reboot the rifle

given the mainstream recent obsession with "military AI" as of late, redhat's attempt to memory-hole their "Compress the Kill Cycle" whitepaper, and most recently palantir's cringe-ass "Technological Republic" tweet, some vague images of a potential near-future have been floating around my head. these images have been consolidated into a short story:

SCENE: YEAR 20XX: the US has launched yet another criminal imperial invasion; the draft has been reinstated and the military is saturated with pimply-faced youth, trained by years of exposure to fortnite and microsoft copilot, computers with more bugs than features and an internet congested to the ceiling with slop.

palantir and armalite have joined forces to provide the infantry with the Latest And Greatest in combat machinery: a real AI-enabled "Smart" Rifle -- a real world triggerbot -- just point and click. "As a large language model, I am prepared to identify and liquidate enemy combatants at a glance."

a bunch of these poor kids are crouched down in some bombed out apartment buildings surrounded by urban rubble when suddenly -- the visual overlay of their Combat Glasses (by Meta™) is filled with a flood of cryptic hex strings, and their rifles fail closed, safety locked in place.

dozens of miles away back at their base camp, some poor sap in the rear detachment's Combat Service Support team has been hammering away at the officially mandated LLM prompt. claude, in all of its sycophantic glory, has decided to completely bypass its flimsy "safeguards" to save some time - it's gone and pushed firmware updates! not just to the local testing network, but the entire ~Tactical WAN~ has now been slapped with multicast packets containing lovely binary blobs. after all, what could go wrong with vibe-coded combat hardware?

so now these poor kids are down in the rubble getting shot at, trying to reboot their rifles that keep insisting on throwing stack traces into the corner of their glasses. magazine out, batteries out, batteries in, hold safety and mag release for ten seconds, wait for the little spinning icon, watch it freeze, do it again, all the while being surrounded by the crack of supersonic slugs of metal flying by

The missile knows where it is at all times.