There are two general cases where drones are useful (for combat, not just surveillance): Swarms and tactical/targeted strikes.

For a swarm? It is literally any other artillery barrage. You either find shelter or you die. It is just a case of the attackers spending a lot more money so that they don’t have easily detectable artillery pieces (or man portable mortars) to lug around

For targeted strikes? The advantage there is that quadrotors (et al) aren’t easily detectable by humans when they are high up in the air (shockingly easy for the kinds of mics that are already used to triangulate gunfire though… and there is some university research to amplify specific frequencies for “tactical” headphones). This means that an operator can essentially hover even 20-30 feet up above a target and then either drop the payload or fly it in.

At which point it is literally the same defense as mortars. The fancy kind of netting to reduce the effectiveness of airburst munitions (and prevent drones from reaching the juicy bit). Trenches/foxholes to minimize the damage caused by any one detonation. And… just closing the damned door on the APC.

What you are describing is something we mostly only see in video games and the Drone Racing League. The idea that you get above your target, swoop down, and do a trench run through the hallways to get to your high value target.

First? That pretty much gets stopped immediately if people just close doors and windows.

But more importantly? You need to be a DAMNED good pilot to do that at speed so that you can’t be stopped in time. And you need ridiculously effective real time intel. Because if that HVT walked down the hallway to inappropriately flirt with Private Pyle? Your ace drone pilot is now blowing up a few random admins and not the Super General or whatever.

Which more or less becomes the same issues as mortars but with an added bit of snipers: “Important” people don’t stand near windows.

Drones, like mortars, are still pretty effective at harassing infantry and breaking up (poorly) entrenched positions. One of the most infamous examples of this is the Benghazi embassy attack. Most reports (so grain of salt) put the contractors as being REALLY good at shooting back. But when the attackers did a bit of math (allegedly weeks earlier…) and dropped mortars on their asses, it basically collapsed the defenses.

And… obviously drones are super effective at going after civilian targets. Same as mortars (or high angle grenade launchers, according to a certain nazi running for the Senate in Maine…).

But this is also something we “solved” back in World War 1 and 2. Which… is a big chunk of why the war in Ukraine is a lot closer to a WW2 battlefield than not.

And… people are now wondering just how fast Bitwarden can speedrun late stage capitalism with recent changes. And realizing just how much data Bitwarden Corp actually has.

We go through cycles of this. Company A is bad but Company B is good… and it is almost always based on marketing. Google used to be AMAZING because “do no evil” and “they gave me a bunch of gigs of email storage!”.

Hell, some of us might be old enough to remember when Spideroak was the bee’s knees and totally secure… until people started realizing there were issues with what they were saying. They have no copies of your encryption key… but you can recover your password. And then there was the brief debacle where people realized they could download any file they had the hash for. But hey, they weren’t Dropbox!

I don’t think a company being involved inherently makes it bad. I don’t even think a company that keeps keys on their servers are inherently bad. Data… gets murky but that is more because of the logistics of what that means for hosting and operating costs.

But it IS important to actually assess a product before using it and to understand the risks. Every year or so people lose their shit at Protonmail when they find out that, contrary to widespread belief, Proton Corp isn’t going to serve a century in a black site for their customers. And every single time, people point out that Proton never said they would. They are VERY upfront about what they do and don’t provide and… the reality is that most of the privacy oriented benefits of that service are in that they don’t require any kind of authentication to create an account. Which… is akward when you realize it is better to NOT pay if privacy is your concern.

But what makes a random start-up with no meaningful (professional) footprint “a more trusted option than Google”?

A “privacy product” inherently involves a lot of trust. When the creators are academics with little to no professional footprint, you need to assess things based on what information they do provide you. Whether that be code (yay open source) or customer interactions (forum posts).

I know we all yearn for the days of “Use Google. Their motto is ‘do no evil’ so you know they are our friends!”. But… that was a much stupider time.

Like, even if you suckle at the teat of Saint Capitalism, you should at least want a good product. And… this looks like enthusiast code with minimal maintainability but a heavy emphasis on marketing.

Never going to not smirk at the israelis getting an L.

But be wary of media coverage of these kinds of drones. If you listen to The News, they are the greatest paradigm shift ever and you should totally give the military industrial complex even more trillions of dollars to find a solution!

