I'll spell it out: A lot of air force pilots in these countries end up being rich kids who do it because it's a fun hobby, not motivated soldiers.
Because many of these people see it as a fun hobby, they don't spend much time worrying about potentially being ordered to drop bombs on schools filled with children. It's rather unlikely that their government would order them to do so anyway, compare a list of countries being hit by Iran with a list of countries bombing Iran.
When you say, “these countries,” I imagine you include the United States, where politically connected youngsters like George W. Bush secured and then ignored jet interceptor training during the 1960s?
Not everyone agrees that America is special. You haven't convincingly won a conflict in how long, so we're not really convinced your military is as exceptional as you like to say.
I would include the USA, with the caveat that in the US being sent to the military is often seen as a punishment for rich children where as in the Middle East being sent to the military can be an opportunity to build an independent power base for yourself or your family.
The USA has a volunteer military. Occasionally there are cases where the criminal court system might agree to dismiss a minor charge if the defendant enlists. But that doesn't happen to rich people, or those joining as commissioned officers (pilot track).
Air force pilots are the modern day knights of the sky. Also, up until WW2, which social class you were from determined whether or not you were going to be an officer or canon fodder so rich kids swooping their way into being captains is historically normal.
Air national guard. He didn't want to go to Vietnam, so he (or his father) used his connections to join the weekend warriors. One of my uncles did something similar (while my dad got drafted in the army and went to Vietnam).
Another example of using children to shield a military target. (The USA has done the same thing in the past. For example; Aviation High School was located on the same parcel as TRW.)
In the case you're presumably referring to, no fighter pilots were involved. A Tomahawk missile was launched from a US naval vessel, aimed at a military site next door to the girls school.
What does that have to do with anything? They went through training in different times when conflicts were not on their plate. During peace it is a cool job, you know not every air force around the world bombs schools, in fact most don't.
Anybody who ever went through arab countries with eyes opened saw the massive nepotism and corruption at all levels. Army/air force ain't immune to this, in contrary. Do you think ie some general or politician's first son would be treated and pushed up same as common folks?
> Cool job? Being ordered to drop bombs on schools filled with children doesn't seems like a cool job..
That was a launched cruise missile from a ship, targeted by an LLM. Apparently the grounds USED to be a valid military target long ago (a decade? I'm not sure exactly) and now there's a school there.
I can guarantee you that if there were an accurate test for morality (like humanity) it would show the ones with the least, being the most powerful and wealthy on this planet.
I think that many of the most powerful and wealthy have very low morality, but that's not exclusive to them. There have been many sadistic killers who were poor or middle class.
While I agree with the thrust of where you're coming from, that number is much much higher than 30%. While pigeonholing the problem this way might make you feel good, it's really not productive.
The definition of amoral we're using here isn't someone being openly amoral, but rather people who think they're acting morally but actually rationalizing immoral things to themselves as moral. So it's not terribly surprising for this to be nearly everyone - that 30% is also acting directly against their own self-interest, yet rationalizing this as well!
I suspect part of the dynamic with the rich and powerful is that rationalization and general success are both reliant on intelligence - the same ability that helped them amass wealth/power has also assuaged their ego that they did so for some higher purpose. In addition to the obvious dynamic whereby sticking to your morals is generally less lucrative, of course.
Of course, why wouldn't they? They do not work without a meta account. /s
Is anyone at meta going to be bald accountable?
An absolute privacy nightmare especially in places like Switzerland or Germany where recording people (subject focus) even in public is not permitted without consent but you have tourists now showing up everywhere wearing these.
The LED is barely visible during the day and some have modified their glasses to disable/remove it.
I suspect what'll kill these is the same thing that kill google glass - social ostracisation. It's so, so wildly adversarial to effectively shove a recording device in the face of everyone you're interacting with you might as well wear a emergency orange t-shirt with 'verified asshole' written on it.
They look like any other pair of sunglasses. No piece of glass over one eye reminding everyone you meet that you’re wearing a camera. They’re incredibly stealthy
Have you seen them in the wild? They're notably chunky and have an obvious hole where the lens is. You might not notice it in passing but if someone's talking to you it's hard not to notice. I wonder how many of their owners realise how much they're affecting every interaction they have with another human.
If they are held accountable they'll get a slap on the wrist and pay a fine to the government or maybe throw a few more pennies at a class action, but none of it will come close to the amount they made in profit and it won't prevent meta or Kenyan contractors from having gotten off on your nudes.
