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URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI The Pentagon's Silicon Valley Problem
smsm42 wrote 12 hours 2 min ago:
I'm not sure why they discussed Israel at all - except for bullshit
accusation in racism which seems to come automatically nowdays. Israeli
intelligence failure had zero to do with any technology and everything
to do with political and ideological delusion. They had fake data, they
had real data, they had all the data. They had tons of opinions and
options. They had to choose which concept to believe and which
conclusion to make. This is not something that depends on technology,
and it can't be, that depends on the person or persons making the
decision, and it is as unsolved problem now as if was millenia ago.
oglop wrote 18 hours 38 min ago:
Iâm a combat vet from the infantry. I was a lowly enlisted, not an
officer. I attended college after wards and now work in tech out west.
I am amazed how confused, historically ignorant, but intelligent my
coworkers are. Itâs like theyâve never even heard of NATO, world
war 1 or 2, and almost each one when theyâve asked what I did has
then had the follow up question âwhatâs the infantryâ. This used
to seem cute, but lately Iâve wondered if itâs something to be
concerned with.
If the people who are being paid all this money and building all these
products are incredibly intelligent but have zero wisdom, what does
that look like when war comes? Do they just step aside, point at a
stock price, and tell me Iâm barbaric and living in a past century? I
wonder about it almost daily now as the conflict looks more and more
likely to spread and I see an electorate more and more isolationist and
looking to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Hmmm, not even sure my point. I guess itâs that I find many Americans
insanely smart and intelligent, but they lack any wisdom but act as
though they are all Martin Luther king jr when they pronounce a name
correctly, or some such morally insignificant thing compared to life
and death.
Something is totally fucked with how people are valuing things. What
Iâm not sure, but when a US Republican senator named JD Vance (a
fucking veteran!) starts going around literally spouting Kremlin
propaganda lines about Ukraine, and conservatives agree and repeat it,
I just feel sad about my society.
Also, obviously some people do know these things, Iâm being loose
with language here. But a huge majority of the people have asked me
those questions.
bitwize wrote 1 day ago:
> Nevertheless, Hamasâs devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin
Bet and the rest of Israelâs multibillion-dollar defense system
entirely by surprise.
Somebody high up in the Israeli military was probably like, "After very
careful consideration, sir, I've come to the conclusion that your new
defense system sucks."
URI [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyFB2p1yrQI
thyrsus wrote 1 day ago:
At the end of the article, Cockburn complains that asking ChatGPT about
Palantir work with the IDF gets a hallucination in response. I just
queried duckduckgo.com with "IDF Palantir", and receved links to
several news articles from relatively mainstream news sources. If the
point is that LLMs are currently unreliable, then sure. If the point
is that we can't know whether Palantir is working with the IDF, then
there is available evidence
musha68k wrote 1 day ago:
What aspects of modern warfare didn't Hideo Kojima foresee?
>Another combat veteran, now with a Pentagon agency working on these
issues, told me that the AI developers he works with didnât seem to
understand some of the requirements for the technologyâs military
application. âI donât know if AI, or the sensors that feed it for
that matter, will ever be capable of spontaneity or recognizing
spontaneity,â he said. He cited a DARPA experiment in which a squad
of Marines defeated an AI-governed robot that had been trained to
detect them simply by altering their physical profiles. Two walked
inside a large cardboard box. Others somersaulted. One wore the
branches of a fir tree. All were able to approach over open ground and
touch the robot without detection.
Oh..
>I was curious about Palantir, whose stock indeed soared amid the 2023
AI frenzy. I had been told that the Israeli security sectorâs AI
systems might rely on Palantirâs technology. Furthermore, Shin
Betâs humiliating failure to predict the Hamas assault had not
blunted the Israeli Defense Forceâs appetite for the technology; the
unceasing rain of bombs upon densely packed Gaza neighborhoods,
according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval Abraham in
+972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI target-creation
platform called the Gospel. The Gospel produces automatic
recommendations for where to strike based on what the technology
identifies as being connected with Hamas, such as the private home of a
suspected rank-and-file member of the organization. It also calculates
how many civilians, including women and children, would die in the
processâwhich, as of this writing, amounted to at least twenty-two
thousand people, some 70 percent of them women and children. One of
Abrahamâs intelligence sources termed the technology a âmass
assassination factory.â Despite the high-tech gloss on the massacre,
the result has been no different than the slaughter inflicted, with
comparatively more primitive means, against Dresden and Tokyo during
World War II.
sequoia wrote 1 day ago:
> at least twenty-two thousand people, some 70 percent of them women
and children.
People are definitely dying and that includes civilians, but facts
matter and a lot of these numbers are simply made up by Hamas. Here's
some analysis that demonstrates that it's extremely unlikely Hamas's
Gaza Health Ministry numbers are based in reality: [1] Stuff like
almost perfectly linear growth of deaths over days and so on, take a
look at the article.
This is also Hamas who claims that every person killed was a
civilian. Try to find "number of Hamas combatants killed" in the Gaza
Health Ministry numbers, they don't even count this. Isn't that a bit
weird? Israel will tell you how many people killed were armed
soldiers and how many were civilians, as most places will do.
I don't know why people believe the numbers coming from Hamas. I wish
there were a more reliable source in the area, but believing Hamas
because you have no other numbers to go on is plain stupid.
URI [1]: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/how-gaza-he...
enterprise_cog wrote 17 hours 1 min ago:
This piece makes a series of assumptions, with no proof those
assumptions are true, then says the Gaza Health Ministry must be
lying because the numbers don't match the assumptions. That isn't
how statistics work.
"One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the
daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270 plus or
minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should
be days with twice the average or more and others with half or
less. Perhaps what is happening is the Gaza ministry is releasing
fake daily numbers that vary too little because they do not have a
clear understanding of the behavior of naturally occurring
numbers."
Why would you expect that? Why isn't the number of munitions
dropped on Gaza plotted with this data if that is the case? Why
isn't it simply that an overloaded and besieged health care system
can only process a certain amount of deaths per day?
"Unfortunately, verified control data is not available to formally
test this conclusion" indeed.
"The Gaza Health Ministry has consistently claimed that about 70%
of the casualties are women or children. This total is far higher
than the numbers reported in earlier conflicts with Israel."
Israel is trying to kill civilians and Gaza has a large population
of women and children.
"The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated
with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men)
reported."
Why should this be the case? It is more likely that Israel is
targeting women and children at a higher rate than men.
"Another red flag, raised by Salo Aizenberg and written about
extensively, is that if 70% of the casualties are women and
children and 25% of the population is adult male, then either
Israel is not successfully eliminating Hamas fighters or adult male
casualty counts are extremely low. This by itself strongly suggests
that the numbers are at a minimum grossly inaccurate and quite
probably outright faked. Finally, on Feb. 15, Hamas admitted to
losing 6,000 of its fighters, which represents more than 20% of the
total number of casualties reported."
So they look a less than one month time frame (10/26-11/10),
assumed all the deaths there are still the total now in March, then
state that Hamas lost 6k troops in Feb and that makes the numbers
invalid. That makes no logical sense. Obviously more people have
died, likely over 100k. Sadly, Israel has devastated the health
system in Gaza so numbers can't be accurately reported. So given
100k total dead, 6k dead fighters is 6% of the casualties. Which
does point to the fact that Israel is targeting civilians and that
they are ineffective in eliminating Hamas.
Then they have these gems:
"Are there better numbers? Some objective commentators have
acknowledged Hamasâ numbers in previous battles with Israel to be
roughly accurate. Nevertheless, this war is wholly unlike its
predecessors in scale or scope; international observers who were
able to monitor previous wars are now completely absent, so the
past canât be assumed to be a reliable guide. The fog of war is
especially thick in Gaza, making it impossible to quickly determine
civilian death totals with any accuracy."
Why are there no observers? Israel refuses to let them in because
they are doing a genocide.
"Not only do official Palestinian death counts fail to
differentiate soldiers from children, but Hamas also blames all
deaths on Israel even if caused by Hamasâ own misfired rockets,
accidental explosions, deliberate killings, or internal battles."
al-Ahli has been shown to not be a Hamas rocket.[0] Of course,
Israel pivoted on that and started to say every hospital was a
Hamas C2 headquarters, makes it harder to prove they are lying.
"One group of researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of
Public Health compared Hamas reports to data on UNRWA workers. They
argued that because the death rates were approximately similar,
Hamasâ numbers must not be inflated. But their argument relied on
a crucial and unverified assumption: that UNRWA workers are not
disproportionately more likely to be killed than the general
population. That premise exploded when it was uncovered that a
sizable fraction of UNRWA workers are affiliated with Hamas. Some
were even exposed as having participated in the Oct. 7 massacre
itself."
This argument, outside of being misleading with regard to "a
sizable fraction of UNRWA workers" (even Israel's fake numbers said
10%), does nothing to "explode" the premise. Hamas has military
groups and government (civilian) groups. Of course people involved
in the aid distribution might be involved in the government. That
doesn't mean they are armed combatants nor that they would be
killed more than other civilians.
In short, this is a propaganda piece with a veneer of statistics to
try and obfuscate that fact.
[0]
URI [1]: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/israeli-di...
scotty79 wrote 1 day ago:
> Gospel
People are so desperately wanting to believe that AI will give them
the revealed truth. Such systems should be named "Racist Uncle Dave"
because they hallucinate some answer everytime they open their
virtual mouths with some probability of being somewhat correct this
time.
TheJoeMan wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve been hanging around some MBA types lately, and Iâm coming
to realize the product doesnât actually have to perform to high
specs like engineers would demand. Palantir is selling a
âstoryâ that their AI system magically decreases casualties and
finds good targets, and itâs got firm numbers printed in the
console (that could be completely wrong) but that is more
convincing to MBAâs than any wishy intuition. So the MBAâs buy
into the marketing, and the executors are buying into offloading
their conscience.
vasilipupkin wrote 1 day ago:
please. the last people that would buy into any kind of
marketing are MBAs because they actually study marketing among
other things during their 2 years of obtaining an MBA.
there is no perfect product, I don't know how well Palantir AI
works, but I would be surprised it doesn't work at all
scotty79 wrote 19 hours 17 min ago:
Psychological research shows that bulshitters are easiest to
bullshit.
vasilipupkin wrote 3 hours 25 min ago:
source? most psychological research doesn't replicate
scotty79 wrote 1 hour 13 min ago:
Here's something about it. [1] I'm sure you can find more.
URI [1]: https://www.psypost.org/new-study-suggests-you-can...
joloooo wrote 1 day ago:
You're right. MBA's are immune from marketing or sales tactics.
Don't tell Mckinsey.
vasilipupkin wrote 3 hours 24 min ago:
McKinsey hires top of the class people at top schools and
pays them top dollar. If all they needed was marketing or
sales, they could go to University of Nowhere and hire good
looking tall people to do sales.
lupire wrote 1 day ago:
Absolutely ridiculous comparison.
The bombing of Dresden killed 25K people in 3days, not months of war.
The bombing of Tokyo killed 100K people in 1 day.
Furthermore, those cities were not where the military was actually
operating. Hamas is operating its offensive throughout Gaza.
maskil wrote 1 day ago:
Why is this comment being downvoted?
saagarjha wrote 1 day ago:
It is also 2024. One would think that reducing the number of
civilian noncombatants killed would be in order since then, no?
bart_spoon wrote 1 day ago:
Why would that be the case. If anything, the last 20 years have
reinforced the idea that if enemy combatants simply embed
themselves in civilian populations, they are virtually impossible
to target without mass collateral damage.
saagarjha wrote 1 day ago:
Assuming you are unwilling to put in effort to identify enemy
combatants or risk anything to do so, sure.
Jensson wrote 1 day ago:
If the enemy is in a group of civilians then the only way to
take him out is to fire into the group of civilians, there is
no getting around that.
runarberg wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
No no no no no no no, please no. Under no circumstances is
that OK.
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, you use the
police, arrest them, put them for a trial and send to
prison.
If the enemy is in a group of civilians, and your immediate
action is to bomb them along with the civilians, then you
donât value the lives of those civilians. At best you
donât care whether those civilians are alive or dead, and
at worst you actually want those civilians dead. In the
former case, you are doing a war crime, a crime against
humanity, in the latter case you are doing a genocide and
using the enemy as an excuse or justification.
In any case, there are plenty of ways to get around that.
Unless the mass casualty is the point.
ZoomerCretin wrote 1 day ago:
Assuming you are only willing to use aerial bombs, yes. A
ground war would have been far more discriminate.
shrimp_emoji wrote 1 day ago:
It is also in the Middle East, where the only democracy there is
surrounded on all sides and has no options left.
Qem wrote 3 hours 49 min ago:
To call an apartheid a democracy and conflate the two risks
giving the concept of democracy a bad reputation. Please don't
do it.
saagarjha wrote 1 day ago:
This is an extreme position that is factually incorrect from
almost every viewpoint it is read from.
FourHand451 wrote 1 day ago:
That would be great, but why would one think that?
skyyler wrote 1 day ago:
22,000 people. 70% of them women and children, was it?
But itâs okay because Hamas exists?
What led you to this conclusion?
snapcaster wrote 1 day ago:
Why are you attempting to downplay the killing of so many people?
You could just not do that and keep moving
darkerside wrote 1 day ago:
This is horrible news. Blurring the lines of accountability between
people and software in the industry of war is a recipe for
Armageddon. It's not only genocide laundering, which is atrocious
enough. Unchecked, it will lead to a "stand your ground" type of
situation where countries may strike first in anticipation of other
actions. I fear for the future.
magic_hamster wrote 1 day ago:
Not news, rumors with no shred of evidence.
l3mure wrote 22 hours 34 min ago:
The IDF openly touts their use of AI, moron.
URI [1]: https://www.idf.il/%D7%90%D7%AA%D7%A8%D7%99-%D7%99%D7%97...
darkerside wrote 1 day ago:
[1] Here is the original report. Why are you so confident that
there is no evidence? Not the curiosity we generally expect at
HN.
URI [1]: https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel...
MSFT_Edging wrote 1 day ago:
> according to a well-sourced report by Israeli reporter Yuval
Abraham in +972 Magazine, was in fact partly controlled by an AI
target-creation platform called the Gospel
Don't try to "fake-news" it because it doesn't fit with your
narrative.
Tech is being abused and combined with already
authoritarian-fascist policies, is killing civilians en masse.
literallycancer wrote 1 day ago:
Have you read the report?
imwillofficial wrote 1 day ago:
He doesnât need to. We cited a well respected journalist in
a well known publication.
DragonStrength wrote 1 day ago:
The point remains: software is continually used as the scapegoat
when things go wrong to shield human actors. Practitioners in
our, admittedly young, field have shown very little appetite for
taking any sort of responsibility expected of engineering
professionals who inflict harm.
afthonos wrote 1 day ago:
Best suggestion I ever saw for regulating autonomous software:
make software usage in decision-making an aggravating factor in
mistakes.
surfingdino wrote 1 day ago:
Any sufficiently advanced technology can be defeated with sticks and
stones.
gorgoiler wrote 1 day ago:
âThe AI system knows everything about Hamas: what they said, what
they published [â¦] it analyzes behavior, predicts risks, and raises
alerts.â
âWell aware of this Hamas members fed their enemy the data that they
wanted to hear. The AI system, it turned out, knew everything about the
terrorist except what he was thinking.â
When your opponent can see everything you do and hear everything you
say, the only defence is privacy. In the novel The Three Body Problem
this is taken to an extreme: the only privacy is inside the human mind
and so select individuals are allowed to make decisions based on
strategies known only to them which they have never said aloud.
Science fiction has become reality.
lupusreal wrote 1 day ago:
(That was from the sequel, The Dark Forest.)
Barrin92 wrote 1 day ago:
It's just the usual technology obsession of military industrial and
political types that's been around for decades. The reality is that the
most important factor in combat is the human one and every fancy gadget
you use just introduces more liability and weak points.
The AI marketing hype and lobbying stuff fills the pockets of a few
people but it doesn't make soldiers more effective, "cloud computing
controls the battlefield" is such a meme worthy sentence I don't
understand how anyone can take someone seriously who says that out
loud.
What you could see in the Israel-Hamas conflict mentioned in the
article is what you also see with the Houthis or in Ukraine, that the
best technology on the battlefield is cheap, resilient and simple
enough to be understood and operated by the least competent soldier,
not some 10 billion dollar fantasy tool out of a sci-fi novel.
The example in the article of Hamas feeding Israeli informants
deliberate misinformation to strengthen the notion that Hamas would not
attack, now imagine this amplified by even more gullible LLM powered
"intelligence analysts". It's a theme of the "AI age", the people who
stand to benefit the most are critically thinking humans able to
exploit the tool induced stupidity of everyone else. Hackers,
appropriately enough.
quantum_state wrote 1 day ago:
It seems difficult to escape from the eternal truth of measure and
countermeasure ⦠a fool with a tool is still a fool â¦
hedora wrote 1 day ago:
The subtitle is rather telling, when combined with the title:
How Big Tech is losing the wars of the future
The underlying assumption of the article is that we want AI to further
centralize military power into the hands of fewer and fewer people.
Whenever that goal has been achieved in the past, it has been
disastrous for human rights, scientific progress, and things like life
expectancies and food security.
Iâd rather Silicon Valley keep producing stuff like the printing
press and gutenberg bible, and not work on reducing the costs of
operating a new Spanish Inquisition or an S.S.-style surveillance
apparatus.
Even if you trust the current Pentagon, thereâs some other government
that would misuse the technology. Also, you have no way of knowing who
will control the Pentagon in 50-100 years.
dosinga wrote 1 day ago:
The examples in the article are rather cherry-picked. Failures in
Vietnam can hardly be blamed on an IBM 360 only. The Hamas attack might
have surprised Israel but the Iron Dome has been tech working well in
recent years. The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many)
that Russia was about to attack Ukraine. And it was a bunch of rather
theoretical physicists who built the atomic bomb.
yieldcrv wrote 1 day ago:
> The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that Russia
was about to attack Ukraine.
I had a Ukrainian model over February 21st, 2022 and I had mentioned
it, she was very dismissive about the idea of invasion, and I gave a
quizzical look because I wasn't sure if this was a coping mechanism,
a real belief, her playing devil's advocate, or just a cultural way
of responding - you know how some cultures or individuals have toxic
positivity like ingrained in all their responses.
To me, it was obvious, like short position, prediction-market level
of obvious. 0 days to expiration options contracts obvious. I saw the
buildup on the border, the chatter, what Biden was saying, how
Republicans politicized it based on nothing.
But I still think about her reaction, like in the future how I would
respond. It seems pointless to have a differing worldview than
people, and that leaves me with either complete inaction or just
financial bets. I like "betting on my beliefs" as that's rewarded
decently, and I'm fine with things not panning out like I predicted.
Just seems more natural to have discussions and seek a shared
understanding of reality. But that seems pointless nowadays.
ZoomerCretin wrote 1 day ago:
> The Hamas attack might have surprised Israel
What? They were warned multiple times of an attack and chose to do
nothing.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> The US warned anybody who wanted to listen (not many) that Russia
was about to attack Ukraine
The fact that anyone needed a warning was ridiculous. It was plain as
day that Russia was committed to entering the country either
immediately before or immediately after the Olympic games.
