this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2026
749 points (99.0% liked)
Technology
87184 readers
3821 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
As someone with previous defense connections, I'd been wondering when we'd see this.
ITAR has severely restricted access to nav system tech export, but there was always this open question about reckoning position by visual cues rather than GPS + dead reckoning. We all knew it was technically feasible, but we assumed that having "visual" cues was further out because AI at the time wasn't up to the task.
The answer is the same, though. Nvidia, willing or not, is now a defendant in an unjust war, and must be subpoena'd by the ICC. At a minimum, they should be immediately sanctioned by foundry specialists (like ASML) until they are prepared to account for how, exactly, this tech ended up in a Russian missile.
For just terrain recognition, the US has had that since before there was GPS. Since the 1950s even.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TERCOM
Lots of cheap plane-type drones do terrain navigation now. And the Russians are busily deploying their military version of Starlink.
Subpoenas only exist in the US. Since it did not sign the Rome treaty, and since Nvidia is an American company - the ICC has no power here.
There's always going back to the old-fashioned method of having a trained pigeon inside of the device instead of a sophisticated computer vision system.
Or the pigeon can be the drone itself, what a wonderful world it is
Wasn't there some historical leader with mad beef with someone they were at war with, she requested several pigeons as part of peace negotiations and she released them to fly back carrying burning twigs and absolutely destroyed the enemy city?
Edit: Added a necessary word lol
Yes, Saint Olga of Kyiv.
Current defense worker here:
Was talking with a coworker recently about how ITAR/EAR rules are hilariously out of date. Basic IMUs coming from China these days are good enough that you can establish a reasonable dead reckoning nav to where those parts of the munitions list are just defunct. Shit I did that in college ten years ago with high power rockets and things have only gotten better.
The new proposed regulations over AI chips are also wildly misguided and demonstrate how Congress/Executive branch have no idea what the tech even is. The top of the line chips today are needed for LLMs, fast fixture acquisition and tracking can be done on a way less powerful piece of hardware that new regulations will fail to stop (that's even assuming that the bans would have worked in the first place, which they won't)
Plenty of western tech still ends up in Russian weapons, it's nothing new. NVidia should be just put in queue.
and they too should be held accountable.
If I can't buy lower-priced Chinese RAM, then Russia shouldn't be able to make weapons with our tech
I know that's not how it works but it should be
It might not even be for vision applications. These little tegra boxes end up in all sorts of rapid prototype DSP applications. It could easy be doing comms or ECM.
Sources? Credible or incredible; just not some Telegram channel please. Open www.
The rest of your comment is just whataboutism, and writing "you people" on social media always says more about the writer's mental health than about said people. No disrespect.
America is a terrorist nation and if you can't see it.. I dunno what to tell you, man.