Here is the actual story, transcription repeated from here:

So, no, contrary to your unsourced claim, it was based on (a) a specific incident (b) material concern about the implications of the specific incident (c) escalation through the chain of involved parties (d) without apparent direction by the "convicted felon president and war criminal in chief".

Also pretty clear from the anecdote how it is that DoD has sincere concerns with actual grounding. Debate over the legitimacy of those concerns, the ethicality of what they want the software to do, etc. would all be reasonable to discuss. But it really does help if you want to argue against something to start by properly understanding what you are debating.

They didn't exactly whittle down their options before settling on sending missiles and drones at the civilian populations in neutral neighbors. It was among the first things they started doing.

In fact, during the 12-Day War Israel took out their missile command so thoroughly that for a long time there was no one to launch missiles in retaliation. Iran learned from that and had given the IRGC members pre-determined launch orders so they could at independently. That means shooting missiles at everyone in the vicinity was their plan even before any operations started.

I think people struggle to grasp that when it's called a "terrorist regime" it's not name-calling, it's actually how Iran's insane theocratic leadership thinks. They kill their own people by the tens of thousands and don't bat an eye. They would legitimately struggle to answer why killing a few civilians next door for leverage should be considered an immoral act.

Can't believe "it's the Jews!" gets +5 here. Same any century I guess.

Iran and it's proxies have killed hundreds of not thousands of Americans over the years. In US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hundreds were killed by Iran backed militias which were supplied with Iranian weapons. Retaliation for that was the justification for the US strike to kill Iran's extraterritory general Soleimani who was still operating in Iraq in 2020. Iran has frequently harassed ships and threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz through which ~20% of global oil passes. Just recently the Iranian assassins who tried to kill an American in New York (Masih Alinejad) were sentenced. Two years ago they tried to assassinate the same American who has now ordered the strikes against them. The Iranian response to that stine has been to fire missiles into all neighboring countries including their specific *allies* like Qatar, hitting a number of civilian targets including multiple hotels, commercial buildings and airports, in hopes of blackmailing those countries into pushing for a ceasefire. Would the US be likely to let a country that does that get enough missiles to have effectively nuclear-level blackmail and be untouchable? Right now they have ~2000 missiles but they were producing 80 per day with a goal of at least 8000. To say nothing of actual nuclear deterrence; Iran openly admits they have enough 60% enriched uranium to make ~11 bombs and throughout the negotiations has refused any possibility of sending it abroad.

The US obviously has a lot of interest here. It doesn't always have to be Jewish masterminds behind everything to where you say "that's all you need to know" and don't even bother to think that in complex geopolitical questions, countries strategic decisions might be based on a range of inputs. Maybe those inputs are even wrong. But the us notoriously considers its own interests and not really those of other countries when it makes strategic decisions, especially DT.

It was just 7 weeks ago the people across every strata of Iranian society were pouring out by increasing millions to protest his government and seemed like he was about to be ousted (to the point that many top government officials were wiring all their money out of the country in preparation for exile).

Then, also just 7 weeks ago, he ordered his forces to just... kill all of them. Machine guns fired into crowds. Survivors were found and executed at the hospitals. In one case they set a market on fire, trapping the protestors, and then shot anyone who fled. Tens of thousands were killed. More were arrested and sentenced to death. Anyone who wanted to recover their loved one's body had to pay an exorbitant fee to the government for the bullets. The streets were now patrolled by armed militia breaking up groups of even a few people. No more protests.

And your question is - "Why not just let the old guy live out his days"?

I'm sure in your society unpopular leaders are removed from power. That's not how it works in a despotic regime in which the ruling party has a complete monopoly on force.

How divorced can you be from any concept of what is actually going on there? Iran could not care less if any of their citizens died they are by an unfathomable margin the ones killing the. And there very first response on the attack was to launch missiles at all neighboring countries hitting hotels in Dubai, office buildings in the UAE, streets in Bahrain, and of course killing civilians in Israel. Your picture of who the Iranian government is and their motivations doesn't match up with *anything.*

It's not a "metric" and "idiotic" is trying to shove across the implication that the attitude of the local population into irrelevance. That is intuitively unintelligible. A rational person could contextualize the popular sentiment as less important than some other factor if they had good evidence, but to dismiss it out-of-hand is just flailing. Provide evidence. Provide examples. Show me where the United States has people cheering for outside attack and for British monarchs to reassert themselves, since apparently you think that's an equivalent thing that exists.

