I think that's the point. Used to be only a few countries had the resources to build a global army, ICBMs, and/or nukes. Now we have what, 10 nuclear powers? And building an ICBM is something a billionaire can do in a single factory? The Ukrainians are showing that I can buy a container-load of consumer quad copters, add some grenades produces by the millions, and take out an armor column (yes, yes, I know, it's likely not that effective).

But yes, this could easily be the great democratization of weapons of very-wide-scale, if not mass, destruction.

I stand corrected. Thank you.

(I can't believe the LARP plate held up. I wonder what kind of Colt that was and what was it firing, not that I'm enough of a gun user to appreciate it. The LARPere must have made a point of hardening the steel after forming it, which is a step I would have thought he might have skimped on. Evidently not.)

I remember visiting an armor museum (in Worcester, MA, IIRC) and seeing a suit of armor with a big round dent from a musket ball. I sorta remember as firearms became more prevalent, armor became less so. The exact causality is apparently beyond me.

No matter, I think my larger point stands. As firearms and artillery became widely deployed, the old defenses became obsolete. I expect that 30 years from now, we'll find all sorts of expensive systems becoming less important versus just massive numbers of drones.

I too will believe it when I see it. Until then, I'll assume this is as real as the "Working Polaris Submarine!" you could find advertised in the back of comic books.

That said, the article has a point. As we're seeing in Ukraine and Iraq, drone offense is becoming cheaper and better at a rapid clip. We need to rapidly invent a way to intercept 10,000 drones. Million dollar missiles isn't it, it's probably 30,000 interceptor drones.

This kind of reminds me of the rise and falls of castles. Used to be defense was the tallest, thickest wall you could build. Then relatively inexpensive artillery showed up and could make rubble of any wall, no matter how well built, and castles became obsolete. Same story with armor: ten farmers with muskets can kill a knight in plate no matter how well he fights. I have no doubt military historians will look back and identify this as a transition point when war stopped being waged with million dollar weapons and started being fought with millions of inexpensive drones.

...can stand still faster than you can sprint.

...tells his GPS where it is.

...unscrambled an egg.

And my favorite:
...told his wife to calm down and she did.

Sure. And normally that's handled through zoning laws. From the fine summary, I take it that swaths of Ohio don't have any zoning laws.

(And, IMHO, good for them. I'm not a huge fan of zoning. But I don't live in Ohio so it's none of my business.)

So, and hear me out, perhaps pass some zoning laws first?

Technical question for the nerds in the crowd.

Where exactly does the real-time translation run? I assume part is on the headphones themselves, my guess would be tokenizing the incoming sound. Is there something running on an iPhone (which I assume is a required accessory)? What runs on an AI back end service?

Anyone know the details?

I'm with you in this case. Part of the art is that the artist is anonymous.

As others are writing, he has no legal or moral right to privacy. But I think we live in a better world if we don't out him.

No doubt. And hopefully the Canadian government is less heavy-handed than other governments. I wouldn't assume that's the case but maybe it will be.

What I'm most comfortable with is there being lots of models, created by lots of organizations, funded by a plethora of sources, produced in different societies, and freely (as in speech) available to all humans. That way, if one is too biased, people will ignore it in droves.

That and "national emergency".

I'm hoping the silver lining we'll get out of the debacle of the last ten years is a renewed respect for federalism and separation of powers. I'm not holding my breath. People are stunningly resistant to realizing it won't always be your friends and allies wielding that power you want to hand out. "We can let the President use his judgement, surely he'll use it with restraint and for the good of the entire country; if he errs, how bad can it be?"

Very, very bad, as it turns out.

Ditto. Time was we coded in assembly. Then compilers came out but people didn't trust them. I, for one, would have occasion to review the generated assembly to double check what got generated matched what I thought the C code should do. By the time I was doing this, it was virtually always me misunderstanding C semantics, not a compiler bug.

AI feels like the next iteration. I code in reasonably specific English. I may or may not carefully review the code, depending on how familiar I am with the toolset and whether the result is a toy, a throwaway tool, or production.

I'll give you yesterday's example. I'm working on a REST API which presents telemetry from a brand new hardware device. There's a lot of uncertainty in how the hardware, control software, and my processing work. In the past, if I wanted to understand what's going on, I'd run a bunch of queries and pore over the output by hand, or maybe copy and paste into a spreadsheet, or write a Perl/Python script to analyze the output. Today I get an AI to create a browser browser app (took maybe 20 minutes if you count bug fix iterations) to fetch the data and render it in a chart. Do I know how to write a good React app? Not in the slightest. Do I care, as long as I can see the shape of the resulting curve? Also not in the slightest, this is a throwaway. Does it help me do a better, faster job on my real work product, the REST server? Oh my God yes.

When I hear "nationalized", I hear "government takes ownership of privately owned organizations." I don't think this is what they're proposing. Without just compensation, that would be wrong.

I don't see the Canadian government shelling out, say, $400 billion to buy Anthropic or whoever but maybe they would. It sounds like what they want instead is for the Canadian government to create an entirely new LLM and AI apps using nothing but government funding. That's not a cheap undertaking.

However, if that's what canucks want to pay for this with their tax dollars, knock yer socks off. Make sure you include some metrics to tell whether this is succeeding and when to pull the plug. I'm skeptical that works if the California high speed rail project is any sort of precedent. We voted on all sorts of guidelines and the state government is blithely ignoring them.

Being an American, it's not my business. Having seen how effectively the US government spends money on technology programs (*cough*Artemis*cough*) I wouldn't endorse my government working on that project with a three meter pole.

Are you sure of that? How in the world would you measure and audit that?

IMHO, bias is in the eye of the beholder. What one person might call biased another might call obviously correct. Forget AI, every human is biased to every other human. When I talk to my 20-something daughter, she (lovingly) thinks I'm a biased anarcho-capitalist-libertarian, I (lovingly) think she's an indoctrinated progressive feminist wackadoodle.

Sure would be a shame should somepin' to happen to it, like being banned in the US.

No mafia don was ever as brazen as this administration.

Except that's not exactly what happened. Anthropic and the DoD signed a contract with explicit terms. Both sides agreed to the terms. Anthropic was perfectly willing to deliver services which meet the terms of the contract. It's not like Anthropic suddenly declared "you're about to attack Iran, we're going to disable our services because we don't agree." That would be legitimate grounds for a grievance.

Declaring a company a supply chain risk is a nuclear option. It should be invoked only after DoD has exhausted every other option to remedy the situation, including finding other suppliers. To me, that would imply the supplier is providing something like spyware or trojans or intentionally defective munitions, something surreptitious which undermines the ability of DoD to wage wa...er...sustained combat operations. Something which can't easily be detected ahead of time. Not something you were told about months ago.

What's really going on is DoD has a lot of leverage and this administration gets their jollies throwing their weight around. "Nice AI business you got here. Sure would be a shame if something was to happen to it, like being declared a supply chain risk."

That's the thing. As soon as POTUS gets his fingers into company operations, that's when I, as an investor, start looking for the door. The one thing I'm sure of is Trump won't use his influence to boost shareholder value.

It would be an interesting research project to see whether that's actually happened to Intel, US Steel, and the other companies Trump has demanded stakes of.