In May 2025, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth disbanded the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence in the Pentagon, because in his own words, he wanted a military "focused on lethality". I think that is the real story. Pete Hegseth only cares about civilian casualties if they could potentially become a liability to himself or the President. That is also why the President ordered Marco Rubio to "dismantle" the ICC "brick by brick".

To better understand the Maven system, I highly recommend reading the book, "Project Maven" by Katrina Manson. In it she does a deep dive into the history of Maven, what it can and cannot do, and how it can be misused in the wrong hands. Maven was never intended to be a stand-alone targeting system, and the people who created it were very aware of the deficiencies of relying solely on an AI system to make military decisions. It is a great read for any military nerd who wants to understand the history of AI in military planning, and why these systems were created.

I think the blame can be correctly applied to Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump for ordering this war, and for ordering the military to stop considering "collateral damage" when making targeting decisions. Pete Hegseth bragged about the military striking 13,000 targets in the first month of the Iran war. This is only possible if you forgo the traditional target development process, and strike targets based on thin or no current intelligence, no collateral damage analysis, and no weaponering (selecting appropriate ordnance for the target) considerations. It appears the military just took a long list of potential military targets and ordered strikes on all of them without any verification or thought of how those destroying those targets ties into a greater military strategy. This retired military officer believes that violence was the military strategy.

In my opinion, Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and their many acolytes believe that violence is how you win human conflict, and the side that is more violent will win. Military officers who do not share his world view are suspect, possibly woke, and have to be purged. In his word view all targets are good military targets, even civilians, if their deaths result in the desired outcome, regime change in Iran. It is the same world view that has taken over policing of minority communities in America, ICE enforcement to include shooting down protesters, or Israel's military operations in Gaza and Lebanon. What military history teaches us is that unmitigated violence doesn't win wars, but only prolongs them and turns them into multi-generational wars.

After 12 months the subscription to AI Pro is $26.99/mo.

You can cancel the subscription and still use the laptop, but some features that were built into it go away without AI Pro. Such as autonomous agent support, and of course you look 5 TB of cloud storage when you drop Pro.

Nobody? Honest mistake? I guess nobody has to take responsibility for anything anymore. THANKS AI!

At least the retail arm of Amazon is um a wait for it a retailing operation. The individual candy bars, and $2 for 20z chilled sodas are up by the checkout line where you are standing around waiting at the grocery for a reason.

At any large retailer (an some small ones) quite a lot of thought goes into what is on the end caps and what gets less prime real-estate. I actually don't think it is unreasonable Amazon should seek to control the shopping experience to a degree even if to the point of using so called 'dark patterns' to drive some impulse purchases or steer customers toward higher margin items in the category.

That is consumer selling and has been since probably some ancient farmer bartering with his neighbor suggested he'd take fewer animal skins if the other guy agreed to accept some of the squash that had already gone a bit soft over the fresher merchandise.

Does big tech, take that probably way to far - I think the answer is likely yes, but how far that is and how they should be restrained is really a different conversation.

The separate question is should Amazon have to let Meta (or anyone else) step in and completely separate Amazon's own customers from interacting with the store front Amazon wants to present to them? I think the answer to that really should be no.

The reason it should be no is not to protect Amazon but because as much influence as they have in the retail space (maybe to much) think how much influence a handful of frontier model AI providers might get in terms of determining product selection etc if shopping via AI bot becomes the nominal consumer expectation.

The more fundamental problem is distributed responsibility and lack of transparency.

Until recently, drone strikes required a long sequence of command decisions, starting with intel gathering, analysis, decision, orders, and remote command of the device. No one is directly responsible when something goes wrong, the failure is distributed among many players with the result that no one has to bear the consequences.

For example, the "collateral murder" incident, where apache helicopters gunned down civilians and journalists.

In normal situations, we have Derek Chauvin, who was an individual who caused the death of one man. He went to trial, the evidence was examined, and guilt was assigned. Trials are more-or-less held in the public light, and journalists and interested parties can examine court records and in some cases reanalyze evidence (not all physical evidence is kept or available, but for example, DNA evidence can sometimes be reexamined).