You don't bother sending a large part of your navy all the way around
Europe and into the Black Sea just for fun. And you definitely don't
send supplies of blood to the staging area near your border if it's
just a drill or a show of force.
mikrotikker wrote 18 hours 40 min ago:
It was only 6 extra boats according to RealLifeLore
_heimdall wrote 18 hours 15 min ago:
That sounds about right. It wasn't a massive naval deployment
that concerned me at the time, it was a naval movement at all in
coordination of the troop deployment. Honestly, a huge naval
movement would have looked more like sabre rattling as they
really shouldn't have needed a massive naval force to do what
they wanted to do (assuming that was a blitz on Kiev).
Anyway, I just happened to be right once among the countless
times I have been wrong about similar situations. My main
surprise is that anyone considered the idea of an invasion
impossible once blood was being delivered to the line.
inglor_cz wrote 1 day ago:
I thought that Putin was bluffing, based on the low number of the
soldiers around the borders alone. 200 000 simply aren't enough to
take a country the size of Ukraine. During the wars of the 20th
century, the Ukrainian theatre was regularly contested by millions
of soldiers at the same time, and basic control of population still
requires about 1 soldier to approx. 30 civilians or so, even if the
only resistance is guerilla-like. It is much worse with the regular
army fighting back.
As we saw, 200 000 definitely weren't enough to take Ukraine, but
possibly Putin believed that the country was going to collapse
immediately instead of fighting back.
pyuser583 wrote 16 hours 41 min ago:
I thought the exact number wasnât well reported. There was talk
of
âdivisionsâ but it turned out those âdivisionsâ were
severely understaffed.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
The number of troops was absolutely low. My read at the time was
that 100,000 troops (the early build-up) was concerning but could
easily be a bluff or a test. The naval movement was the tip off
to me, with the blood reserves setting a very short clock on how
soon it would start.
I really think the Russians believed they either were going to be
welcomed by many Ukrainians, or that a blitz for Kiev would be a
quick 3-7 day affair. The downed planes of paratroopers in the
first day or two, plus the convoy of trucks that only brought a
few days of diesel seem to line up with the second scenario.
tim333 wrote 5 min ago:
Putin seems to get a fair bit of information from people who
tell him what he wants to hear. I think he was surprised how
poorly went.
Sakos wrote 1 day ago:
Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I
saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as impossible,
since "Putin would never do something this stupid, it's just
posturing like every other time". Meanwhile, it seemed inevitable
to me once Putin started making ultimatums that would never be
fulfilled and gave him no way to back down without a significant
loss in reputation and standing.
Stuff like [1] which Putin doubled down on harder and harder until
the invasion finally started. Couple that with all the reports of
the military and supply build-up, I found it weird that everybody
was so skeptical. It felt more likely to me every day that we got
new information about what was happening to the point that I didn't
see how it couldn't happen.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Putin%27s_December_...
tim333 wrote 12 min ago:
Maybe it depends what circles you frequent. Most of the stuff I
saw said it was likely. Some of the pro-russia people were like
Putin will never.
SkyMarshal wrote 1 day ago:
> Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I
saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as
impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid,
it's just posturing like every other time".
Unless you're deep in policy circles and those people you talked
to are some of the people who would be crafting a govt response
to a Russian invasion, then that's not really what "anybody who
would listen" refers to. It's not the internet hoi poloi that
Biden was trying to convince, but anyone who could help stop it,
or at least formulate govt reactions to it.
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
> Everybody I talked to online and offline, all the discussions I
saw, dismissed the idea of Russia actually invading as
impossible, since "Putin would never do something this stupid,
it's just posturing like every other time".
The Russians had, and continue to have, a very strong presence in
online communities aimed at shaping consensus, disrupting
community, and obfuscating efforts. it is plainly active here on
HN, on Reddit, and on Twitter -- often quite blatently.
"hypernormialization" and all that. there was a concerted push
prior to invasion across all platforms of "Russia would never do
this".
China, NK, Iran, are also very active in this game, though often
more focused on specific areas. India, Europe, and even Brazil
have also dipped toes in aggressive online efforts, though mostly
focused on very specific things, like stymming the flow of Indian
ex-pats to Canada (and killing Canadian-Indian activists...), or
consensus shaping around Brexit.
woooooo wrote 19 hours 1 min ago:
It doesn't have to be a Russian psyop to be skeptical of the US
government line.
They had been telling us the Cubans have a secret microwave
superweapon in the weeks prior to Ukraine going off.
Sakos wrote 2 hours 58 min ago:
[1] You mean this? Seems legit enough to me to consider a
possibility. This just shows that you and others are unable
to properly evaluate and analyze the news that you consume.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55203844
Invictus0 wrote 1 day ago:
And yet, many people in Ukraine did not believe it until after the
invasion began, because they had had numerous false alarms in the
years after the Crimea seizure.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
I can't speak to anyone in Ukraine as I don't know what was being
reported there, but from the basic media reports I saw in western
Europe it was clear.
Russia had built up a similar sized ground force in the border in
past years, either as drills or threats. Those never included
major naval movements though, and definitely didn't include blood
supply on the front lines.
As soon as the blood showed up a week before the Olympics
everyone should have known it was game on, even if naval actions
alone could be written of as not a sure sign.
bart_spoon wrote 1 day ago:
French intelligence was asserting the US was essentially
fearmongering and that Russia would not invade right up until
the moment they did.
mdekkers wrote 6 hours 42 min ago:
> French intelligence
What a great idea!
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Well unfortunately that says something about the French
intelligence.
I really don't mean this as a condescending arm chair
quarterback statement. The intelligence agencies would
clearly have access to much, much more information than a
civilian. That said, I don't know who, with any level of
military understanding, would expect medical facilities and
large amounts of blood to be setup and delivered to the front
line of fear mongering campaign.
mikrotikker wrote 18 hours 36 min ago:
Ukraine was quietly telling everyone to shut up because it
was frantically trying to position troops and equipment.
Had it been officially acknowledged these trips and
equipment would have been trying to smash through an
onslaught of refugees fleeing the east, thus helping Russia
to face less pushback and effectively ceding the territory
as Ukrainians fled and ethnic Russians stayed.
_heimdall wrote 18 hours 13 min ago:
This seems 100% plausible, though its one I haven't seen
anything necessarily to corroborate. It makes total sense
though and would be a reason for silence.
Edit: rereading this theory, it does read pretty terribly
for any civilians living there. Effectively, in that
scenario the government decided to mislead the public in
order to purposely keep civilians in harm's way rather
than allow them to flee (and get in the way). This
matches my cynical views of government, but if true it
should still piss off a number of people that actually
believe governments are there to serve us above all else.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote 1 day ago:
>> The danger could only be warded off by adopting ... aerial and
naval unmanned systems ...
That was actually spot on, as recent events show.
quotemstr wrote 1 day ago:
Organizations commonly fail by deluding themselves. One form of
self-delusion is confusing motion for progress. The author's point is
that the Pentagon thinks it is funding technology but isn't getting
value for its money. It's failing to do so because it lacks the will
or ability to unite expertise, authority, and responsibility in a
single brain. When organizations diffuse responsibility or grant
authority to people unequipped to distinguish motion from progress,
the result is always waste and stagnation.
Effective leadership is a continual struggle against this entropic
tendency of organizations towards management of appearances over
world-of-atoms results. During those rare interludes in history when
a strong leader manages to temporarily reverse this organizational
entropy, magic happens. Consider ULA versus SpaceX or DeepMind vs.
OpenAI
Imagine how much further up the technology ladder we as a species
would be if institutional competence were the norm, not an unstable
and fleeting miracle.
kurthr wrote 1 day ago:
Lots of failures are just human and political. Sure technology can
obscure the obvious or highlight the unlikely, but it's just not that
commonly influential (at least not yet, the day will come).
The US even warned Russia of the attack in Moscow, but it was treated
as political interference. That was almost certainly signals
intelligence ignored.
URI [1]: https://apnews.com/article/russia-intelligence-duty-to-warn-...
somenameforme wrote 1 day ago:
The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was planning
some attack on some large gathering, including concerts, in Moscow,
of which there are many. And it warned Americans to avoid large
gatherings for the next 48 hours. That was on March 7th. The actual
attack would only take place on March 24th.
Incidentally, there is speculation that the attack may have been
planned for March 9th. One of the terrorists was photographed at
Crocus on the 7th, and on the 9th there was a large concert by
Shaman - a patriotic Russian singer who's regularly made songs
glorifying the war in Ukraine, performed for soldiers in Russia's
claimed territories, and so on. This would also have coincided with
just before the Russian elections, which happened on the 15th. But
security was extremely high during that concert - very possibly in
response to the US warning.
By contrast when Russia warned the US about the Boston Bomber, the
warning was precise to the point of even naming him.
temporarely wrote 1 day ago:
The little remarked fact is that all these paramilitary groups
are "proxies". No one ever mentions "whose proxy" is ISIS in the
hn pages.
t888 wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
Maybe itâs little remarked because itâs not a fact?
AnimalMuppet wrote 1 day ago:
Well then, mention it. Whose proxy are they?
imwillofficial wrote 1 day ago:
The CIAs.
temporarely wrote 1 day ago:
Why, we can all count fingers on one hand, can't we? We know
whose proxy they ain't and after that it is process of what
is not eliminated. Some say they are the original
counter-counter-proxy (cause the others also liked the idea
of this genre and made counter-proxies) and with the first
proxies (in that genre) being the Mujahidin in Afghanistan
hitting USSR troops, unless you want to go all the way back
to Lawrence of Arabia and Ottomans ..
p.s. part of the deal Nixon made with Mao was that CPC would
no longer support various cells in the 'Global Energy Zone'
since they were now "partners" in the Global Economy.
Overnight thousands of Maoist flowers all over campuses and
in middle east went away. All these groups existentially
require a powerful patron or two. So ISIS has a mommy and a
daddy and it aint Russia and it aint Iran and China has been
out of that game since 70s as a matter of historic fact. That
leave US, UK ("the Empire"), the Europeans (French?
Doubtful), and Israel, KSA, Qatar and UAE. Qatar is Muslim
Brotherhood [& so is Turkey] so that seems to eliminate it
[them]. That basically leaves Western and Abrahamic patriarch
wanna-bes at the table of candidates.
omnibrain wrote 1 day ago:
> The warning was quite broad, claiming that some group was
planning some attack on some large gathering, including concerts,
in Moscow, of which there are many. And it warned Americans to
avoid large gatherings for the next 48 hours.
That was the public "travel advisory" by the US department of
state. We don't know what the CIA told their Russian counterparts
according to their "duty to warn".
Insightful thread:
URI [1]: https://twitter.com/laurae_thomas/status/177309428332066...
somenameforme wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
The media has swapped into repulsive but predictable propaganda
mode over the attack. However, as a result, more facts are
coming out. And those facts suggest that nothing significant
was shared beyond the travel advisory. From a recent NYTimes
article [1]:
---
"Aleksandr V. Bortnikov, the director of the F.S.B., emphasized
Tuesday in public comments that the information the United
States provided was âof a general nature.â âWe reacted to
this information, of course, and took appropriate measures,â
he said, noting that the actions the F.S.B. took to follow up
on the tip didnât confirm it.
The adversarial relationship between Washington and Moscow
prevented U.S. officials from sharing any information about the
plot beyond what was necessary, out of fear Russian authorities
might learn their intelligence sources or methods.
In its March 7 public warning, the U.S. embassy said the risk
of a concert venue attack in Moscow was acute for the next 48
hours. U.S. officials say itâs possible Russian authorities
pushed hard around the 48-hour warning period but later grew
more relaxed and distrustful when an attack didnât occur."
It is unclear whether U.S. intelligence mistook the timing of
the attack or the extremists delayed their plan upon seeing
heightened security.
---
It's amusing contrasting the very few facts the article
provides, buried deep within it, with the framing,
implications, and non sequiturs scattered through the first 60%
of the article. Irrefutable and undeniable [2], all over again.
[1] - [1] - [2] -
URI [1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/world/europe/russia...
URI [2]: https://archive.is/l6BYv
URI [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/06/opinion/irrefutable...
wolverine876 wrote 1 day ago:
Is there evidence of the last claim?
semerda wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/boston-bombing-anniv...
foolfoolz wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBREA2P02R/
est wrote 1 day ago:
Looks like op staff were overwelmed by oncall duty false alarms.
Yeah the best way to fix errors is to ... just ignore them.
I think any sophisticated system that requires a bureaucratic staff to
operate is doomed to fail.
causal wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, in any data product scenario it is extremely easy to find a
signal and extremely difficult to validate that it's the most
important one.
UberFly wrote 1 day ago:
That's the truth. In the case of October 7 (and 9/11 for that matter)
lots of useful info was coming in, and regardless of the source, it
was actively ignored. Human error at it's best. AI analysis is just
another tool but ultimately we need competent or empowered people
involved in the chain.
OhMeadhbh wrote 1 day ago:
Finally. someone talking sense about AI.
j16sdiz wrote 1 day ago:
I don't understand why this have anything do with silicone valley or AI
/ AGI.
It is just a classical confirmation bias.
agomez314 wrote 1 day ago:
âno one appears to have noticed that Project Maven fit into the grand
tradition of many other high-tech weapons projects: ecstatic claims of
prowess coupled with a disregard for real-world experienceâ
kromem wrote 1 day ago:
I'm getting really tired of writers crapping on 'AI' as if a static
self-sufficient offering.
Like no, the AI doesn't know everything other than what the terrorist
is thinking. It summarizes what it's being fed.
If a chatbot was being fed reports concerned about border activities
then it's going to raise concern about border activities.
This is an unnecessary and misleading angle to the article jumping on a
bandwagon.
The failure here is a broader failure of human intelligence across
Western intelligence services in favor of contracts with third party
defense contractors. There's a story for that.
For "AI not knowing the terrorist mind" not much of a story.
rossdavidh wrote 1 day ago:
The issue is, that many non-tech (and I'm starting to think also some
tech) people believe that "AI" is an accurate label, and therefore
that they can expect these algorithms to be able to think
intelligently. The reason that it's called "AI" instead of, say,
"large language models" (or whatever algorithm is being used), is
precisely to create this impression of that capability, so as to sell
the product.
"Using artificial intelligence, the system analyzes behavior,
predicts risks, raises alerts..."
No, not very well, it doesn't. And this claim was not at all
equivalent to "it summarizes what it's being fed".
Eisenstein wrote 1 day ago:
> The issue is, that many non-tech (and I'm starting to think also
some tech) people believe that "AI" is an accurate label, and
therefore that they can expect these algorithms to be able to think
intelligently.
Until we can define it, I think we should stop using the term
'intelligent' at all. It misleads people precisely because it means
different things in different contexts.
If something can comprehend language, solve word problems, get a
really high score on the SATs and LSATs and translate perfectly
from any language to any other, we could definitely say it is
'intelligent' in all of those contexts. Is it 'intelligent' in
other contexts?
Applying a technology that is really good at many things to things
which it is not good at and selling that as a panacea is not a new
idea. If we want it to change in this instance, we should start at
least defining the terms we use so that we can determine the scope
of its relevance to any area. Otherwise people make assumptions to
their detriment and we can't agree even on what we are arguing
about.
Const-me wrote 1 day ago:
I think the most important lesson, itâs borderline impossible to
design any good system without clear use cases.
Ukraine has these use cases, also high motivation to tackle them.
Ukrainians are controlling battlefield with commodity computers [1]
They sunk multiple Russian warships with long-range naval drones [2]
They recently started large-scale testing of cheap flying drones with
computer vision-based target recognition on board [3] However, US is at
peace. Which is a great thing by itself, but it means itâs too easy
for them to waste billions of dollars developing technologies which
look awesome in PowerPoint, but useless in practice.
URI [1]: https://en.defence-ua.com/news/how_the_kropyva_combat_control_...
URI [2]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68528761
URI [3]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/03/21/ukraine-...
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
> but useless in practice.
we are seeing them actively used, in practice, now. In Ukraine. And
they work
Like, WW3 quantities of cluster munitions, destined to be
decommissioned and thrown out, handed over to the AFU. aging
Bradleys, Javelins, Stingers, etc., designed to blow up T-72s and
Hind-Ds -- and boy howdy, that's what they're doing. wait until you
see what the "awesome in powerpoint" stuff can do.
and remember, a sizable chunk of Ukraine's military effectiveness is
NATO intelligence sharing. of those combat controllers and naval
drones are sideshows without NATO mapping of Russian EW, ship, and
troop movements.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
> However, US is at peace.
This has always been a difficult concept for me given that we have
decided to maintain a very large standing army since WWII. Where is
the line really drawn between being prepared for imminent war and
being at peace?
helsinkiandrew wrote 1 day ago:
> However, US is at peace. Which is a great thing by itself, but it
means itâs too easy for them to waste billions of dollars
developing technologies which look awesome in PowerPoint, but useless
in practice.
It's always easier to develop weapons in wartime because the
requirements and effectiveness are much easier to find, but it's not
cheaper. Billions will still be wasted but it will be spent on
rebuilding buildings, bridges, infrastructure and lives destroyed by
the war.
Ukraine has done some amazing things with cheap and boot strapped
technology but the cost is the $486 billion required to rebuild the
country.
URI [1]: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-needs-486-bln-r...
wojciii wrote 1 day ago:
Also .. I think that the Ukrainians are testing the prototypes on the
battlefield and rejecting designs that don't work quite early. I have
seen a prototype of a machine gun with auto tracking (reminded me of
Aliens 2). Also the flying drone designs are made my a large number
of companies to avoid the risk of one company being destroyed by a
russian missile strike. I would assume that this is also common for
other products for their military.
rossdavidh wrote 1 day ago:
That is absolutely the most important lesson. By the way, also true
of non-military software development.
SteveNuts wrote 1 day ago:
This was a huge problem for the Nazis too, Hitler loved hugely
complex and massive âsuper weaponsâ and wasted immense amounts of
money and scientific effort to build them. The allies built practical
and easy to maintain equipment in great quantities.
dotnet00 wrote 1 day ago:
The allies had their own set of "super weapons", like radars and
proximity fuses.
The Nazis had the issue that they wanted to field massive
superweapons, but were nowhere near as mechanized as the allies,
leading to them being unable to actually practically support those
superweapons (and probably also why they went with such
over-the-top ideas, hoping that they could do the job with a few
units only and relying on scaring and demoralizing the allies into
submission).
jmspring wrote 1 day ago:
The allies also had low tech solutions that helped greatly. One
such example is the Ghost Army which used decoys and the like to
make it look like there was a large force. [1] Last week, surviving
members of the Ghost Army were honored in DC being awarded the
Congressional Gold Medal.
URI [1]: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/visit/exhibits/traveling...
URI [2]: https://www.npr.org/2024/03/21/1239871379/ghost-army-congr...
polishdude20 wrote 1 day ago:
Reminds me of the time the allies literally dropped half sized
fake soldiers from planes before Dunkirk or something like that.
wavemode wrote 1 day ago:
I mean... the Allies also spent billions developing a superweapon.
