Butschi

Careful.  F-16s are no more of a magic bullet than the M1s/Challies/Leo2s. And they die a lot more visibly.

It's roughly the equivalent of the British Sun, mostly yellow Press.
The coverage of Ukraine has been much better than their usual "journalistic work", but still, they would happily invent or exagerate something for clickbait.  
I would not consider it trustworthy unless corroborated by other sources.

I guess one takeaway here should be that nowadays everyone and their dog does AI. It's not an arcane art anymore. You can just buy the stuff from various companies.
For the drone discussion, I think the middle one is most worth taking a look at: Identifying and tracking different types of objects. Looks great and very stable. Some caveats: As far as I understand the description, the algorithm runs offline, i.e. on pre-recorded sequences. In that case you have a more or less infinite computing budget and no latency restrictions. And still, if you take a close look at the cars taking the left turn on the left side, the tracking stops immediately once the car is occluded by a few leaves. The range is also not so great, tracking stops roughly under the bridge... at maybe 100m?
So, no chance to identify a tank a kilometer away partly hidden by bushes or trees. But, again, this video is old (2017) and we probably can do better today.

I finally managed to watch the video skim through the paper. For me, the really amazing thing is that the training happend completely in simulation but was applicable to a variety of real world environments. I guess more relevant for our discussion are a few caveats to note: This is not the average commercial drone but a custom made one. It has a downsized GPU (NVIDIA Jetson TX2) and a stereo video camera. The latter is necessary to get 3D information of the environment (what I said about mono video not having this information), the former in order to make the computation fast enough. This probably does not work on a mobile phone (our infamous five year old snapdragon). And, of course, this is "only" the navigation part. No target detection and tracking and whatever else we may come up with that our drone might need.
That said, the video is 3 years old, the hardware doesn't cost an arm and a leg and it is likely there have been improvements over time.

I finally managed to watch the video skim through the paper. For me, the really amazing thing is that the training happend completely in simulation but was applicable to a variety of real world environments. I guess more relevant for our discussion are a few caveats to note: This is not the average commercial drone but a custom made one. It has a downsized GPU (NVIDIA Jetson TX2) and a stereo video camera. The latter is necessary to get 3D information of the environment (what I said about mono video not having this information), the former in order to make the computation fast enough. This probably does not work on a mobile phone (our infamous five year old snapdragon). And, of course, this is "only" the navigation part. No target detection and tracking and whatever else we may come up with that our drone might need.
That said, the video is 3 years old, the hardware doesn't cost an arm and a leg and it is likely there have been improvements over time.

I finally managed to watch the video skim through the paper. For me, the really amazing thing is that the training happend completely in simulation but was applicable to a variety of real world environments. I guess more relevant for our discussion are a few caveats to note: This is not the average commercial drone but a custom made one. It has a downsized GPU (NVIDIA Jetson TX2) and a stereo video camera. The latter is necessary to get 3D information of the environment (what I said about mono video not having this information), the former in order to make the computation fast enough. This probably does not work on a mobile phone (our infamous five year old snapdragon). And, of course, this is "only" the navigation part. No target detection and tracking and whatever else we may come up with that our drone might need.
That said, the video is 3 years old, the hardware doesn't cost an arm and a leg and it is likely there have been improvements over time.

For the record, all, I’m well aware that ZellZeka’s posts so far are almost comically familiar in tone, content and even syntax to a certain category of posters this thread seems to attract one of every couple of months.  As noted previously I think it’s always important to engage in good faith on the off chance that such is reciprocated.
If/when we find out it’s not I will happily drop out and let nature take its course.  

Well yes, you’re right, because pro-Russian parties have been banned in Ukraine.  I’m not aware that they’ve been banned in Czechia so, on the face of it at least, no representation in Czech Parliament means not many people want to be represented by them in Czechia.
 
Ok, well that’s your friends’ and relatives’ right, confusing though I may find it (‘I don’t want the trauma and inconvenience of mobilisation, therefore I support the people trying to kill us’ - I mean wtf?!).  What is clear though is that they represent Czech opinion even less than those thousands who turned out to support PRO, don’t they?

No, it doesn’t.  Do you still think thousands of Czech people at this demonstration supports your claim that “Pro-Russian sentiments here are no less strong than in Hungary or Slovakia”, though?
The answer is no, it doesn’t, and in fact the article you linked to specifically mentions that the party who organised the demonstration have zero parliamentary representation. That suggests that their position specifically isn’t representative of most Czech citizens.
We also have Letters from Prague telling us, as a Czech person himself, that this pro-Russian position is not widely popular in a Czechia.  Of course, in isolation, his contribution is only anecdotal but do you see how your link actually supports his assertion more than it does your own?

