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BodyBySisyphus [he/him]

@ BodyBySisyphus @hexbear.net

Posts
67
Comments
1232
Joined
4 yr. ago

  • One of the many problems with an all-volunteer military is that if your society has a sufficient density of religious zealots with deep-seated animus for those outside of their personal tribal affiliation and dreams of a glorious afterlife, those folks end up taking a disproportionate share of your military leadership.

  • Looks like the new Evangelion series is going to take a weird turn.

  • Did his Mossad honeypot girlfriend break up with him?

  • There are easier and more environmentally friendly ways to create artificial reefs.

  • Manicheanism alive and well in the 21st century :augustine-shining:

  • I'm currently trying but it's been slow going thanks to the fact that AI is eating the economy and my struggles to frame my accomplishments as something positive. Advice appreciated if you have any!

  • While the article doesn't directly suggest that the author thinks these systems might be unreliable, it does have this juxtaposition:

    “This is the next era of military strategy and military technology,” said David Leslie, professor of ethics, technology and society at Queen Mary University of London, who has observed demonstrations of AI military systems. He also warned that reliance on AI can result in “cognitive off-loading”. Humans tasked with making a strike decision can feel detached from its consequences because the effort to think it through has been made by a machine.

    On Saturday 165 people, many children, were killed in a missile strike that hit a school in southern Iran, according to state media. It appeared to be close to a military barracks and the UN called it “a grave violation of humanitarian law”. The US military has said it is looking into the reports.

    It is not known what AI systems, if any, Iran has embedded into its war-fighting machine, although it claimed in 2025 to use AI in its missile-targeting systems. Its own AI programme, hampered by international sanctions, appears negligible by contrast with the AI superpowers of the US and China.

    I pointed out elsewhere that just because the AI companies think that their products can deliver doesn't mean they actually can, and I think we'll see more and more instances of creators of these systems falling victim to their own hype machines. And while poor "AI" weapons performance can still create tragic outcomes for the people they're deployed against, it represents yet another gap in the empire's armor. A canny human opponent can learn how to game these systems and hopefully do so in a way that minimizes both the collateral damage and the loss of mission critical infrastructure. Maybe Iran will learn how to borrow 10,000 arrows.

  • People who have free time might think about better ways to organize society. Gotta find ways to keep people occupied so they don't get their own ideas.

    I have a personal conspiracy theory that this idea is behind the broader "content" push of tech companies. Nobody at the top actually cares about the quality issues inherent in "AI" because the goal is just to manufacture distractions, keep jacking up throughput to keep everyone in a state of cognitive overwhelm.

  • Hello from within the NGO adjacent bullshit

  • Ehhhh... I don't disagree that this is what OpenAI is trying to do, but I don't really buy the rest of the message. You fundamentally need real training data to get anywhere - synthetic training data might be an option and it might be better than nothing, but it's the same problem as using LLM output to train LLMs. All the weird deviations from the underlying dataset get captured and amplified, and the result is performance degradation. If Sora was good enough to get around this limitation, that would imply that OpenAI had enough actual training data to accomplish that, so they wouldn't need Sora to generate more.

    Sam Altman knows that his company is screwed if they don't get major government support, and he's clearly chosen to abandon any pretense of scruples to chase those dollars, but that doesn't mean he can deliver. We're probably more likely to see drones bombing someone because they wore the same shirt as the target rather than actually competent automated surveillance state.

    Also @ the prickly disclaimer:

    the same way a writer might use a search engine, a database, or a conversation with a knowledgeable colleague to stress-test arguments and surface sources.

    The author is aware that Claude is none of those things, right?

  • From last year: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-war-hawks-arent-even-trying-to-persuade-us-anymore

    The United States is at war with Iran. On Saturday night, President Donald Trump announced that U.S. warplanes had struck three nuclear sites in Iran and suggested more strikes might be ahead. The next day, he began calling for “regime change.” Despite Trump’s attempts to posture as a peacemaker, it was an escalation many of us knew was coming. Neoconservatives have been chasing the holy grail of war with Iran for decades, and at long last they got Trump to reach out his sweaty orange mitts and grab it for them. The most unsettling part is that it felt as if this outcome was always inevitable.

