4 ms·

I would be shocked if their R&D isn't far ahead of what they share publicly. We've seen in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia that drones have b

by aggie 6y ago

I would be shocked if their R&D isn't far ahead of what they share publicly. We've seen in the recent conflict between Azerbaijan and Armenia that drones have become a major factor in modern battlefields. And not just surveillance, as the article talks about, but essentially as affordable missiles. At least there's an obvious civilian benefit from this work.

lallysingh 6y ago
I wouldn't be. AFAICT all the classified stuff in most defense systems is usually applications of existing technology. Classified R&D is large-D, small-R. They only get significantly ahead of the industry when nobody else is doing research. Such as when the only applications or scientific value is in warfighting.
- RealityVoid 6y ago
  Cryptography is a good counter to your claim.
  - Vervious 6y ago
    Maybe historically, before the public even had computers, but do you have anything to support your claim for cryptography in the modern era?
    - RealityVoid 6y ago
      Historically is exactly what I was referring to. I do not have anything to support this for the modern era nor am I certain this still holds now.
      - lallysingh 6y ago
        It hasn't been true for over 20 years. If it were, the NSA would've done a much better job backdooring crypto [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
- derefr 6y ago
  Sometimes "nobody is commercializing the research" can look a lot like "nobody is doing research." In holography, for example—no civilian market demand, so even in academia, the researchers tend to retread the same ground, "forgetting" all the existing research, because there are no productized civilian applications around to remind them that X/Y/Z can already be assumed.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    How do those papers pass peer review if they're "forgetting" existing research?
    - derefr 6y ago
      It’s less that they’re explicitly doing the same thing while not citing existing research; and more that they’re constantly inventing new and different ways to do foundational things, rather than taking some of the things that have already been proven to work and “moving up the tech tree” to doing more interesting things. (Imagine if you will: everyone constantly doing research into new lightbulb technologies — so we’d get the LED a century sooner! — but nobody ever researching the implications of evacuated incandescent bulbs [vacuum tubes! CRTs!], nor into the implications of miniaturizing/printing LEDs, etc.) It’s kind of like where fusion research and ML research were during their “dark decades” — everybody doing breadth-first searches of the possibilities, nobody digging much deeper into the implications of research that showed promise. In all three cases, it’s because it’s hard to model those implications without a real experimental prototype; and because, in all three cases, costs to do real experiments (for reactors; for training datasets; etc.) shoot up exponentially as you “go deeper” — as you need to do those experiments in the context of a working example of everything you know so far. The true issue is one of team size dynamics. Particle physics has figured this out: to continue foundational research, you need a few large teams with huge grants/budgets (to build particle accelerators), rather than many small teams (that can’t individually afford to build particle accelerators.) But other fields haven’t managed to have the same epiphany, and so in those fields, small teams just continue to explore the parts of knowledge-space they can “reach” with a small team — which isn’t really too productive. (ML got going again because large companies figured out basic research into ML could be a loss-leader for renting out time on specialized ML-accelerator hardware. Nuclear science never slowed down, because governments were doing the basic research with huge teams+budgets from the start. Etc.)
- mr_overalls 6y ago
  Materials research is an exception to your claim. Aviation and weapons research depend heavily on exotic materials that are almost certainly NOT found in civilian applications. E.g. nuclear weaponry, stealth coatings, metamaterials cloaking devices, camera systems, hypersonics, directed energy weaponry, plasma generators, etc.
  - lallysingh 6y ago
    You> Aviation and weapons research depend heavily on exotic materials that are almost certainly NOT found in civilian applications Me> They only get significantly ahead of the industry when nobody else is doing research.
    - jbay808 6y ago
      Nitinol and Terfenol-D are two good examples of military-developed materials that have broad commercial applications today.
jbay808 6y ago
I'd believe that it is, but why would they publicize that they've unlocked "the secret to quieter drones" if that were a classified development? Even if they can't say that "the secret is to change the fans like so", they'd at least say "thanks to this work, the latest drone prototypes are now half as loud as the old ones" or something to indicate the progress. If the fact that a noise reduction was achieved was itself classified, then the headline would trumpet an advance in computer modelling, which is what the article actually talks about.
- kube-system 6y ago
  > I'd believe that it is, but why would they publicize that they've unlocked "the secret to quieter drones" if that were a classified development? Marketing. For a potential adversary to gain useful knowledge from this article, they'd need some numbers to understand the extent of the capability. They're not learning much from "we're using computers to make shit better", they already know that. It is not uncommon for the military to publicly announce something, yet keep the specs a closely guarded secret.

by aggie 6y ago

lallysingh 6y ago

I wouldn't be. AFAICT all the classified stuff in most defense systems is usually applications of existing technology. Classified R&D is large-D, small-R. They only get significantly ahead of the industry when nobody else is doing research. Such as when the only applications or scientific value is in warfighting.