Do you want to watch the videos of Iranians in Tehran cheering on news of the Ayatollah's death? How about millions protesting the government in January? Unlike past protests, these including member of every class in Iran including the merchants (historically conservative and supportive of the regime). Why did the government have to engage in all-out slaughter against the protestors if they didn't represent a majority? Why did they have to cut out the entire countries internet? The protests were across hundreds of cities and towns. (Some towns even fully seized control before regime forces showed up with machine guns. The IRGC was talking about using their own missiles against cities that fell.)

What is your apparent counter-evidence that Iranians are somehow mostly en camp with the Islamic government?

Tbh, it's not unexpected for people without ties to the area to be ignorant of what it's really like in Iran. You don't get a great picture from Western media, which mostly focuses on the government. But I don't understand knowing nothing about it and then feeling justified to make sweeping claims.

No, and if I did, you would have happily quoted where I said that. Instead you are just being tactically obtuse so you can reframe the argument around an evaluation of US intentions instead of what I actually commented which was regime atrocities.

I am for the people of Iran no longer having to deal with a government they don't want and which blithely murders them en masse. Somehow in your reply you managed **not a single word*** for the Iranian people or the tens of thousands killed. Just desperate it make about your petty US internal politics.

A "pressure tactic" is to take out the Ayatollah? Why did the planning around this just happen to start after the mass killings of protestors?

If you don't want to side with the Iranian fine. It's frankly too late for your opinion to matter, for which I am very grateful. But just fyi, since you care so much about your domestic US political jockeying, the outcome here is already Iranians cheering in the streets. If the regime falls and all the images that come out are of the people praising the US - followed by hard evidence on the regime's atrocities - and then more gratitude to the US - you are going to have handgifted Trump a huge political win by allowing your side to be anchored to the defeated regime instead of seizing the opportunity to make it a "we all win here" outcome. I guess we'll see if your "ACKTUALLY EPSTEIN" response is a winning strategy for the midterms.

Iran is not an Islamic country. Persians were Zorastrians. Mostly they are now something like agnostics. They don't believe in Islam, they don't want to wear the hijab, they are just held captive by a fanatical government that requires them put "Muslim" on their birth certificates.

When has US sponsored regime change ever before come at the direct request of the people living there? (Maybe Vichy France.)

Persians hate the Islamic regime. They have been in the streets by the millions protesting against Khomenei (who is hopefully now deceased). In response he ordered his personal forces and secret police to open fire on them, killings tens of thousands of innocent people over just two days, another ten thousand put in prison and placed under sentence of death. They went to the hospitals afterward and executed anyone with injuries, and doctors who didn't comply. You can find pictures of people in bodybags who still have the hospital IV in their arms. I am not aware of anything like it in recent memory. Maybe the Rwandan genocide. Fyi the women taken prisoner will almost certainly be raped before execution. The regime believes that virgins go to heaven automatically, and in order to avoid giving their enemies a free pass into paradise by killing them, the rape is considered essential. That's what the people there have been enduring.

The only thing that has been keeping the present regime in place is having a monopoly on guns and firepower. The protests "ended" because Khonemeni was brutal enough to terrify all of his own citizens with the massive killings and subsequent armed militia patrols including imported from Iraq and Lebanon - always helpful when the people charged with mass murder have no cultural ties to the people they are expected to kill. (Some IRGC members refused to follow orders to open fire on crowds - they were also sentenced to execution.)

Instead of vague insinuations of bad outcomes, why don't you explain how you think that government is best option for the Iranian people? Persians have been perfectly capable of uniting under a peaceful government, and all of the older generation lived under the Shah. The have a leader in exile (the Shah's son) who quite likely has enough political goodwill to lead a transitional role to a democratic government. No vacuous chaos.