(And used German scientists to do it!)
SteveNuts wrote 1 day ago:
Sure, thatâs true. I forgot to mention that most of them never
saw action except the V2, which was only mildly effective (more
of a psychological weapon than anything).
WalterBright wrote 1 day ago:
The material effect of the V2 was not in the destruction the V2
caused. It was in the massive diversion of Allied resources
trying to stop it.
See "Impact" by Benjamin King
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Impact-History-Germanys-V-weapo...
resolutebat wrote 1 day ago:
The Allies would have won without the superweapon though
(remember, Hitler had already surrended and Japan was clearly on
the ropes well before Hiroshima), and the jury is still out in
whether it even sped things up.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
The has been a ton of debate since the war over whether Japan
would have surrendered, and if so how early. The concern at the
time, and it has always seemed reasonable to me, was that the
Japanese were committed to fighting to the last person and to
make them surrender through combat on their home turf would
have killed many, many more than the two nukes did.
I don't raise that as justification and personally wish we were
never stupid enough as a species to build such a weapon, but we
tend to be that stupid. I do, though, agree that we likely
would have lost more people on both sides and for Japan that
number still would have included a large number of civilians.
PolygonSheep wrote 1 day ago:
I agree, it was totally reasonable and worth it.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Oh I didn't meant to imply that I personally see the nukes
as having been reasonable or worth it.
Frankly, I don't know how one could ever make the decision
that killing 100,000 is "worth it" and I hope I never have
to.
Personally I think we should never have tried to invent the
nuclear bomb to begin with, avoiding the decision entirely.
I understand the whole "but then the enemy would have it
first" argument, I just don't buy it. Sure, maybe the
"enemy" would go on to invent it but that's a burden
they'll have to bear.
Sometimes standing on principle includes dying on
principle, we seem to have lost the importance of all that
along the way. I chalk that up to the increase rate of
invention making it too scary to take a step back, even for
a moment, to decide whether we should do something that we
know we can do.
WalterBright wrote 1 day ago:
It clearly sped things up.
"Downfall" by Richard Frank [1] "Code-Name Downfall" by Thomas
Allen
URI [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Downfall-End-Imperial-Japanese-...
URI [2]: https://www.amazon.com/Code-Name-Downfall-Secret-Japan...
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
im not buying books to understand your point.
summarize those please
WalterBright wrote 1 day ago:
The second bomb convinced the Japanese to immediately
surrender.
resolutebat wrote 16 hours 43 min ago:
It took 5 days from the 2nd bomb to surrender, and many
historians think the Soviet Union's simultaneous
declaration of war was a more significant factor.
WalterBright wrote 37 min ago:
This theory is debunked by the two books, written by
two different historians, which go into it in great
detail.
The second bomb made it clear that the first one was
not a one-off, and that the US was going to nuke the
cities one by one. The Japanese also had intelligence
(that turned out to be false) that Tokyo was the next
target.
I've read a couple accounts by anti-nuclear activists
who held that the USSR was the reason for the
surrender, but if you compare those accounts with the
ones written by historians, the former are crackpots.
An invasion of Japan would be an absolutely massive
operation (see D-Day) and the USSR was in no position
to mount one.
hughesjj wrote 1 day ago:
I always saw the atomic bomb as more of a defensive rather than
offensive tactic. We were super worried about the Germans
getting there first and wanted to ensure we could respond in
kind of they did
LtWorf wrote 1 day ago:
And then germany surrendered and it was still dropped. Twice.
Doesn't hold.
ipaddr wrote 1 day ago:
Japan was never going to surrender. They were going to
fight until the end. More lives would have been lost. The
bomb saved lives.
LtWorf wrote 1 day ago:
allegedly
Staple_Diet wrote 1 day ago:
You either have no knowledge of the topic or have some
secret source of information that has evaded the
world's historians, because it is a fairly acknowledged
fact supported by both Allied and Japanese sources.
Japan didn't even surrender after the first bomb was
dropped.
kevindamm wrote 1 day ago:
I think there's nuance here that gets lost in the
retelling. From what I learned of it in a university
course dedicated to many aspects of the topic of that
bomb, there was a demand of /unconditional/ surrender
but Japan wanted to keep their emperor. The emperor
was really more of a cultural and spiritual persona
than a political one, but regardless the US gov't.
insisted on an unconditional surrender, including
dethroning the emperor. I think there was an offer
of surrender by the Japanese if they could keep their
emperor. I don't have proof handy and I'm not
inclined to dive down that particular rabbit hole
right now so I hope someone can support or correct
this.
Skgqie1 wrote 1 day ago:
I vaguely recall hearing something similar, with
the reasoning being that there was a fear of future
hostility enabled by Emperor driven fanaticism.
That said, I've also heard that there wasn't really
enough time given for a response after the first
bomb, and that it was largely a political move to
claim they'd offered an initial surrender - and
that the goal was always to drop two bombs, partly
because they wanted to test out different aspects
of their designs.
dimask wrote 1 day ago:
It was really aimed at "allies" (soviet union), not
japan.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
We had really, really bad aim if those two nukes were
aimed at the Soviet Union.
spanktheuser wrote 1 day ago:
And it wasnât even the most expensive. The Norden Bomb Sight
cost slightly more than the Manhattan Project. B-29 development
and production cost nearly 3x the cost of the fission bomb.
dreamcompiler wrote 1 day ago:
The Norden stands out because it couldn't see through clouds,
and Europe has very few cloud-free days. So it turned out to be
largely useless in practice. The US didn't get much value for
its money with that project.
speed_spread wrote 1 day ago:
Well, if you include the cost of decontaminating the Hanford
site, amongst others, the numbers grow rapidly. Once the B-29
was done, it was done.
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
>Nevertheless, Hamasâs devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin
Bet and the rest of Israelâs multibillion-dollar defense system
entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even more striking
considering Hamas carried out much of its preparations in plain sight,
including practice assaults on mock-ups of the border fence and Israeli
settlementsâactivities that were openly reported. Hamas-led militant
groups even posted videos of their training online. Israelis living
close to the border observed and publicized these exercises with
mounting alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence
bureaucraciesâ analyses and, by extension, the software that had
informed them. Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring
developments through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza
border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamasâs
preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have their
findings dismissed as âan imaginary scenario.â The Israeli
intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in possession of a
Hamas document that detailed the groupâs plan for an attack.
At some point you have to hazard the notion that they let it happen on
purpose. "Wag the dog" trended around that time, and with Netanyahu's
various woes, maybe they went ahead and built the Torment Nexus.
Aerbil313 wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm shocked by the amount of taxpayer money gone to waste. So many
unsuccessful projects, the infamous incompetence of Big Tech looks like
nothing compared to US military industrial complexâs.
So this was where all the surplus of Western civilization was going to
for the last 3/4 of a century. Now the surplus is no more, and soon to
turn negative as the critical resources and energy sources run out, I
hope the US loses its global dominance as soon as possible. Iâm
sorry, but at no point in time have they been just rulers over planet
Earth. Entire countries of mine have been demolished and entire
populations have been killed/forced to migrate, so that you can buy the
new Xbox to your child, and your neighbor can buy a new yacht.
nebula8804 wrote 1 day ago:
To be fair the US is like what 247 years old? Thats a toddler in the
grand scheme of things. And the founding fathers did not have a lot
of confidence in this thing lasting.
[1] "At the end of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington
said, "I do not expect the Constitution to last for more than 20
years." Today, the United States has the oldest written constitution
in the world."
If anything what the country has achieved over the years is pretty
darn good. For a large part of its existence, the US also wasn't this
super power that we know of today. The future is unwritten but maybe
we will see an isolated US that is left to tend to only its own
internal issues.
URI [1]: https://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtID=2&...
mandmandam wrote 1 day ago:
If anything, the numbers in the article undersell the scale of waste.
Our Middle East clusterfuck has cost us at least 8 trillion dollars
since 2003.
Enough to convert the entire US to clean energy, feed every hungry
person on the planet, and house every homeless American. With change.
Instead it was spent on murdering millions, displacing tens of
millions, and riddling generations of children with cancer and birth
defects (again).
It's so, so far beyond evil and stupid that even Noam Chomsky says
there's no word for it.
cratermoon wrote 1 day ago:
I was looking for a mention of the Strategic Defense Initiative, aka
"Star Wars". Among the technical issues the program never overcame was
the ability to adequately recognize incoming missiles and guide
anti-missile defenses to the target. Much like the Igloo White and
Assault Breaker systems mentioned in the article, it failed to
distinguish decoys from real.
jandrewrogers wrote 1 day ago:
> Among the technical issues the program never overcame was the
ability to adequately recognize incoming missiles and guide
anti-missile defenses to the target.
This is factually inaccurate, both of these were proven capabilities
several decades ago. The biggest technical issue with ballistic
missile intercept was getting the new hypersonic rocket motors they
wanted to use to respond to guidance commands with sufficient
precision. It was a materials science problem; if you put the same
package on a normal rocket motor it (demonstrably) worked just fine.
cratermoon wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
"respond to guidance commands with sufficient precision" is just
restating the same problem.
"if you put the same package on a normal rocket motor it
(demonstrably) worked just fine." Except that the interceptor
wouldn't be able to reach the target traveling at hypersonic
speeds.
In other words, the guidance didn't work. Either the interceptor
missed because it was off target or it missed because it was too
slow. Dressing it up in technicalities doesn't negate the failure
for the purposes of SDI.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
'Caught by surprise' is a weird description. Israeli press has
repeatedly run stories about how frontline analysts sounding the alarm
were ignored.
That could be due to things like sexism, ageism or discrimination
against conscripts, or it could be due to the settler organisations
having their people in government and a strong wish to resettle the
Gaza strip.
Either way, the signals were there, they had been watching the
preparations and exercises for a year or so. Even if the resistance
groups had kept that secret even a mediocre officer in intelligence or
the army should be able to conclude from 'first principles' and what
they were doing that there would eventually be a violent response.
sequoia wrote 1 day ago:
I'm a fairly ignorant outside observer, but it seems that government
disarray and massive internal dissension within Israeli society
caused by Netanyahu's increasingly extreme political moves must have
contributed to Israel's defense failure on October 7. Netanyahu had
so split Israeli society that millions were out protesting every
weekend for months leading up to 10/7 and reservists were even
refusing duty in protest.
Perhaps if he were more focused on governing or stepping aside rather
than keeping himself out of jail by any means necessary, there would
have been fewer distractions at the national level. I'm not saying
it's his fault but the chaos he caused can't have helped.
Invictus0 wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone directly familiar with the IDF knows that there is a deep
hubris engrained in the organization.
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
A violent response was expected. What was not expected was a
competent violent response.
Spooky23 wrote 1 day ago:
This is just a blaming the wrong tools.
The people running the Israeli government and army are tools. They
fucked up, plain and simple. Whether through malice or just
ineptitude and incompetence, they failed.
dmurray wrote 1 day ago:
Or, they intentionally ignored the intelligence hoping for a casus
belli and an excuse to wipe their hated enemies off the map.
nsguy wrote 1 day ago:
This reads like "9/11 was an inside job" or "Trump is still
president". A conspiracy theory. Something usually not true but
some people want to be true for various reasons.
EDIT: I don't think on Oct 6th, 2023 (e.g.) many Israelis were
concerned about wiping Gaza off the map. As long as it was quiet
nobody cared (which was sort of the problem here).
underdeserver wrote 1 day ago:
1200 dead. 250 kidnapped. Every politician and senior officer
expected to resign after the war ends. No, this was incompetence,
or at least systematic failure, not malice.
lupire wrote 1 day ago:
Why so quick to write off malicious incompetence?
Observing that the man will be forced to retire at age 76 after
a decade longadder climbing career is hardly a resounding proof
of incompetence
edanm wrote 1 day ago:
This is a fairly unrealistic idea. Unfortunately, mistakes and
incompetence really are the answer, partially brought about
because Netanyahu has spent years appointing people based on
loyalty rather than credentials, partly because Hamas is smart
and "played" Israel, partly because humans sometimes make
mistakes.
If there truly was this kind of conspiracy, far too many people
would have known about it, and this would've been leaked. Even if
Netanyahu wouldn't mind the death of a thousand of his citizens
(and personally I don't think anything is beneath him), there is
no one else who would be so stupid or evil.
Also, Netanyahu almost certainly lost most of his public support
because of this. Even if he truly was cynical anything to do
something like this for his own personal gain, almost no one
thinks that this has gained him anything. He will almost
certainly go down in history as the worst Israeli leader of all
time.
Also also, Israel isn't wiping anyone off the map. If this was
all a ploy to do that, why wouldn't it just do it? I'm fairly
certain that three days after Hamas's invasion of Israel, Israel
had far more leeway from the world to do what it wanted.
lupire wrote 1 day ago:
Bombing a million people to death gets different international
response than bombing their infrastructure and then opps they
starved to death, what a tragedy.
javajosh wrote 1 day ago:
This speculation reminds me of early speculation about Covid-19's
lab origin. They are both horrible ideas, but there is also too
much evidence for both for them to be dismissed as mere bad-faith
fear-mongering. That's the problem with conspiracies: some of
them are real.
wongarsu wrote 1 day ago:
I'm not sure what you are trying to say? If a theory has too
much evidence to dismiss it, how can it be a terrible idea? Are
they terrible because they don't fit your ideology, or because
of their implications about other people, or what is the issue?
javajosh wrote 1 day ago:
Horrible in the moral sense. For example, that some people
really want in their heart of hearts to kill entire other
groups of people. Or that political or military leaders might
willingly sacrifice hundreds of men, women and children to
advance their goals. Horrible in the Machiavellian sense of
pursuing power without moral constraint.
TacticalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> ... an excuse to wipe their hated enemies off the map
21% of Israel's population are arab-israeli muslims. How many
jewish people are living in Iran? How many jewish people are
living in the Gaza strip?
Who hates who here?
aprilthird2021 wrote 1 day ago:
The number of times people trot out 20% to excuse a very long
and detailed history of overt and explicit Israeli cruelty to
the Palestinians makes me think Israel only allowed these
people to be citizens to blunt any criticism.
The conflict isn't about who hates who. It's about how to deal
with millions of stateless people living in an occupied,
blockaded, besieged territory where they can't control how much
of any kind of import or export they do with the outside world
because their integration into their occupiers legal system
would upend its ethno-nationalism.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
The jewish israeli mainstream hates palestinian israelis,
regardless of whether they are muslims, christians, jews or
atheists. Recently israeli troops shot a jewish convert israeli
palestinian because they found a knife in his bag.
Israel has also transported jews to Israel from the entire
region with fervour for decades, sometimes with dubious
consensuality, similar to how immigrating ethiopian jews have
been given contraceptives without making sure they really
wanted it.
It's also a state claiming to be jewdom, period, and uses
religious imagery in its warfare, so it's not surprising if
people who aren't aware that many, maybe most, jews aren't
zionists fall into antisemitic tropes and conspiracism.
nsguy wrote 1 day ago:
I'm pretty sure your first paragraph is not true (personal
experience- I used to live in Israel). Link to surveys? I'm
not even sure what you're referring to specifically as
"Jewish Israeli Mainstream". The Orthodox Jews?
Israel has rescued Jews from places they were persecuted-
Yes.
Israel also doesn't "claim to be jewdom" whatever that means.
I can't even parse it. The US or Canada or most of Europe are
decidedly Christian. In Israel you find more diversity
(partly because the other religious minorities are much
larger).
cess11 wrote 23 hours 3 min ago:
A good resource for contemporary israeli discourse is the
account @ireallyhateyou on Twitter.
I wouldn't reduce e.g. Operation Magic Carpet to rescue
from persecution. The main zionist motivation was to expand
the jewish population in Palestine.
Sure it does. It's The Jewish State. It's were jews belong,
as famous zionist Joe Biden puts it, no jew would be safe
unless it existed. Inbetween messages about 'death to
arabs' the IDF puts up menorahs and paints the star of
David when they're operating in the Gaza strip. In the
Knesset they've tried to expel Ofer Cassif for defending
international law over the religious fervour of the Likud
and far-right settler parties.
Edit: As for surveys, take a look at those from Israel
Democracy Institute.
nsguy wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Both things can be true at one time, saving from
persecution and expanding the Jewish population.
Doesn't US money say "In God we trust"? Don't various
Christian countries put up Christmas decorations and
trees everywhere? Aren't there courthouses in the US with
the "bible" statues in front of them? I think the US is
more of a "Christian" state than Israel is a Jewish
state.
Israel is primarily founded as democratic free secular
society, not a Jewish State in the sense you're implying:
"will promote the development of the country for the
benefit of all its inhabitants; will be based on the
precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the
Hebrew Prophets; will uphold the full social and
political equality of all its citizens, without
distinction of race, creed or sex; will guarantee full
freedom of conscience, worship, education and culture;
will safeguard the sanctity and inviolability of the
shrines and Holy Places of all religions; and will
dedicate itself to the principles of the Charter of the
United Nations."
Anyways, in the sense that Israel is the country of the
Jewish nation, like Japan is the country of the Japanese,
and China is a country for Chinese, and India is a
country for Indians, that's sort of true. But I don't
think this is the point you're trying to make here?
I did a quick Google for surveys from the Israel
Democracy Institute and I failed to find a survey saying
Israelis hate Palestinians. Maybe point me to the
specific survey(s) you had in mind?
I don't think Ofer Cassif was being expelled for
"defending international law". Israel is abiding by
international law. Anyways, if he wasn't that shows you
democracy in action. How many senators e.g. in the US
were "defending international law" by opposing their
country internationally post 9/11 e.g.? Israel has a
diversity of opinions (of which Ofer is on some extreme)
and the freedom to voice them.
cess11 wrote 11 hours 3 min ago:
No, Israel is not democratic. It's an apartheid state,
established through colonial displacement and ethnic
cleansing. It is currently engaged in genocidal
practices against neighbouring indigenous populations,
which I don't believe is compatible with democracy.
I don't think it's a jewish state because I believe
zionism and judaism to be fundamentally incompatible,
but it's the mainstream zionist position that it is.
You can look at pretty much any survey they've done
during al-Aqsa Flood. You can also, you know, just look
at israeli television? Listen to some politicians and
pundits?
No, even the ICJ has concluded that Israel is plausibly
committing genocide. What do you mean by "extreme"? Are
you seriously claiming that he is free to voice his
opinions, even though he is routinely harassed by the
state for trying to do so? To my knowledge the arab
parties in the Knesset has been allowed one, maybe two
if the managed one in november, demonstrations. Look at
photos from the israeli anti-government protests and
count the palestinians, you'll find that they are very,
very absent.
Or, you know, listen to some popular israeli pop songs,
like Shager or Harbu Darbu? Look at some IDF TikTok:s
where they say the genocidal stuff out loud while
looting some dead or displaced peoples home?
FireBeyond wrote 1 day ago:
Hard line right wing Israelis started funding Hamas because
towards the end of the leadership of Arafat, Palestine was much
more willing to adopt a two state solution, and it would have
been awkward for Israel to be asked âif these
âterroristsâ are willing to compromise, why arenât
you?â
So they helped Hamas rise.
