German company HIGHCAT is demonstrating its HMX fiber-optic drone in Ukraine this month. Now combat footage has emerged of what appears to be the first strikes by this type of weapon ... The controller can use an AI system heavier and more powerful than a drone could carry, taking advantage of high-resolution imagery to track and identify objects in real time. The cheap drone is expended but the expensive controller is reused for multiple strikes. Six months ago this technology was not even a rumor. Now it is on the open market and destroying targets.
I would say not really. This pretty much only fits the exact use case for its specific niche need. E.g. operating in RF adverse/non-recoverable environments. Otherwise it's a waste. So technically it's still not "popular" in the sense of general popularity. You're not going to see your general drone pilot rushing to put fiber optic on thier drone. This also isn't a new concept. Its the same thing as wire-guided missiles that have been around since WWII.
A lot of top comments from HN age badly or are just blatantly incorrect/false. People are captured in their own ideology which gets reinforced by the eco chamber effect here, and so refuse to acknowledge the possibility they might be wrong or that the real world is vastly different than the one in their eco chamber (like the fact that most of the world uses Windows).
Especially true for SW engineers and other privileged people (politicians are an even better example) who due to their high status and wealth assume that if they got a well paid job, then they must be super smart and right at any other topics or areas, and then end up shocked that their viewpoint gets demolished by the masses or by the end results down the line.
In a way it's like how democracy works: it doesn't matter what is right and what is wrong, the opinion that ends up denominating is what the the masses perceive as being right.
Is creation of an SEZ and causing a metro of 8 million people in about 40 years an exercise in government restraint/deregulation? The US has to make forward thinking, intentional decisions about the direction of the country, and so far it seems to be delegating direction to folks who mostly want their own enterprises to succeed.
Not sure if it is about regulations, companies are heavily regulated in their business scope and taxes (although taxes are low). It is more about internal competition maybe. Living in Shenzhen feels like a race to the bottom, involution[0] if you will. Unless you take part in the maelstrom, you are out. Practically this means to work 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for 200 dollars a month. How to compete against that?
That's not the reason why the guy in charge is being called a fascist, if you do believe so you ought to educate yourself instead because you do not understand what's happening, much less the criticism.
August 2024, commercial availability, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/08/20/russia...