The dog ate it! HONEST!

This is the same military that just sits and frets because it has all kinds of widgets that need a vendor tech called out to service them; but suddenly they've never heard of being restricted from a lawful use ever before...I don't expect honestly from these guys; but the transparency of their lies is pretty pathetic.

I don't think you understood my question: "why now?" is, in large part, "why not earlier?" It's not like domestic repression is normally enough to get you a particularly harsh American response, under this administration perhaps even less so than usual; and I'm unclear on why our other objections to Iranian policy wouldn't have had just as much weight last year when we were bombing centrifuge facilities because they were allegedly for nuclear weapons use; or basically any time during the first Trump administration(where the focus remained mostly on economic sanctions and some back-and-forth hacking until late 2019, when things heated up and Qasem Soleimani did get assassinated but his boss didn't).

My question was not 'why pick on the poor old guy?'; but about what logic would lead you to want to kill him now that would not have led you to want to do so years earlier. Khamenei was president from '81 to '89, then supreme leader '89 to present; and levels of tension have varied but it's not as though either his domestic or foreign positions have undergone particularly shocking changes over time. It seems like someone who thinks he is worth killing now would essentially have to concede that he was left alive significantly too long(unless his operational security used to be impeccable and only very recently slipped and it was purely a matter of inability rather than unwillingness); while if you don't think that there's necessarily an obvious benefit to killing him(in terms of a more cooperative successor you expect to be slotted in or the like) then it seems like a potential miscalculation to give a relatively unpopular figure who is aging out of his position anyway martyr cred, which is unlikely to sway his more enthusiastic opponents; but is exactly the sort of thing that will burnish his legacy and symbolic value among anyone who didn't already hate him.

My question applies to the Israeli interests as well. I'm not pleased that we are obligated to pretend that they are an ally that is worth the trouble because of fundie lunatics; but I'm also unclear how their interests are served by killing the guy now; when it's basically a free set of rose-tinted glasses for him; rather than years ago when a succession crisis would have been much more likely or not at all to let the usually-undignified process of authoritarian geriatrics clinging to power take its course.

Mossad and friends have been picking off various people of interest, including inside Iran, for years, so it seems strange that he's either managed impeccable security until now or someone decided that this opportunity was actually worth taking up when prior ones were not.

Is anyone else puzzled about the logic behind hitting him now? Sure, there's some amount of supremacy nerd 'noone is beyond our reach' wank value to targeting someone through the CCTV system; but why hand a fairly unpopular theocrat who is already old enough that succession planning is an urgent problem basically the most PR-friendly death imaginable at the same time as you provide his government with a plausible argument along the usual 'need to take necessary measures during the current crisis' lines?

That's a more or less instant upgrade from 'increasingly pathetic reactionary with questionable public support' to 'martyred by jews and international zionism' for a guy who was otherwise not long on options for shoring up his popularity.

4 time zones won't be enough for that!

It sounds like Microsoft has a bad case of micropenis.

Has anyone tried that one yet?

But not the age of the kids that find them in the woods, under the bed, or hidden in the garage.

At least bonzie buddy was computationally inexpensive...

That sort of feature would be much more interesting; but it's hard to be optimistic about the quality of the implementation from your average PC OEM, given how utterly trash vendor utilities tend to be.

On the plus side; now that fairly extensive virtualization support is effectively mandatory even in consumer gear, you could probably get most of the benefits of such a system without needing explicit vendor support. It'd be cleaner if you had it and the firmware were aware of the arrangement; but a totally normal system set to boot a hypervisor and a small, hardened, VM that handles the storage abstraction for the user-visible OS that gets all the rest of the hardware passed through natively would be pretty doable. Not on 100% of models; depending on fiddly details of PCIe topology there are some systems that fall over and die if you try to pass certain peripherals through; but you wouldn't need a fully secondary embedded computer in there unless you were particularly worried about side-channel attacks.

It looks like abject trash with no redeeming qualities; but the fact that it's sold separately does at least suggest that you can just not buy it; which genuinely puts it ahead of a lot of companies 'AI' rollouts.

The 'supply chain risk' declaration also seems exceptional in terms of how broad it is.