People like to point to âfrom the river (Jordan) to the (Red)
seaâ as âevidenceâ that Palestinians hate the Jewish
people, but that ignores that that phrase was literally the
election campaign for Likud (Netanyahu) in the 1970s and formed
the back bone of the Israeli rights policy to this day.
Also, Hamas is less than 40,000 people in a country of 3
million, so generalizations arenât helpful.
aprilthird2021 wrote 1 day ago:
People also like to forget that Likud was itself born from a
terrorist organization, Irgun, whose leader, a proscribed
terrorist by several Western countries, was elected Prime
Minister of Israel.
shrimp_emoji wrote 1 day ago:
The Sons of Liberty were terrorists too. ;p
The important thing to me is those guys don't lead to
Islamic theocracies.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
Jewish theocracy with nukes is fine, but islamic
theocracy without nukes is not?
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
Iran probably has nukes, or has the ability to get
there.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
The ability to get there is quite common. Not sure
how that's relevant?
javajosh wrote 1 day ago:
The composition of the population is less important to this
calculus than the composition of Israel's political leadership.
It was already known that Netanyahi/Likud allowed Hamas to grow
stronger to prevent unification of Gaza and the West Bank.
Allowing the Oct. 7 attack gave him every excuse to prosecute
total war on the Gazans, while maintaining a great deal of
moral and financial support, especially from the US and
Britain. Allowing your enemy to take first blood in order to
justify annihilating them is a ploy as old as time.
Note also that there is a distinction between Hamas and Gaza.
Prior to the invasion, Hamas had weak support among Gazans - I
think in part because they understood that their extremism was
to blame for the blockade and ongoing hardships in the region.
It may also be because Hamas systematically embedded its
military infrastructure in civilian areas, and they knew what
this would mean for them if war broke out. So its particularly
evil that Netanyahu propped up a weak Hamas and then invaded
with the intention of wiping it out. He prevented the Gazans
from voting out the extremists and saving themselves the
experience of this atrocity.
FWIW Netanyahu (or Israel, as a state) has never spoken once
about wiping out "Arabs". Whereas Hamas' stated goal, as with
Iran, is to wipe out Jews (and the West).
aprilthird2021 wrote 1 day ago:
They do speak about erasing specific towns (and after saying
such things their supporters go and torch such towns while
killing the inhabitants), forcibly expelling all
Palestinians, and calling for a second Nakba though: [1] [2]
URI [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/gaza-nakba-israel...
URI [2]: https://www.972mag.com/intelligence-ministry-gaza-po...
URI [3]: https://www.axios.com/2023/03/01/hawara-israeli-smot...
logicchains wrote 1 day ago:
>FWIW Netanyahu (or Israel, as a state) has never spoken once
about wiping out "Arabs".
He did tell people to "remember Amalek": [1] . Amalek refers
to a verse in the Bible where God told the Jews to: "go,
attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to
them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children
and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys."
URI [1]: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/benjami...
edanm wrote 1 day ago:
Not that I like that kind of talk, but he wasn't talking
about Arabs in general. He was talking about Hamas or, at
worse, about Palestinians in general. Certainly not all
Arabs.
cess11 wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
Why do you think that?
He's not talking about Hamas specifically, which is a
political movement running a party and charity work. He's
not even talking about Hamas and the al-Qassam brigades
specifically.
How you can know? Because a splinter group from Hamas,
Palestinian Islamic Jihad, is the second largest
political force in the Gaza strip and that's not a
movement he intends to help by removing Hamas.
If you dig up some israeli television you'll find that
pundits and other talking heads are quite clear with
their genocidal feelings, and that's how they're using
the Amalek terminology. Same goes for pop songs high on
the charts in Israel.
outside1234 wrote 1 day ago:
The thing we should all really be terrified about is how Trump and
Stephen Miller will use of all of this technology we have built against
us when elected.
alephnerd wrote 1 day ago:
No offense, but this article is MASSIVE BS.
There are issues with innovation in the DoD and DHS, but a lot of this
is offloaded to private sector vendors anyhow.
I notice how the article didn't mention any of the companies I
personally know doing stuff in the space, nor actually sourced from
members of the VC, Business, or Defense community.
The fact that the author took Palantir's marketing at face value is
proof enough - the CIA let their contract with Palantir lapse a couple
years ago (and I think they only even bought it because of their stake
in In-Q-Tel), and they haven't had great success selling to the Fed.
I actually work in this space btw.
-----
The bigger stumbling block is procurement.
Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively straightforward
so a Series E+ startup can make it if they spend around $7-10M and
1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell.
Throw in the paperwork hell from Grantmakers like the DoD and DoE, and
you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system.
Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added
for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet
it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and
innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that, but
it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely dependent on
firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc acquiring
promising startups to evangelize their innovations internally.
Fundamentally, this is why I dislike the New America/Khan/Chopra vision
of anti-trust. It doesn't actually help innovation from a federal
standpoint, as small companies and startups have no reason to work with
the Fed given the amount of red tape that exists.
If the same effort was put to harmonizing and simplifying procurement
across the Federal Government, you could directly make demands on
competition.
This is what China does, and is a major reason their MIC was able to
grow leaps and bounds in just 20 years.
nceqs3 wrote 1 day ago:
The way Palantir talks about the CIA really rubs me the wrong way.
For years, they would leak to journalists that Palantir "found bin
Laden" when, of course, it had nothing to do with finding him.
Several CIA employees died trying to find Bin Laden, all for some
schmucks in Silicon Valley to try and capitalize on their sacrifice.
l3mure wrote 1 day ago:
Critical support to Palantir in their quest to steal CIA valor.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
What more do you expect from a project from Peter Thiel, which is
named after the most evil guy's magic all seeing orb from LoTR,
which is explicitly made for governments to target whatever they
want to call "bad guys" by slurping up as much data as possible
from people who shouldn't be collecting it in the first place?
Dude has a dictator complex. Of course he fully the embraces the
"just fucking lie and make money" ethos
hayst4ck wrote 1 day ago:
What's funny is that Thiel is a believer of nominative
determinism: [1]
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
URI [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39172475
alephnerd wrote 1 day ago:
If you want to give a Silicon Valley company kudos for Bin Laden,
give it to Cisco, VMWare, and Equinix.
Palantir's whole "CIA" marketing schitck appeared to be a ploy to
build a strong reputation to help hiring.
At the end of the day, they're just another Datalake company that
makes money off professional services, except Databricks and
Snowflake can actually execute.
neonate wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20240327152111/https://harpers.org/...
cameldrv wrote 2 days ago:
I have no idea how Silicon Valley could be held responsible for an
Israeli intelligence failure. Israel is not a part of the U.S.
The author exhibits essentially zero knowledge of the advances in
military intelligence in the past 10-20 years. Heâs talking about
problems in the Vietnam war and IBM 360 mainframes as if all of the
stuff Macnamara dreamed of werenât daily reality now.
luaybs wrote 1 day ago:
> Israel is not a part of the U.S.
The US sends $3.8B in military aid to Israel yearly...
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
It makes me laugh how itâs always described as aid.
If someone gave their friend a gun, would anyone ever call it aid?
lesuorac wrote 1 day ago:
In the world where ask is a noun (and you wanted the gun), yes.
bushbaba wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs over simplifying it. but itâs not aid, more like
strategic interests aligned. For example the U.S. aid prevented
Israel from continuing development and selling its own fighter
jets. It gives U.S. arms actual military exposure in dense urban
warfare. Thereâs lots of joint benefits here.
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
Real aid must be provided with no strings attached.
Much of this so-called "aid" comes with the condition that it
be spent in the US. This prevents us from developing our own
weapons, selling them to whomever we want, and diversifying our
sources of military supplies.
In addition, the US provides much more "aid" to our enemies.
Also, part of this "aid" is used to financially bribe our
generals. Essentially making them American "Foreign Agents of
Influence" in the spirit of FARA[1], not as literal spies.
Unfortrunatelly we lack legislation like FARA, so it's still
legal here.
---
URI [1]: https://www.justice.gov/nsd-fara
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
> the US provides much more âaidâ to our enemies.
Could you explain this? The US arms Israelâs enemies?
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
The only real peace (aka "normalization") we have (had?) is
with the UAE.
We only have "peace" with Egypt and Jordan on paper.
This is much worse than a cold war situation between the US
and the Soviet Union back in the time.
Their armies still define Israel as their main enemy.
These countries are not safe for Israelis to travel.
In Jordan's case we only have "peace" with the foreign
royal family imposed by Britain. And even that doesn't
include their queen ;)
And yes, US provided and still provides military aid to
terror group such as PLO, Fatah, even Hamas and PIJ (under
the pretext of humanitarian aid).
US even removed Houthis from the list of terror group in
order to give them money (and just recently put them back
on the list).
Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which resulted in
giving them $10B.
---
U.S. Foreign Assistance to the Middle East:
Historical, Recent Trends, and the FY2024
Background Request
Updated August 15, 2023
URI [1]: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R463...
JacobiX wrote 1 day ago:
From the same report, "U.S. Foreign Assistance to the
Middle East": Israel has been the largest cumulative
recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II,
receiving $158 billion. Jordan for example received $26.4
billion from 1951 to 2020.
>> Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which
resulted in giving them $10B.
In the case of Iran, it was not a matter of receiving $10
billion in aid, but rather the release of $10 billion of
Iranian funds that had been frozen.
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
> From the same report, "U.S. Foreign Assistance to the
Middle East": Israel has been the largest cumulative
recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War
II, receiving $158 billion. Jordan for example received
$26.4 billion from 1951 to 2020.
Check again, the majority of the "aid" got to our
enemies in MENA (and that excluding non-Arab enemy and
semi-enemy countries, which are for some reason not
included in MENA).
Look at:
- Figure 2. U.S. Foreign Aid to MENA Countries:
FY1946-FY2020
- Figure 3. Israel, Jordan, and Egypt in the FY2024
Assistance Request for MENA
- Table 1. U.S. Bilateral Aid to MENA Countries:
FY2021 - FY2024 Request
The majority of this "aid" (~56%) goes to enemies and
semi-enemies (and that's even excluding hostile
non-Arab countries in the region).
--
>> Similarly with lifting sanctions on Iran, which
resulted in giving them $10B.
> In the case of Iran, it was not a matter of receiving
$10 billion in aid, but rather the release of $10
billion of Iranian funds that had been frozen.
Did I wrote somewhere that Iran got $10B aid?
What you wrote is factually correct, but the net effect
is that Iran got $10B which they didn't had access to
before.
JacobiX wrote 1 day ago:
Not sure why you consider those countries as ennemies
(or semi-enemy) ?
For example, Jordan has maintained a position as a
key major non-NATO ally of the United States within
the Middle East (since 1996).
Also starting from 1989, both Egypt and Israel became
major non-NATO allies of the US.
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
> from 1989, both Egypt and Israel became major
non-NATO allies of the US.
Just b/c somebody is an ally of the US, doesn't
make them automatically an ally of Israel.
Paraphrasing: An ally of my ally is not my ally.
But with the current leadership and State Dept we
are not sure that even US is our ally.
--
Türkiye is a member of NATO, with antisemitic
leader. Is Türkiye a friendly country? It used to
be, but now it's a gray area.
[Trans-]Jordan's royal family is on life support
from Israel, but it still openly acts like an
enemy.
Egypt is the most obviously an enemy, even though
there is "peace" on paper. Instead of asking me,
ask an average Egyptian or [Trans-]Jordanian if
they see Israel as an enemy.
Just b/c US pays them extortion or "protection"
fees, doesn't make them any less of an enemy. It
only delays the coming inevitable military conflict
with them.
--
We are not that far from NATO planes bombing Tel
Aviv and carrying out SEAD operations[1].
If in the past it was a Sci Fi scenario, nowadays
it becomes much more plausible.
---
1.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppression_...
lostlogin wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
> We are not that far from NATO planes bombing
Tel Aviv and carrying out SEAD operations
I think you might be perceiving things as more
threatening than is warranted. Lebanon and Egypt
are complicated neighbours and may not quite be
friends. NATO isnât going to bomb Tel Aviv.
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
That puts rather a different spin on things.
Arming one with weapons, versus letting the other have
its money.
Neither meet my definition of âaidâ.
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
> versus letting the other have its money
OK, let Putin have his money then.
The truth is, US giving "aid", imposing or lifting
sanctions exactly to protect their interests, and to
increase their leverage, not because they care about
other countries in question.
For decades our country tries to get rid of this
"aid", but it's virtually impossible.
lostlogin wrote 22 hours 40 min ago:
I completely agree. However I assume you exclude
Israel and youâd like to keep American aid?
nivertech wrote 22 hours 19 min ago:
No, we don't need it. This "aid" is a net loss
for us.
Itâs the reason US State Dept treats us like
Puerto Rico, without giving us any of the perks
of Puerto Rico's status, like tax exemption and
unrestricted access to the US mainland.
Netanyahu tried to get rid of American military
"aid" in the past, but he failed to do so.
Aid must be spent to purchase arms from American
suppliers at greatly inflated prices.
It also creates perverse incentives that
ultimately weakens, if not cripples, our
military.
lostlogin wrote 20 hours 4 min ago:
You want US backing but not the military aid?
Israel without US backing seems a perilous
place for Israel to go, and if accepting the
aid keeps the alliance alive, surely thatâs
in Israelâs interest?
Thanks for the explanations - I havenât come
across these viewpoints before.
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs so complicated.
Hamas was elected if memory serves, and while getting
them to renounce violence would seem ideal, how could
they? Israel wasnât going to. They have behaved
terribly and until someone starts behaving better, itâs
going to carry on as it has for so long.
Peace with Egypt has been maintained and relations with
Egypt seem to be improving and are ok - what am I
missing? There seems very little chance of war.
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
Egypt violated almost every signed treaty.
Sinai was supposed to be a demilitarized zone, slowly
it was filled with the Egyptian army. Egypt built
multiple tunnels under the Suetz canal.
Yet our governments and military still trying to
appease them, in the same way as they did to Hamas.
And how do you think all these advanced weapons (RPGs,
anti-tank missiles, thermal bombs, etc.) got into
'azza[1]? How did their terrorists go to train in Iran?
Why do you think Egypt opposes an Israeli presence on
the border in Raphiakh[2]?
---
[1,2] I'm using the original biblical place names here,
instead of the English distortion of a broken Arabic
pronunciation of their Hebrew names.
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
Iâm surprised at this.
According to the Wiki, Israel has agreed to Egyptian
military being there. Relations have thawed a lot as
far as I can tell.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EgyptâIsra...
nivertech wrote 1 day ago:
> Yet our governments and military still trying to
appease them, in the same way as they did to Hamas.
They turn a blind eye and try to appease Egypt, but
it never works in the long run.
Our politicians and generals think short-term, they
just want to finish their term and get their lavish
pensions, and lucrative security contracts from the
US, or a high-paying position in some
Washington-funded military research think tank.
luaybs wrote 1 day ago:
There is no benefit other than the profit made by the companies
manufacturing this "aid", payed for by the American taxpayer
via the US congress and government.
luaybs wrote 1 day ago:
well said
wslh wrote 1 day ago:
It is not too much if you think Israel is covering US military
mistakes and cybersecurity (e.g. Iran).
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
Isnât this policing of Iran needed because of the US supporting
Israel?
I know there are other interests (oil), but the complete freedom
to do anything that the US gives Israel is not entirely helpful
to the US.
wslh wrote 1 day ago:
Isnât this policing of Iran needed because of the US
supporting Israel?
No, do you remember the terrorists attacks in USA and in
Europe? Have you watched the Argo movie? Do you know about
terrorist attacks in Latin America where Iran is involved?
Seems people don't check history beyond Israel (21k km^2)and
Jews (16m).
sangnoir wrote 1 day ago:
I remember the JPCOA and egging on the Trump administration
to break the agreement and the subsequent escalations.
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 2 days ago:
I personally think this is the most interesting part of the entire
article:
'He then focused on defense work, lamenting that people with the
relevant tech skills to build the weapons of the future were âlargely
refusing to work with the defense sector.â'
I wonder to what extent that is still true. There is clearly a lot of
money flowing and some definitely followed the money ( Palantir exists
after all ).
civilized wrote 1 day ago:
I suspect it's way less true than tech folks who hate the US defense
industry think. The correlation between liberal opinions and
problem-solving intelligence is nonzero but it's not all that high.
notaustinpowers wrote 1 day ago:
> ...lamenting that people with the relevant tech skills to build the
weapons of the future were "largely refusing to work with the defense
sector".
Getting tech people into defense was easier when they never saw the
aftermath of what those weapons did or were largely unaware of what
they were actually building (a la Manhattan Project). But when people
can watch a live-streamed bombing of a random neighborhood on
Twitter, they may have second guesses about assisting in that...
goatlover wrote 1 day ago:
> or were largely unaware of what they were actually building (a la
Manhattan Project)
Scientists were unaware they were building an atomic bomb to use in
WW2? Oppenheimer certainly was aware.
gallegojaime wrote 1 day ago:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calutron_Girls
marcosdumay wrote 1 day ago:
> a la Manhattan Project
I imagine approximately every single person that worked on this
project wouldn't be there if the Nazis and Japan weren't actively
trying to kill... well whatever share of the world's population
they desired to kill. (I'm pretty sure the union would be close to
100%)
Terr_ wrote 1 day ago:
There's also the general government red-tape issue, which cascades
down into bureaucratic projects with two year long waterfall
designs, etc.
gamepsys wrote 1 day ago:
It's clearly true to some degree, there are documented cases of
people that refused to work with the defense sector at great personal
costs. The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor
force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit talent?
aleph_minus_one wrote 1 day ago:
> The questions are how much resistance is there in the labor
force, and how does that impact the ability to recruit talent?
Easy: Give potential employees similar salaries to MAMAA companies,
and a similar amount of freedom and independence (at least in the
ways in which it is possible at a defense company) as it existed in
the early days of Google and Facebook, and I think a lot of
potential employees (though of course not all, but this is not
necessary) will "forget" their initial moral objections and go for
the money. :-)
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 1 day ago:
Wasn't DARPA kinda close to that idea ( I am honestly not sure,
but it seemed like a lot of interesting stuff came from there )?
Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely
predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be
responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
aleph_minus_one wrote 1 day ago:
> Still, a person who knows what he/she is building can likely
predict how it is going to be used. Would I want to be
responsible for popularizing portable black hole generators?
You just developed an insanely small part of this machinery.
Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot. :-(
If you still have bad feelings, there exists the
charity-industrial complex: donate some decent paycheck to give
a poor, starving child a better life - something that you could
not have done if you hadn't accepted the well-paid defense
contract.
geomark wrote 1 day ago:
"Compartmentalization of the work appeases the mind a lot."
Definitely. When I worked at a aerospace co some of the young
engineers had internal conflicts they rationalized away by
saying "we aren't building bombs." No, they were just
building the targeting systems. Pointing the gun but someone
else pulling the trigger. So it's all good.
mattnewton wrote 2 days ago:
I canât speak for Israeli tech, but the pentagon has an image problem
in the valley, I donât believe they are getting the best recruits
even for contracting companies like Palintir. Our generation is closer
to Iraq and Vietnam than WW2, and many of the bright minds are first
generation immigrants. Despite the more recent image problems ad tech
has (now that people are seeing more of how the sausage is made),
itâs still sexier to work on big consumer companies than defense.
