I'm skeptical of that claim. I'm not even sure the Israelis would need refueling assets for this. According to the DoD source in the article, the ALBMs were fired from aircraft over the red sea. That's not far from Israel. Depending on the aircraft used and the exact loadout aerial refueling would probably be unnecessary. If it was necessary, Israel has aerial refueling assets of its own: they were able to conduct a strike campaign against Iran, which is much further away, without foreign tanker support.
It just doesn't make sense to me. This seems well within Israel's own capabilities. Why would they even ask another country for support? Just adds diplomatic complexities and increases the risk of the strike getting leaked.
It is my understanding that the UK refuelling system is incompatible with the one the Israelis use. Probe and drogue vs flying boom (or whatever the US/Israeli one is properly called).
That surprises me, I thought all NATO planes were interoperable. Israel isn't part of NATO but their systems are mostly sold by NATO countries. US jets can't use UK tankers?
Each system has its pros and cons, and as a result both methods are widely used. Even the US isn't standardized. The US Air Force I believe largely uses the boom method, while the US Navy largely uses the probe-and-drogue system. Though I believe some aerial tankers are capable of providing fuel via either method.
I think interoperability and modularity as core concepts in military design are "only" a few decades old and as such there's probably plenty of existing systems that haven't needed to be replaced yet, or can't be replaced due to constraint chains that will start fitting into that dogma over time.
if somebody defects against society very seriously, damaging others, i have no problem with stripping them of legal rights. this is in fact exactly the principle underlying imprisonment. constitutional rights are granted by men, not god, in service of shared prosperity; democracy is good insofar as it produces good results, not because it is the intrinsic source of good. there is no higher construct to appeal to, like this platonic ideal of democracy you're gesturing at
Okay so now you’ve set an arbitrary limit with “very seriously” yet you do not define what that means. Is grand theft auto worthy of striping someone’s vote? Is conviction of marijuana possession? Is shop lifting? Is embezzlement? Where’s the line of very serious for you? It won’t be the same for someone else. Do you see the issue inherent with your proposal?
it is arbitrary yes, but the point of democracy is to allow society to codify these subjective questions into rigid laws. I mean, what is the arbitrary line between tough love and child abuse? We have to decide somewhere, and we use democracy to draw that line.
Let's consider the consequences of that line with respect to electoral math. If we consider only serious criminals, e.g. murderers, they constitute a negligible proportion of the population and with high probability the number of election outcomes changed by allowing them to vote or not would be none.
By contrast, if you lump in people convicted of things like drug possession, that is enough people to change the outcome of some elections. And in general it's a strong heuristic that if huge numbers of people are committing a particular crime, it's a result of flaws in the law or society rather than flaws in huge numbers of different people.
So the only time disenfranchising felons matters to the outcome is when you get the line wrong, implying that it shouldn't be done because it shouldn't affect the outcome unless it's being done improperly.
The big issue are perverse incentives here. If felony sentence means no vote, the best thing you can do is to criminalize demographics you dont like as much as possible.
That way you can have pleasure of mistreating them and also prevent them from voting.
Unfortunately you're also engaging in an appeal to universal virtue.
It's weird because your argument doesn't seem to disagree with the notion that people should stay enfranchised, other than you saying specifically people should be disenfranchised for breaking a law. But you're now discussing lines so I guess you mean, literally any crime means no more voting.
A good democracy, and by that I mean useful for humans, isn't good by trying to be perfectly virtuous, it's good because it has recursive mechanisms to maintain its usefulness to humans. The primary mechanism is voting. For that reason I personally believe nothing should be allowed to remove the ability to use that primary mechanism, since the obvious outcome is a fascist is elected, and begins seeking means to strip the right to vote from his opponents, ensuring his perpetual rule. Modern example: I have a little antifa flag on my backpack, and therefore am now considered a terrorist in the USA, and can be arrested and have my right to vote stripped (other democratic mechanisms might prevent this, for now).
