China is the world’s largest fossil fuel importer, so this is a case where their economic incentives align with global environmental trends. I suspect they would be trying to do this regardless of whether global warming were a problem. And now that they’re heavily invested in green tech manufacturing, it’s kind of a self-fulfilling feedback loop - they have an interest in promoting electrification worldwide.
If this turns out to be true, which seems increasingly likely day by day, this will be the humanitarian price against which the rest of the campaign will be measured. The US will have ceded much of the moral high ground they claimed in avenging the slaughter of innocent protesters.
I hope you're right, and one day we don't read 20 or 30 years from now the biography of a terrorist, and it starts out with their experience being the sibling of a child injured at one of these schools.
The IRGC's strategy in this conflict has been to blow up civilian targets in nearly all nations surrounding it.
It appears the IRGC has chosen civilian targets (eg: high rise apartments, airports, oil fields) on purpose, but if not, then they have such poor technology that their strikes are random.
Killing people in 11 nations to put pressure on the two nations that actually attacked you is a good demonstration of the Iranian regime's morals.
If the USA or Israel bombed this school, it clearly was an accident, since the only party it benefits is the Iranian regime.
Although the UAE and everyone else Iran has attacked may not have directly attacked Iran, they are hosting the American infrastructure making the attacks possible.
I can understand why Iran considers most gulf states complicit.
This story is now being carried by WSJ.. the likelihood that it’s real only seems to grow each day. If true, this will be the humanitarian price the war is measured against, assuming the casualties don’t grow further.
I can’t argue with you there. The Pentagon’s silence is deafening; I only want to caution myself as much as anyone against jumping to conclusions. It may be AI, it may be bad intelligence, it may be Russian counterintelligence, it may be an IRGC false flag, it may be a little bit of all of the above.
The key difference is that Anthropic aired their disagreement with the DoD publicly, and the DoD is not going to work with a company that tries to exert any amount of control over their relationship via the public sphere. Same goes for Trump.
I think Anthropic knew full well that by publishing their disagreement, it would sink the deal and relationship, and I think they also calculated (correctly) that that act of defiance would get them good publicity and potentially peel away some of OpenAIs user base. I think this profit incentive happened to align with their morals, and now here we are.
This reminds me of the Al-Ahli hospital incident in Gaza, when a mysterious explosion at a hospital was immediately blamed on an Iraeli strike - first by Hamas, then by the international press. A precise death toll was immediately available: 500 killed. Israel urged caution as they investigated, but were ignored.
Eventually, it was established that 1) the casualty number had been a fabrication, 2) the explosion was in the parking lot, 3) it was NOT caused by an Israeli strike, but by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that had fell short.
Soon the press was forced to issue corrections - New York Times [1] , Le Monde [2], BBC [3]...
This incident looks VERY similar. Which is not surprising, since Hamas was trained in information warfare by the IRGC. Note that Al Jazeera (the media arm of Qatar, who funds Hamas and hosts their leaders in Doha) is enthusiastically amplifying this story with no apparent effort to cross-examine Iran's official source.
I predict that this story will turn out to be fabricated as well.
What the comment fails to mention is that Al-Shifa hospital was ultimately destroyed by Israeli forces, with grave civilian casualties, and no Hamas tunnels ever found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Shifa_Hospital
The Wikipedia article you link says that Hamas tunnels were found under the hospital, and did have entrances near the hospital, but that no proof was provided that they were using the hospital and nearby tunnels as a 'command and control' centre.
My comment is about Al-Ahli, not Al-Shifa. Those are two different hospitals.
> Al-Shifa hospital was ultimately destroyed by Israeli forces
It was damaged by a series of battles between Hamas and IDF, because Hamas militants embedded themselves within it - like they embedded themselves within all civilian infrastructure. That is the reality of urban war against a terrorist group.
> with grave civilian casualties
Hamas alleged grave civilian casualties. Israel contests it. Again, just like the Al-Ahli incident, Hamas rushes to publish suspiciously precise casualties and reframes an urban battle as a genocidal massacre; naive newsrooms uncritically publish it; wikipedia editors quotes it; then people with an axe to grind endlessly reference it in online arguments like this one.
With Al-Ahli, we got lucky. Independent evidence made it impossible to ignore that Hamas was lying. In many other cases, it is impossible to independently verify how many civilians were truly killed in this or that battle. You have to either believe the IDF, or Hamas.
> and no Hamas tunnels ever found
Al-Shifa was controlled by Hamas and used as a military facility. Hostages were held there. After the ceasefire, Hamas used it as a jail and torture center for Palestinian dissidents.
Or do you believe Israel sent troops inside a hospital in a warzone, at great risk to their safety, to destroy a random hospital with no military value?
The Palestinian rocket story was never confirmed, and it seems unlikely that the rockets from PIJ were the cause. Their ballistic trajectory did not match with the hospital, and most or all their fuel had burned [1].
I recommend you read the whole text, it's quite short.
In other words, the new "established facts" about Al-Ahli are also questionable, and part of Israeli propaganda. It remains to be seen what the truth is in either case.
The fact of the matter is. Eventually Israel destroyed a fuckton of hospitals and schools in Palestine, on purpose. So this particular story in itself does not really matter.
If this spreads into a broader conflict, it remains to be seen whether Europe sticks tightly with that block. They certainly won’t align with Russia, but they may be tied so closely to China economically that they can’t afford to be dragged into a direct conflict with them. I could see a situation where they try to remain non—aligned.
Given that we now that to deploy troops to prevent the US from invading Greenland.
I'd agree, it's not a given that the US can count on Europe in a conflict with China.
But probably Europe wouldn't be trading with China or anything.
It's just given the treatment of the US administration, the US probably can't build a volunteer coalition like I Iraq - unless there is an attack on US mainland.
Yeah… turns out you have to keep a certain balance of domestic industries to keep 350 million people employed in a capacity where they don’t want to burn down the whole system. But that would be socialism.
Now you’ve got the people whose jobs suck and want their old jobs to come back vs the people whose jobs suck and just want to dispense with the illusion that everyone needs to be employed. Either way, the money-generating corporate automaton needs to cough up some of its profits to fund people’s existence. If everyone could just agree on how, maybe they’d get somewhere.
Meanwhile, I will continue to cling to my slice of the corporate automoton pie.
knowledge cutoff staying the same likely means they didn't do a new pre-train. We already knew there were plans from deepmind to integrate new RL changes in the post training of the weights. https://x.com/ankesh_anand/status/2002017859443233017
This keeps getting repeated for all kinds of model releases, but isn’t necessarily true. It’s possible to make all kinds of changes without updating the pretraining data set. You can’t judge a model’s newness based on what it knows about.
I suspect this may be the case. There’s inherent inefficiency in having a human forced to translate everything into context for the LLM. You don’t get the full benefit until you allow it to be fully plugged in.
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