Youâd have to pay my colleagues more to work for the US government,
even indirectly, instead itâs often less (and often with less
freedoms of what they do off the clock).
And now, what Iâm reading is that if you do go contract for the
military in AI, your function is partially some kind of scapegoat
insurance. Blame those eggheads with their computers who can be fooled,
not the fools who hired them and acted on that signal above others I
guess?
The idea that a chatGPT model would have been a deciding factor in
preventing 10/7 is laughable on its face to anyone who works in the
industry, except maybe a consultant selling LLMs to the IDF.
Der_Einzige wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of the issue is that tech workers want to "smoke weed on the
way to the interview", and in doing so, they become ineligible for a
clearance.
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
That sounds like an imaginary problem.
Valord wrote 17 hours 9 min ago:
Very real problem
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
serious problem.
generally they don't take weed to seriously, but want to know
you've been drug free for roughly a year.
By comparison, several / most of the Cali tech firms I've worked
for / with / around had devs hitting a THC vape at lunch. Might
have had to pass a piss test to get the job, but that's just 30
days, and no one is knocking on your neighbor's doors to verify
your drug and employment history.
datavirtue wrote 1 day ago:
It's very real. Having smoked or taken other illicit drugs in the
recent, or not so recent, past is a major source of stress for
people applying for clearance. You have to be sponsored at a
significant expense by a current employer and if you don't get
clearance your career is going to be upended. It's up to the
worker to judge if they pre-qualify based on opaque information
and anecdotes you find on Reddit.
Yodel0914 wrote 1 day ago:
> Having smoked or taken other illicit drugs in the recent, or
not so recent, past is a major source of stress for people
applying for clearance.
If you have broken the law in the past, the clearance processes
mostly seem to care that a) you acknowledge it and have stopped
b) you are upfront about it, and it can't be used as leverage
against you.
If you're currently routinely breaking the law, yes, it's going
to be hard to get clearance. That seems pretty reasonable to
me.
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
I'd venture to guess that more tech workers lack citizenship
than lack the ability to pass a drug screen. More importantly,
the problem you describe is problems with the opacity and risk
of failure for a clearance: not "fuckin' druggies", which is
what I responded to.
robotnikman wrote 1 day ago:
It also seems like many defense companies do no offer remote work
opportunities either last I checked
datavirtue wrote 1 day ago:
Often, no. This is serious work being carried out by adults that
need to come together. There is no replacement for the water cooler
yet. I made the decision to explicitly seek out in-office,
on-location defense work. The seridiputous conversations and
relationship building was not happening in remote work. I'm someone
who has always worked from home and I still do every week but my
career and life were going no where typing at people through Slack
and building meaningless web apps--despite making enough money to
be reticent to tell most people my earnings level.
Now I'm building software, involved intimately with designing and
interfacing with specialized hardware, and travelling to
interesting places doing interesting things with interesting
people-- occasionally toppling off of combat machines. I took a 30%
pay cut to do it. No regrets whatsoever, living life.
joncrane wrote 1 day ago:
It has little to do with collaboration.
Most Top Secret work occurs in a SKIF. Basically you enter, lock
your phone, smartwatch, and whatever else in a locker, then enter
the area where the work gets done. This area is regularly swept
for bugs and whatnot.
You can't work on "top secret" stuff on your own due to OpSec.
dmd149 wrote 1 day ago:
hybrid is likely the best case scenario, and very unlikely if
youâre in an individual contributor role with a higher level
clearance.
One way to âget aroundâ this is work it as a 1099, charge a
high bill rate, and then just work less overall.
But, if youâre trying to move outside of a major contracting area
like DC, youre probably better off just getting a remote private
sector job.
nradov wrote 1 day ago:
Some offer hybrid work arrangements, but if you're doing classified
work or dealing with hardware then there's no practical way to do
that remotely.
alephnerd wrote 1 day ago:
> pentagon has an image problem in the valley
That image problem goes away when you want to close a 7-8 figure TCV
Fed deal to make your quarterly sales KPI.
The bigger stumbling block is procurement.
Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively
straightforward so a Series E+ startup can make it if they spend
around $7-10M and 1-1.5 years on a dedicated roadmap for FedRamp and
FIPS compliance.
Once you step out of software, procurement becomes paperwork hell.
Throw in the paperwork hell from R&D Grantmakers like the DoD and
DoE, and you end up with a quasi-Soviet procurement system.
Ironically, most of these compliance and regulatory checks were added
for good intentions - primarily to minimize corruption and graft, yet
it basically clogged up the entire system, and dissuades startups and
innovators from working directly with the Defense community.
Some projects like DIUx and and In-Q-Tel are trying to change that,
but it's too little too late, and our defense base is entirely
dependent on firms like Microsoft, Cisco, Crowdstrike, Zscaler, etc
acquiring promising startups to evangelize their innovations
internally.
rockskon wrote 19 hours 6 min ago:
The Pentagon has more image problems than being a difficult
customer to work with.
The "mission" they tout as being the main driver to work for then
is often ill-defined and what is best known typically has an
atrocious public image problem surrounding it.
There are people in the Valley who will work for less money if it's
for a cause they believe in.
The Pentagon's work? It isn't a cause they believe in. In-fact
many see it as a more noble cause to thwart all military actors -
our own included.
alephnerd wrote 14 hours 55 min ago:
Most research is in some way shape or form is funded by the
military. The era of having some general commanding eggheads is
long gone.
Since the 1970s, it's almost all outsourced to the private sector
via PPPs because private sector players can deploy capital and
execute much quicker than the DoD or DoE who have regulatory
requirements and need to have specific line items defined for
them within budgets.
Also, I think you underestimate or don't realize how much DoD
related work is done in the Valley today. I'd estimate that
30-40% of startups in the Bay Area are in some way funded by the
DoD - either via Federal sales or via strategic investments via
In-Q-Tel or their private sector counterparts.
On top of that, most STEM research grants at Bay Area
universities come from either the DoD, DoE, or DHHS.
This public private partnership model is what China copied, which
is unsurprising, as most of their middle level leadership and
policymakers attended these programs and benefited from the
US-China Science and Technology Agreement which evangelized the
American PPP R&D model in China since the 1970s.
The difference is, the Chinese system is much more lax about
compliance and graft, which allows for it to be much nimbler. The
downside is graft can be MASSIVE, such as the corruption scandals
surrounding China's Big Fund and fiascos such as the collapse of
Tsinghua Unigroup
cuuupid wrote 1 day ago:
> Software Procurement by Federal standards is relatively
straightforward
> FedRamp and FIPS compliance
Itâs odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so
insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward way.
Even by your own estimate for a series E startup (with lots of
capital and the ability to spend >18 months< on compliance)
thereâs a 3M$ variation in cost.
That rules out every startup or SME in software and thatâs why
you have Palantir, half baked tech that rarely delivers/is somehow
more universally hated in USG than ServiceNow. Yet able to seize
the space and hike prices endlessly due to compliance being so
difficult to achieve â they realize/accept this as their edge as
well and itâs why they so aggressively pursued IL6.
The good news is that this is going away and USG is strongly
reconsidering its approach here. CMMC, imo, is a huge step in the
right direction.
alephnerd wrote 1 day ago:
> Itâs odd to see these in the same sentence. FedRAMP is so
insanely complex/difficult to achieve in a straightforward way
Agreed! Hence why I said "relatively". It's an easier procurement
system than for other products in the Federal space.
> That rules out every startup or SME in software and thatâs
why you have Palantir
Tbf, Palantir's federal usage is kinda overstated from what I've
heard from peers.
But yea, I agree, and made this point in another comment
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
I think they're talking about hiring, not purchasing.
alephnerd wrote 1 day ago:
At the end of the day, most work done by technical teams within
Defense Agencies is implementation, and the R&D related work is
done by specific vendors or very autonomous labs (either National
Labs or a specific PI at a University)
This is how it works at the Fed just like any other corporation,
as well as with any other peer country.
While there are internal R&D projects, most agencies aren't
having their engineers design and productionize bespoke
environments from scratch - they're implementing existing tooling
and buying it off the shelf.
For example, if you want an internal cloud platform, you'll just
use Azure GovCloud. If you want to spin up a K8s cluster, you'll
spin up an AKS cluster. Want to protect your cluster? You'll just
purchase an off the shelf CNAPP.
For defense, R&D is important, but that isn't the DoD's forte and
distracts from it's core mission, which is why they offload
innovation to the private sector. Even the USSR did this to a
certain extent by the 1970s by supporting defense corporations
like Mikoyan and Sukhoi that basically operated as state owned
corporations that competed with each other.
The issue is the amount of suppliers in the US has shrunk
dramatically since the 1990s due to the compliance overhead and
requirements such as a single platform DoD wide (a major reason
for F35 cost overruns).
On top of that, any fundamental research requires a significant
amount of paperwork to justify funding and sets limits on
salaries for PIs and Postdocs that are significantly lower than
market rate.
Basically, American private industry has largely been divorced
from the MIC, and aside from a handful of major enterprises,
there isn't an incentive to enter the procurement space. We've
accidentally remade the entire 70s-80s Soviet procurement system
in the US today.
There are some changes happening in Software and Satellite
procurement, but not as much in other sectors like Avionics.
lazyasciiart wrote 13 hours 59 min ago:
That has nothing to do with it. You responded to a comment
saying "X makes it hard for the DoD to hire people" by saying
"X doesn't affect procurement". If you actually realized they
were talking about hiring, what you should have said is "they
never have to hire anyone so the difficulty with hiring you are
talking about is not relevant".
rockskon wrote 19 hours 4 min ago:
? There's DoD research labs. Every service has one. They're
not even hard to find. Literally google a service name +
"research lab".
alephnerd wrote 15 hours 6 min ago:
They aren't a significant portion of the DoD R&D infra.
Most FFRDCs and UARCs are staffed by civilians employed
concurrently with a regional University or Industry Vendor,
and these labs in turn are PPPs often operated by a private
sector firm like Lockheed or a university like UCB.
On top of that, the bulk of the budget goes to funding
research done outside of FFRDCs and UARCs via programs like
DARPA, grants from the DCTO S&T, SBIR/STTR, etc
This fusion of university research, private sector research,
and some limited in-house research is what's called
Civil-Military Fusion.
The issue is the private sector portion has increasingly been
divorced from the private sector, as up and coming private
sector opportunities or promising startups don't have an easy
on-ramp into the existing defense procurement or research
infrastructure, and grantwriting+compliance overheads plus
limited grant funding dissuade most companies aside from your
Charles River Analytics types from going thru the hurdles.
kjellsbells wrote 2 days ago:
There's another issue here as well, which is that many of the tech
folks who would be ok working for the government, even at reduced
rates, cant get through the hiring morass that uncle sam puts up. The
fed gov simply isnt set up to quickly acquired talent from industry.
They also remain remarkably hidebound by old rules like requiring
advanced degrees for senior positions.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
That hasn't been my experience.
For example, Naval Undersea Warfare Centers, Division Newport, had
a job fair a few weeks ago. IIUC a number of attendees were given
offers very soon after.
But NUWC is a DoD DEMO organization, so maybe it's easier for them
than some other parts of the DoD.
And salary definitely is an issue. Even with the Boston pay scale,
I think they have a hard salary cap for most software positions at
about $150k + very small annual bonuses.
red-iron-pine wrote 1 day ago:
how many of those hires already had clearances and/or military
experience?
you've got an active TS/SCI and we'll get you onboarded next
week.
and if you don't... it'll be at least 6 months. and that's
assuming people aren't too upset about ties to China, a
polyamorous lifestyle, or how much weed you smoked.
FAANGs did a lot of stupid interview BS, whiteboarding and
leet-code nonsense, but I got an offer letter a couple weeks
after, or a rejection, and a start date a month later.
CoastalCoder wrote 1 day ago:
> how many of those hires already had clearances and/or
military experience?
>
> you've got an active TS/SCI and we'll get you onboarded next
week.
Defense contractors often want candidates to have an active
clearance, but AFAIK that's not at all a requirement for DoD
labs.
I'm guessing the contractors want to avoid the financial cost
and scheduling uncertainty of applying for the clearance.
Especially because the clearance follows a person when they
change employers.
> and if you don't... it'll be at least 6 months.
I'm not sure where you got that information, but it doesn't
match my experience. You get an interim (non-TS) clearance
very quickly, and a permanent clearance eventually.
> and that's assuming people aren't too upset about ties to
China, a polyamorous lifestyle, or how much weed you smoked.
I have no idea what exact criteria OPM uses for denying a
clearance application.
But last I knew, DoD does do random drug testing. I'm not sure
what the consequences are for failing a marijuana test, but it
wouldn't shock me if it causes loss of clearance.
jajko wrote 2 days ago:
I am still not 100% convinced they didnt just let it happen on
purpose (and then were surprised just by the scale), having an excuse
to raze the place down for good, which is exactly what they are
doing. The signs were there, everywhere, and mosad aint bunch of
clueless paper pushers.
The guy in charge is former spec ops, murder of anybody without
battling an eye is part of the deal so dont expect some humanism from
that direction.
If I didnt read similar stories from other times and places, where it
played almost exactly like this... AI is not going to solve political
issues, just make them more complex than they already are
nkozyra wrote 2 days ago:
I think - like a lot of media reporting on the space - this
overgeneralizes (heh) artificial intelligence. The predictive aspects
of ML have been in use in modern militaries for _decades_, and the
opening graf handwavely indicates that an LLM was a bigger chunk of the
perceived intelligence failure of the October 7 attack.
That an LLM is a part of a system that includes a large amount of ML is
not surprising. It's a great human interface. Do I for a second believe
that it played a much larger role, such to be implied as responsible in
any non-negligble way for missing the attack. Of course not.
My point here is that ML continues to play a role, ML continues to both
succeed and fail, and ML will continue to be imperfect, even moreso as
it competes against adversarial ML. Blaming imperfect tools for
inevitable failures is not a useful exercise, and certainly not a
"problem" considering the alternative being even more failure-prone
humans.
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Part of the ongoing confusion, in my opinion, is that we as an
industry leaned full into calling LLMs artificial intelligence.
The phrase AI has much more weight behind it than what we give it
credit for, and using the term for LLMs cheapens it.
The average person hears AI and expects much more than an algorithm
that can attempt to predict and mimic human written word, no matter
how clever or impressive it is.
As an industry we seem to have agreed to call the next round of
machine learning algorithms "artificial intelligence" because it
sells better and raise a hell of a lot of funding. What does that to
the very real safety, moral, and ethical questions that need to be
asked before we actually create an AI?
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
Are you unaware that the field has been called AI for decades?
_heimdall wrote 1 day ago:
Language models weren't considered "AI" until very recently.
Research, really theory, in the area of AI has been around for
decades but focused on artificial intelligence rather than how to
weigh and compress massive amounts of written language to used by
a text predictive algorithm.
thfuran wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
Natural Language Processing is a long-standing area of research
in the field and, though it hasn't always been based on ANNs,
ANNs have themselves also long been considered AI regardless of
application.
_heimdall wrote 18 hours 20 min ago:
My understanding has always been that language processing,
language models, etc. have long been considered a necessary
prerequisite to AI and research was often done as part of the
AI field but was never itself considered AI in isolation.
Calling LLMs artificial intelligence is either (a) cheapening
the meaning if intelligence, (2) embellishment for the sake
of fund raising, or (d) subtle acknowledgement of vastly more
powerful systems behind the LLM tools than is currently being
publicly described.
pwdisswordfishc wrote 2 hours 31 min ago:
> (a) [â¦] (2) [â¦] (d) [â¦]
Looks like the kind of error a low-parameter LLM would make
thfuran wrote 14 hours 46 min ago:
>(a) cheapening the meaning if intelligence
It's hard to cheapen it more than perceptrons and expert
systems. The lay impression of artificial intelligence may
be all skynet and c3p0, but AGI isn't really even a goal of
most AI research, let alone representative of the current
state of the art.
_heimdall wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
What is your definition of artificial intelligence?
OpenAI has an explicit goal of developing AGI for the
"greater good," whatever that means. If LLMs are indeed
AI, as many assume, then OpenAI would fall squarely in
the space of AI research that is the current state or the
art.
thfuran wrote 12 hours 46 min ago:
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_int...
nkozyra wrote 1 day ago:
My read is they're complaining about the conflation of LLMs with
AI in general.
rossdavidh wrote 1 day ago:
Blaming the excessively grand claims that were made for those tools,
however, is absolutely a useful exercise.
blitzar wrote 1 day ago:
Doing so in all seriousness would collectively wipe trillions off
the valuations of companies and reduce peoples net worths.
rossdavidh wrote 1 day ago:
It would also redirect resources towards boring stuff like
manufacturing, that actually increases real wealth. But you're
right, the fact that so much of our theoretical wealth is in
hype, and there's a lot of people who don't want that brought
down to more realistic valuations, is what's driving this.
But, you can look at the Chinese real estate market for an
example of what happens if you try to keep inflating the bubble
for too long.
jonchurch_ wrote 1 day ago:
But grand claims made by technologists are nothing new. Certainly I
donât know, Ive never been in the military, but arenât people
always trying to sell The Next Big Thing to the military? Is it not
the responsibility of those in charge to evaluate the capabilities
and limitations of new systems being integrated into their forces?
If someone said âwe dont need the rigor we used to have anymore,
we have AIâ I see that as a failure of the org, not an indictment
of the claims being put forth by boosters.
Corporate Decision Maker #2, sure, theyll get hoodwinked. They and
their company may have only 50 years of experience and
institutional memory to draw on. But State Militaries? What excuse
do they have? War changes, but the armed forces have a long memory,
and their poor decisions cost lives. Maybe Im off base, but I would
expect each mistake to be an opportunity to learn for that
industry. The industry has had plenty of lessons learned over the
past 100 years. Why is the latest hype cycle to blame, and not
those whose job it is to ensure they maintain capabilities and
extensively game out scenarios and responses?
Bad bets on tech happen even in institutions with lifetimes of
history to draw on, but I see that as a failure of the institution,
not on the completely mundane hype cycles which occur naturally.
Obviously mistakes happen, and maybe thats what the article is
getting at. But if weâre going to point fingers (not saying you
are) then lets not let decision makers off the hook whose job is to
prevent that hot new thing getting their people killed.
rawgabbit wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. It is a military maxim you will lose if you want to fight
the next war with the tactics and equipment from the last war.
Your future opponents have been studying the last war and have
invented all kinds of ways to destroy you if you use the same
tactics again.