Yes. Based on being one and living in the country.
Also based on the election results - most of the parties with actual presence are pro-West, including the populists (who had some anti-war messaging in the presidential elections and it is thought that's what lost them the elections). There is one pro-Russian far right party nobody wants to touch with about 10 % of votes. The president is former NATO general and heavily in support of Ukraine.
Meanwhile Slovakia has just (2023) elected openly pro-Russian and anti-West parties and (2024) openly pro-Russian and anti-West president. Though given that the Slovak prime minister recently got shot for his pro-Russian stance, I'm feeling the results are not that one-sided either, the country is pretty divided. They might follow Hungary's path or they might not.

From your own link:
“[The demonstration was organised by] a new political party known as PRO. … [The] group, whose name in English stands for Law, Respect, Expertise, has no seats in parliament.”
Forgive me if I don’t expect a Prague Putsch any time soon.
Every country has its extremists, with or without external provocation and support.  Spotting them in the wild doesn’t mean they represent a majority opinion.

No, sorry, there’s no convincing argument here:
Granted, for the sake of this discussion. 
Assertion/speculation.  Needs support.
On the contrary to what?  Also, this is baseless assertion again (feel free to add a base for it though).  Also, you don’t get to introduce what turns out to be an assertion as an “argument” and then immediately leap to calling it a “fact”.
Overall, given that you’re the one who identified “logical thinking” as the basis for your argument, your grasp of how rational inductive reasoning works seems to be lacking.
 
tl;dr - You don’t have a rational argument here.  You have a stream of thought which ends in a conclusion that you find meaningful but you cannot expect anyone else to find it convincing.

And this is when I stop listening.  If this were remotely true then what is stopping Russia from conducting strikes into Poland right now? This is the complete BS line of thinking that Russia is somehow some unstoppable juggernaut that only Ukraine can possibly stand up to, while the weak kneed western powers are too scared to do anything other than support Ukraine.  This sort of nonsense is the mirror of the pro-Russian crap that we get drive bys on every month or so.  It has no basis in facts and is basically propaganda lines.
I am about as enthusiastic to being a target of Ukraine IO campaigns as I am being a target of Russian ones.

This is true, but those blows and that defeat are survivable and recoverable in ways that a strategic nuclear exchange is not.
See WWII for example - the UK did survive and ultimately recover from the loss of Poland, France, Singapore, Malaysia, Burma even though it wasn't all happiness and roses, and the UK was permanently altered after the war.

So your theory is that if Kyiv falls Poland, the Baltics, Finland and Sweden are going to do what?  Switch sides?  If we lose in Ukraine it is definitely a western defeat a la Vietnam (but no where near as personal) but we can live with it.  There hasn’t been a single signal out of any NATO nation that the alliance is in doubt if Ukraine falls.  In fact I suspect it will be quite the opposite, we will likely double down on the one mechanism that keeps Russia in check.  In fact the entire theory of an Eastern Europe schism in light of a Russian victory doesn’t make any sense but you keep rolling it out like Armageddon.  Further, you seem to imply that it is an outcome so bad that we should be willing to start playing fast and lose with the nuclear equation.  
You do realize that you are promoting reckless courses of action that if they slide are going to hurt Ukrainians first?  If Russia either loses control, has a misunderstanding or simply says “nope” Ukraine is very likely going to the demonstration venue.
As usual you are going off without a shred of proof behind your own opinion.  Show me one declaration from any of the states you mention that they are willing to start taking the risks you are advocating or that Ukraine is the central issue in their continued partnership.  FFS we are putting a Bde in Latvia, I am sure of Ukraine falls the first thing then Latvians are going to do is tell us to leave.
You are over inflating a Ukrainian loss to the point that WW3 makes perfect sense. This is not good analysis, it is hyperbolic propaganda.  Of course we do not want Ukraine to lose.  We have spent billions trying to stop that from happening.  But we also do not want an uncontrolled escalation…and my proof is self-evident by the lack of western air or land power direct involvement in this war.  Ukraine is simply not worth this whole thing expanding or escalating into a broader regional or global conflict - we already did that sort of thing in 1914 and do not need a repeat.

