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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • a Ghost Robotics Vision 60 Quadrupedal-Unmanned Ground Vehicle, or Q-UGV, armed with what appears to be an AR-15/M16-pattern rifle on rotating turret undergoing “rehearsals” at the Red Sands Integrated Experimentation Center in Saudi Arabia

    They’re not being used in combat.

    With that aside, I appear to be the only one here who thinks this is a great idea. AI can make mistakes, but the goal isn’t perfection. It’s just to make fewer mistakes than a human soldier does. (Or at least fewer mistakes than a bomb does, which is really easy.)

    Plus, automation can address the problem Western countries have with unconventional warfare, which is that Western armies are much less willing to have soldiers die than their opponents are. Sufficiently determined guerrillas who can tolerate high losses can inflict slow but steady losses on Western armies until the Western will to fight is exhausted. If robots can take the place of human infantry, the advantage shifts back from guerrillas to countries with high-tech manufacturing capability.





  • the size/capability of violence

    That’s, uh, not a small difference. Even if you’re saying that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, neither the terrorist nor the freedom fighter are comparable to a large, powerful country.

    Edit: One more interesting difference is that because a country has a much greater capability to wage war, it also has much more to lose in war: it can lose that very capability. A small group of irregular fighters does not depend much on infrastructure, but a country has population centers, factories, military bases, the seat of government, etc. which are all vulnerable in a way that a hidden cave or tunnel isn’t. We’re seeing the effects of this distinction between Iran and its proxies play out right now.










  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.workstoRPGMemes @ttrpg.networkD6 bite damage
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    7 days ago

    Once when my sister and I were teenagers, she was hogging the computer and so I just picked up the chair with her in it to move her out of my way. As I walked past, her friend (whom I hadn’t touched) used her bite to make an attack of opportunity against me. It wasn’t gentle - there was no blood but there were tooth-marks.

    I had mixed feelings afterwards. On the one hand, it hurt. On the other hand, a girl touched me. With her mouth. I had never been kissed at that point but being bitten was close…

    (I didn’t end up marrying her.)


    Also a d6 bite is nonsense. The average commoner has 4 hp and 10 strength, so one commoner would be able to kill another commoner with a single bite 50% of the time. I’m not saying a human bite can’t be lethal, but it’s not “stabbed with a shortsword” lethal. Meanwhile, even a d4 bite from a level 1, 16-str barbarian is already invariably lethal to a commoner.

    (Yeah, I know, HP isn’t supposed to be realistic, etc. I just hate fun.)