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Comment by ACCount37 | Hacker News Reader

In Ukraine, the first place that was bombed was the red tape factory.

The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned. So they use civilian motors, batteries and SoCs, sketchy firmware with zero code inspection, and more. Does it work perfectly? No. It works well enough.

I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

I'm not sure if "AI for red tape mitigation" is a thing, but "AI for killer drones" sure is. I suspect that "killer drones are insufficiently smart" is easier to fix with AI than "too much red tape". Because the amount of red tape, if unopposed, will expand to consume any capacity of dealing with it, AI or not.

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> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

Seems unlikely. Regulation and Health & Safety are both societal luxuries, which only happen once societies are stable and prosperous enough to start valuing human life beyond its ability to perform labour.

The moment the bombs start dropping, the time for luxuries also stops, and the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society. There isn’t the money or resources for anything more than that.

The US (most developed democracies) places an extremely high value on the lives of soldiers, because dead soldiers in foreign wars does terrible things to politicians in power. Paying 1000X more for the same tech as Ukraine to minimise the number of service members killed using it, is a pretty small price to pay.

And yet the regulation actually will result in more dead soldiers or else it wouldn't be the first thing that goes out the window in a war.

The regulation crucially results in your recruits not dying for no good reason during training just because some random piece of trash equipment predictably failed.

Preventing that is much more important than the exact dollar efficiency of said equipment during peacetime.

Perhaps, but, for better or worse, it's about optics. It looks better to say a soldier died bravely in war than it does to say they died because of a friendly-fire incident with a drone with shoddy control software.

No. Certainly not. The fundamentals of modern flight safety rules, Procedures and organizations were created in the Second World War when losses of aircraft and crew due to weather, environment, maintenance, poor training and so on greatly exceeded the losses inflicted by enemy action.

Rules and regulations on safety and health will maintain combat effectiveness and manpower where the loss -even temporary due to injuries or sickness- of well trained specialists (and don't forget that even a "simple" infantryman is a highly specialized expert in his field!) is not acceptable. Those rules were written in blood and modern western militaries can not sustain the rate of loss that Russia seems to be ok with. Western leader will be well advised to try to minimize losses to real combat casualties.

But I sure think that they will start to cut corners, at least where it comes down to documentation and purely cya.

I think I covered all that with

> the value of human life drops to value a person can produce defending their society.

OP was talking about how US munitions software needs to go through a 6 week long integration test before it can be deployed. I seriously doubt that kind of testing would last very long if the US was engaged in peer level war, and their enemy had found a flew in their munitions guidance systems that made the munitions useless.

At the end of the day, when at war time isn’t just money, it’s also lives. When you have people dying on the frontlines, the risk of equipment failures from lack of testing will be substantially smaller that loss of lives from ineffective equipment, that can only be improved every other month.

> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

Regulation - or more generally - formalization comes with scaling up. A skunkworks project can innovate really fast, and has no integration and scale needs. When you want to scale up any project (hardware or software), integrating and scaling become a real bitch, and you need to ensure that everyone is on the same page or face costly "silly" mistakes that history is replit with.

You can't magick away coordination challenges by labeling the process "red tape." This happens every single time any small nimble organization grows beyond certain thresholds. On a personal level, organizing a trip for 3 friend is process-free, but for 10+ people requires checklists and heavier processes, for 30 people it becomes a nightmare requiring professional assistance. Low probability events become regular occurrences when you scale, and you have to plan and/or mitigate them adding "red tape".

Yes and no. Acceptable failure level is important.

It matters if you care about 1, 2, or 10 out of the 30 people on the trip missing a flight, getting lost, or going hungry.

Of course there's a bare minimum for a product that works at all. Beyond that there are increasing levels of rigor that focus on reliability, and these can be non-linear.

I'm not an expert but I think this is an old lesson in warfare, that guerillas can triumph over larger adversaries by being more exploratory/iterative and less rules-bound. Tolstoy tells this story in the second half of War and Peace. Likewise with Iraqi militants wreaking havoc with IEDs. People repelling an invader have every incentive to move fast.

I've just read that section of War and Peace and was blown away by the descriptions of guerrilla tactics as well as Tolstoy's way of capturing the state of mind of the Russian POWs and their ever-shifting relationships with their captors.

As an aside, the word Guerrilla (little war) was coined during Napoleon's occupation of Spain to describe the resistance effort by locals and peasants against the French army.

That applies everywhere. You’re commenting on a forum for startups that compete against established players. David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

I'm hesitant to use 'always' language but the innovator's dilemma is indeed another application of the same principle. It's remarkable when a company like Google can pivot in a way that threatens its existing core revenue streams.

> David will always, in the long run, win against Goliath.

Every Goliath may, in the long run, meet a David that beats it, but this premise ignores all the thousands of Davids that don't win.

Historybooks are 90% filled with tales of exterminations, slaughter of citystates and permanent area destruction.

If you glass the villages and salt the fields, you even win against the taliban and vietkong.

> If you glass the villages and salt the fields, you even win against the taliban and vietkong.

You may win tactically, but you lose strategically - firstly by demonstrating that surrender is pointless, and secondly by creating a martyr movement across the world.

When you sow fields with salt, the only harvest you should reasonably expect is more blood.

