Feels like a pretty tidy parallel to luxury beliefs. Luxury activities would fit, especially since some of these are the activity equivalent to the belief.
If a missile passes the long hurdles and hoops built into modern Defence T&E procurement it will only ever be considered out of spec once it fails.
For a good portion of platforms they will go into service, be used for a decade or longer, and not once will the design be modified before going end of life and replaced.
If you wanted to progressively iterate or improve on these platforms, then yes continual updates and investing in the eradication of tech debt is well worth the cost.
If you're strapping explosives attached to a rocket engine to your vehicle and pointing it at someone, there is merit in knowing it will behave exactly the same way it has done the past 1000 times.
Neither ethos in modifying a system is necessarily wrong, but you do have to choose which you're going with, and what the merits and drawbacks of that are.
Unfortunately standard practice for LAPD is to engage in a dangerous police chase along with the helicopter, not to simply follow with a helicopter.
They don't really use them for hit and run. How could they? Think about how fast that crime occurs and how much time will pass between that incident and vectoring a helicopter, which might be tied up on other work.
Less than 20% of hit and run cases are even solved in California (1). I'm sure the rate is even lower in a city like LA.
It does, but I would be very surprised if the LAPD knew its place or cared to keep it there to prevent it from wandering into places that are totally unnecessary and expensive invasions of our privacy.
I'll be honest, I like the way Claude defaults to relentless positivity and affirmation. It is pleasant to talk to.
That said I also don't think the sycophancy in LLM's is a positive trend. I don't push back against it because it's not pleasant, I push back against it because I think the 24/7 "You're absolutely right!" machine is deeply unhealthy.
Some people are especially susceptible and get one shot by it, some people seem to get by just fine, but I doubt it's actually good for anyone.
I hate NOTHING quite the way how Claude jovially and endlessly raves about the 9/10 tasks it "succeeded" at after making them up, while conveniently forgetting to mention it completely and utterly failed at the main task I asked it to do.
That reminds me of the West Wing scene s2e12 "The Drop In" between Leo McGarry (White House Chief of Staff) and President Bartlet discussing a missile defense test:
LEO
[hands him some papers] I really think you should know...
BARTLET
Yes?
LEO
That nine out of ten criterion that the DOD lays down for success in these
tests were met.
BARTLET
The tenth being?
LEO
They missed the target.
BARTLET
[with sarcasm] Damn!
LEO
Sir!
BARTLET
So close.
LEO
Mr. President.
BARTLET
That tenth one! See, if there were just nine...
It does make me wonder if people are running very boring polite websites that can suddenly do very not boring or polite things if you know how to ask the right way over an onion address.
Surely I can't be the only one to think of this right?
In fact dozens of US spies and informants were killed or imprisoned when a secret communications network was exposed doing just that. I wish I bookmarked a better source, it described that the HTML for the portal was reused on every site, so once it was discovered on one site, everyone using it was burned.
Here's one article that alludes to it re: CIA informants in Iran, but I seem to remember China killing US spies and it just not making the news at all
"an analysis by two independent cybersecurity specialists found that the now-defunct covert online communication system that Hosseini used – located by Reuters in an internet archive – may have exposed at least 20 other Iranian spies and potentially hundreds of other informants operating in other countries around the world.
This messaging platform, which operated until 2013, was hidden within rudimentary news and hobby websites where spies could go to connect with the CIA. Reuters confirmed its existence with four former U.S. officials."
>WebTunnel is a censorship-resistant pluggable transport designed to mimic encrypted web traffic (HTTPS) inspired by HTTPT. It works by wrapping the payload connection into a WebSocket-like HTTPS connection, appearing to network observers as an ordinary HTTPS (WebSocket) connection. So, for an onlooker without the knowledge of the hidden path, it just looks like a regular HTTP connection to a webpage server giving the impression that the user is simply browsing the web.
I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?
Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).
I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:
