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I don't believe you understand how modern bombs work.


They seem to work not very well, considering the number civilians they've killed in Iran.

Supposedly the issue was less bomb accuracy and more bad intel

Weird that we can afford how many hundreds of thousands per bomb but can't be bothered to pay entry level wages to manually verify each site. I'm sure the DoD has access to something even better than Google Maps.

Does it matter, at this point? If you go and tell someone who’s lost their home and half their family in a strike, "oops, it was just bad intel", do they hate you less?

Oh no, if anything I think bad intel is probably worse

The issue was starting an unnecessary war. When you did, then all the deaths are on you.

Yeah, but… I think if you’re bombing a child’s school because of bad intel, the deaths are on you either way. We’re not going to be like “oh, this war was necessary, which means it’s no biggie that you accidentally killed two hundred children because you didn’t do your DD”

Ostensibly, it wasn't unnecessary to those who started it.

its always that, and absolutely nobody cares

I sometimes wonder if our modern philosophy of requiring intentionality for crimes is the wrong way. You can launder intentionality be not trying too hard. If you try really weakly, it's called negligence but even that isn't as morally bad as intentionality. Perhaps we should forget about trying to read the mind of a state or criminal and only judge them by their actions.

In my country, punishments for killing people with deliberate violence varies from 8 months home detention (bus driver punched a passenger in the face, knocking him out so he fell backward and cracked his head on the ground), to several decades (man grabbed scissors from the kitchen, ran to his ex girlfriend's room, and stabbed her repeatedly). Both victims are equally dead but the courts decided that the perpetrators' feelings mattered far more than what they did. Perhaps if the bus driver had been weaker and needed a weapon, he'd be in prison for 10 years instead of free? Perhaps if the ex-boyfriend had used his fists outdoors on a concrete pavement, he'd be free? Seems grossly unfair.


You think the pentagon was like "shit, Iran is bigger than we thought"?

Pentagon, absolutely not.

The current USA leadership, I’m afraid it isn’t impossible.


Of course not, but it's very believable that the current administration ignored what the pentagon told them.

God created war so that Americans would learn geography. Like Trump's obsession with Greenland because he does not understand the Mercator projection...

I am certain that Hegseth is facing several, "shit!" moments, at least one of them along those limes, yes.

He doesn’t show any signs of that kind of introspection. The simple answer as to how he is conducting this war is the best one.

He’s a fucking moron.


If you've been paying attention you'd understand that (1) the US military brass has been almost entirely replaced by MAGA stooges who think the rapture is real and (2) Trump and co 100% thought they could Maduro-esque behead the IRGC and this would be over in a week. The military officials who (correctly) dare not attack Iran aren't in any positions of power any longer.

I'm sure the Pentagon did not come up with this idiotic plan. I doubt the current admin is utilizing their frontal lobe.

I'm not really sure that's any of their business.

wasn't that about when the iphone came out?

First iPhone was 18 years ago, but yeah it around the time of the first iPhone. IIRC he actually mentioned that because he had already been confronted to Apple’s lockdown before the iPhone. It was a long time ago and I was young, so I don’t remember the details.

There was a decade between them.

> try tweaking the description of a widely-known algorithm just a little bit and see how good the generated code follows the spec.

this works well for me


No, because of the fundamental limitation of DRM. Content must be delivered as plaintext.


localization? Why would you oppose LLMs doing localization?


I guess the chain of reasoning would be: AI for art is bad -> Writing is art -> Translation is writing.

Personally, I do appreciate good localisation, Nintendo usually does a pretty impressive job there. I play games in their original language as long as I actually speak that language, so I don't have too many touch points with translations though.


In case they hallucinate? There's no point having content in a wide variety of languages if it's unpredictably different from the original-language content.


It’s bad at it. At least, it can’t be guaranteed to get nuance or context correct in a way that doesn’t feel artificial to a fluent speaker.

My favourite example I saw was where Google translated an information page of the Italian branch of a large multinational as “this is the UK branch of [multinational]”, presumably because the LLM thought that was more contextually appropriate in English.


never let philosophers do math


No. Equality is defined on sets, with exactly one exception, this stupid fucking notation.


Notation is invented to be useful. A lot of mathematicians and physicists write stuff like

f = g + O(h)

and then proceed to do a bunch of manipulations without getting bogged down in set theory syntax.

Also equality isnt just defined on sets, usually people start by defining it as like a formal thing satisfying a bunch of rules as a part of their logic, and going from there.


Equality is defined on sets. Everything is a set. Equality means equalty as sets. That's how math aorks unless you're doing type theory shit.


That's not an aside. The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben. People invoke it without ever asking themselves if its true because they think of it as the hard won wisdom of a great man.


> The quote is pernicious because of its attribution to Ben.

It's not pernicious for any reason because it's absolutely true in general, Franklin was simply using a general piece of wisdom to justify particular government actions.

Yes, using it that way was an improvisation and a bit of a stretch, but the real issue here is why he needed to resort to it - that's a rabbit hole that pretty much goes to the bottom of today's problems which we're handling in a much worse manner than him back then.


What do you consider "absolutely true" or "in general" to mean?


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