Can you at least muster up a "Trump is awful and I hate him and maybe the US and Israel are terrible too - but it's fundamentally good that a government that just executed 30-40k of its own citizens for peaceful protest faces consequences for doing that"?

Constitutionality is not the DoD's quibble.

Nor is it anything in the content of the Anthropic's objections. In fact the DoD explicitly insists they will not use AI for the surveillance or autonomous killing. (Which I suppose they could be lying about but then why not just lie about following the ToS, and they match in existing policy e.g. they insist on inserting human approval for any otherwise autonomous drone killing.)

If the DoD agrees with the principle of the restrictions what do they actually object to?

What armed forces do and decide is constrained by something like "Constitution -> US Law -> personal conscience -> Chain of Command." What they don't like is the idea of that ever becoming "Constitution -> US Law -> *various random companies' Terms of Service* -> ...".

In most other context I have to imagine most people here would agree. Should companies the justice department does business with get to place ToS limits on their judicial decisions if the provided resources are involved? Could the entity supplying a legislator's word processor ToS what kind of laws they can write? If so would it be acceptable for the legislator to use that word processor? If not, why shouldn't the executive branch similarly object to that kind of arrangement?

If there is a backlog of 30k vulnerabilities I don't see how AI is even relevant here. Linus Torvalds himself could have entered a fugue state and churned out 500 reports over the weekend and surely it would still be the case that his reports would be stuck in the queue.

The real concern is if while blue team is stuck on their trusty human-in-the-loop evaluation system, red team is 1000Xing exploits. (I don't think they will mind too much of 90% are false positives or implemented with crummy code.) In that case, be as skeptical as you want of AI code vs human code quality, acceleration-in-kind is the only alternative the blue team has to giving up and airgapping everything.

China already gets its way in forcing Hollywood and other big industries to self-sensor on its behalf, down to the individual level (e.g. sanctioning NBA teams if their members made a post in solidarity with the oppressed in Hong Kong).

But even when you have no business with China you still have to worry about what will happen to your business if you acknowledge their persistent genocide of the Uighurs?

This isn't a situation to passively accept.

The idea you can disburse massive money with less oversight and get *less* fraud is as crazy as it sounds.

In fact we got a nice empirical taste in what to expect in the pandemic payouts. Numerous persons and addresses were invented. Checks were intercepted in the mail or redirected to a different address and washed. Or people were scammed e.g. by being sent fake "overpayments" they needed to "partially refund" to the scammers. That was hundreds of billions defrauded from the government just from two payouts.

What do you think will happen in terms of domestic abuse and human trafficking if a constant influx of dollars magically accompanies any person even if they never leave the house?

What about people with substance and compulsory addictions? Or ties to violent crime organizations? Do you just send them money and not care what it's ultimately used for?

It is very appealing to redirect money spent on bureaucracy to its intended targets, but the idea you can reduce misuse by making free money easier to access is just not so.

NHSTA data shows Tesla's being ~1/2 as likely to be involved in a crash as comparable cars. That already covers the premium reduction.

Tesla often claims much higher safety advantage (up to 10x) and has been criticised for misrepresentation as those numbers are based on pretty selective data - telemetry collected when FSD is turned on. Which is obviously not all the time and in fact most likely to be used on the easy part of the route, so not at all represent of the average risk.

But in this case those are exactly the conditions in which Lemonade is offering the reduction, so they are providing a 2X payout for 10X payoff. And even if that affects the statistics negatively (more use of FSD in risky conditions for reduced premium) you would expect that to at worst converge to the overall 2X payoff.

But honestly they are probably going to get their real savings from the telemetry and being able to back their non-payouts with ironclad proof, and, conversely, not spend legal and investigative resources when they should just payout.

Assuming AI tooling did offer a productivity advantage, if both you and your competitor move from not having it to having it, then you have gained no net advantage. That doesn't mean you could just as well have skipped it, because then your competitors *would* gain an advantage.

In short, you need to measure something besides $.