That's how it's supposed to happen.

Contrast that with erroneously ordered drone strikes that hit civilians instead of legitimate targets.

I suppose the biggest, most egregious example would be George Bush taking the country to war because Saddam Hussein had "weapons of mass destruction", and of course one were found, and the security services swore up and down that they told him there were none, but he stated "well, the message didn't get through".

And skated responsibility. Completely.

To bring this closer to home, software engineers implement all sorts of insecure, inconvenient, and privacy violating features with no moral pushback. Even if it's completely obvious that something is an anti-feature, people do it because a) their job depends on it, and b) it's someone else's decision. And if there's a breech and ten million social security numbers get made public, the company simply fixes the problem and continues. No responsibility is assigned.

I was satisfied to see videos of the "narco terrorist" boats get destroyed, and then the survivors killed. Not the actual killing, but just knowing that the event was recorded and analyzed in the public sphere, and there was a conversation about it, and it was investigated. That seems like it was handled the right way.

Death is permanent, it can't be undone. If we're going to kill people, regardless of whether it's AI or anything else, it should be transparent and put into the public discourse.

No one is assigned blame for screwing up, that's the more fundamental problem.

Because Republicans believe the average American to be an uninformed lout. That none of this will ever come back to their party. That they can simply pivot away, stir up a new crisis, and we will all forget.

No. I think hollywood has always been subversive and run by foreign pedophiles. For example, look for the interview with Shirley Temple about what they tried doing to her as a _child_,

I think it has produced enough pro-American-MIC films every now and then to stay out of more government trouble.

You usually don't realize (at the time) that the media you watched as a child was subverting you (and your parents desires). And unless you revisit those films a generation later with a critical eye, you may not realize it ever.

But that's how the ratchet effect works. The newer media that is now visibly odious to me is only visibly odious to me because it is targeting the edge of an overton window that has continued moving since my own youth. The leading edge of socially allowable media subversion continues to advance until a historical reset event sets it back somewhat. Or, sometimes, when there is sufficient market rejection.

In the case of hollyweird, the concentration of power has significant drawbacks; destroying that concentration of power will probably be a net benefit. (to be clear, I think It will amplify other problems instead).

In general, I think evil seems to be more effective when it is centralized and powerful, with captured institutions, while maintaining the ability to operate openly, and has de-facto monopoly control over the domain in which it operates, and when most people do not understand what is being done to them.

Well no, it's not just entertainment. News is in the deal also, specifically CBS and CNN.

Well if they even just brought CBS and CNN more towards center and away from left...that might even things up more....the left will still have NBC, ABC, MSNOW (or whatever they go by now) and most of the major news papers and other new sources.

A bit more balance would be nice.

I've seen enough videos of yahoos expressing their "rationale" for voting for Trump, that I wonder if AI and chatbot recommendations might be an improvement.

It was simple....better choice than cackling Kamala....

More evidence has been presented publicly that Trump fucked kids than was necessary to convict Cosby or Weinstein. There are more accusers, too.

Citations please?

Surely there are valid new stories about such by major networks, major news sources?

Interesting....I've never had a separate app like the mentioned yubikey or bitwarden....new to me too.

I rarely use or have to use the 2FA which is just generally a text message with a code....

Do you ... ever have like a moment of non- black and white thinking?

Just a little nagging, uneasy feeling, that perhaps things and people are not all good or all bad?

Well, that's nice.

Fortunately, we're still a sorta free country, so they are doing it anyway. Regardless of what you think, commissar.

... that Google's laptop strategy was "thin, cheap client"? I guess that's changed.

Yeah, exactly. I definitely don't need or want an "agent" to do things in my life.

Research and organize some info, maybe. Write some code, maybe. Draft something that won't piss people off as much as something I would say off the cuff, maybe.

Buy things for me, or do personal communications for me in non-draft mode? Definitely not.