What crime would I have committed? Declaring an ideology a terrorist group is nonsensical but possible. Me suddenly being a terrorist crossed that line for you though.
So does speeding. So does operating your motor vehicle without checking your brake lights and turning indicators, every time. So does riding on a horse backwards in a specific town in Texas (don't forget local jurisdictions have their own laws, often insane!)
Well, first, I reject both sidesism because Nazism is an ideology that wants me and my friends to die, and denies our very humanity, and my ideology doesn't really want anyone to die, and absolutely does not deny anyone's humanity.
However, under liberal democracy I personally don't believe the wearing of a swastika should be a crime, though I don't mind if people wearing swastikas are rejected from every interaction they attempt to have, denied business everywhere. The simple banning of nazis memorabilia doesn't seem to be doing anything to stop the rise of nazism in Germany so it seems pointless overall. The Germans had their opportunity to actually apply this anti-nazi law when banning the AFD came up, and they failed to act, so it seems the only thing the law is good for is preventing people from playing Wolfenstein.
Under other forms of society I think the wearing of a swastika should result in the ejection of someone from society entirely.
You're the perfect person to have illustrated this. Someone could've committed no crime, as you're claiming for yourself with your symbol, and you'd still want them ejected because of a symbol.
You are in principle no different to the people you're complaining about. You've just got a smaller set of symbols than they do that you don't like.
I'm not a liberal, I don't worship law as a basis for ethics. Hence why I specified how I think things should work under liberal democracy (not arrested for the symbol) vs how I think things should work under other systems. Under other systems the word "crime" isn't really meaningful, more of concern is what is considered disruptive, violent, antisocial, or harmful to other people, which describes perfectly the wearing of nazi symbology as well as the ideology itself.
Nazis should be ejected from society. Liberal democracy shouldn't have laws that allow arresting people for speech. Those aren't mutually exclusive concepts, that's just an anarchist explaining to you their ideology as well as how they apply their values under the current system.
Tell me, straight faced, that displaying a pair of antifa flags is as bad as displaying a swastika.
I can understand stripping them of the right temporarily while in prison. That's the time in which they pay their debt to society for the harm they're convicted of. Some rights are restricted during that period.
But once it's determined that the debt has been repaid and they're free to live outside and participate in society again, it seems hard to justify them not also participating in the democratic process.
How exactly is taking away an inmates vote "paying me back" for a crime in my community? "Society" isn't actually benefiting here.
Let's go down the list of justifications:
1. Is disenfranchisement rehabilitative justice? No, if anything it's the opposite, preparing them to fail when they get out, promoting ignorance and helplessness instead of engagement in the political process.
2. Is disenfranchisement punitive justice? Not usefully, because the worst criminals won't care anyway, instead it tends to hurt the people who deserve it the least, the people who would otherwise try to work through "the system."
3. Is disenfranchisement a deterrent? No, LOL. Nobody goes: "OK, I was going to commit the crime and risk being caught and shot or jailed for many years, buuuuut then I realized I wouldn't be able to vote, so I'm out."
What's left? Bad reasons, like helping politicians get away with abusive policies.
I know people say this, but I think this framing likely generates anti-prison arguments because it basically doesn’t make any sense. How does being in a cage for X years repay society? It doesn’t. It does keep the harmful person away from society though, which is a very different and useful thing (in many cases, obviously imprisonment for some crimes is dumb).
Being in prison is the punishment. It is not restitution, but as part of the punishment restitution could be imposed. It's hard to pay that restitution while incarcerated though. Some people advocate that just because one has been released from incarceration that they should still not be allowed to vote until any moneys owed have been paid. That could be fines from the court as well as restitution to victims.
> One of the strangest fixations of AWFL metaphysics is on a substance called 'trauma' that they believe is 'stored in the body' in small saclike organs where it constantly threatens to be 'triggered' and erupt out of its ducts. They assert life itself is about 'processing trauma'
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages. Just as the Luddites tried to stop the rise of industrialization that threatened to bring the skills they used to employ to the wider public at lower costs.
