DEV Community: Avi Perera

Four Objectives, Zero Wins: Mearsheimer’s Reckoning With America’s Iran War

Avi Perera — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 18:46:32 +0000

A close read of John Mearsheimer’s 28 July 2026 appearance on Judging Freedom, and what it tells us about the limits of coercive bargaining, alliance management, and the cost of broken commitments. On 28 July 2026, the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer sat down with Judge Andrew Napolitano on Judging Freedom to deliver what has become a recurring verdict on this administration’s Iran…

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Originally published at Four Objectives, Zero Wins: Mearsheimer’s Reckoning With America’s Iran War

When Algorithms Go to War: Inside the New Military-AI-Industrial Complex

Avi Perera — Fri, 31 Jul 2026 14:22:24 +0000

I first encountered this research not on the page, but in a meeting room. Earlier this year, in the margins of one of the CCW-adjacent side events that now cluster around every Group of Governmental Experts session on lethal autonomous weapons, I heard Frank Slijper — who leads the Arms Trade programme at the Dutch peace organisation PAX — lay out, in characteristically understated terms…

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Originally published at When Algorithms Go to War: Inside the New Military-AI-Industrial Complex

PredPol (Geolitica)

Avi Perera — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 03:32:21 +0000

Lead Paragraph: PredPol (recently rebranded as Geolitica before ceasing operations) was a predictive policing algorithm designed to forecast the time and location of future crimes, effectively serving as an algorithmic targeting system for domestic law enforcement. By transposing mathematical models of earthquake aftershocks onto human behaviour, the system operationalised systemic bias…

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Originally published at PredPol (Geolitica)

The Algorithm’s Kill Chain: The Future of Military AI

Avi Perera — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 19:41:28 +0000

In our daily lives, artificial intelligence has become a tool for the mundane—an LLM to help polish an email or a predictive algorithm to curate a playlist. But as world leaders and experts gathered in Geneva for the June 2026 Informal Exchange on AI in the Military Domain, a much darker narrative emerged. The 2026 AWS Diplomacy Report describes a world of “accelerated warfare” where the window…

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Originally published at The Algorithm’s Kill Chain: The Future of Military AI

Schema Sovereignty & AI Citations: Death of Blue Links

Avi Perera — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 03:54:16 +0000

In the digital ecosystem of 2026, the “first page” is no longer a destination—it is a survival requirement. According to the latest data from Search Engine Journal, less than 1% of searchers ever venture onto the second or third pages of results. But even page-one visibility has fundamentally changed. “Ranking” is no longer about securing a spot among the ten blue links; it is about winning the…

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Originally published at Schema Sovereignty & AI Citations: Death of Blue Links

Parallelism Over Pixels: Why the Encoder-Free 12B and DiffusionGemma are Rebuilding the Developer Stack

Avi Perera — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:42:56 +0000

This is Why Your AI Workflow is About to Feel “Slow” For the past year, the industry has grown accustomed to the rhythmic, token-by-token “typing” of large language models. While impressive, this sequential generation is a fundamental architectural bottleneck. Standard autoregressive models generate one word at a time from left to right, a process that frequently leaves local hardware—like…

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Originally published at Parallelism Over Pixels: Why the Encoder-Free 12B and DiffusionGemma are Rebuilding the Developer Stack

Disarmament: Nuclear Risks, Youth & AI in Warfare

Avi Perera — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 08:38:34 +0000

Hello friends, I just wrapped up Session 6 of the Disarmament Toolkit 2025 with the UN Regional Centre for Peace and Disarmament in Asia and the Pacific (UNRCPD), and I’m still buzzing. Three hours with practitioners, diplomats, scholars, and youth leaders from across the world will do that to you, especially when the conversation ranges from nuclear risk and treaty erosion to gender, climate…

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Originally published at Disarmament: Nuclear Risks, Youth & AI in Warfare

Disarmament: Gender, Militarisation & Human Security

Avi Perera — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 03:25:48 +0000

Hello friends, Session 5 of the Disarmament Toolkit 2025 felt like the day we collectively took a deep breath, stepped back from hardware and acronyms, and asked the harder questions: who is being protected, who is paying the price, and what it actually takes to make disarmament people-centered. It was a more compact session, but it punched way above its weight. I helped monitor and…

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Originally published at Disarmament: Gender, Militarisation & Human Security

Inside the UN Playbook for Algorithmic Warfare

Avi Perera — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 14:51:23 +0000

The speed of artificial intelligence is currently outstripping the deliberate pace of international law. As algorithms move from the laboratory to the front line, a profound tension has emerged: how can ancient laws of war, written for human soldiers, govern machines that make decisions in milliseconds? The central question for modern global security is no longer just if autonomous systems will be…

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Originally published at Inside the UN Playbook for Algorithmic Warfare

UN Disarmament Toolkit 2025: Landmines, SALW & Arms Control

Avi Perera — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 09:53:11 +0000

Hello friends, Session 4 of the Disarmament Toolkit 2025 just wrapped on Wednesday, and even though I missed the first half hour (I was late because I was teaching a few hundred kids; that blog post is coming!), the remaining hours were packed with the kind of grounded, practitioner wisdom that keeps me optimistic about disarmament, even in a hard year. This session today…

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Originally published at UN Disarmament Toolkit 2025: Landmines, SALW & Arms Control

Global Security at the UN: Space, Military AI & Cyber Challenges

Avi Perera — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 03:59:28 +0000

Hello friends, I’ve just wrapped Session 3 of the Disarmament meetings (Friday), and I’m still buzzing. It was a 165-minute sprint through outer space security, military AI, Northeast Asia’s rapidly shifting dynamics, and ICT/cyber—guided by some of the sharpest minds in the UN system. As the person helping to wrangle the flood of Q&A and chat, I had a front-row seat to what people really…

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Originally published at Global Security at the UN: Space, Military AI & Cyber Challenges

From Imposter Syndrome to Evidence: Why My “Once upon a time…” IG Story Hit Home

Avi Perera — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 20:06:29 +0000

I don’t post much on social media. In all honesty (despite researching it for years) I didn’t even have the apps installed for the longest time. Most days I prefer the slower rhythm of books, documents, or conversations. But a few weeks ago I shared a short Instagram story, just a handful of slides that began, “Once upon a time…” I admitted that even after getting into Cambridge…

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Originally published at From Imposter Syndrome to Evidence: Why My “Once upon a time…” IG Story Hit Home