Iran will be taunting Trump with that before the mid-terms in 3... 2... 1...

To be fair, the Roadrunner cartoons were pretty much all the same, with differing details. Retreads aren't necessarily bad. Formulas exist because they work.

I just don't like the things I've seen in the last 40 years. (OTOH, I didn't like the movie version of "The Wizard of Oz" when I was a kid...I much preferred the book version.)

Let me start by saying that I dislike the attitudes of this current administration, and I'm not happy that our military is being led by the tattoo-and-flex crowd. War is enough of a hell already. Better for the brainy thinking spectacle wearing crowd to have a say in these things. We don't need MAGA types making it any crueler than it already is.

That being said.....

I will repeat. War is hell. The fog of war is real. Mistakes are made. Perfection is impossible. As much as I dislike the whole DOGE flamethrower-and-hire-back-the-important-ones approach, apparently they got 999 out of a thousand missile strikes correct, and screwed up 1 out of a thousand? In war, that accuracy level seems pretty good to me. As much as I want to blame this administration, that number is actually an indication that our systems are working pretty damn well. War is confusing, messy, chaotic, hell.

Your argument about the IRGC is pretty weak. Why should we be worried in the slightest about antagonizing the IRGC? As you pointed out, they're already radicalized. We can't make them any angrier at the US. The needle on their anger meter is already buried at 10. Actually, I meant 11. The mis-fire isn't justified. But, it is a tragic consequence of war. War. Is. Hell.

It seems like the issue of AI hallucination is widely promulgated and widely known. I mean, this site has an overrepresentation of technicians who tend to think of highly esoteric tech information as common knowledge just because they work with it every day.....but I don't think this quirk of AI behavior is in that category.

And yet, people keep making this same mistake precisely where it matters. We get stories like this every other day. I have seen it at my own job, where my own boss who still has some semblance of technical talent was downplaying the risk of AI hallucination in a pipeline that would have the AI directly manipulating mission critical data prior to an import.

It is surreal how people want the AI hallucination problem to just stop being a problem the moment it is inconvenient for them. People who should know better let their wish for a reliable AI override their knowledge that AI is not reliable, and they just move forward with it.

I fear things are going to get worse, because we really seem to be failing to learn the obvious lesson here.

These remind me of the early Chromebooks - I bought one from Asus, jailbroke it, and installed Linux. If somebody figures out how to do that with this latest offering, I could see a lot of people doing the same thing.

I wouldn't pop for one, because I'm addicted to Trackpoints and hate touchpads almost as much as I hate iPhones. But it might be good for other folks. And I like the idea of Google providing cheap, capable hardware that doesn't participate so heavily in their privacy rape.

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.

What applicable US law would any of those responsible face? Misfeasance is the only one that comes to mind, and I think that's a state level law.

If you mean the laws SHOULD criminalize and punish this kind of behavior, I agree. They don't for high military or executive branch officials. Not even after they leave office.

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'm with you, I'm baffled how it can be hard to find stuff. From stainless steel screws I recently needed to .1% smd resistors to spline tools for screens, to specialized brass shutoff valves, to misters I just don't seem to have a problem finding sources and getting stuff. And that was just last week. And generally I avoid amazon. There have been a few things I've never found. There is some stuff that just doesn't exist. Market too small I imagine.

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one, and in this case, given what I've seen people do with AI, and given my own experience with Claude Code (Opus and Fable models), the normal human inclination to trust it's probably right and click OK is by far the most likely explanation. And remember that frontier models have grown increasingly better over the last year, and one of the newest improvements is that the reasoning models use two models in an adversarial mode where the second model checks and challenges the output of the first. The timeline of the events in Iran probably indicate that this was an older AI model without those newer advances. I can totally believe this story. When consumers were expected to keep their hands on the wheel of self-driving cars, I absolutely knew they wouldn't, and when humans are told to check the conclusions of AI, they mostly just click OK. I do actually look at the code that Claude generates before it goes into our codebase, and I can tell you, the desire to just skim read is real.

From what I've read it seems the AI co's are under-reporting cap ex numbers by stretching depreciation schedules. If that 3 year old GPU is worth zilch and you've binned it, but your depreciation schedule has it at 7, it will still be an expense from years 4-7 when there is zero value coming from it. Those finance guys have always been just as creative as AI.

On the one hand, this administration is desperate because the mid-terms are coming up and they're so far underwater in the polls that they're pushing up seaweed. They'll say anything and everything to gain even a fraction of an approval point, and are grasping at every straw that might allow them to keep breathing long enough to successfully rig the election. So throwing Palantir under the bus would be psychopath logic.

On the other hand, Thiel and Karp are themselves creepy psychopathic fuckers who support the genocide in Palestine and probably masturbate to images of children being tortured and killed; so it wouldn't surprise me in the least to hear that they covertly engineered a strike on a girls' school.

As a third option, both of the above could be true.

As a fourth option, it could just be the AI mistake it's being portrayed as. And even if that's the case, it's still sufficiently damning that those responsible should be in prison. So any way you put it, members of the administration including Trump, and people at Palantir including Thiel and Karp, should be facing charges over this.

Someone needs to mod this up. Wasn't it google that just bought some bankrupt companies chats, voice recordings, ... for peanuts. In bankruptcy court, there just doesn't seem to be any restriction on privacy rape.

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?