their ships for years now. This is what Dragonfire, Phalanx, and the 30mm and 40mm quick-firing radar and electro-optical guided medium guns the Navy have already put on their ships are already for. Or ordered as soon as the R&D was finished, in the case of Dragonfire.

This is designed to protect a much bigger bubble around the ship - but without using expensive surface to air missiles. Because the ships can already defend themselves from Houthi or Iranian drones and missiles - and have been able to for years. But in the Red Sea crisis over the last couple of years, they were having to use their top-of-the-line SAMs against cheap drones, because their cheap SAMs only have limited range. And you don't want to be spending £2-10m on a round to destroy a Shahed - but may have to if you're defending a tanker 100 miles away.

One option, as stated in the article, is to put up Wildcat. Which can carry 20 Martlets, that are an excellent and proven anti-drone weapon, and only cost about £50k each - so pretty much the same as a Shahed. But that requires keeping your helicopters on station for a long time, which is only practical if you know the attack is coming.

Hence this RFI to use tech that didn't exist until last year, things such as drone interceptors, that are being built for Ukraine. If you can get loitering ones, you can send them out in patrols, returning them to the ship and recharging them as you put other ones up. And maintain a combat air patrol of drones.

One option might be to have some of them in deck mounted containers that you can load onto your merchant ships as they go through the Red Sea or Straits of Hormuz - and have them controlled remotely by a defending warship, that way you can use the fancy radars and computers on the warship, that would be too expensive to put on the merchant ships, but give them cheap self-defence drones with a small maintenance crew that they can drop off at an assigned safe port, where the next ship can take them on. This means the slow drones will already be in the combat zone. So your warships don't have to be everywhere at once.

Re: RFI?

Yeah, you'd think that they've thought about drone defense already, at least since the drone-dominated Ukraine war got under way.

Generals (and Admirals apparently) are always preparing to fight the previous war....

For fuck's sake! The design requirements for Type 31 were to be able to shoot down large numbers of swarming drones. And that was ordered in 2019! So 3 years before Ukraine was invaded - and therefore the design requirements finalised years before that! That's why it was armed with 2 x 40mm and 1 x 57mm guns - rather than a bigger 155mm main gun (5") - so that it could deal with large numbers of swarming drones.

Plus they've been working on Dragonfire for literally decades. Type 45 has just been updated with cheaper Sea Ceptor missiles, for shooting down cheaper targets at closer ranges and they've trialled a ship-launched Martlett system, which sadly did too much damage to other deck-mounted items and so would need a major re-design. Speculation was that this was because they tried to mount it to an existing 30mm mount - because then it could be cheaply retrofitted - rather than requiring a complex design for a whole new mount that would then need serious dock time to install all the required power and comms connections.

They've also built a drone training centre off the coast of Wales where they lob various flavours of drones at RN (and other NATO) ships, to see how they coat.

I know it's fashionable to pretend to be all-knowing, and that other people must be stupid for not be as wise as yourself. But a few minutes of research would show all this stuff up. The leadership of various NATO militaries have been regularly banging on about the future of drones in warfare for at least 15 years now.

Jellied Eel,

The biggest risk is still drones with relatively small warheads.

The Iranian air force isn't in any state to chuck around 1,000lb bombs. Short range ballistic missiles can be intercepted by even quite old SAMs - and have big enough warheads (and are expensive enough) that they're worth intercepting - where drones are more numerous and cheap. The Intermediate range ballistic missiles are bloody expensive, as are the interceptors, and they're also the easiest to track and destroy on the ground. There's also cruise missiles, but those can be intercepted by aircraft as well as SAMs.

You can't really harden against ballistic missiles and large cruise missiles, but you can shoot at lot of them down, and it's financially worth doing. But you can try to harden against drones, at least to the extent that you can mitigate the damage relatively cheaply. And if you force the drone payload and capabilities to be increased, then that turns them from cheap drones into expensive drones, or even cruise missiles, which cost a lot more and so the enemy can't afford as many.

It's an underappreciated strategy to make the job of drones significantly harder, forcing them to be improved to the extent that they're no longer cheap-as-chips, and so the enemy can't afford to have as many.

Re: Digital currency

Doctor Syntax,

Thanks for that, I've been too lazy to read into this, as I both didn't understand what they were trying to do or see much progress, to make it worth looking up.

In 2000, my Belgian debit card had a little extra chip on it. This was for a digital currency. You could load it up at a cash machine (money would leave your account and go onto the card), and then use it to make small payments at small shops, as I guess it was cheaper for them than cash, credit card or debit card fees. I think it could hold up to €20 at the time, (but this is a quarter of a century ago) - and then if you used it in one of the Bancontact terminals that was the most money you could lose. Bancontact also handle their version of pay-by-bonk (as contactless used to be known on El Reg), and also a QR code based payments system with smartphone apps. A quick Google seems to not show the chip being there any more, but I haven't lived there in years, I don't remember seeing many people use the chip thing, so I didn't bother.

It looks to me like the Bank of England are just doing their job of studying everything, so they've had projects on crypto (and how to handle it), blockchain for settlements and things like inter-bank lending backed by assets (where you have a blockchain so people can't borrow against the same asset multiple times). Plus they've looked at retail digital currency, which could be anything from a replacement for the US based VISA and Mastercard to a ledger-based system.

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

Jellied Eel,

"The lesser Satan" was mostly the Soviet Union in Iran-revolutionary-government speak. Israel are the "Little Satan" apparently. Although a quick Google suggests that Iranian government propaganda isn't entirely consistent on this, and that the UK has occasionally been promoted to "Great Satan", but us and the French also sometimes have to languish as "lesser satans" as well.

Re: Just Weird

Bebu sa Ware,

I'm pretty sure that the Iran / Scottish Nationalist Twitter thing is true. As you say, not exactly big news, but the Iranian government have invested a lot in cyber and intelligence. Admittedly if they'd spent more on counter-intelligence then Israel wouldn't have blown up their air defence command on day one of the last war, and their Supreme Leader on day one of this war...

Various security researchers have commented on it, and it seems to be that they've got a lot of bots involved.

It's a pretty rubbish investment, but the Iranian government have been blowing tons of cash on pointless stuff, like giving ballistic missiles to Hezbollah and pissing around with Scottish politics (not to mention the billions invested in nuclear posturing and damage from sanctions) - which is why they've got a water crisis, economic crisis and large chunk of their population that would like to get rid of them.

Re: "the good sense to leave the US & Israel to slog it out"

Keith already managed to get the UK involved

Surely Iran managed that? We had stayed out of it, not allowing the US to use UK bases, until Iran attacked our base in Cyprus - at which point Starmer allowed bases to be used to hit missile sites.