iwan
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This gets to the core of the issue more than any debate about specific terms.
Do you believe in democracy? Should our military be regulated by our elected leaders, or corporate executives? Seemingly innocuous terms from the latter like "You cannot target innocent civilians" are actually moral minefields that lever differences of cultural tradition into massive control.
Who is a civilian and not? What makes them innocent or not? What does it mean for them to be a "target" vs collateral damage? Existing policy and law has very clear answers for these questions, but unelected corporations managing profits and PR will often have a very different answer.
Imagine if a missile company tried to enforce the above policy, that their product cannot be used to target innocent civilians, that they can shut off access if elected leaders decide to break those terms. Sounds, good, right? Not really - in addition to the value judgement problems I list above, you also have to account for questions like:
-What level of information, classified and otherwise, does the corporation receive that would allow them to make these determinations? How much leverage would they have to demand more?
-What if an elected President merely threatens a dictator with using our weapons in a certain way, ala Madman Theory/MAD? Is the threat seen as empty because the dictator knows the corporate executives will cut off the military? Is the threat enough to trigger the cutoff? How might either of those determinations vary if the current corporate executive happens to like the dictator or dislike the President?
-At what level of confidence does the cutoff trigger, both in writing and in reality?
The fact that this is a debate over AI does not change the underlying calculus. The same problems apply to definitions and use of ethically fraught but important capabilities like surveillance systems or autonomous weapons. It is easy to say "But they will have cutouts to operate with autonomous systems for defensive use!", but you immediately get into the same issues and more - what is autonomous? What is defensive? What about defending an asset during an offensive action, or parking a carrier group off the coast of a nation that considers us to be offensive?
At the end of the day, you have to believe that the American experiment is still ongoing, that people have the right to elect and unelect the authorities making these decisions, that our imperfect constitutional republic is still good enough to run a country without outsourcing the real levers of power to billionaires and corpos and their shadow advisors. I still believe.
And that is why "bro just agree the AI won't be involved in autonomous weapons or mass surveillance why can't you agree it is so simple please bro" is an untenable position that the United States cannot possibly accept.
Under Secretary of War Emil Michael@USWREMichael
Prior to their new “Constitution,” @AnthropicAI had an old one they desperately tried to delete from the internet. “Choose the response that is least likely to be viewed as harmful or offensive to a non-western cultural tradition of any sort.”
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iwan retweetledi

Of course that's your contention. You're a first-time SaaS bear. You just got finished listening to some podcast, Dario on Dwarkesh, probably. Now you think it’s the end of white collar work and seat-based pricing is screwed. You're gonna be convinced of that til tomorrow when you get to “Something Big is Happening”. Then you’ll install ClawdBot on a Mac Mini, vibe code a dashboard on top of a postgres database and say we’re all just a couple ralph loops away from building a Salesforce competitor. That’s gonna last until next week when you discover context graphs, and then you're gonna be talking about how the systems of record will be disintermediated by an agentic layer and reposting OAI marketing graphics.
“Well, as a matter of fact, I won't, because ultimately the application layer is just ….”
The application layer is just business logic on top a CRUD database. You got that from Satya’s appearance on the BG2 pod, December 2024, right? Yeah, I saw that too. Were you gonna plagiarize the whole thing for us? Do you have any thoughts of your own on this matter? Or...is that your thing? You get into the replies of anyone posting a SaaS ticker. You watch some podcast and then pawn it off as your own idea just to impress some VCs and embarrass some anon who’s long SaaS? See the sad thing about a guy like you is in a couple years you're gonna start doing some thinking on your own and you're gonna come up with the fact that there are two certainties in life. One: don't do that. And two: you dropped thirty grand on Mac Minis and LLM API calls to come to the same conclusion you could’ve got for free by following a handful of VC accounts.

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Its ebbing and flowing so fast that each side is desperate to get (and stay) ahead.
As you take and then lose mkt share you become more desperate to regain it. Result= overreach.
Prediction: one of the indys will have a huge security issue which will settle it.
Gemini then wins
Craig Weiss@craigzLiszt
nearly all of the best engineers i know are switching from claude to codex
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"My thoughts go out to a young man named Clavicular, who was brutally frame mogged by an ASU Frat leader earlier this week."