You really do not understand the risks or dynamic here do you?  So the entire nuclear equation is designed around mutual deterrence through mutual destruction.  In order to sustain mutual deterrence one needs to have full and open visibility of all the facts surrounding that situation.  Fog, false signals and  blind spots create uncertainty in that mutual assurance/deterrence is always unacceptable.  Why?  Because these are human systems and errors are going to happen naturally, we do not need to add to these error probabilities when the stakes are this high.
Attacks on Russia’s nuclear architecture - in this case, their detection tripwires - create uncertainty in the one arena which we cannot have it.  So we don’t care if the Russians are using them as dual use because…and try to follow me here…Ukraine is important, but it is not that important.  Your problem has been that for some time now you have lost objectivity on this whole war to the point that the ends are justified by pretty much any way and means.  You have demonstrated this on many occasions and expressed vigorously your frustrations.  I can sympathize but in this case, you, and any whom may be tempted to go down the same path are very wrong.  The deliberate calculated release of nuclear weapons is very low.  The accidental or uncontrolled release is low but can change very quickly.  We have enough examples of this during the Cold War.  
To your point on Russia  “troop stripping”; this makes the situation worse.  It means Russia is likely down to nuclear deterrence as the sole means of guaranteeing their security…and now Ukraine is hammering their tripwire…that is a phenomenally bad idea.
So, no, it does not matter in the larger strategic equation if these were dual use. It may matter to Ukraine, and even this war, but in the larger picture of global security those radars are as sacrosanct as our own North Warning Systems under NORAD. The West will not support any playing around in this field. They will likely let Kyiv fall first.  So if Ukraine wants support for deep strikes into Russian, of which many are merited…I think we are at that point, strikes on Russian nuclear architecture are off the table entirely even if they are dual purpose.  Agree with me or not.  Stamp your feet and call the US and NATO “cowards” but there is an entire defence and security world out there that no one under the age of 40 really understands.  It faded into the background over the last 30 years, to the point an entire generation of policy makers, diplomats and academics have grown up thinking that it was all over.
It is not.  It never was.  The nature of warfare changed in 1945, not the character, the very nature of it.  Learn to live with it because what comes next is going to make this entire war look quaint, and it will be ruled by this harsh calculus.

How so? Sorry but your statement is really easy to falsify. Just use my billboard example: If the camera moves straight towards a 2D plain that is perpendicular to the movement that camera has exactly zero 3D information and no way of finding out that it is a 2D plain.
I know what you intend to say, you can derive 3D information, making assumptions, using heuristics and in the right circumstances. If you see a car moving you can derive distance and speed once you make an assumption about its size and shape. You use your experience to do that (a child will have a harder time than you have) but you can be entirely wrong if the car you assumed to be 5m long is, in fact, just a toy car of 5cm.
Moreover that isn't how simple detection and tracking works. Usually detection is frame by frame and afterwards tracking tries to match the indivual detections to each other (maybe priming detection to take a closer look at a region of interest). But it is not "ok we now have 100 detections of this tank, lets put them all together and see if it is really a tank". You can always do better, sure, but better is more expensive.
This isn't necessarily true, either. Depends on how the training is done and how inference is done later. For instance, in some cases, when using the network afterwards you draw many samples from some distribution. During training often just one sample was used (but for a batch of different input data) whereas later on you draw many samples for just a single input situation. That is not necessarily less computing (or memory!) intensive than training. Also, during training you don't care about things like real time capabilities. Coming back to our drone, it can really make a difference if you can make updates with 0.5 Hz or 10 Hz. Even if training needs more compute power that doesn't mean you can run every trained model in real time on a phone.

Um, no, I'm not, and I have no clue how you arrived at that conclusion. The closest I got to AGI was mentioning ChatGPT. And while that is a marvelous piece of technology compared to everything we had a few years ago, it is not AGI. My point was that hardware requirements scale with how smart you want the drone to be and that not everything AI (where AI means is sadly use synomymously for all machine learning etc. stuff these days, include image classification) runs on a mobile phone, even if it isn't ChatGPT.
That's a large claim to make and you provide nothing to back it up. 😉 Especially the "even if it hasn't seen them before" part. Snapdragon or not, as far as I know (granted, that may not be far enough) even the more modern neural network architectures still struggle with "out of distrubtion" inputs (i.e. things they haven't seen during training) or "generalization". You can train a network on images of cats and it will usually do a good job of identifying cats looking similar to those in the training set. It will have a hard time with red (really red: crimson or similar) cats, though, unless you specifically trained the network to ignore colors or gave it pictures of red cats.
Which plays into this:
It is not just about having only "valid" (no friendlies, no civilians) targets in the area. You (possibly) also don't want your drone to be wasted on the wrong targets or be easily fooled. It is one thing to have a poster boy of tank sitting in an open field. A simple image recognition will struggle with a tank with a very different camo than what it was trained on or with extra shapes on it. Or a cope cage, a turtle shell, you name it. Not to mention partial or occlusion, bad weather, etc. You don't want your drones to go for cardboard tanks ignoring the real ones. 
What's more: Maybe a snapdragon is enough for detecting and tracking targets. If that is all you want to do, perfect. If you want your drone to navigate a dense forest while coordinating with the rest of the drone swarm than all that has to run on top of the image recognition and that snapdragon may no longer be sufficient.
All that said, I think we agree that mobile phone hardware is very probably sufficient for primitve autonomous drones. As I said above, my entire point was that hardware requirements scale with what you want the drone to do. And I'm fairly certain that mobile phone hardware is not going to solve all your heart's desires in that regard.
 

