Undoubtedly they're now working on a War Prize for him.

I just saw an article that said there have already been about 100 complaints filed by NCOs whose commanding officers told them in meetings that the war was to set things up for Jebus to come back.

Oh, I say something nice about him: he got us out of Afghanistan.

Unfortunately I can't think of anything else.

And don't forget the Millennium Challenge 2002 wargame.

Probably also ought to avoid a sea war in Asia.

50 years ago we didn't have a government that needed a distraction from an ever-growing scandal.

"Burden Foreign Countries with Slop"

The problem here is that developers can take responsibility for the action while AI can not. Humans do make mistakes and that's ok; best practice is not to just can employees for messing up. Once is a mistake. Twice is an HR event. When someone does something dumb we forgive but we also insist that meaningful steps are taken to prevent that problem in the future. AI can't really take those steps because AI can't be accountable for "don't do it again." Taking down production because you dropped a table once is forgivable. Taking it down twice for the same reason is a different matter.

The developer can be accountable. And if HR fails to hold them to account for it, HR is accountable. And if HR isn't held accountable, leadership is. And if leadership isn't held accountable, the board is. And if the board isn't held accountable, the stockholders have some hard decisions to make. And if they choose not to make them than it wasn't really that big a deal, was it?

But with an AI the option is "we stop using AI" or "we live with the result."

Everyone is so excited about not having to pay software engineers to write code that they've forgotten what engineers actually do. It's less common in the software world but go find a civil engineer or an electrical engineer or an aerospace engineer and follow them around for a week.

At some point, there's going to be a document in front of them laying out how something is going to be built and they're going to be asked to approve it. And when they do that they're taking responsibility for the design. If it falls down, if it catches on fire, or if it crashes into the mountains and kills people, they're the name on the form saying that won't happen. They're responsible.

Claude 4.5 Opus is very impressive, but if it writes a software application that kills people it can't take responsibility. It can't be punished. It can't even really be sued.

I just don't see how we, as a society, can trust fundamentally unaccountable entities to build systems that can do real harm if they go wrong. I suppose the alternative is that Anthropic accepts full legal liability for everything its models do. Their unwillingness to make that move tells you all you probably need to know about their own internal confidence in those models.

One thing the science does tell us is that we all have a very hard time separating the world that existed when we were children from our perception of that world through the eyes of a child.

Ask nearly any population in the United States when this country was best and you'll get a majority who'll swear to you it was when they were teenagers. The age of the group doesn't matter. You get the same result from 20 year olds as 40 year olds as 60 year olds as 80 year olds. And what you're seeing is people looking back to a time when they had lots of free time, lots of freedom, and most of their income was disposable and thinking "that was pretty great." And it was.... except they were living under a roof someone else paid for and still experiencing the risks and complexities of the world through the filter and safety net provided by their parents.

And since we're being scientific about this: yes, obviously not everyone. I'm sure someone reading this right now is thinking "I had a tough childhood." And I'm sure they did but anecdotes are not data.

The 1980s were -- and I say this as both a historian and someone who lived through them -- fucked. Reagan torched the New Deal consensus. The AIDS crisis was literally laughed out of the White House press room. Our government perpetuated a long string of dirty intelligence/foreign-policy interventions. The wealthy and powerful were juiced to the gills on cocaine.

There was a sense of decorum which has sense evaporated from American politics but that's about it.

Right now the pushers aren't much interested in ROI or whether it's ready for prime time. They're just trying to stake out a big market share while things are still fluid.

Why is it considered news when someone says something utterly predictable?

The Foundation TV series has been a lot of fun but I just can't shake how very much it is NOT ASIMOV'S FOUNDATION. Not even a little bit. It's fine that they didn't want to tell the Foundation story. Honestly, I'm not sure it would make good TV in a faithful adaptation. But... why set yourself up for failure like that? It's not like the majority of the people watching it are 1940s era Sci Fi fans.

AI is the solution to every problem.

You're supposed to pound the table, not make shit up.