Modern military doctrine can be attributed to the Prussian
General staff that defeated Napoleon III in the Franco Prussian
war. Moltke the Elder was in charge of the Prussian army at the
time. Moltke the Elder was a student of Clausewitz who literally
wrote the book on modern strategy. But Clausewitz when he was in
active service was not some world beating general. Clausewitz
fought for the Prussians during the Napoleonâs time and was
actually at one point a prisoner of Napoleon. Clausewitz and his
boss Scharnhorst spent the rest of their careers developing a
scheme to defeat Napoleonsâ tactics of massive concentration at
a single point. They developed modern combined arms with a
logistical backbone of railroads.
orange_joe wrote 2 days ago:
Since the article talks about the failure of AI in the context of the
10/7 I think itâs worth discussing the situation directly. Everything
points to the Israelis not having taken their security seriously beyond
the tactical level. Iâm certain they thwarted other attacks, but it
was an inevitability that a major attack was successful at some point.
Such an attack would necessitate a military response. However the
Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked serious plans for such
an eventuality and still lack a serious goal for their invasion of
Gaza. They havenât articulated anything that indicates a vision to
meaningfully change the situation from the 10/6 state to something more
sustainable. Therefore, it doesnât seem like a reasonable takeaway
to say AI failed.
bushbaba wrote 1 day ago:
More sustainable is what exactly? The Gazans dont want peace, donât
want their own state while the Israeli state exists,â¦etc. if you
have a solution that can be done by Israel alone without changing how
ruling parties of Gaza and West Bank operate, please share.
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
> However the Israelis have no strategic vision. They lacked serious
plans for such an eventuality and still lack a serious goal for their
invasion of Gaza.
They have competing strategic visions.
The current ruling coalition under Bibi Netanyahu, which is far more
conservative, wants Israeli control of the entirety of what used to
be Mandatory Palestine between the West Bank of the Jordan River and
the Mediterranean. Palestinian Arabs would have some presence in such
a society but it would be as a minority, and only if said minority
plays nice with the majority. There would be a single state with a
Jewish ethnic majority and government acting under Jewish
jurisprudence as opposed to secular, Christian, or Islamic.
The goal for the invasion of Gaza for this coalition is simple: break
the will of the Gazans. The coalition points to the fact that the
Gazans elected Hamas over the more secular Fatah in 2006, and that
Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel has
any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine. The
coalition under Netanyahu sees them as a thorn in their side and will
commit total war on Gaza, seeing that as a way to convince the Gazans
that there will be no success in raising a military challenge to
Israel. They've shown themselves to be right while committing a whole
host of actions that probably deserve ICJ review. While Hamas still
holds Jewish hostages, they have virtually no control over the
current war. The Israelis conduct military operations at will in the
territory and Hamas has no real way to prevent that.
The other vision is that of a significant portion of the Israeli
population and most of the rest of the international community, which
at this point just want the hostages back. Some believe in a
two-state solution. There's probably no way to achieve that with
Hamas in charge of Gaza, but that will come later: the hostages are
the main priority. This part of the population sees Netanyahu's
government as incompetent for failing to stop the massacres on
October 7th and for not having gotten the hostages back.
nerfbatplz wrote 1 day ago:
> Hamas has, for a very long time, refused to recognize that Israel
has any right to exist anywhere in former Mandatory Palestine.
Why is this piece of misinformation so pervasive?
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/01/hamas-new-ch...
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
It seems quite plausible that another aim of today's war on Gaza is
to push the international community into accepting the evacuation
of Palestine on humanitarian grounds. Netanyahu might be prepared
to accept some Palestinian Arabs in his Israel, but he'd be even
happier if they were all gone.
nerfbatplz wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah the Israeli left has come to accept that the final solution
is to push the Gazans into Sinai as exemplified by Benny Morris'
opinion that he has stated repeatedly since October 7th.
downWidOutaFite wrote 1 day ago:
So Gazans are blamed for voting for Hamas's "from the river to the
sea" 15 years ago, but Israelis are blameless and "just want the
hostages back" even though they have repeatedly voted for Likud's
"from the river to the sea" over and over again ever since Likud's
terrorist branch assassinated Yitzhak Rabin and his peace plan 30
years ago.
persolb wrote 1 day ago:
Do you think the 1 km wide DMZ isnât meaningfully changing the
situation?
(I obviously donât like the idea⦠but from my view there have
been multiple attempts to have Gaza develop, and they generally fail
out of apparent spite. If the adjacent country is a failed state run
by a terrorist group⦠Iâm not sure what better âmeaningful
changeâ can be reached.)
r00fus wrote 1 day ago:
One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail - so they
could respond with disproportionate and indiscriminate force to
achieve their actual goals.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from
malice.
mupuff1234 wrote 1 day ago:
One could say that that's an insane take.
Any sufficiently sign of incompetence and negligence is usually
just that - incompetence and negligence, you know, occam's razor
and all.
c420 wrote 1 day ago:
[1] According to Politico, they did indeed ignore the
intelligence.
URI [1]: https://www.politico.eu/article/israel-border-troops-women...
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
I don't see how that is relevant to the parent comment. The
question isn't whether they ignored the intelligence; did they
ignore the intelligence because of incompetence or because they
wanted to ramp up their colonialist programs?
Either way, this seems stupid for Israel. They're a group of Jews
in the middle of a sea of muslims, their military edge is
weakening and they will be relying on goodwill in the future.
Their long term interests are not served by solving problems with
large scale military operations, or by doing anything that fuels
the perception that they might be genocidal.
Supermancho wrote 1 day ago:
This is a common tactic for someone trying to hold power at any
cost. Seems good for the leadership if the country can last
long enough for the world to blame it on old leadership, long
after they are dead...or if they are successful enough that
it's a statistic.
traceroute66 wrote 1 day ago:
> According to Politico, they did indeed ignore the intelligence.
It has also been reported[1] that they ignored intelligence
handed to them on a plate by the Egyptians three days before the
raid occurred.
URI [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67082047
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
Apparently something that also happened recently with the ISIS
attack in Russia (US intelligence warned them). Unstable or
vulnerable regimes using terror as a pretense is not that
farfetched, is it? I think we should also be paying attention
to this dynamic, considering who is going to be on the ballot
this fall.
hackable_sand wrote 1 day ago:
Trump has been more routinely advocating and threatening
violence with a well-established gallery of Hunnic boogie men
to provoke his base.
I suspect this galvanization is a fear response to a
contracted race for immunity.
Considering that violence is his response to every effort
towards his accountability, lawful exchange of power, and
deposition, it follows that he would justify disproportionate
violence under even more tenuous pretense.
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
I agree. I'm also going to say something a bit
controversial: the effect of Roe vs Wade being overturned
has been the institution of, effectively, a terror
campaign. And while that campaign has been carried out by
Republicans... it's been allowed by the Biden
administration and congressional Democrats, because they're
vulnerable against Trump and need something powerfully
persuasive to run on. Securing a woman's right to choose is
something that we should have seen Profiles in Courage-type
sacrifices for; instead the party under whose watch it was
lost are using it in their emails asking for donations.
Altogether, it's very worrying, because both sides of the
establishment seem willing to threats of violence should
they lose as motivation to vote for them. We're aching for
a third party.
mc32 wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno, that sounds awfully close to saying, "the victim deserved
it" rather than the attacker being at fault for attacking because
the victim dressed in a certain way or did not cross the street
when the victim saw a potential aggressor.
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
Only if you conflate the residents and citizens of a state with
the organization/people/bureaucracy that runs it. Everyone
(afaik) concedes that US intelligence failed catastrophically
before 9/11, but nobody think that is blaming the victims who
died.
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
> One could say they almost wanted to the security to fail - so
they could respond with disproportionate and indiscriminate force
to achieve their actual goals.
Is very clearly not saying "the victim deserved it".
It is saying "the 'victim' was looking for an excuse".
Either way, both statements are harmfully reductive.
falserum wrote 1 day ago:
if you replace âtheyâ with âprime minister that is hanging by
a thread for quite some timeâ, you would get my personal
conspiracy theory.
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
Their strategic vision seems to be using attacks against them as a
pretense for more land grabs, which in the future, promotes more
attacks against them, which provides a fig leaf for more land grabs.
The end game, as Likud's party manifesto makes very clear, and their
PM helpfully pointed out two weeks ago is a single state between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan river, with no Palestinian sovereignty.
They'll likely accomplish this goal in a generation or two (And no,
it won't happen by enfranchising the natives. Israel's government is
looking for lebensraum, not building a partnership with its
subjects.)
It doesn't really need any strategic vision past that. It's a nuclear
power, none of its neighbors can credibly threaten it, its main
enemies are the people trying to live within its occupation zones.
sudosysgen wrote 1 day ago:
But it just isn't true. Israel's neighbors can very credibly pose
an existential threat, which only external intervention can thwart.
Imagine for example the very realistic scenario where Iran obtains
nuclear weapons. Then, should Iran decide to fund a missile
blockade of Israel in the Mediterranean and Red Sea, Israel has
zero capability to protect shipping. Since Iran would be a nuclear
power, it's very obviously not in Israel's interest to escalate to
the use of nuclear weapons, so a threat to do so wouldn't be
credible.
The only way Israel could achieve its goals in such a scenario is
through external intervention, which the Yemenis have shown even
now would be difficult.
Israel does need strategic vision, desperately. It's a tiny country
that's existentially depend on the US and Western Europe, and
doesn't have the industrial capacity to independently defend itself
while it's neighbors increasingly can. This is the first time this
ever happened - in the past, Israel and it's neighbors were on an
equal footing because while Israel couldn't produce its key weapons
on it's own, neither could it's neighbors.
This isn't true anymore. It's a momentous strategic shift in the
region. What's worse is that this happens at the same time as the
balance of power is tipping away from its main allies. What's even
worse is that public opinion, especially in the US, is undergoing
an unprecedented shift.
Something else that has not been reported on is that China, which
historically was agnostic on the issue, now has an official policy
that Palestine has the right to armed resistance. It's a sizeable
diplomatic shift because historically neither of the dominant
powers openly supported armed Palestinian resistance.
If this grand strategem is to take more than 15 years, and it is,
it's extremely risky strategically. It's not true that strategic
vision past that is unneeded, it's more important now than it ever
was. I imagine that many in the leadership of the IDF realize this
but that it's just not something that's politically viable to run
with.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
One neighbour and some militias they cooperate with, plus the de
facto government of Yemen, pose a threat, but it's probably not
existential and probably not enough to save the palestinians from
a genocidal catastrophe that at the very least will affect
generations.
Israel is a surprisingly large exporter of diamonds. Does it have
diamond deposits in its own territory? No. They are friends with
neighbours that have a long history of exploitation on the
african continent. UAE is infamously ruthless when it comes to
slavery and supporting genocidal coercion, and they are buddies
with Israel since years back.
Iran would have to arm and train opposition in the arabian
sunni-states to make them existentially dangerous to Israel,
since the US is quite clear that it will try to be an existential
threat to Iran if they go hard against Israel on their own. How
would Turkey react if Iran engaged in active politics in Saudi
Arabia and the UAE? Do the ruling elites in Iran consider
establishing normalised relations with the saudis and emirates
less important than the palestinian cause?
sudosysgen wrote 1 day ago:
Your comment relies on three basic assumptions. The first is
that the US will intervene militarily to defend Israel. The
second is that a military threat to Israel (ex: a blockade)
would need military collaboration from Sunni Arab states. The
third is that the Sunni Arab states that have relation with
Israel do it from direct self-interest.
None of those are truths you can rely on right now, let alone
for 1-2 generations.
It's doubtful that the US, should Israel really fly off the
handle, would be willing to intervene against a nuclear state -
it hasn't in Ukraine despite much more favourable
circumstances. As time goes on and the balance of power shifts
away from the US this will become more and more true.
Additionally, the US cannot militarily stop antiship missiles
even at a relatively small scale, so the only intervention that
would be guaranteed to work would be an invasion of Iran, which
if it had nuclear weapons would probably not be undertaken.
Secondly, there is no need for cooperation from any Sunni Arab
state. In theory, all it would take would be missile launches
from Iraq, Syria or Lebanon to shut down traffic to Israel from
the Mediterranean - that would be enough to basically collapse
the Israeli economy, as it would not be economical to ship
overland from Egypt or Jordan, even if those countries would be
willing to collaborate (and they might not).
Thirdly, no Arab country has diplomatic or economic ties to
Israel out of the goodness of their heart. They only do due to
massive pressure from the US, who either gives diplomatic
concessions in exchange (ex: recognition of Western Sahara) or
hangs the military umbrella (Saudi Arabia, UAE). This is not
something you can bank on when shit hits the fan, let alone for
the next 1-2 generations.
At the end of the day Israel's strategic situation is extremely
precarious and is completely dependent on foreign powers who
not only have greatly waning influence and relative capability,
but also declining sympathy. This used to also be true, to some
extent, for it's neighbors, but it isn't anymore because Iran
managed to make its own sanction-proof and relatively
competitive MIC. In the future, Iran might not even be the only
state in the region to manage such a thing, and structurally
any state which aims to do this aims for strategic
independence, and a state which is strategically independent
doesn't have much of a reason to be sympathetic to Israel right
now, let alone in the situation you presented. Additionally,
it's not unlikely there will be nuclear proliferation in the
Middle East, which will greatly weaken Western influence as
Western nations will oppose proliferation and because states
which attain nuclear weapons are no longer reliant on the US
for defense.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
The US _is_ intervening militarily to defend Israel, mainly
in Iraq, Yemen and Syria (as well as nearby oceans). Moving
those air strikes to iranian territory would in practice be
easy, if the political conditions allow it, which Iran knows.
The US might not be able to stop anti-ship missiles, but
that's not the strategy either. The strategy is to keep
starving Yemen and showing off military equipment, reminding
every nearby state, including Pakistan, how the US conducts
diplomacy in hostile situations.
An existential threat to Israel needs to invade, which means
military bases in a neighbouring area where the US doesn't
already have thousands of soldiers and a lot of equipment.
Nasrallah doesn't have the people or equipment needed, Iran
wouldn't be allowed to use saudi or jordanian territory.
Sure, it's not about goodness, it's more about not having to
arm their own populations and trade in blood commodities from
Africa. It's also about the US and Israel being a relatively
reliable enemy, that isn't going to perform surprise missile
strikes on your territory for obscure reasons like Iran did a
while ago. They'll do air strikes, but they'll also tell you
why in advance. It might be a lie, but they'll look a bit mad
rather than devious and mainly attack civilian or
paramilitary targets.
Israel's strategic problem is the same now as it has been for
almost a century. How to get away with ethnic cleansing, and
if that doesn't work because no other country wants to
participate, how to get away with genocide? US protection has
been the answer for most of that time, and is likely to
continue, with Europe using Ukraine as a domestically
communicated reason to produce more weapons which will then
be transfered mostly to Israel. I might be wrong and Iran
more reckless than I expect, we'll see over the coming decade
or so.
sudosysgen wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
Airstrikes against a nuclear-armed state just isn't
something that the US is willing to do right now, and it's
something it will be less willing to do in the future.
Additionally, American airstrikes in Iraq, Syria and Yemen
are ineffective, so I'm not sure why you mention them. In
Syria it's only Turkey that's preventing Assad from a
complete victory; Iraq's primary military force is an
Iranian proxy, while Yemen is still hitting ships in the
Red Sea.
There is no need to invade Israel to pose an existential
threat. Israel is a tiny country with very little resources
- should it be blockaded it would fall apart, even just for
lack of energy.
Israel's strategic problem just isn't the same. For the
first time ever, it has to deal with an adversary that is
almost completely strategically independent and that it
simply cannot defeat militarily.
There's nothing here that needs recklessness either - as it
is right now we are at the stage of threats. That's part of
what the Houthi missile strikes, it's Iran sending a
message that it can threaten shipping in the region and
that no one can actually stop them. If Iran wanted to
actually hurt Israeli shipping, the missiles would be fired
into the Mediterranean, not into the Red Sea. Just the fact
that the Houthis are still hitting ships today is a
momentous geopolitical shift - it's a Suez crisis lite
edition.
If all you're looking forward is a decade, then it's
probably true that there isn't going to be something huge.
But if you're talking about 1-2 generations, there are
clear strategic trends that threaten Israel's current
strategy of relying on the US for protection and pressure.
The idea that the US can no longer ensure maritime safety
in any major trade route, let alone in the ME, or that
there is a nuclear threshold state with a missile industry
advanced enough to export to Russia in the ME is something
that would get you laughed out of the room just 15 years
ago.
cess11 wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
What do you mean, "ineffective"? They kill civilians, or
paramilitary leaders in civilian areas, to remind
everyone in the region that their civilians are on the
line if they transgress too heavily against US policy.
What do you mean by Assad "complete victory"? Syria is
devastated, something like ten million people are food
insecure, the country is occupied by both other countries
and militias.
What do you mean by "proxy"? Does your definition imply
that the ukrainian army is a "proxy"?
What do you mean by "Houthi missile strikes"? It's the de
facto government of Yemen engaged in a blockade against
Israel, which is composed by more groups than the Ansar
Allah. It is also quite popular due to its position
against the genocidal colonial governments of the US, UK,
Israel and so on.
Edit: I now realise that "and so on" could be interpreted
to include the UAE which is occupying part of Yemen
together with Israel, which is not the case. At the
moment Yemen is not directly engaged against the UAE,
presumably because its leadership considers a future arab
peace more important and the US-israeli influence a
driving factor in the UAE transgressing against Yemen.
cameldrv wrote 2 days ago:
To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the U.S.
since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one ever
sets out clear achievable goals. The notable exception was the
Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm. For that one, the goal was to kick
Iraq out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti monarchy, which was
achieved. If you look especially at Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria,
there is this magical thinking that if we destroy the Evil Dictator
and run an election, that everyone will naturally vote to ally with
the U.S. and completely change their social organization to be in
accordance with western values.
The place we spent the most time in the 21st century, Afghanistan,
somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring
that girls got a good education and had equal rights. That sort of
societal transformation is not possible even with 100,000 troops when
they don't even speak the local language. Can you imagine the hubris
of trying to tell people in some remote village that the way men and
women relate to each other has to change through a translator,
because some tall buildings in a place they've never heard of got
destroyed? The obvious result was total failure and the Taliban
picking up right where they left off in 2001.
lupire wrote 1 day ago:
Thank you, cameldrive, for this perceptive commentary on culture
clash in the mideast :-)
ripe wrote 1 day ago:
> we keep losing wars because no one sets achievable goals
In Afghanistan, our goals were in fact achievable, but we screwed
up the execution.
In 1979, when we used the Mujahideen to kick the Soviets out, we
succeeded because we had Pakistan to give us logistical support
from the sea, and to do some of our our dirty work. General Zia was
a true Islamist, so there was no daylight between him and William
Casey in going after the godless communists.
After 9/11, George W. Bush had a blank check from the American
public. But he went back to the Pakistan military, and this time
their goals were very different from ours.
The generals took our billions and cooperated with us as little as
they could to escape sanctions, while continuing to harbor the
Taliban. They themselves were thoroughly penetrated by Al Qaeda.
[1]
We could never defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan as long as they
could just retreat to their sanctuary in Pakistan, get arms and
healthcare.
But publicly we kept saying that Pakistan was our ally. No wonder
the public are confused about why we lost.