Which binds the empire crime family together. This was how it was done allover until 1945. Its how its still done in russia, near china, how the middle east does things. That we "shall overcome" only applied to the west as a selfset achievement. And history tells us that the dead are forgotten. Nobody is out there avenging jews or armenians. Thus also the pro active paradigm of "better fuck around as a empire" then being "found out to be peace loving". Congrats to the anti western westerners, you won so much, you got the old world back.

"Some" David will always in the long run, win against Goliath. But many, many millions will be buried.

Thinking of past notable Goliaths: Ma Bell has been reconstituting herself from the split apart companies, IBM and GE are… alive, and Edison Illuminating Company and Carnegie Steel are alive in successor companies.

>The drone industry was allowed to basically "do whatever as long as it works", consequences be damned

Yes because Ukraine fights an existential war and at this point on both sides people just shrug when a few civilians get blown up.

The US isn't under existential threat and when they go to war their highest priority is to never risk the lives of operators and if possible, if only for PR reasons (and even then it doesn't always work) not generate news about rogue missiles or rogue killer drones. The attack on a school in Iran that killed 150 children apparently was already the result of a rushed mission that ignored procedures because this kind of thinking is starting to take hold in US defense circles.

That's not just an ethical disaster but also a political and strategic one because these events can rally enemies around a regime and the political arena is where for the US wars are won and lost, both at home and abroad.

You are making a good point but blaming the wrong thing.

Caution needn’t spiral cost. The reason US weapons cost so Much is because it’s profitable.

Building things that work 80% of the time makes sense in wartime. It doesn’t as a rule. Hence wartime production will always be cheaper.

Americas problem is that the military industrial complex is built to maximize cost and profit for private corporations, despite them being entirely dependent on government.

Until they are nationalized, and the profit margins are eliminated, you will always pay 20-50% more than you should and gains from efficient won’t be realized.

Look at the auto industry in the US. It’s protected by tariffs and still incapable of matching the Chinese and others on cost. It mainly survives because of incentives which subsidize vehicle types other countries don’t want (pickups) and Americans only buy because of incentives.

Iran is building drones for £3k. The US clones cost 30x that for “additional features” the spec didn’t ask for.

I don’t know the details of that situation, but I have been on the other side of that debate.

People say “it’s a one line change” (once they argued it was a 1 bit change!). But lacking a fully controlled and hermetic build system with its own exhaustive test suite you can’t be sure about the relationship between the source and the binary. And that continues to every step to get the binary into production (updating existing devices, etc).

Welcome to Tradeoff Town.

Sure, your ultra paranoid checking of everything might catch an extremely rare bug caused by something like interactions between a benign code change and a build system. But is it worth slowing down the development process by that much?

Is it worth missing out on an entire generation of technology, like what happened with US and the shift from 00s drone warfare and 20s drone warfare?

Usually not.

It depends. For a JS web front end? Go crazy.

For the consensus algorithm in your distributed database? slow down there buddy...

You have to ask: how bad could this get? How hard will it be to fix? Could we loose or corrupt user data?

In this case, it's probably more about preventing a foreign-compromised build system / developer from getting malicious code into lethal devices.

"It works well enough" is a significant understatement. I think it would be more accurate (especially given the perceptions at the outset of the war) to say that it has worked significantly better than anyone expected. Ukrainian ingenuity is single handedly driving conversations about the "future of warfare" in capitals from Brussels to DC to Beijing.

> I wonder if anyone is going to learn a lesson about overregulation.

This also misses the point imo. A simpler answer is "necessity is the mother of invention". There is value in a regime for peacetime. One is also a fool if they do not recognize needs change drastically in wartime. Two things can be true. The United States, like nearly all sensible nations, has almost always understood this and acted accordingly. On the other hand, nations that govern themselves as if they were on a perpetual war path are usually far less desirable societies. The idea that we need to speed rush "AI for killer drones" because otherwise we will find ourselves on the wrong end of an existential invasion are nonsensical. Americans would be far better off if our leaders and our people stopped acting like every potential conflict was existential.

There is no Russia on our borders. The only thing American adventures overseas have accomplished in the last two decades is making our country weaker.

Correct, but it goes deeper than just the building components. In the US you have to go through an entire military procurement process within each iteration loop. So you design a weapon, then try to sell it to the military, but just the process of demonstrating it and selling it to the military takes a long time and costs money. If you fail you can go back to the drawing board, but each iteration loop is probably a year minimum. And if you are successful now you have to set up and scale production. Get ready for years of environmental reviews and lawsuits.

In Ukraine the military will take any drone they can get their hands on, so all you have to do is build a drone, give a bunch of them to the army to try out on the Russians, and within a week they will tell you if it works or not. So your design iteration loop is probably weeks. If you are successful, the time between hearing the general say "give me 1 million" and when the bulldozers start clearing the factory site is probably measured in days.

Emergency is the mother of making exceptions. During both US gulf wars, the army broke from its long tradition of over-regulating new systems before they could be fielded, especially for small semi-autonomous platforms like flying drones and robots. Entirely new systems as well as major updates to fielded system were routinely prototyped in-country / on-the-battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan. The demand for new capabilities and fixes was simply too great not to ship ASAP.

It's interesting that the red tape is still there on the Russian side. A Ukrainian drone maker can make a new one and put it on their brave1 website straight away, Russian ones have to go through a lengthy bureaucratic procurement process. I think Russian interceptor drones still can't use explosive warheads because regulation, health and safety etc. It's quite a plus for the Ukrainians.

And the consequence of this is a total lack of the consequences when something goes wrong. Complete with a PR cover-up all over the world.

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