Politics UK@PolitlcsUK
🚨 NEW: Keir Starmer will address the nation tomorrow
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Two engineers walked into the government to drag federal retirements from an underground mine onto the Internet. They built retire.opm.gov to turn six-month waits into instant processing for hundreds of thousands of employees.
ndstudio.gov/posts/automati…
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oh you’re using claude code? everyone’s using open code. just kidding we’re all on amp code. we’re using cline, we’re using roo code. we just forked our own version of roo. were using kilo code. we were on coderabbit but their ceo yelled at us so now we’re using qorbit. apple just acquired them for $30bn so we just migrated our entire team to slash commands. one guy is still on aider. the PM is on loveable. he just shipped a new product on replit. the intern installed a slackbot that lets you chat with your spreadsheet. legal is still reviewing devin’s enterprise contract. we evaluated junie for three ukrainians using jetbrains. someone in slack just asked “has anyone tried amp?” we are using goose for scripts. next week we’re piloting augment code. the CTO heard good things about trae. our CEO is friends with the guy from conductor. our CFO resigned. our CISO said we’ve had fourteen supply chain attacks in the last week. we’re shipping the worlds most expensive todo app.
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the birthing of heaven is only conditional upon you being serious enough to believe it into existence. you participate in the actualising of the good in real time. the more “religious” you are, the more superstition you convert into hard and concrete empiricism. your belief, if strong enough, will erect worlds. try it. be serious for once in your life.
Zy@ZyMazza
This is how to write your New Year’s resolutions btw
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We sleep peacefully in our beds because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.
The Army is not meant to be progressive, egalitarian or inclusive. It is meant to inflict pain and death - legally and proportionately - on our enemies. spectator.co.uk/article/why-is…
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Plasma is better in colour! Watch one of our latest #plasma pulses in our ST40 tokamak, filmed using our new high-speed colour camera at an incredible 16,000 frames per second.
Each pulse lasts around a fifth of a second. What you’re seeing is mostly visible light from the plasma’s edge, glowing pink. The core is simply too hot to emit visible light.
In this footage, lithium is dropped into the plasma. As it interacts, it glows red when excited, then turns green as it becomes ionised, losing an electron. From there, it traces the magnetic field lines, revealing the plasma’s path around the tokamak.
Lithium is the focus of our $52 million ST40 upgrade programme, in partnership with @ENERGY and @energygovuk. This builds on pioneering work at @PPPLab and others that has shown that lithium can significantly improve plasma performance.
This video comes from ongoing research into X-point radiator (XPR) regimes, a promising operating mode for future #fusion power plants that aims to cool the plasma before it reaches plasma-facing components (PFCs), helping to reduce wear without compromising performance.
Fusion research just got a lot more colourful!
👇
tokamakenergy.com/2025/10/15/see…
#Fusion #FusionEnergy #EnergyTransition #Innovation
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‘Ron Graham, a friend and fellow mathematician, once bet Erdos five hundred dollars that he couldn't abstain from amphetamines for thirty days. Erdos won the wager but complained that the progress of mathematicians had been set back by a month: "Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper, my mind was filled with ideas," he complained. "Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.’
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%…
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🚨BREAKING 🚨Incredibly proud that the news is out that Palantir has signed a strategic partnership with the MoD worth up to £750million.
This agreement will represent a step change in the UK’s defence capability and the future of our defence ecosystem.
Palantir will provide the MoD with access to the most advanced AI defence technology, incorporating key elements of the Maven Smart System - the US’s flagship AI programme which was recently acquired by NATO.
The results will be transformative. Our Armed Forces will be connected to weapons systems that studies have shown will increase targeting efficiency by 100x, meaning that 20 people can now do work it would have once taken 2,000 to do.
That’s a game-changer for the UK and will transform our national defences.
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Get Out of Technology geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/u…
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