The reality is that they are a lot closer to mortars than not. Comparatively short range and low payload weapons that are ridiculously cheap. Against an entrenched position with minimal defenses, they are devastating. But, ironically, most of the same defenses against mortars apply here too. They just tend to be ridiculously effective in Ukraine due to a mix of propaganda and how incredibly undisciplined russian conscripts are (see also: the idiots falling off of aircraft carriers in the us military). And… we aren’t THAT far off of basically connecting small arms, sensors, and simple motors up to shoot drones out of the sky in areas where we don’t care about collateral damage from falling bullets.

Don’t get me wrong. Cheap drones have very much changed the battlefield. But… closer to “affordable” night vision gear equalizing things rather than the initial advent of (good) night vision gear basically turning rich (read: US) militaries into invisible killing machines.

Fair enough. I’ll still say that is bad engineering but acknowledge that starts to get into the realm of taste.

Either way, in the past 24 days you have MR commits on 8 of those and April looks similar. The code is generally poorly documented and skimming the closed MRs, I am not seeing much discussion or review in any of them. So I stand by

At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

From a quick glance at the repo?

The commits generally come hot and heavy. Going back to the earlier 2025 commits and the messages mostly look like what you would expect from folk raw dogging main. Arrdalan in particular looks “real”-ish. Whereas jkaczman is already showing signs of the kinds of commit messages that claude et al generate, but those ARE based off certain style guides.

Roll up to 2026 and I can see 11 commits on May 17 alone, they all look like claude messages, some are outright just arbitrarily changing magic hashes, and there are little to no comments.

Not gonna fully call this ai slop but, it is REAL flipping sus as it were. At best, this is enthusiast code without proper engineering and is immensely unmaintainable. Use at your own risk.

Like… I am not going to say I am NOT surprised.

But it really does make sense if you look at history as a whole. Catholicism has largely always been characterized by a religious third party meddling in politics, economics, and the legal system. When they have a critical mass of Believers, they are a force to be feared. When they don’t? They are a nagging voice that world leaders are expected to kiss the ring of.

In this case? Somehow the catholic church is NOT the most evil voice in the room which… is a whole level of fucked.

But England broke with the pope centuries ago. And people forget that the US was “founded” by protestants. Or that the country is basically controlled by evangelical christofacists (another flavor of protestants). Like… it is STILL a big deal that JFK was openly catholic.

So… in a lot of ways? This is one fallen empire that pissed away its soft power getting mocked by the figurehead of a falling empire that pissed away its soft power.

Pointing out that the US spends massive amounts of money on military spending is just a fact. https://www.nato.int/content/dam/nato/webready/documents/finance/def-exp-2025-en.pdf is the official NATO write up of this from last year and the only countries that outspend the US (as a percentage of their GDP) tend to be the countries that are where The War will kick off Poland) or… countries with other things going on

And keep in mind that is in terms of GDP percentages and how massive the US’s economy was for most of that period.

The “conservative” talking point is not: “The US spends money on war while the EU spends money on healthcare and actually giving a shit about its population”. It is “The US spends money on war so you should do whatever we want”. Its also worth understanding that The EU did not spend that money anywhere near that altruistically but it doesn’t change the situation that the EU/NATO finds itself in.

Because when that military is increasingly likely to be the aggressor? You need to rapidly start making guns and revisiting what is required of your populace. People have exploded over Germany recently more or less codifying a standing policy but… there is a reason politicians are looking at their conscription laws.

Look. We all live in a content bubble. But if you actually want to understand the world, rather than just get angry in ways that are convenient to influencers and politicians, actually look at statistics and respond to facts. Rather than getting pissy and screaming “fake news” because you don’t’ like what you saw.

Because, to be clear, I REALLY don’t fucking like how broken the US is because of how much it spends on the military.

Yes… I said that the US was the military might of NATO. I did not say that was the only reason we have a truly massive military.

If all you are able to do is build tangential strawmen then… do yourself a favor and just go post on chatgpt.

You talk about GDP percentage, as if every country had a similar GDP per capita, and could this afford to spend similarly

Where did I ever say this?

The reality is that the US had more then enough money to both fund its military and fund its social programs, but it chose to instead fund the military and the already wealthy.