[1] Steve Coll, "Ghost Wars: the CIA's secret wars in Afghanistan",
cameldrv wrote 13 hours 47 min ago:
My question then is, what was the achievable goal? What is the
end state for the country, do any U.S. troops need to be there
permanently, and how does the society work such that the U.S.
goals are achieved?
ks2048 wrote 1 day ago:
What were our goals in Afghanistan, exactly?
ripe wrote 1 day ago:
Bush said it was to kill or capture Al Qaeda leaders and to
prevent Afghanistan from becoming a base for terrorism again.
sirspacey wrote 1 day ago:
The Economist did a great deep dive on why we lost. Short version:
a major export of Afghanistan was wheat, which we wouldnât let
them sell to us because of US agricultural interest. With no ready
markets, their farmers switched to opium. We wouldnât prevent it
because it would destroy livelihoods, a sure way to spark
insurgency. Al Qaeda became drug lords, made a fortune, and bank
rolled a resistance and eventual overthrow.
As with Charlie Wilsonâs war, it is precisely because we
wouldnât fund health economic and development projects that we
lost a war we had already won.
overstay8930 wrote 1 day ago:
Mountainous arid country economy collapses because of a rough
wheat market lol come on do you really think the taliban was
going to be unseated by competing with the economies of scale of
an American wheat farm? How do people fall for this
boppo1 wrote 1 day ago:
I dunno, I'm gonna go with the parent comment's version of the
failure instead of 'No we just didn't neoliberal hard enough'.
nradov wrote 1 day ago:
Something is missing in that story. Afghanistan isn't a great
location for any sort of agriculture: it lacks the reliable
rainfall and flat plains needed for optimal cereal cultivation.
And as a landlocked country it's impossible to export large
volumes of grain. Most of what they grow has always been for
domestic consumption.
It is precisely because of those obstacles that opium poppies are
one of the few practical cash crops. One motorcycle can carry the
refined output of an entire farm.
URI [1]: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna24489703
underlipton wrote 1 day ago:
One might consider that it would give something for these
farmers to subsist on that didn't enrich the Taliban. With that
issue settled and stable, you could make inroads elsewhere
without inadvertently filling up the enemy's coffers.
resource_waste wrote 1 day ago:
>the lack of strategic vision
The vision is that through liberal democracy we can achieve world
peace.
Believe it or not, it doesnt matter. That is the core of US foreign
policy and there are ~300M americans that believe that. Only
leadership can really change that.
Also
> Can you imagine the hubris of trying to tell people in some
remote village that the way men and women relate to each other has
to change through a translator, because some tall buildings in a
place they've never heard of got destroyed?
Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this
doesnt work.
I find it interesting, you have some mix of realpolitik but you
have a cynicism that takes away your ability to see reality.
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
Occupation is very labor-intensive. The Allies did it after
WWII.[1] It took a huge number of Allied troops, and continued
until 1952.
URI [1]: https://history.army.mil/books/wwii/Occ-GY/ch16.htm
ramblenode wrote 1 day ago:
> Religion and Military occupation do this, lets not pretend this
doesnt work.
Most successful occupiers seem to intermarry into the society
they are occupying. Without this, there is always a clear
distinction between occupier and occupied, that even shared
culture, language, and religion will not smooth over.
lazide wrote 1 day ago:
Occupation over generations with severe and autocratic control of
daily life and institutions maybe.
Not dudes driving through on patrol once a day and never stopping
unless they are attacked.
xanthor wrote 1 day ago:
Go check the annual opium poppy production in Afghanistan in the
years leading up to and following the US invasion if you're
interested in a more coherent justification.
tivert wrote 2 days ago:
> To be fair, the lack of strategic vision has also plagued the
U.S. since WWII or Korea. We just keep losing wars because no one
ever sets out clear achievable goals.
> ...
> The place we spent the most time in the 21st century,
Afghanistan, somehow went from an objective of destroying Al Qaeda
to ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights.
I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was not
achievable. A bombing campaign, some boots on the ground, and
killing some leaders could not actually achieve the "objective of
destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form afterwards.
You'd have to change the society so it wouldn't reform, hence
"ensuring that girls got a good education and had equal rights."
Though I suppose installing and supporting some brutal warlord as a
secular dictator (e.g. a Saddam Hussein) would have achieved the
objective too, but the US would have gotten so much condemnation
for that I'm sure the option was not on the table.
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
> the "objective of destroying Al Qaeda," because it would just
re-form afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it
wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a good education
and had equal rights."
How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss off
surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries even
more?
If you want lasting change, the new regime either needs
widespread support from its subjects (Why wasn't it in charge to
begin with, then, why did it need to be installed by an
occupier..?), or you need to scorched-earth, mass-graves
liquidate every single participant in the old regime, and all of
their supporters (And not just fire them from their jobs, as we
did in Iraq. All the ex-Baathists went on to gainful employment
in the various insurgent groups, instead.)
Not doing it is exactly why Reconstruction failed. The slavers
lost the war, but won the peace, and their politics reasserted as
soon as they were allowed to govern themselves.
lazyasciiart wrote 1 day ago:
Unfortunately, that's literally genocide.
Detrytus wrote 1 day ago:
Many people naively think that liberal democracy, where human
rights are respected is kind of the natural state, which can be
distorted by some evil regimes. Nothing could be further from
truth: natural state of mankind is slavery with a small elite
exploiting the masses. Democracy is a product of European
culture and it slowly evolved from: Ancient Greek philosophy,
Ancient Roman law, and Christianity as a religion. Countries
that do not share the same cultural background are simply not
compatible with democracy.
082349872349872 wrote 1 day ago:
> ... Ancient Roman law, and Christianity as a religion.
Were Mussolini alive today, he'd have another form of
government to sell you!
krapp wrote 1 day ago:
Ancient Greece and Rome both had a small elite exploiting the
masses, and both states practiced slavery. The Bible endorses
the institution of slavery as God's natural order numerous
times in both the Old and New Testament. Europe held the
greatest slaveowning imperialist powers the world has ever
known - and monarchies to boot.
Also there is no such thing as "European culture" or "Western
culture"[0] per se, that's a modern retrofiction meant to
lend credence to white nationalist ideology, much less any
credibility in the claim that such is the sole originator and
inheritor of the concept of democratic government. India had
its own democratic ideals[0], as did Africa[2], and America's
own democracy is derived in part from that of the Six Nations
Iroquois Confederacy[3].
Also... since you're implying (as everyone who makes this
argument does) that Islam is "simply not compatible with
democracy," the cultures of the Islamic world have been
influenced by ancient Greek and Christian philosophy since
Islam began[4,5]. That's why European culture(s) had to
recover much of the knowledge they lost after the Dark Ages
from Muslim sources. So your statement disproves itself even
by its own ethnocentric standard.
[0] [1] [2] [3] [4] [4] [5] [5]
URI [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/wester...
URI [2]: https://thediplomat.com/2023/03/is-india-the-mother-...
URI [3]: https://trueafrica.co/article/why-democracy-is-just-...
URI [4]: https://blogs.loc.gov/law/2023/09/the-haudenosaunee-...
URI [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_influences_o...
URI [6]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_contributions_to...
selimthegrim wrote 1 day ago:
So, Japan is not a democracy then?
goatlover wrote 1 day ago:
The natural state of humanity was hunter/gatherer.
Civilization is kind of a later comer, although it might be
older than previously thought.
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
> How exactly does providing the latter do anything but piss
surviving conservatives and hardliners and reactionaries off
even more?
It is fairly well understood that decreasing gender inequality
by empowering women is one of the most effective ways to reduce
instability in struggling societies.
ramblenode wrote 1 day ago:
This sounds a little vague. Do you have a citation I could
learn more from?
shuntress wrote 20 hours 55 min ago:
This is a good general summary:
URI [1]: https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/...
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
Did any of those societies have as many hard-liners who were
both running the country prior to a regime change, that were
fully committed to political violence to achieve their
cultural goals?
It's one thing to slowly shift the goal posts in a civil
society over decades through these kinds of soft changes...
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
> Did any of those societies have as many hard-liners who
were both running the country prior to a regime change,
that were fully committed to political violence to achieve
their cultural goals?
Yes
> It's one thing to slowly shift the goal posts in a civil
society over decades through these kinds of soft changes...
Are we talking about the same thing? "Shifting goal posts"
usually means confusing positions in an argument by
changing the point of the discussion. I'm not sure what
relevance that has here.
Also, the US occupation of Afghanistan did last for decades
so, again, I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
> Yes
Examples?
> Also, the US occupation of Afghanistan did last for
decades so, again, I'm not sure what point you are trying
to make.
There's a world of difference between 'Occupation
security forces sometimes kind of control some of the
major towns', which accomplished nothing[1], compared to
the decades of incredible political repression in the
USSR/China, that actually moved the cultural needle and
destroyed organized internal opposition within those
societies.
[1] The country reverted back to its previous state
before the occupation even ended.
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
> Examples?
Look into it yourself if you care so much. I don't care
to get so far off topic.
> [1] The country reverted back to its previous state
before the occupation even ended.
Ok, so, you would agree then that ensuring that girls
got a good education and had equal rights is an
important part of the plan when the objective is to
destroy Al Qaeda?
krisoft wrote 1 day ago:
> Look into it yourself if you care so much. I don't
care to get so far off topic.
You donât need to get âfar off topicâ. You said
yes there were such examples. So kindly name one.
Clearly you were thinking something when you wrote
âyesâ.
Right now it sounds like you bluffed, you were called
on it and your argument collapsed. Not a good look.
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
Whoops! You got me! I guess every time a society
starts to empower women after a violent overthrow
of a political regime it has been stopped by
backlash from surviving conservatives and
hardliners and reactionaries.
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
It should be trivial of you to provide examples of
this, if you are so confident in your claims. You
bring the point up, the onus is on you to at least
provide an example of this claim.
You also seem to be confused as to the difference
between the Taliban and AQ, and seem to mistakenly
believe that there weren't efforts to drive women's
education in Afghanistan. It turns out that it didn't
accomplish what you were hoping it would.
shuntress wrote 1 day ago:
You seem to be confused.
The initial comment was this:
> The place we spent the most time in the 21st
century, Afghanistan, somehow went from an
objective of destroying Al Qaeda to ensuring that
girls got a good education and had equal rights.
Which implies that the commenter does not
understand how decreasing gender inequality would
help "destroy Al Qaeda" in Afghanistan.
The next commenter then very clearly points out the
missing information stating:
> I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear
but it was not achievable. A bombing campaign, some
boots on the ground, and killing some leaders could
not actually achieve the "objective of destroying
Al Qaeda," because it would just re-form
afterwards. You'd have to change the society so it
wouldn't reform, hence "ensuring that girls got a
good education and had equal rights."
You then re-assert the initial flawed reasoning by
stating
> How exactly does providing the latter do anything
but piss off surviving conservatives and hardliners
and reactionaries even more?
To rephrase my previous answer with a quote you
won't bother to look up: "Women's full
participation in politics and the economy makes a
society more likely to succeed"
And you want to splinter the discussion further
into the difference between the Taliban and Al
Qaeda?
gknoy wrote 1 day ago:
> scorched-earth, mass-graves liquidate every single
participant in the old regime, and all of their supporters
I feel like this would be an excellent way to speed-run the
creation of a large group of people (and their descendants) who
hate us _specifically_, and are even more motivated to cause us
harm. I can't imagine many people would say "yep, I guess you
won!" when you've killed their fathers, uncles, grandparents,
and older brothers.
nebula8804 wrote 1 day ago:
>Not doing it is exactly why Reconstruction failed. The
slavers lost the war, but won the peace, and their politics
reasserted as soon as they were allowed to govern themselves.
Well there are more peaceful ways of achieving this: Look at
post Nazi Germany and how they tried to eradicate even
thinking about Nazism just to try and limit these thoughts
from festering and growing.
In the US Reconstruction failed because of circumstance.
Lincolns assassination led to what is considered the worst
president in the US taking the reign. For goodness sake he
was drunk out of his mind during his inaugural address! He
systematically started to reverse the progress his
predecessor made and gave cover to the losers to regroup and
make gains again. We are still suffering to this day because
of that one event.
vkou wrote 1 day ago:
Which is why you shouldn't get into this business unless
you're fully committed to it, as opposed to just doing a
flavor-of-the-week invasion and destabilization of a country.
Historical track record shows that it takes at least a
generation of war and incredibly brutal repression to
actually accomplish the kind of regime change that the war's
architects were aiming for.
If the issue is a few leaders, sure, invading and removing
them can work. If your issue is with the entrenched system
that produced those leaders, I've outlined what it takes to
replace it.
lazide wrote 1 day ago:
It takes a few generations of extreme overwhelming force, at
a minimum typically.
See: the Roman Empire. They had a timeline of several hundred
years before the new territories were âromanâ
bilbo0s wrote 1 day ago:
I don't know man?
Everyone failed in Afghanistan.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but even Alexander
himself failed in Afghanistan. The Persians tried for
centuries, and always failed. The Caliphate was the most
successful, but only because they never wanted any kind of
real change. The place is just unique.
The thought that we were gonna go in there and change
things was probably ill considered at the outset. When you
objectively consider the historical record of the people of
Afghanistan. Force was extremely likely to not work. I
believe there doesn't really exist anyone out there with a
good idea on anything that could have worked. In the end,
we left. Just as everyone before us did. And I'd be willing
to go on record now and say that everyone who goes into
Afghanistan after us will leave Afghanistan in the end as
well.
It's never as simple as, "more bombs", "more money", "more
education", etc etc. Afghanistan is a unique problem, that
is uniquely resistant to all of the common solutions.
Omniusaspirer wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs simply not true that everyone failed in
Afghanistan- the Mongols were very successful and the
Mughals after them created a roughly 600 year period of
relative peace. They just understood the realities of
that region and operated in ways that modern western
nations (thankfully) arenât willing to. The fact we
tried a different way was admirable despite ultimately
being unsuccessful and a poor allocation of resources.
Relevant wiki quotes:
âIn the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian Empire
(1219â1221), Genghis Khan invaded the region from the
northeast in one of his many conquests to create the huge
Mongol Empire. His armies slaughtered thousands in the
cities of Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad etc. After Genghis
Khan returned to Mongolia, there was a rebellion in the
region of Helmand which was brutally put down by his son
and successor, Ogedei Khan, who killed all male residents
of Ghazni and Helmand in 1222; the women were enslaved
and sold. Thereafter most parts of Afghanistan other than
the extreme south-eastern remained under Mongol rule as
part of the Ilkhanate and the Turko-Mongol Chagatai
Khanate.â
And:
âFrom 1383 to 1385, the Afghanistan area was conquered
from the north by Timur, leader of neighboring
Transoxiana (roughly modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan,
and adjacent areas), and became a part of the Timurid
Empire. Timur was from a Turko-Mongol tribe and although
a Muslim, saw himself more as an heir of Genghis Khan.
Timur's armies caused great devastation and are estimated
to have caused the deaths of 17 million people. He
brought great destruction on Afghanistan's south,
slaughtering thousands and enslaving an equal number of
women. Allied with the Uzbeks, Hazaras and other Turkic
communities in the north his dominance over Afghanistan
was long-lasting, allowing him for his future successful
conquests in Central Anatolia against the Ottomans.â
The Mughal empire rose out of this and ruled until the
1800âs.
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
> I think in Afghanistan's case, the goal was clear but it was
not achievable.
I suspect some people thought it was achievable because they
looked at post-WW2 Germany and Japan and concluded that:
1. Cities reduced to rubble in a war with America and its allies.
2. Lengthy occupation, plenty of money & loans for rebuilding.
3. Occupation transitions to an democratic government. Some
American forces stick around just in case, but they don't have to
fight anyone.
4. ????
5. Successful, stable, western-style democracy with an aversion
to armed conflict, a strong economy and a renowned car
manufacturing industry.
Obviously it didn't actually work in Afghanistan or Iraq, but I
can see how politicians surrounded by yes men and pro-war types
might have thought they had an achievable plan.
Rinzler89 wrote 1 day ago:
Germany and Japan were culturally different and scientifically,
economically superior to how Afganistan
was before they were invaded and bombed.
dragonwriter wrote 2 days ago:
> The notable exception was the Powell Doctrine in Desert Storm
I dunno, the NATO-Yugoslavia war is both more recent and produced a
much clearer and more stable, positive local outcome than the 1991
Iraq War. (And if you argue âbut didn't that restart US-Russian
geopolitical rivalry, making it worse than Desert Storm,â I would
counter that it didn't, Yeltsin designating Putin with his yearning
for a return of the USSRâs Eastern European empire as his
successor did that, the aftermath of the NATO-Yugoslavia war is
just when the West realized it, plus, Desert Stormâwell,
actually, Desert Shield, but the two are inseparableâby the same
token, was, in fact, the proximate trigger for the formation of
al-Qaeda, so...)
vasac wrote 1 day ago:
There's nothing stable in ex-Yugoslavia, and that will become
evident once the current hegemon gets busy elsewhere.
dragonwriter wrote 1 day ago:
Nothing lasts forever. ââInstabilityâ that exists but is
suppressed so as to be not evident for a few decadesâ is not
meaningfully different from âstability for a few decadesâ.
selimthegrim wrote 1 day ago:
What exactly is VuÄiÄ on about these days?
cameldrv wrote 2 days ago:
That's a great point, and I think that Yugoslavia was one of the
very few successful post WWII major military interventions.
There's a common pattern where you have a multiethnic state
that's held together by a brutal dictator. Often the boundaries
of this state were drawn a long time ago in London. There's
usually a lot of pent-up ethnic resentment. If you remove the
brutal dictator, it spirals into civil war. The Yugoslavia
solution of just breaking up the country into tiny ethnic states
actually worked pretty well. So well, in fact, that now the
constituent parts of Yugoslavia are even coming back together
through the EU.
We've seen abject failure in Syria, Libya, and Afghanistan, and
mixed results in Iraq with the strategy of keeping the country
together and assuming democracy will solve everything.
ChrisMarshallNY wrote 1 day ago:
Just FYI, many of the early Greek city-states were democratic,
and they fought like cats and dogs.
Tito kept Yugoslavia in check for decades, and he was Not A
Nice Man. The Romans probably had the longest-lasting empire in
history, and they were very "not nice."
I'm not sure that there's any "magical" system of government
that works better than others.
Also, you have governments that work well for the governed, and
ones that don't bother others. Whether or not it is a "good"
government probably hinges upon which side of the border you're
on.
I remember reading that the best system of government is an
absolute monarchy, and the worst system of government is an
absolute monarchy.
People are really complex, and "one size fits all," tends not
to work for us.
kjellsbells wrote 2 days ago:
I'd be interested in your take on the UK documentary The Death
of Yugoslavia[0], available on YouTube. It gave me the distinct
impression that the US didnt have a strategic vision so much as
they got unwillingly dragged into it and felt that they had no
option but to try and solve it.
As a lay person not from the Balkans, I was impressed that the
filmmakers got all the major players to speak candidly, on
camera, about their involvement. Mladic, Tudjman, Milosevic,
all there for example. Reminded me of another great series, the
World At War.[1]
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-ur6mGQeTOmuwxnBW-...
