There’s a lot of strife inside the tech world from people who work for both big multinationals and startups, over their company’s continued dealing with Israel, and especially so with their armed forces. It’s not well covered, because tech journalism is - frankly very corporate friendly - because it relies on access to sources, and so is very subject to access journalism that self-censors and chills dissent or criticism.

Someone who joined on to work on population mapping for vaccine coverage planning, or a cloud service engineer, may strongly object to their work being contorted and sold off to enable and supercharge a genocide.

Fly high = very, very easy to spot for active radar and passive sensors. Which is why almost everything that isn’t yeeting glide-kit dumbbombs from half a country away, flys incredibly low. Like “scraping the trees” low, because hiding among the EM backscatter makes evading airborne sensors like AWACS or interceptor jets easier, and ground radar has a real hard time with that whole curvature of the earth thing.

So the Shaheds are going to be under 100m AGL elevation, which means the AA gun trucks and airburst-flak are the answer for Ukraine - so the counter is back to either dodging bullets, or dodging the defender’s location . The old Shaheds don’t, they blithely soak up Ukrainian gunfire without reaction before blowing up. These new AI powered models represent a big jump in credibility.

Swarming. Especially in areas denied by electronic warfare. Currently the Shaheds are built for cost (and sanctions) reasons, and are ‘dumbfired’ at coordinates/an object. GPS and inertial navigation fly towards the target, but it doesn’t make any decisions. Launch, set orientation, hit waypoint, next orientation, next waypoint, repeat until final attack phase.

What it can’t do is react. To anything: bad weather, Ukrainian EW/air defense, tall trees or buildings, other aircraft nearby, etc they just fly along their pre-programmed flight plan, providing any defenders with a predictable heading and airspeed to intercept and shoot at.

Add onboard autonomous AI and Russia has a lot more options.

• The camera sees/microphone heard a bunch of tracer bullets flying past? Start evasive maneuvering, diving and changing speed. Much harder to hit an approaching/leaving aircraft that is also changing speed and/or direction.
• Other Shaheds launched earlier are getting signal loss from EW or shot down? The remaining craft can send and receive that info to all the others, and re-route the pack around that area of air defense.
• Image recognition of high value targets like HIMARS or Patriot/IRIS-T allows the Shaheds to immediately ditch their pre-programmed mission, and all focus fire on that newly discovered target instead of the original hospital or apartment building that Russia was targeting.
• Data sharing among Shaheds in flight can allow more efficient use, so instead of committing a dozen or so Shaheds to a single target like a military command post to ensure at least a few get through air defense and hit it, now they can communicate if it actually has been hit or not, and refocus/divert the remaining Shaheds in that wave.

Essentially think of it as the difference between the dumbest box of rocks AI in a video game that doesn’t react, versus going player versus player online.

It’s unbelievably hot when you’re getting blown with enthusiasm though… Slurping away like my dick is the last ice cream cone they had at the store during an August heatwave is sublime, even a mid grade delivery gets upgraded when it’s clearly desired instead of a choice or foreplay obligation.

During COVID when nobody able to spray for mosquitoes there was a really cool resurgence - even in the suburbs. Came home from a bicycle ride late one evening, and swear every tree had Christmas lights strung up, they were chilling out and just glimmering in every branch.

I pushed the bike home that night and watched the show in the trees, a lovely coda to the day

Proper scran, that