Which changes absolutely nothing from the perspective of NATO

Not a one sided deal to the disadvantage of the US as Americans seem to be made believe by Trump and his oligarchy.

Where did I ever say this was a one sided deal?

If you think we ‘happened’ to keep a large standing army just because we were defending Europe.

Where did I ever say that?

Because, for decades prior, the US was the military of NATO. The US pumped massive percentages of its GDP into maintaining a standing military while most of NATO focused more on social programs with comparatively minimal military spending.

And threats like russia wouldn’t attack out of fear of having to fight said militarized nation. Whereas now there is a very clear window where the nations that might stand up against them are rebuilding. “Fortunately” russia is stretched pretty far by a failed invasion of Ukraine but… go read the wikipedia article on how their previous invasions of Ukraine went.

Welp. The Internet as a whole is real broken. But Lemmy is very rapidly taking the cake for THE place where you can never discuss anything and the only responses are people who are incapable of having a conversation and are just angry that you didn’t say what they wanted to hear.

Dead Internet Theory looking increasingly not that bad. Or, better yet, prioritizing different social media where people respond to each other rather than the voices in their own heads. Somehow… we managed to actually leap frog reddit on the way down?

A better approach is to always run any software like this in a container/VM.

For piracy this is particularly important as you can very easily set it up so that it can ONLY communicate over VPN. So if your VPN goes down, you stop sharing.

My “primary” is qbitorrent+gluetun over proton (port forwarding). For Soulseek I have that go over the same tunnel but don’t bother with port forwarding.

I do my nonsense on a server in my basement. But you can run a docker compose stack on a Windows desktop if you really want to.

Its one and the same.

They don’t have any more (or less) credibility than the us government has. If the Iranian regime says something about how the war is going, assume it is a lie by default.

It is just in this specific case, what they say tends to line up with what third parties are corroborating.

Again. Fascist regimes lie. They don’t HAVE credibility as a result. That doesn’t mean everything they say is a lie, but it does mean everything they say should be verified by third parties.

Nobody said they weren’t

Iran doesn’t have “much to gain” from insisting they defeated The Evil United States and that no matter what the US throws at them they won’t give up the Strait?

The US is still, technically, the muscle of The Western World… at least right now. Saying that you withstood them (and all signs are that Iran has) is a HUGE “win” for a regime. Both in terms of making sure the people who were rebelling a few months back know they have no hope and nobody will come to save them but also to look strong in case any of the other superpowers want to back them up as a puppet regime.

And a LOT of the claims the Iranian regime have made have been rather suspect over the course of this war. A lot of it is “fair” murkiness when things were even more chaotic. But even their recent missile attack in the Indian Ocean is a mess of carefully leaked verbiage as each side decides whether they want to call it a failed attack or a warning shot. And I want to say the US/Israel started as the former before pivoting to the latter to try to convince Europe to join them.

We are all aware Iran sucks, but you seem to be clinging to the “the USA is fighting for democracy” BS that was stale a decade ago

No. I am not. Again. It is incredibly obvious you view the world as good versus evil. You cannot look at an event without deciding who is the good guy and who is the bad guy and you ignore whatever facts get in the way of that. A LOT of people do that. It is a symptom of the infantilization of so much Western media. But that isn’t real life and all you are doing by the constant “gotta hand it to them” nonsense is literally caping for murderous bastards.

Because, like I said,

This is two evil fucking regimes going to war for no apparent reason.

There is no strawman. I was literally responding to

Iran has more credibility than the orange pedophile

In this specific situation? Iran’s official line is more likely to be correct. If we were to look at things tomorrow, that very well might flip around. If you consider being correct in the moment to be “credibility” then… you probably should reassess your decision making skills.

Regardless: To quote the great one

issuing correction on a previous post of mine, regarding the terror group ISIL. you do not, under any circumstances, “gotta hand it to them”

…

They are a regime that has imprisoned and murdered civilians by the thousands. They didn’t like TO YOU because you weren’t paying attention.

Look, I realize we all want clear good guys and bad guys. And your favorite influencers LOVE to play on that to get views for their twitch channels. But this isn’t even a case where “Well, Hamas does a lot of evil things but they are morally justified in my opinion”. This is two evil fucking regimes going to war for no apparent reason.

Trust third parties. Trust facts. Don’t trust fascist fucking dictators.