URI [2]: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYxy4la9w2tfotW1Xs-...
cameldrv wrote 1 day ago:
Iâll check it out. We generally supported the independence
claims of each breakaway state in turn. Some of that may
have sort of been a default for the time given that the USSR
had just broken up without too much violence, and shortly
thereafter Czechoslovakia broke up fairly amicably. That
probably made Clinton and his people more pro-breakup.
This was discussed a lot in Iraq as well, but I believe the
worry was that the Shia state would basically be absorbed by
Iran. Itâs not clear that whatâs happening there now is
much better, but Iraq had been seen as a useful counterweight
to Iran and the neocons wanted to preserve that. The only
problem is that they also wanted democracy, and most of the
voters are Shia, so democratic Iraq is always likely to be
friendly to Iran.
cess11 wrote 1 day ago:
That documentary is very, very well done. The BBC journalists
also wrote a book with the same name, which has more detail.
foobarian wrote 1 day ago:
I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything in
ex-Yu, other than some sorties, though they did a lot
indirectly by recognizing the new states and providing aid in
various forms including armaments and other military supplies
and training to make sure the stronger neighbors don't get
too aggressive. (Which is way understating what happened in
Bosnia, but still).
dragonwriter wrote 1 day ago:
> I don't remember the US directly doing much of anything
in ex-Yu, other than some sorties
Reducing the US/NATO involvement in the former Yugoslavia
(both the intervention in the Bosnia War and subsequent
deployment of IFOR/SFOR and later the NATO-Yugoslavia War
and the subsequent deployment in KFOR) to âsome
sortiesâ seems to be missing a bit.
I mean, sure, the combat involvement prior to achieving
agreements in both cases was application of air power,
but...
foobarian wrote 1 day ago:
That's fair enough. I should not come off as critical of
their involvement; without it (especially the less
visible non-active pieces) who knows how things would
have turned out. And most people I know from there are
grateful for the help and view them as heroes. But
compared to a theater like Kuwait or Afghanistan they had
a lot less active deployment. IIRC there were many air
missions out of Aviano.
dragonwriter wrote 2 days ago:
I'm unconvinced that the lack of success in Afghanistan was not
primarily driven by the shift of focus to the naked war of
aggression in Iraq in 2003, and the subsequent mismanagement of
the occupation of Iraq, starting with radical de-Baathification
and other rejections of lessons learned in previous (e.g.,
post-WWII) occupations, both because of the message that war
sent to peopke everywhere, including in Afghanistan, about the
US and because of long diversion of resources and focus it
produced. (And, obviously, the US involvement in Syria was
largely a product of that.)
Afghanistan was never going to be easy to succeed at something
more than a punitive mission against al-Qaeda, but I think that
the fundamental root of much later failure including the
ultimate failure in Afghanistan is the 2003 Iraq War.
specialist wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and:
Post 9/11, the USA had the moral authority to "do something"
in Afghanistan. Iran, Russia, and nearly everyone else
offered to help. Alas, whereas GHWB was an internationalist,
the Cheney Admin's neocons were belligerently stubborn
unilateralists. So instead of seizing the opportunity to
reset troubled relations (and boost their internal
reformers), we further spited them (and empowered their
hardliners).
Further, Afghanistan was a failed state. Iran and Pakistan
were struggling to manage the refugees. And could do nothing
to address the flood of drugs plaguing their people.
Afghanistan's neighbors wanted us, needed us, to help them
restore stability.
Lastly, the Cheney Admin won in Iraq without firing a single
shot. Hussein conceded to ALL of our demands. If Bush had
simply declared victory and gone home, he'd've become an
int'l hero and considered one of our greatest presidents.
(Until Katrina.)
Such a stupid waste. So many dead, so much wrecked and
wasted, the middle east further destabilized... Et cetera.
cameldrv wrote 2 days ago:
It's hard to say exactly what would have happened in
Afghanistan without the distraction of Iraq, but my feeling
is that making Afghanistan into a functional western style
democracy with western style human rights is more like a
50-100 year project.
In Iraq though, it was always going to be messy simply
because of the fact that there are three major
ethno-religious groups, two of which had been long repressed.
I don't know enough of the details about the 2003-2005 time
period to really specifically address radical
de-Baathification, but if you institute democracy in Iraq and
keep the country together, you're naturally going to get
de-Baathification because the Shia will vote the Sunni out.
The Sunni will resent this, and as we've seen, this is how
you wind up with ISIS.
foobarian wrote 1 day ago:
It's too bad that the borders there are leftovers from
colonial map-making. I wonder what "United States of
Arabia" would look like if allowed to form on their own
terms.
woooooo wrote 1 day ago:
They tried a few times in the 60s (pan-arabism) but it
always broke down over the question of who to put in
charge.
lotsofpulp wrote 1 day ago:
> but my feeling is that making Afghanistan into a
functional western style democracy with western style human
rights is more like a 50-100 year project.
Easily a 50+ year project, because progress effectively
happens one death at a time. A large percentage of the old
guard harboring outdated ideas will simply never change.
The only hope is changing the minds of the new generations.
treflop wrote 2 days ago:
I donât think the language barrier or anything was an issue. We
entered Japan and helped rebuild it and now we have some of the
best relations in the world.
Re-building Afghanistan was more like building Afghanistan. We
werenât fixing a collapsed patio like in Japan â we had to
build a whole housing tract, and at no point did we or anyone in
the world have that amount of money.
sudosysgen wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't true. Up until the fall of the Soviet Union, there was
an Afghan state that was able to motivate enough of the
population to believe in it and fight for it in order to largely
defeat the Mujahideen.
Were it not for external support for the Mujahideen, it is almost
certain that an Afghan state would have succeeded in achieving
some form of monopoly on violence.
The idea that nation-states were something alien to Afghanistan
that we had to force on them just isn't true.
cameldrv wrote 2 days ago:
Yes. We did not try to radically transform Japanese society down
to the level of the family. Same in Germany. Both of those
countries also had a fairly cohesive sense of nationhood without
massive ethnic divisions. We just had to deprogram the
hyper-aggressive militarism, but the rest we could pretty much
leave alone.
Your point about rebuilding Afghanistan really being building
Afghanistan is very true. I remember hearing a soldier in
Afghanistan talking about how surprised he was at the number of
people he met in Afghanistan that had never even heard of
Afghanistan.
nkozyra wrote 2 days ago:
> Therefore, it doesnât seem like a reasonable takeaway to say AI
failed.
There are a lot of reasons - from quite intuitive to conspiratorial -
to not take the idea that AI caused or meaningfully contributed to
this failure at face value. Or that it was a failure of intelligence
in the first place.
tivert wrote 2 days ago:
> Nevertheless, Hamasâs devastating attack on October 7 caught Shin
Bet and the rest of Israelâs multibillion-dollar defense system
entirely by surprise. The intelligence disaster was even more striking
considering Hamas carried out much of its preparations in plain sight,
including practice assaults on mock-ups of the border fence and Israeli
settlementsâactivities that were openly reported. Hamas-led militant
groups even posted videos of their training online. Israelis living
close to the border observed and publicized these exercises with
mounting alarm, but were ignored in favor of intelligence
bureaucraciesâ analyses and, by extension, the software that had
informed them. Israeli conscripts, mostly young women, monitoring
developments through the ubiquitous surveillance cameras along the Gaza
border, composed and presented a detailed report on Hamasâs
preparations to breach the fence and take hostages, only to have their
findings dismissed as âan imaginary scenario.â The Israeli
intelligence apparatus had for more than a year been in possession of a
Hamas document that detailed the groupâs plan for an attack.
> Well aware of Israelâs intelligence methods, Hamas members fed
their enemy the data that they wanted to hear, using informants they
knew would report to the Israelis. They signaled that the ruling group
inside Gaza was concentrating on improving the local economy by gaining
access to the Israeli job market, and that Hamas had been deterred from
action by Israelâs overwhelming military might. Such reports
confirmed that Israelâs intelligence system had rigid assumptions of
Hamas behavior, overlaid with a racial arrogance that considered
Palestinians incapable of such a large-scale operation. AI, it turned
out, knew everything about the terrorist except what he was thinking.
That sounds a lot like a company that's implementing data-driven "best
practices" from some expensive management consultants.
It truly is the best system, regardless of how bad the results are.
It's best by definition.
hackerlight wrote 2 days ago:
Precautionary principle and defense-in-depth would have prevented
this.
You plan for the worst, but most importantly you plan for multiple
different versions of what "worst" could entail, and you have
uncorrelated redundancy such that the probability of disaster reduces
from p to p^3.
Ukraine made the same mistake by not putting mines along the border.
Just taking it for granted that an invasion wouldn't happen.
Hedge your tail risks with cheap real options, folks.
hayst4ck wrote 1 day ago:
More succinctly: hope is not a strategy.
lostlogin wrote 1 day ago:
In both situations, is it 100% certain that war wasn't seen as a
good thing?
There were plenty of Ukrainians who wanted Ukraine invaded.
There are some hawkish types in Israeli politics.
wpietri wrote 2 days ago:
Ooh, very interesting point:
> That sounds a lot like a company that's implementing data-driven
"best practices" from some expensive management consultants.
>
> It truly is the best system, regardless of how bad the results are.
It's best by definition.
Well that rings some bells. It's as if there's a religion where the
sacred totem is a graph that goes up and to the right.
Some question for the crowd: How do systems like this insulate
themselves from failure? Before something goes wrong, what prevents
seeing the problem? And after something goes wrong, what are the
words and behaviors used to avoid fundamental change?
chasd00 wrote 1 day ago:
> what are the words and behaviors used to avoid fundamental change
in my experience it's one of two things.
1. it's declared the process is what was wrong and so immediately
everyone is off the hook. Then a year is spent refining or
adjusting the process but it's still the same people making bad
decisions and underperforming and then, eventually, leadership
changes and the "well, what we have seems to be working" will
start. The process changes fade into the sunset.
2. someone will leave, retire, resign, or be fired. Then all the
blame leaves with them and any additional discovery of what went
wrong will also somehow be their fault. It's assumed all the
problems left with this person and so no change is needed.
I sound pretty jaded and cynical but i'm actually not, it's just
that's the way i've seen it go down before.
danlugo92 wrote 1 day ago:
This is pretty much it yeah...
throwaway4good wrote 2 days ago:
I don't understand the headline "problem" of the article. Or the "How
Big Tech is losing the wars of the future".
Silicon Valley has always been a part of the US military complex. Maybe
there was a period sometime in the 90es where it was irrational
exuberance and don't be evil. But now we are surely back under manners.
selimthegrim wrote 1 day ago:
TIL âunder (heavy) mannersâ
082349872349872 wrote 1 day ago:
TIL 'put manners on'
(in combination, it would appear that whatever 'manners' may be,
they are located distal of the cranium)
chiefalchemist wrote 2 days ago:
> The system knows everything about [the terrorist]: where he went, who
his friends are, who his family is, what keeps him busy, what he said
and what he published. Using artificial intelligence, the system
analyzes behavior, predicts risks, raises alerts.
Where does "the terrorist" end and me, you and anyone else just minding
our own business get inserted instead? And let's say it's not even the
gov doing this but some private company with public data, what's to
stop the gov from buying "reports" from that company. 100% legal. That
is, no rights being violated, etc.
Anyone who says, "I have nothing to hide" is a fool, at best.
nurple wrote 2 days ago:
The terrorist ends wherever a threat to the state's power exists,
it's been shown quite well that they don't care if you're domestic or
not. This, IMO, is why "self-radicalized" and "domestic terrorist"
were injected into our vernacular, to normalize and justify the need
to surveil the general public.
The thing is, and like I mentioned in a post awhile back: technically
competent actors, the ones bound to cause the most harm, would
absolutely be using a bespoke method of covert communication. There's
really little value, IMO, to the countrywide dragnet outside of
sentiment analysis and control.
The military complex wove itself early into the tech industry in ways
that they could intentionally side-step laws meant to keep such
public/private collusion from happening[0]. The impetus for the
founding of the collaboration was a report on the importance in
controlling perception in future wars.
We saw the same strategy deployed directly against the American
people during the election "fortification" where DHS and social media
colluded to control perception with little regard for truth[1].
[0] [1]
URI [1]: https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-goo...
URI [2]: https://homeland.house.gov/2023/11/06/chairmen-green-bishop-...
chiefalchemist wrote 2 days ago:
> The thing is, and like I mentioned in a post awhile back:
technically competent actors, the ones bound to cause the most
harm, would absolutely be using a bespoke method of covert
communication. There's really little value, IMO, to the countrywide
dragnet outside of sentiment analysis and control.
Agreed. And yet their persistence to surveil continue to expand.
They're not trying to watch those who are sure to be hiding.
They're watching the rest under the guise of "We gotta get those
terrorists."
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 2 days ago:
I think, in a sense, that part is already over. Entities that
encompass both ends of the spectrum exist and any remaining gaps are
filled by public/private partnership ( and hailed as a great thing
just about anywhere ).
The scenario of a private corporate entity wielding that power has
already come to fruition if you look at what Google or Facebook has
available on its users.
I think that is the main reason why I am not as.. restrictive on use
of LLMs and AI, because I see it as a form evening out the playing
field at least a little bit.
nurple wrote 2 days ago:
I think one of the things that scares me most about API-accessed
LLMs is how powerful they are as data collection tools in their own
right. OpenAI, for example, recently updated their terms of use to
be more vague about how they work with the gov and I have no doubts
that giving the NSA access to conversational feeds is absolutely a
requirement to their continued operation as an entity, a la
lavabit.
In fact, part of me thinks that the Sam/Ilya drama and sam's god
complex are at least partially rooted in this, alleged,
collaboration.
Imagine the questions you could pose to a GPT trained on all the
conversations had with users that's been enriched with their
biographical data. These conversations are often intimate and
curiosity driven in a way that seeking the truth could easily be
framed as self-radicalization.
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 2 days ago:
That API is one the main reasons companies are not as keen on
jumping on the bandwagon. They don't want to have OpenAI to have
access to their corporate data. But then, there are options of
running models locally..
I think your concerns are valid.
humansareok1 wrote 2 days ago:
I don't support ubiquitous spying at all but are you hanging out with
known ISIS members or members of White Nationalist Militias
regularly? Because I'm pretty sure that's where the line begins.
chiefalchemist wrote 2 days ago:
You've heard of guilt by association, well guilt by co-location
isn't that far off. Along the same lines, the rationale is going to
be, "We need to track everyone so we can be sure to see all
relationships and connections, and connections to connections, and
so on.
Try to draw the line wherever you want, but they're going to step
over it, and never look back.
wpietri wrote 2 days ago:
Maybe that's where the line starts, but does it stay there? As an
example, look at how the US's anti-communist fervor led to things
like COINTELPRO: [1] Especially today, I think we have to look at
every power we might give to government and ask, "What happens if
the worst people get access to this?" Because they're certainly
going to try.
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
chiefalchemist wrote 1 day ago:
Did we give it, or was it taken? Yeah, maybe we consented to The
Patriot Act. But when it was renewed, it was *expanded*. Too late
now.
hwbehrens wrote 2 days ago:
> I'm pretty sure that's where the line begins
Based on what?
From my perspective, the easiest way to design such a system would
be to create entries for every 'actor' in the system, feed in as
much data as you can get your hands on, and then let the weights
sort themselves out. So for example, if you're hanging out with
ISIS members obviously your weights would be higher, but even if
you're a server at Applebees you'd still be in the system
somewhere.
Doing it the other way necessitates some kind of bright-line
division, and any such boundary, once defined, becomes susceptible
to exploitation. e.g. I won't hang out with the White Nationalist
Militia because that puts me "into the system", but I can hang out
with insert radical right-wing group where I can talk to 80% of the
same people without being flagged. In practice, I imagine that the
gradient of extremism is rather gradual and with blurred
boundaries.
humansareok1 wrote 2 days ago:
As another poster mentioned this is literally why we have courts.
There is a clear line for obtaining a search warrant for example.
Precedents exist.
raisin_churn wrote 2 days ago:
Are you familiar with FISC? I'd say go familiarize yourself
with its case law, but you can't, because it's secret. And it
authorizes methods much more powerful and invasive than a
simple search warrant. Precedent exists, but nobody outside the
national security state actually knows what it is.
dragonwriter wrote 2 days ago:
Everything the FISA process overseen by the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court and the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court of Review can authorize (and much more
invasive means, contrary to your claim) can be authorized by
regular search warrant.
The FISC process is used when the purpose is foreign
intelligence rather than domestic law enforcement, and it
exists because prior to that there was no limit on the
covered activity when it was done for that purpose.
> Precedent exists, but nobody outside the national security
state actually knows what it is.
Well, some of it. [1]
URI [1]: https://www.fisc.uscourts.gov/public-filings
URI [2]: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-court...
humansareok1 wrote 2 days ago:
You're maybe proposing another line where no spying is legal
at all and we should just submit ourselves to the whims of
terrorists or other lunatics? Surely there is actually a line
where there are tradeoffs between security and privacy and
its probably not 0% security and 100% privacy.
Perhaps you think all FISA rulings should be public and any
sufficiently savvy malicious actors can just read them to
know exactly how to avoid suspicion?
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote 2 days ago:
If you don't know, who they are and just happen to serve a 'bad
guy' ( hate that term ) a burger, should you be in the crosshairs?
Because this is where this is heading. If you think I am
overselling it, remember that police in US can ask for all users
from specific location.
To your point, if there is indeed a line, it need to be clearly
articulated so that the rules of the game clear.
AlexandrB wrote 2 days ago:
There's a lot of grey here. What does "hanging out" mean? If my
weird uncle is (unknown to me) in ISIS does spending thanksgiving
with him count as "hanging out"? ISIS is at least pretty specific,
but what counts as a White Nationalist Militia? Both of these can
be redefined to capture more and more of the population if desired.
forgotmyinfo wrote 2 days ago:
This is what we have attorneys and judges for. And no, obviously
Thanksgiving isn't "hanging out". But going to the same weekly
meeting and practicing lynching minorities? Yeah, that's a little
more than just mashed potatoes and gravy, isn't it. (These
contrived "whatabout" gotchas are exhausting. It is abundantly
obvious who is and who is not involved with white nationalist
militias.)
chasd00 wrote 1 day ago:
It's really the court of public opinion that has the greatest
risk of harm at the day to day level. A non-poc going to the
gun range and then posting on social media could cause a "White
Nationalist Militia" label to get attached by a jilted coworker
and then go viral. That can cause serious harm.
mindslight wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe gun clubs should implement DEI programs. Then those
pictures would have some colorful people in the background.
sakjur wrote 2 days ago:
None of those things seem particularly obvious to me.
nurple wrote 2 days ago:
Yes, all the legal arguments presented before the FISA court by
the lawyers working on behalf of those targeted have been
really interesting reads!
dragonwriter wrote 2 days ago:
There aren't legal arguments by the targets in law
enforcement search (either physical or wiretap) warrant cases
either, that mainly only happens if (as does not always
happen) the product of the search is used in criminal
prosecution later.
7thaccount wrote 2 days ago:
I think they're just saying it's a slippery slope. It starts out
with good intentions we all agree on, but then continues to slide
and more and more of our freedoms erode as they crank up the
boiling pot ever so slowly.
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