> An absolute privacy nightmare especially in places like Switzerland or Germany where recording people (subject focus) even in public is not permitted
That's the prime example of a law that can't be enforced and thus shouldn't exist. You go in town, you can be recorded inadvertantly, as long as it's not some creep stalking you, I say it's fine.
Legal frameworks often struggle to keep pace with technology, leading to complex issues. In regions that prioritize privacy, finding the right balance between innovation and individual rights can be particularly difficult.
> If you post a video online of someone's worst day which you decided to film for entertainment, they can legally go after you.
Then,it's stalking and it's different. There are much less case of stalking than people accidentally incorporating other people in their picture frame.
What is an effective use case? I have set it up but I don't know what to do with it. Just a personal assistant (if you were to give it access to your stuff)? Mine is caged in a VLAN with only internet access.
There is none. It's just a way for coders to feel or be able to say they "work with AI" imo. Same with doing light wrapper coding to do agents stuff. The real AI work is on actual math and ML with the internet scale data, but only four big companies does that and this is the closest regular coders can get.
I guess we are just boring and/or unimaginative. I don't get that many communications per day to require an abstraction level between me and the messages. The daily automations I need are more efficiently carried out by home assistant / n8n. I'm not in a position where I need automated briefs on every new company started in my area. I genuinely don't see how it could benefit me.
Most humans are unimaginative because to be imaginative is actually really, really hard. People are also incredibly overly optimistic about their own ideas etc... until they go through the craftsmanship of producing something great.
Most peoples thought process is "oh great idea, just gotta do this and that and out pops something that'll improve peoples lives". Erm no... its nothing like that in reality.
I'd counter that n8n (or most other workflow tools) can handle as much ambiguity as OpenClaw - it has a LLM call node. Stuff the ambiguous parts in there, but don't burn a rainforests worth of compute figuring out how to call the weather API each and every time.
Also, in the olden days of pre-AI, if our weather workflow did not notify us because conditions juuust failed to be met, we adjusted the thresholds. Uphill, both ways.
Don't get me wrong, I use a bunch of LLMs for automations. By prompting the model "here is what I want to achieve, here are the tools I have, figure out how to stitch them together". Actual workflows run (mostly) deterministically, with a sprinkling of "classify this image" or "summarize this text" nodes thrown in for a good measure.
Which one? None of those that came up when I searched were really containing a lot of real uses. Both top threads[0][1] don't really contain much of substance.
I don't doubt that there are people using it for legitimate stuff, but I'd wager the vast majority just set it up for the hype and to feel in the "in crowd".
I set it up, and had it do a few things, then decided its too risky after seeing some of the drastic failures it had caused some people.
Sure I understand you can sandbox it and all, but even then I couldn't think of much stuff I wouldn't want to do myself just nor justify the cost to run it.
Wannabe Tony Stark love these gadgets, and there are a lot of them out there. Just look at what tech content is trending on youtube &co these days, we got gangrened by influencers like most other hobbies/lucrative industries
Here are some of the things I did with it while running locally:
- Ask it to perform a scan of your local network and give you advice on output
- Tell it to login to various computers and re-boot them (I have a few servers I host and setup openclaw to have a user on them)
- Replace web search by asking openclaw
It's neat but the token use is pretty inefficient and security of course is a mess but it's been fun to play with.
I am messing with NanoClaw now and it's pretty much the same but only support Claude (uses code to do everything)
And in reality most of what does need a heartbeat loop can also easily be automated by just asking Claude to set up a cronjob. I think genuinely the most "novel" thing about something like OpenClaw is just that it "feels" more like a "real entity", like a partner rather than a chatbot, and for some reason that resonates with people. Whether that's by itself kind of a huge red flag or kind of a nothingburger, everyone has to decide for themselves.
Not many people are using local LLMs for their OpenClaw backend, so most are paying money to OpenAI/Anthropic/etc. and getting their data siphoned as a bonus.
What are you talking about? Russia has effectively been blocked from the west while when the United States invaded Iraq nothing happened. Europe trades with the US like nothing ever happened while Russia will never return to what it was before without at minimum Putin being gone.
Europe even still trades with Israel when what they have done is Gaza has been declared a genocide by everyone. At the same time Russia can't even take part in the Olympics or the Eurovision song contest.
The west has no moral ground to stand on and hopefully people in the west will start to see that.
You raise a lot of good points here. Another unconfortable truth: Russia is withstanding the sanctions way better than anyone expected. I don't think that they can sustain it forever, but I do think they can make it (at least) another 2-3 years.
I have to give it a try. Will need to check for Anthropic compatible APIs (I know openrouter have one) and see how it works. Will def try it out and post some benchmarks in the repo!
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