And that alas has worked with the BBC and MSM reporting Ukraine is on the ropes and struggling.
The simple headlines are being picked up and amplified to the masses who don't have time, or the understanding to assess what is actually happening.

Even though Steve gave this line a warning shot, I think we need to try and really put some punctuation points on the idea because it does directly relate to this war.
Beyond these points here, opening up another strategic front in this war, which is essentially widening it into multiple proxy conflicts, comes with extreme risks.
First problem is that it is indeed a major escalation on Russia's doorstep. This would be akin to Russia sparking a proxy war between the US and Mexico...that is how World Wars start.  This may very well cross a nuclear or WMD threshold, and we would be starting it.  In fact if we were going to go down this route it would make more sense to do it on multiple fronts - the Caucuses and the Stans.  Start leveraging the East-West divides.  This of course is setting in motion events which could lead to a hard-fast collapse of Russia - which a few people out there still are not getting as a bad thing.
Second problem is resources.  FFS, we can barely support one proxy war.  How do you think we are going to do trying top keep 2 or more going?  If we somehow talked Georgia into going rogue they may wind up looking at the 1992 Kurds longingly when it comes to western support.
Third is that it will definitely make Putin's job a lot easier...and frankly the Russians would be correct in doing so.  If my nation was suddenly being attacked on multiple fronts by a foreign power, no matter what we may have done to trigger it, survival instinct is going to kick in.  This would no longer be a far fetched conspiracy, the West would be trying to destroy Russia - one cannot have a soft wide-scale proxy assault.
Finally, if we are actually willing to go this direction...why not stop f#cking around and just commit Western forces to Ukraine?  We are courting WW3 anyway, commit and hope we can drive Russia out (if we can) without sparking an Apocalypse. A bunch of proxies are a half-measure when compared to risk.
I keep coming back to this.  None of this is the western strategy here.  We want containment and a slow burnout.  We want a soft long fatal trajectory for Russia with a lot of potential for offramps along the way.  We want to prove that the Western Rules Based Order works, not blow it up.  Ukraine is important, but it is not that important.  "So what is that important Cap'n?"  Well good question and one we really need to have an answer for, before we drag ourselves further into a WW1 situation...but now with nukes.

Even if this approach didn't backfire, which it almost certainly would, we would be winning by defeating the whole point of winning. I think most people here, myself included, want Ukraine to win for Ukraine's sake. But from the West's perspective the whole point of supporting Ukraine is to uphold international law. You can't uphold international law by breaking international law. We would be "winning" by maximizing the defeat of our own political objectives, giving us an outcome even worse for us than if we had lost.

Provided that 1) the political decision to supply the Ukraine is still in force (if I am getting too optimistic about this, I remind myself of the time, when the US Wilson's administration was fundamental in setting up the League of Nations and then the next administration declined to join); 2) the Ukrainians themselves do not throw in the towel. 
In broadest of terms, the Russians have at least 3 ways to win this war: (1) political victory in the US; (2) political victory in Europe; (3) military victory in the Ukraine (UKR morale collapse & suing for peace included here, as it would be a consequence of military losses most likely). They will be working hard on all these fields simultaneously.

I gotta be honest, I am far more concerned at the indications that then western mil industry complex has become a sponge for military aid.  It makes sense that we had to go through them as Ukraine really had no MID of their own and we have been buying few-expensive for the last 30 years.  Now we are asking industry to do many, so there are going to be losses.  But I have a sinking feeling that a whole lot has been wasted getting our own factories up to speed while the UA goes dry.  I am not sure that even if we got western troops involved (which we won’t) that we ammo stocks to supply them either. This trend of highly inefficient contributions has to stop.  But perhaps we are in a “darkest before dawn” moment.

Ugh, now that 1) rings true and 2) is discouraging.  We spend money for Ukraine on our own manufacturing to build capacity…which of course is going to come with western overhead and likely no small amount of fat-catting.  FFS, it isn’t Ukrainian corruption we need to worry about, it may be the good old fashion western mil industrial complex.

Ok, so what is going on then?
Right now, Ukraine is supposed to have over 150B euro in aid in motion, while another tranche of what looks like 140B euro (if one adds in latest from US)
https://www.ifw-kiel.de/topics/war-against-ukraine/ukraine-support-tracker/
That is approaching 140+ billion per year of this war.  Ukraine's entire national GDP in 2021 was 200B.  It is effectively subsidized for 2/3rds of its entire economy to fight this war for the last two years.
So where did it all go?  Did it not show up?  Do we have evidence of this?  Why after coming up on 280B euro is the UA lacking equipment and vehicles?  Things are not adding up here.