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Where things stand with the Department of War
141–150 of 862 posts
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#142Messages about project Maven, Palantir and Anthropic integration are flagged by certain interest groups:
"Palantir's Maven uses Anthropic's Claude code, sources say."
https://www.reuters.com/technology/palantir-faces-challenge-...
It is always astonishing that the reviled mainstream press is more critical than hackers these days.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
Military isn't quite as aggressively catering to the people who historically have bullied techies as they used to. Aside from that - there's a lot more people in tech now. It grew too fast too quick to maintain all the values it had back in the 00's and earlier.
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Jobs the Marketer! You want to lump Jobs in with Ellison because he had the gall to purchase advertising for his products?
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and even their two exceptions, only one is on moral grounds. They don't want to provide tools for autonomous killing machines because the technology isn't good enough, yet. Once that 'yet' is passed they will be fine supplying that capability. Anthropic is clearly the better company over OpenAI, but that doesn't mean they are good. 'lesser evil' is the correct term here for sure.
Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…
War is not moral. It may be necessary, but it is never moral. The only best choice is to fight at every turn making war easy. Our adversaries will, or likely already have, gone the autonomous route. We should be doing everything we can to put major blockers on this similar to efforts to block chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The logical end of autonomous targeting and weapons is near instant mass killing decisions. So at a minimum we should think of autonomous weapons in a similar class as those since autonomy is a weapon of mass destruction. But we currently don't think that way and that is the problem.
Eventually, unfortunately, we will build these systems but it is weak to argue that the technology isn't ready right now and that is why we won't build them. No matter when these systems come on line there will be collateral damage so there will be no right time from a technology standpoint. Anthropic is making that weak argument and that is primarily what I am dismissive of. The argument that needs to be made is that we aren't ready as a society for these weapons. The US government hasn't done the work to prove they can handle them. The US people haven't proven we are ready to understand their ramifications. So, in my view, Anthropic shouldn't be arguing the technology isn't ready, no weapon of war is ever clean and your hands will be dirty no matter how well you craft the knife. Instead Anthropic should be arguing that we aren't ready as a society and that is why they aren't going to support them.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s a mistake to conflate “wants to spend money on the most ethical option available” with “ think the most ethical option available is perfect” Why wouldn’t you move your dollars to someplace incrementally better?
There are so many inference providers not working for Department of War. Even Alibaba and sure China has lots of issues but they are not bombing anyone now if that's your first priority. Or else, smaller US / European / Asian companies with pure civilian focus. SOTA open weights models they serve are perfectly suitable for coding and chat. I run a local Qwen3.5-122B-A10B-NVFP4 instance and it writes entire Android ap…
Can you give a list of high quality alternatives? Morally speaking i would put China on par with the US if not worse (due to their ongoing Uyghur genocide). I will check out Qwen3 but would be interested in others.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
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I also suspect that many could be twice as bad with only half the money there's a corrupting force we're not coming to terms with here
Hard to say for sure. In that instance I can only reasonably speak for myself. So far at least, the evidence suggests the more I have, the more distracted I get by new projects.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hypothetically if we had a choice between sending in humans to war or sending in fully autonomous drones that make decisions on par with humans, the moral choice might well be the drones - because it doesn't put our service members at risk. Obviously anyone who has used LLMs know they are not on par with humans. There also needs to be an accountability framework for when software makes the wrong decision. Who gets fi…
What do you mean, "hallucinates and kills people"? Killing people is the thing the military is using them for; it's not some accidental side effect. It's the "moral choice" the same way a cruise missile is — some person half a world away can lean back in their chair, take a sip of coffee, click a few buttons and end human lives, without ever fully appreciating or caring about what they've done.
The people that actually target and launch these things do think about what they have done. It is the people ordering them to do it that don't. There is a difference, I hope.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#148Could they please start using the correct name? Department of Defense?
The correct name is the Department of War. Calling it the Department of Defense implies a system of laws, checks and balances which no longer exists.
It very much still exists, and statements like this are what’s called “obeying in advance.” Don’t do it.
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a decade older so maybe I missed the memo but I think you'll have a hard time naming tech companies that actually refused to work with the military, which were large enough and important enough to be in danger of selling something to the military (i.e. not Be Inc. or Beenz.com) Clearly, all of the traditional big leagues were lined up to take the Army's money. IBM, Control Data, Cray, SGI, and HP all viewed weapo…
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This wasn't really that long ago.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.6735255,-122.389804,3a,31.2y...
Re: Where things stand with the Department of War
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No war since has been even close to as unpopular or frankly as salient. Iraq. Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too. Also keep in mind when making comparisons that the Vietnam war was not unpopular with Americans at the beginning, and many people justified it all throughout, using language that will be similar to observers of later wars.
> Iraq Not in same ballpark. There’s no Iraq generation the way there’s a Vietnam one. > Spoiler alert, a bunch of the current ones are going to be seen similarly too. No they won’t. The lack of a draft and mass domestic casualties dramatically changes the picture. Especially on the saliency axis.
Correct that there was no Iraq generation because there was no draft and numbers were way smaller. Vietnam had over half a million troops at the height of that war. Iraq had under 170k.
But the war was still deeply unpopular. There is a reason America did the extraordinary - to that point - and elect its first black president.
The economic toll will be greater with these wars than Vietnam.