RealityVoid 6y ago
Cryptography is a good counter to your claim.
- Vervious 6y ago
  Maybe historically, before the public even had computers, but do you have anything to support your claim for cryptography in the modern era?
  - RealityVoid 6y ago
    Historically is exactly what I was referring to. I do not have anything to support this for the modern era nor am I certain this still holds now.
    - lallysingh 6y ago
      It hasn't been true for over 20 years. If it were, the NSA would've done a much better job backdooring crypto [1] [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_EC_DRBG
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
derefr 6y ago
Sometimes "nobody is commercializing the research" can look a lot like "nobody is doing research." In holography, for example—no civilian market demand, so even in academia, the researchers tend to retread the same ground, "forgetting" all the existing research, because there are no productized civilian applications around to remind them that X/Y/Z can already be assumed.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  How do those papers pass peer review if they're "forgetting" existing research?
  - derefr 6y ago
    It’s less that they’re explicitly doing the same thing while not citing existing research; and more that they’re constantly inventing new and different ways to do foundational things, rather than taking some of the things that have already been proven to work and “moving up the tech tree” to doing more interesting things. (Imagine if you will: everyone constantly doing research into new lightbulb technologies — so we’d get the LED a century sooner! — but nobody ever researching the implications of evacuated incandescent bulbs [vacuum tubes! CRTs!], nor into the implications of miniaturizing/printing LEDs, etc.) It’s kind of like where fusion research and ML research were during their “dark decades” — everybody doing breadth-first searches of the possibilities, nobody digging much deeper into the implications of research that showed promise. In all three cases, it’s because it’s hard to model those implications without a real experimental prototype; and because, in all three cases, costs to do real experiments (for reactors; for training datasets; etc.) shoot up exponentially as you “go deeper” — as you need to do those experiments in the context of a working example of everything you know so far. The true issue is one of team size dynamics. Particle physics has figured this out: to continue foundational research, you need a few large teams with huge grants/budgets (to build particle accelerators), rather than many small teams (that can’t individually afford to build particle accelerators.) But other fields haven’t managed to have the same epiphany, and so in those fields, small teams just continue to explore the parts of knowledge-space they can “reach” with a small team — which isn’t really too productive. (ML got going again because large companies figured out basic research into ML could be a loss-leader for renting out time on specialized ML-accelerator hardware. Nuclear science never slowed down, because governments were doing the basic research with huge teams+budgets from the start. Etc.)
mr_overalls 6y ago
Materials research is an exception to your claim. Aviation and weapons research depend heavily on exotic materials that are almost certainly NOT found in civilian applications. E.g. nuclear weaponry, stealth coatings, metamaterials cloaking devices, camera systems, hypersonics, directed energy weaponry, plasma generators, etc.
- lallysingh 6y ago
  You> Aviation and weapons research depend heavily on exotic materials that are almost certainly NOT found in civilian applications Me> They only get significantly ahead of the industry when nobody else is doing research.
  - jbay808 6y ago
    Nitinol and Terfenol-D are two good examples of military-developed materials that have broad commercial applications today.

jbay808 6y ago

I'd believe that it is, but why would they publicize that they've unlocked "the secret to quieter drones" if that were a classified development? Even if they can't say that "the secret is to change the fans like so", they'd at least say "thanks to this work, the latest drone prototypes are now half as loud as the old ones" or something to indicate the progress. If the fact that a noise reduction was achieved was itself classified, then the headline would trumpet an advance in computer modelling, which is what the article actually talks about.

kube-system 6y ago
> I'd believe that it is, but why would they publicize that they've unlocked "the secret to quieter drones" if that were a classified development? Marketing. For a potential adversary to gain useful knowledge from this article, they'd need some numbers to understand the extent of the capability. They're not learning much from "we're using computers to make shit better", they already know that. It is not uncommon for the military to publicly announce something, yet keep the specs a closely guarded secret.