Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.
Specially AI Hallucination bombs, that hit a park named "Police Park", because it thinks it's killing policemen[1], or a children school with Shahed in the name[2], because it thinks It has something to do with drones.
This isn't even that new. Part of the motivation for building autonomous nuclear response programs during the cold war was specifically to remove accountability, and guilt, from human operators. But AI does bring it to a new level.
> Part of the motivation for building autonomous nuclear response programs during the cold war was specifically to remove accountability, and guilt, from human operators.
Details please. Because I can see the reality being most likely an attempt to avoid conflict by solidifying MAD, by trying to prevent a human from vetoing a second-strike.
sadly that's also true within Ukraine. like, I know that Russians are handling Ukrainian prisoners of war very brutally (no sources, why: [0]) but, if not for [0] AND if I wouldn't be killed by my co-citizens for that, I would point out a good chunk of misconduct on Ukrainian side as well.
I also recall the history lessons. I can't remember anyone who committed a war crime against Nazi Germany that also was internationally prosecuted. yep, the West did prosecute domestically, and there were some loud cases with German POWs, but I can't recall any, any Soviet soldier being charged for e.g. rape.
[0]: there is nothing public to link to that remained up, and I'm long out from private Telegram channels where such videos are posted; plus, even if I could, you and mods wouldn't want to see the video of someone getting beheaded
Your links talk about the places that were bombed, but I don't see anything apart for conjecture that this was the product of AI targeting.
Also this is a vast underestimate of the ability of organizations that were able to locate most of Iranian leadership throughout the war in their hiding places, but suddenly their Farsi is so bad they need a twitter account to tell them this is a Park
It's a popular conspiracy theory, without evidence, and without any perspective on any information that intelligence had. Using civilians as shields is well documented/known for Iranian military and groups they sponsor. For example, hospitals [1].
> Gatestone Institute is an American far-right think tank known for publishing anti-Muslim articles.
> The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.
> The Gatestone Institute has been frequently described as anti-Muslim, regularly publishes false reports to stoke anti-Muslim fears, and has published false stories pertaining to Muslims and Islam.
The US and Israel have repeatedly claimed that schools and hospitals are legitimate military targets with no evidence. A highly partisan think tank which is known for putting out misinformation is not a valid source.
If you're going to destroy hospitals and target civilian infrastructure and kill children, you should be accountable on a world stage and provide evidence. Unless you would you accept Iran bombing elementary schools in the US because they claim to have intel that there are terrorists hiding under them?
There are MANY examples of Iranian backed terrorist organizations doing this (which I thought might be too indirect), but here's something more recent [1].
Regardless, left leaning news reports things that make them look good and the opposition look bad. Right leaning news reports things that make them look good and the opposition look bad. Both are needed to find truth because they're all biased for profit corporate entities owned by 6 different billionaires that will only report what's convenient for that bias.
And no, I have no trust in the claims of the Iranian government. Do you? Who do you believe does?
What's the running rumor right now of which AI was involved? I heard Claude awhile back, but this makes me wonder how much Redhat could have been involved?
You're mistaking it for Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School[1], double tapped with tomahawks in the opening salvo of the war. That was another school, hit later. There was multiple schools attacked.
That “smart” vs “dumb” distinction doesn’t apply here though. What is discussed has nothing to do with the ability to physically land a bomb in a precise location, that problem seems to be solved reasonably well already. “Smart” in this case has more to do with using ML/LLM to select a target.
The reality looks more like the worst of both worlds to me.
If you genuinely needed only a handful of "surgical strikes", thete would be no need to "compress the kill cycle".
What we see in Gaza, Lebanon and Iran looks more like "smart carpet bombing": Some AI system generates a continuous stream of "targets" from sensor and intelligence data, according to whatever criteria political leadership defines and according to a given level of allowed "collateral damage", then those targets are immediately fed to drones or warplanes to destroy - essentially a continuous "pipeline" that probably "ideally" (in the dreams of those people) should become fully automated.
For THAT kind of vision, "efficiency" in destroying any particular target and checking all legally required boxes as quickly as possible is probably paramount.
(And in addition to that, there are probably still enough "dumb bombs" if no one is looking)
Smart bombs are no good if they are directed by a dumb AI targeting system, a dumb alcoholic accelerationist religious fanatic Secretary of War, or a dumb narcissistic genocidal pedophile President.
In fact, it didn’t. Trump continued to make “no new wars” a plank of his platform.
Some of his base will follow wherever he goes, but he would not have been elected without those who supported him on the basis of this (broken) promise.
What a great article. Several years ago I wrote a (far inferior) post along similar lines, using a famous railway/bridge disaster[1]. Study of these kinds of engineering failures, even those from hundreds of years ago, are so revealing. I'd lay money on similar reports from the days of the ancient Egyptians as being just as valuable.
Hard to imagine now, but this was a huge turning point. A genuinely powerful CPU in a "Pee-Cee" available for less than RISC workstation money. I had to wait a while, mine was an AMD DX2-66 since I didn't have a budget for Intel... add Slackware... and countess hours messing with XF86config and I had a poor-mans Sun workstation.
These are interesting numbers for engagement but don't mean as much without equivalent stats for the other platforms. It's a little like when a news story quotes only a percentage (but not the absolute figure in $) or vice versa.
Not really, their target audience is much more likely to hang out on Mastodon and Bluesky. So even if the impressions might be fewer the quality of them is almost certainly higher.
Fair, their post gave a nod to the believers I suppose, and it's reasonable to assume they have different metrics of success for getting the message out to believers vs as they described "The people who need us most are often the ones most embedded in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance. Young people, people of color, queer folks, activists, and organizers..."
Having said that, I'd argue that X meets the definition of "walled gardens of the mainstream platforms and subjected to their corporate surveillance."
But, it feels like based on this comment, they should still be on X "We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticizing the very platform we're posting on. We stay because the fewer steps between you and the resources you need to protect yourself, the better. "
And view counts aren't available on most platforms, but on tiktok, where they are, they seem to have about 60k plays or whatever in the past 6 months. So, I'm not sure how you can argue that X is de minimus, but, gotta be on tiktok for reasons, that also apply to X, but, X is de minimus and tiktok is not, even though we get many more views on X.
Anyhow, with this response I've spent 10 more minutes thinking about this than I should, I will leave it here with the closing thought that their post feels very disingenuous.
I use a separate user account per project on my local machine (not in sudoers), which I ssh to, and also runs tmux. If I need claude code in windows, then I run a VM. The performance and (in)convenience cost of this to me is minimal. I started working this way in order to limit the "blast radius" when claude went on a dependency binge within a project.
Recently working on implementing a "MS Teams for the terminal" (video conf, audio, chat, file sharing, recording, etc, the usual things you would expect). Linux and Mac, FBSD and others to follow. Prior to the 1M context window I found I had to restrict myself to specific functionality/areas of the codebase. I'd gotten lazy anyway so this was no bad thing. Reduced the "vibe" quotient of the AI coding.
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