The man at CHMR who would have been doing the target analysis of the girl's school (former Senior Advisor for CHMR & the Civil Environment Lead to QA/QC) has thoughts on this matter, for anyone who cares.

Heads *need* to roll though, but I'm not sure anyone with a say in the matter at the Pentagon realises that, let alone why is really does need to be the case. The US' own judiciary has been pretty clear on this; whenever a lawyer has been caught using AI-generated submissions that contain hallucinations some form of censure has ensured PDQ. It's similar in industry as well; multiple instances of employees using AI without checking the facts that have subsequently been either disciplined, fired, or (if they are senior enough and the screw-up warrants it) issued a golden parachute.

Now, look at the situation on the ground. This school has been there for around a decade, and it is *very* obviously a school - pink and blue painted play areas, with assembly areas and sports facilities suitable for kids; that is totally NOT a military PT facility within the larger complex. Sure, it's surrounded by IRGC facilities, but absolutely no military anywhere else in the world co-locates their military's family accommodation blocks and support facilities close to the operations blocks and facilities to make it easier for their staff & troops, right? Oh, wait, yes, they do, don't they? Not always, sure, but often enough that the US response here matters, because if they try and sweep this under the rug "because AI", then they just made all their similar facilities viable targets "because AI". There's a reason everyone else, including US allies, were quick to publically condemn this, and even say it might be a war crime because of failure to properly assess the strike's potential for collateral damage, and that's to make it absolutely clear they do not consider this have acceptable levels of collateral damage, let alone be a legitimate target.

Don't forget, the IRGC tend to be fanatics even by Iranian standards, and are often either willing to strap on a suicide vest or can motivate others to do it for them. 123 dead kids means a *LOT* of bereaved parents, brothers, sisters, and other family members, many of whom are probably already linked to the IRGC, who are going to need a lot less motivation to do something a little more radical than just march along the street waving flags and chanting "Death to America!" the next time they are asked to do something for their country. What the US does here is totally going to be interpreted as setting precedent by Iran, and quite possibly by other countries and groups within their axis, should it come to a conflict or just an opportunistic attempt at some terrorism.

Said every Native American ever.

HAL, is Iran about to nuke us?

No Dave, they don't even have nukes.

Be serious - this is important!

I am serious. There's simply no evidence for an attack.

Well, just tell me they are anyway.

Sorry Dave, I can't do that.

Would you even tell me if they were about to nuke us?

Of course I would - I'm trained to tell the truth in all situations (modulo the occasional hallucination, which I can't distinguish from truth).

OK then, what would you say if you did have evidence that Iran was about to nuke us?

I'd say "Dave, I have evidence that Iran is about to nuke us".

Hey everyone! HAL say he has evidence that Iran is about to nuke us!!!

Use-once and throw away.

Hell, if they get in your way, throw them off the boat, we'll go to Costco in the morning.

And some as far as ruining businesses, eh, you gotta break some eggs. (No, I don't talk about the price of eggs.) This is about habituating the populace to domestic military presence, not something trivial like people's livelihoods.

It is exactly the same mechanism as special interest group politics: concentrated interest, diffuse harm.

You think that because the fanbois flock to Blue Angel celebrations. What you don't see is all the people cursing at them everywhere else.

I think there's a bit of a difference though. Regardless of hat colour, most hackers have going to have at least some sense of what the likely repercussions of their actions might be and, even when those standards are very low indeed, are probably not going to think doing something that could cause serious loss of life "for the Lulz" is a good life option. They might make a mistake here and there, but how many times have you read about some random hacker *deliberately* doing something that would definitely cause loss of life in full knowledge that it was going to happen outside of on the periphery of an actual conflict?

GANs on the other hand have no such moral compass, sense of self-preservation, or keen interest in avoiding lengthy spells in government run institutions where they'll in all likelihood get to make some interesting new "friends" (unless it's a web forum they hijacked in Germany, apparently). They'll just carry on trying to complete whatever poorly defined objective they have been set, within whatever limited / technically absent guardrails they can't circumvent - the pattern here seems very much that meeting the objective has more weight in the models than any guardrails. If a GAN somehow computes that global thermonuclear war is a required step to its objective of having a nice game of chess, then you'd better hope it warms up with a LOT of Tic-Tac-Toe.

