Odd to consider that Nvidia is now an arms dealer.
The fucktard who made the Oculus Rift likes to use my preferred operating system to kill people. Tech is a wild world.
Edit: actually not just tech. Capitalism is just evil in general and polutes everything both literally and metaphorically
We live in a world where it's sorta just widely understood that the bottled-water chocolate-bar company murders people for profit on the regular
It's all fucked at every level
Shall we mention also The Banana Company and, well, South America?
Palmer Luckey is the goofiest looking cunt out hey. Imagine looking at yourself in the mirror with that stupid goatee and thinking you know what would go well with this, a hawaian shirt. Imagine having so much but being worth so little. What a fucken loser.
Not to mention the mullet! He's certainly made some choices.
Palmer Luckey
You can tell who is evil by their company being named after Lord of the Rings lore.
Always have been. Orin nano/nx SoMs are in all sorts of weapons systems. NixOS had a whole community civil war because Anduril heavily adopted NixOS and integrated it with Jetpack, the BSP that these run. They're kind of a PITA to use (fuck you WayneWWW...IYKYK) but they're easily the highest performance SoM of that size and the power consumption is workable for these kinds of...short lived systems. I think they started out targeting automotive applications and never really took off in the commercial world despite being comparable to Apple silicon in performance because they have no power saving modes. They ended up being perfect for doing real time object detection from a MIPI camera though so now they're the gold standard for bleeding edge slaughterbots.
Before the Orin, a lot of more experimental systems were using the TX2i and Xavier modules, but they had much less computing power and the image recognition models weren't as capable anyway.
This guy tegras
All of the tech giants discovered that there is much more money to be made making tech for dystopian authoritarian governments than gamers. It was inevitable I guess.
Just look at the long, long, LONG list of American and European companies helping Israel murder little children...
That said, Linux is not exempt from being used in weapons.
It's the NVIDIA Jetson Orin NX 16 GB. From the Ampere family, 3.5 years old. Small Tegra SoC.
I guess something like this is a typical dual use good, and doesn't fall under the AI Chip export restriction either because it's too weak. Seems like it would be trivial for Russians to import them from China or India or whomever really.
That's actually a lot more recent than I expected. Was guessing something fairly ancient and pre-sanctions, like 2018. Interesting.
As the other commenter said, likely from China. The US banned exports of the super high-end chips to China IIRC, but not low-end stuff. And India is known to sell anything to anyone as well.
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.
we assumed that having “visual” cues was further out because AI at the time wasn’t up to the task.
For just terrain recognition, the US has had that since before there was GPS. Since the 1950s even.
Lots of cheap plane-type drones do terrain navigation now. And the Russians are busily deploying their military version of Starlink.
Nvidia, willing or not, is now a defendant in an unjust war, and must be subpoena'd by the ICC.
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.
remember when A ps3 was considered militarily significant....
good old days
Well the airforce did build a PS3 supercomputer
True fact!
As a side note, I've been learning about how weird the ps3 cell architecture is, and why it's so hard to emulate.
"Vhen rockets go up, who cares vhere zey come down? Zat's not my department!"
Sarcasm aside, you can buy these in dev kits on MicroCenter:
https://www.microcenter.com/product/691058/nvidia-jetson-orin-nano-super-developer-kit
Which means the components are pretty widely available. I'm not sure how you'd prevent someone from ordering a bunch to an in-between country and then shipping them on to Russia after.
I wonder whether it'd be possible by tracking serial numbers. You might get the first customer.
Potentially, assuming they weren’t stolen or sold off to a secondary buyer from a legit first customer. Problem is another one just pops up in its place.
I’m not saying don’t persue them, I’m saying it’s a game of state funded whack’a’mole.
You might get the first customer.
... and then you find something like a Philippinian trading giant where you still can't know or do a thing.
By all means consider Nvidia a valid military target
Global Capitalism > Discrete Imperialism
oh, that washing machine technology is getting more and more advanced.
Ironically my washing machine has a big AI logo on the front.
Can it play doom?
It IS doom
Oh yeah? Well Russia found a copy of The Sims 3 in a Ukrainian Neptune missile, so now they're even!
It makes sense to use Machine Learning technology (not the Generative crap, the actual pattern recognition stuff) for terminal target recognition.
The surprise would be if Russia did not use AI in their newest cruise missile design - just because their society is fucked up and their leadership is a socipathic, disconnected autocrat surrounded by yes men that put his own personal pride above the lives of millions of his countrymen, doesn't mean Russia doesn't have the people with the technical knowledge to design systems with AI (though certainly far fewer of those than they had before they tried to invade Ukraine, since a ton of the Russians with the highest qualifications left).
I mean, given them another 50 years or so in their current trajectory, but for now they're probably still capable of creating their own high-tech solutions in focused applications.
ai gives me faith that those rockets will miss more than they hit
Rocket missing a military target sometimes means a rocket incidentally hitting a civilian object, so not good. All kinds of rockets and drones are used to hit targets in all major cities. They're not only used for some standalone objects in the middle of nowhere.
Where did you get the idea Russia is aiming at military targets?
The US bombed a girl's school in the opening salvos against Iran because their AI fucked up.
Missiles that miss their target still hit something.
this is why you can't have videogame cards anymore.
Does this mean it can play Doom?
Ukraine-Russia war is in the interest of the USA
Jensen Huang – Le noveau marchand de la mort
This is a big deal, no?
No.
First, need to verify.
Second, need to investigate how they got it. Might be not Nvidia's fault.
Third, capitalism will be the end of most of us.
Not really. If confirmed, it means someone somewhere was smart enough to do something like drive across a border in a truck with fake papers. It's very, very unlikely that Nvidia directly sold to anyone in a way that would get them in trouble.
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
