this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
90 points (95.9% liked)

News

31731 readers
3628 users here now

Welcome to the News community!

Rules:

1. Be civil


Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.


2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.


Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.


3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.


Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.


4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.


Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.


5. Only recent news is allowed.


Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.


6. All posts must be news articles.


No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.


7. No duplicate posts.


If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.


8. Misinformation is prohibited.


Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.


9. No link shorteners.


The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.


10. Don't copy entire article in your post body


For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
  • Software issues led to crashes, mishaps in drone boat tests

  • Pentagon paused an autonomy software contract with L3Harris

  • Navy’s key acquisition program rocked after top admiral fired


NEW YORK, Aug 20 (Reuters) - During a U.S. naval test off the California coast last month, which was designed to showcase the Pentagon’s top autonomous drone boats, one vessel stalled unexpectedly.

As officials scrambled to fix a software glitch, another drone vessel smashed into the idling boat’s starboard side, vaulted over the deck, and crashed back into the water – an incident captured in videos obtained by Reuters.

[...]

all 14 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] uhdeuidheuidhed@thelemmy.club 4 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

I mean, that's just business as usual for engineering.

[–] piecat@lemmy.world 3 points 4 hours ago

Also the point of testting and trials lol

[–] MyNamesTotallyRobert@lemmynsfw.com 4 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

That's because prioritizing ideology above all else including skills and experience when hiring people doesn't work out that well. China does the same shit but worse but they've been doing it longer and better. Even Oppenheimer recognized that the only way to get the most highly skilled people possible was to actually treat them with dignity. Either FUCKING CHANGE, or wait for the corporations to turn their private security into an army and do a coup just to increase profits by 0.01% via lower taxes, or wait for China to bankrupt the US in a massive arms race like the US did to the Soviet Union during the cold war.

I just hope a lot of the bad people who support the current state of things and want it to be worse suffer hardships during all this I guess.

[–] network_switch@lemmy.ml 9 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (2 children)

The US wants cutting edge autonomous boats from numerous vendors that are all supposed to play nice in squadrons. No doubt in my mind the, I'm guessing like a dozen, companies out there all making boats intended to be operated autonomously by the US military are being developed with skeleton sized software teams where team members work multiple projects and there's no time and resources given to them to develop with good practices for long term development and version/configuration management. Without a doubt this whole program umbrella of autonomous naval vessels is a clusterfuck of numerous contractors doing the bare minimum required in their contracts for working together. I bet the teams have bad turnover so the idea of building out and continuously enforcing best practices is a non starter anyways.

I bet the ones overseeing these, politicians/pentagon pencil pushers/captains/admirals can't even identify whether these companies are doing software development long term sustainably and efficiently. They hire companies rather than people so they wouldn't even know if they lost their most important developer and the program was obviously doomed to anyone else left on the software teams. Just hacking away for contract renewals until it finally becomes so much of a mess that it finally gets cancelled as too costly and increasingly obsolete because of how slow development had/will become

[–] acchariya@lemmy.world 2 points 17 hours ago (1 children)
[–] corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca -1 points 17 hours ago

good practices

*good practice

Practices are soccer games.

[–] Witchfire@lemmy.world 15 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Good thing the US is doing everything they can to retain their brightest minds /s

[–] troed@fedia.io 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I'm sure if Trump asks Zelenskyy really nicely and says please the US can buy some designs from Ukraine.

[–] Weirdmusic@lemmy.world -1 points 1 day ago

Yeah, I'm sure he'll ask nicely.. 🙄

[–] sudo@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

As officials scrambled to fix a software glitch, another drone vessel smashed into the idling boat’s starboard side, vaulted over the deck, and crashed back into the water – an incident captured in videos obtained by Reuters.

Release the footage you cowards.

[–] BlazeDaley@lemmy.world 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Footage is in the link OP provided.

[–] sudo@programming.dev 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Oh fuck me it just wasn't loading for some reason...

Surfs up!

[–] Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 17 hours ago

The what it's worth, I'm not seeing it either.