If the DoD wants killbots a vendor who doesn't do autonomous weapons is presumably not going to be the winning bid; but there's no plausible claim that someone using anthropic's stuff to puke out dashboards and reports for their ERP system rather than openAI's or Microsoft's stuff is any more or less able to produce whatever it is they sell to the DoD; unless it's specifically killbots or mass surveillance systems; but the DoD is demanding that they be stripped from the supply chain regardless.

Wholly unlike a case where, yeah, maybe being dependent on Chinese tungsten makes you a less reliable manufacturer of AP ammunition; or using software engineers in Belarus to write military avionics software because it's cheaper is not a super fantastic idea.

It's arguably that specific position that gets you 'science' rather than something else. If there's insufficient interest in prior work or too much zeal for sticking it to the orthodoxy, man, you never actually get a research program; just individual theories advanced in relative isolation, often specifically tied to their creator and a few students, but just abandoned for the next individual theory rather than ever being worked up hard enough for the cracks to start to show. And, of course, if you declare an existing piece of work to be canonical you are explicitly defining it as no longer a research program(with the possible exception of doing a bit of empirical stamp collecting to fill in details around the edges if they cannot be inferred from first principles) because it's the truth.

Galileo's case is, obviously, one of a system that veered too close to being declared The Truth; clearly you've got a problem when academic astronomy will get you hassled by the pope; but it's also a case of astronomy being comparatively mature and functional as a 'scientific' endeavor; and Ptolomaic theory ultimately cracking up under the weight of centuries of carefully collected observations that became increasingly hard to square with the number of deferents and epicycles and things needed to construct a Ptolomaic model that agreed with the observed sky. The Ptolomaic model was, as it happens, totally wrong(as was the Copernican one; heliocentrism with perfect circles rather than Kepler's elliptical orbits gets really gross really fast once you start adding the complications needed to square it with observations); but as an example of science at work astronomy was a more or less enormous success at achieving an ongoing research program that generated empirical results that ultimately both demanded the development of better theoretical models and were conveniently ready and waiting for the people who worked on creating those models.

That would be the case; except that they are also threatening the 'supply chain risk' designation.

Just not-buying something that doesn't suit your purposes would be normal; saying that none of the people you do business with can do business with the guy you have chosen not to do business with is both extreme and clearly intended to be punitive. "Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic" Sure, because there's an obvious risk that someone who sells the DoD 5.56 or gauze might have javscript devs vibe-coding their website with anthropic rather than openAi tooling. Absurd, purely about trying to expand their ability to punish whoever they feel like.

These are people who treat laughably childish assertions of dominance as the point; so odds are it was largely just about dick-waving vs. the 'woke' and attempting to normalize the ability of the DoD to directly punish elements of the civilian economy that don't fall in line with el presidente; not about some capability the Anthropic wasn't selling them, if they even have it(which they potentially do for domestic surveillance and propaganda operations, allegedly LLMs have some value for doing text attribution by style and speech-to-text; and they certainly have utility for more sophisticated sockpuppeting; it's much less clear that the big name LLM guys have anything super interesting on machine vision of the sort that you'd want to use for geospatial analysis or terminal guidance).

There's also the possibility that Hegseth and friends have roughly the same understanding of 'AI' as your average dangerously clueless optimist taking medical advice from chatgpt; and genuinely believe that the techbros are holding out on them when it comes to developing skynet or the assorted near-miracles that the so called "Genesis Mission" is allegedly going to deliver; in which case they might believe that they are actually being denied a capability that they will want in the more or less near future; but my money would mostly be on it being an attempt to demonstrate dominance rather than a meaningful dispute.

The idea that it's a dominance play seems especially likely given that they are throwing around the threat of 'supply chain risk' designation; rather than going with the much more banal "RFP says we need 'AI' that can be used for killbots and agentic stasi, if your product doesn't do that it's not in the running'. It's not like the DoD doesn't buy tons of nonlethal products and services of various sorts all the time, mostly without incident, or normally makes any fuss about just not-buying products that don't meet their requirements; without threatening to blacklist the vendor. A 'power move' from people with the crudest and most puerile understanding of power.