    In recent weeks, there have been many comparisons made between the lead-up to this war and George W. Bush’s war in Iraq. In many ways, that comparison is apt. Iran is another oil-rich Middle Eastern country we’ve accused of building weapons of mass destruction based on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. And yet there is one key difference. In order to carry out the Iraq War—which ended up being the worst crime of the 21st century, leaving the region in tatters and more than half a million dead—the Bush administration undertook a mammoth effort to manufacture consent from the public. Despite tens of millions still marching in protest, it worked. At the dawn of Operation Iraqi Freedom, 72 percent of Americans supported the invasion, according to a Gallup poll. Trump’s war, on the other hand, is deeply unpopular, but he has made far less of an effort to persuade skeptics. Without strong anti-war institutions to oppose him, he may believe he doesn’t need to.

  • So the US uses the best system of governance in history, by which the will of God is expressed through the electorate to select the leaders of the greatest military power in history, the last several of which have blundered into a series of disastrous boondoggles in the Middle East. This disastrous boondoggle will be different, because Heaven, in its divine wisdom and infinite subtlety, decided not to pick an idiot this time around.

  • Earth @hexbear.net

    ‘An epidemic of suffering’: Why are conservationists breaking down?

    news.mongabay.com /2026/03/an-epidemic-of-suffering-why-are-conservationists-breaking-down/
  • Translation: "Well it looks like they're not just gonna let us off the hook this time"

  • Yeah, I keep telling my bosses "Sure, we can do X but here's an estimate of costs and my guess at the limitations", and they keep going "Hmm, maybe." I think they're also skeptics but are getting pressure from their bosses. The thing that's been crazymaking for me is that I keep going to these Emperor's New Clothes presentations where the demonstrated results are mediocre at best and they're being presented like it's a major breakthrough.

  • Haven't had an issue with it, but it's also not something I really pay attention to

  • You should have higher standards for yourself IMHO, military spouses choose that life.

  • "Hi we would like to use our text classification algorithm to run your murderbots": utterly deranged statement hall of fame contender that somehow managed to impinge on our reality.

  • Mouse is a little bit quicker, but the difference hasn't been as big as I was expecting.

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Notes from the San Francisco Cyberpunk Dystopia

    harpers.org /archive/2026/03/childs-play-sam-kriss-ai-startup-roy-lee/
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Meta’s AI sending ‘junk’ tips to DoJ, US child abuse investigators say

    www.theguardian.com /technology/2026/feb/25/meta-ai-junk-child-abuse-tips-doj
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Bully the panopticon

  • Slop. @hexbear.net

    Anthropic CEO Says Company No Longer Sure Whether Claude Is Conscious

    futurism.com /artificial-intelligence/anthropic-ceo-unsure-claude-conscious
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Radicalization used to be a lot easier

  • chat @hexbear.net

    Is "Job Bot" really the best anyone can come up with?

  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Professor Says Her Garbled AI Textbook Was a Huge Success

    futurism.com /artificial-intelligence/professor-defends-ai-textbook
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    She's cracked the code

  • technology @hexbear.net

    Cursor is better at marketing than coding

    www.theregister.com /2026/01/26/cursor_opinion/
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    Advancing toward the worker-free economy

  • Games @hexbear.net

    Celebrate the holiday season with Garden Gnome Carnage

    www.remargames.se /ggc.php
  • politics @hexbear.net

    Seattle appoints former LinkedIn, Airbnb data science manager to be city's first AI officer

    statescoop.com /seattle-lisa-qian-first-ai-officer/
  • Slop. @hexbear.net

    (CW: Meat) Two Nights Playing With Fire At Patrick Mahomes And Travis Kelce's Steakhouse

    defector.com /two-nights-playing-with-fire-at-patrick-mahomes-and-travis-kelces-steakhouse
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    When there's so many racist projects they start causing destructive interference

  • Slop. @hexbear.net

    I Fed Claude 7 Years of Daily Journals. It Showed Me The Future of AI.

    archive.is /aIkdV
  • art @hexbear.net
    Locked

    Architecture of Return, by a Tlingit artist, shows the locations of artifacts in the British museum with possible escape routes

  • Earth @hexbear.net

    Assessments reveal carbon offsets are a false & unjust climate solution

    news.mongabay.com /2025/12/assessments-reveal-carbon-offsets-are-a-false-unjust-climate-solution-commentary/
  • Chapotraphouse @hexbear.net

    And it made one of the cofounders a billionaire at 29

  • technology @hexbear.net

    Anthropic claims Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude Code to access data from and leave backdoors in over 30 companies using AI-automated cyberattacks

    www.bbc.com /news/articles/cx2lzmygr84o