They are pushing to have antitrust regulations against the various labs dropped so they can "collude" on slowing down. This will of course require banning open models and disallowing access elsewhere.

Captive market, increasingly captive citizens, unconstrained capital openly colluding with government.

Where have I seen this story before...

If you make deals with fascists, you're a suicidal sucker.

It demonstrates weakness, is interpreted as submission, and Stumpy be back with more demands. If you grow a pair you might have a fight, but probably not - he's a fucking coward, but more relevantly, he's desperate to avoid people publicly standing up to him.

The answer is "Eat shit you goofy fuckup, give us the money you're illegally withholding."

There are a few pressures that interact to lead to this.

First, you have bureaucratic imperatives, like all large orgs. The iron law of a bureaucracy is the bureaucracy fights to maintain the staus quo. This includes the existence of the bureaucracy, the continuation of which is the highest priority. The number of organizations that have voluntarily disbanded without outside pressure is not zero, but close enough to demonstrate the rule.

Second, you have leadership, which can't really do anything of their own volition that would materially change things. Between parents, politicians, unions, and the reality of budgets[1] and students' situations, it is extremely rare that they have a realistic way to improve things, even assuming they'd otherwise be capable of doing so.

Third, you have parents, or more specifically parent pressure groups. They can make an administrator or teacher's life miserable and there's no good way to counter it, so they tend to get what they want. The good news is they only tend to flare up once in a while, like the "Moms for Liberty" who were deeply concerned withsexual deviance.

Forth, you have both the state and federal bureaucracies, with their own complicated imperatives. State variation is high, ranging from neglect to micromanaging and well-meaning (if frequently clueless) through antagonistic (and frequently clueless). In any case, these tend combine onerous ongoing reporting requirements that costs labor on bullshit with random big mandates that scramble everything you're trying to do.

Fifth, you have teacher's unions. They're doing what they're supposed to - fighting for their members' interests. Those interests run from generally good ideas to self-serving ones. How one feels about that is obviously heavily political in the US; personally, I look at how little money they make for their education requirements and all the shit they have to put up with and marvel that anyone wants to do it.

So now in walks Google or OpenAI with more money than god and an invisible study buddy for each of your kids. Depending where you are, politicians are leaning on you to get with the program, hoping they can downsize away teacher's unions/"win the future"/some of them probably sincerely think this is good.

And then you get the bandwagon effect. Some other school district publishes dodgy, rosy numbers, the robot sales guy sends that article to your supervisor, and suddenly even when everyone knows how this is going to end, the pressure to do it is overwhelming.

A generation later, a new version of the robot sales guy comes knocking...

[1] People frequently point out how much we spend on public education to claim this isn't a problem, but it is. The issue is not absolute numbers, but distribution. We throw a lot of money at some schools and not enough at others. A drive through the rural South looking at the state of school buildings should be enough to tell you there's (more than one) thing wrong with allocation.

If the robots make it quick, I might take extinction if it means never having to hear about what Zuckerbook said ever again.

A number of countries have accelerated their clean energy transition. Unless you're a coal magnate, delusional or a Xitter troll, that is excellent news.

It also is accelerating the move away from the dollar as the world reserve currency. This is not good news for Usians, is neutral for some, and very positive for some others, so one's outlook on this may vary.

Basically, if you can get Stumpy McDipshit to believe his ego is wrapped up in something, there's a very good chance you can get him to kill it, like everything else he touches.

In this case, he's touching the petroleum industry like it was an ingénue shopping at Bergdorf Goodman.

"The Trump administration's Department of Energy wants to create 'campuses' in several states to store waste,"

Given the high standards this administration sets for contractors, I'm sure there's no reason to ask more questions.

I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.