The real answer is that immigrants create enough economic demand to be net positive even for Americans, for much the same reason as Americans are generally more prosperous when there's more of us.
Seriously, you live in some dumpy parts of the country and you can have the exclusive rights on being the town cloud guru locked down and in principle get higher wages in a smaller labor pool, but for some strange reason few of us want to do that.
>
Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.
At least if these other Americans are from a different "tribe" than your own, this does not sound like a dumb strategy if people from your own "tribe" are deeply ingrained in programming jobs. :-D
tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why?
> Well it's because by this logic we should just stop Americans from studying for computing jobs as well, that way those who remain will have higher wages.
generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'. major employers routinely violate federal employment law in the pursuit of wage suppression; cursory googling will show you the biggest names you can think of losing lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars for their h1b pipelines, and yet they continually do this.
> tech wages have stagnated since ~2010 despite being one of approximately three productive growth industries. ever wonder why?
Not really, it's well explained by people realizing that wages are relatively high in tech relative to the labor required, which saw lots of college students pursuing computing degrees, the rise of coding bootcamps, and so on.
The industry was growing, but so was the labor pool. You'd not expect wages to continue shooting up in that situation except for micro-segments where the demand for labor grew without labor supply going up (which is something you see in part of the AI field).
> generally speaking, the point of 'having a country' is not 'offering opportunities to talented foreigners at the expense of citizens'
Of course not, but the point of having a country is to improve the general welfare of the citizens of that country, and immigration contributes to that.
It is good for Americans collectively to have easier (i.e. cheaper) access to good software, even if it is worse for the very small subset of the American population that provides it to allow for there to be more software developers.
We saw the field of medicine self-limit admission in that labor pool out of fear that wages would drop, and it has been disastrous for Americans' healthcare even long after the AMA removed the rules acting to limit new medical graduates. We should earn our wages based on the actual value we provide to our fellow Americans, rather than based on artificial rent-seeking behavior.
larger pool + larger pie due to the growth of the economy. You are viewing it as a zero sum game. What's better ? Two jobs with a pool of 3 people, or 2 million jobs with a pool of 2.3 million ?
The US needs immigrants. We need the best and the brightest. Those are the folks starting the new job creating companies. That’s what keeps us so innovative. The H1B is a good gauntlet through which we can get those immigrants. Ended it is shortsighted.
It is not a zero sum game (long term). Immigrants and their children have founded companies that have employed thousands of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth. Stopping what has worked for your country because "…reasons…" is extremely shortsighted.
It is an exception used to justify the rule. There is a very small percentage that founded companies and the rest are impacting negatively the economy.
If you import cheap labor, you hit your economy by lowering the wages in that sector. When you have immigration, there are a few very top talents and a lot of average people coming, the average ones are not a net benefit in most cases. In US migrants don't create huge problems of integration and culture clashes, in Western Europe there are problems with that so the overall impact is negative.
So foriegners should take potential investment money from American citizens because there business will have hired more American citizens than one founded by an American? I think it's more likely that they would prioritize figuring out to import non citizens, especially from the area of the world that they are from.
There is no "…more likely they would prioritize…". Those are nonsense hypotheticals. I am saying that the US today has many companies that were founded and built by immigrants and the children of immigrants in the past. These companies have employed millions of American citizens and created trillions of dollars of wealth for Americans. Speaking of these things as if they are zero sum games is silly and shortsighted.
In group preferences at least in tech is not a hypothetical.
I'm not denying that immigrants haven't employed millions of Americans, but that the investment for creating such companies is limited. If some product space is going to be a duopoly why not have the duopoly have American founders if possible?
the problem is that this data exists somewhere where i have no control over it and was collected without my consent, in clear violation of my constitutional rights. perhaps you have perfect trust in the current and future good faith of the US federal government, but perhaps you can understand why others do not. i would not want the local police keeping copies of all of my emails "just in case", why would it be any better for unaccountable strangers to keep secret dossiers on me?
> LLMs are so, so far from being able to the thinking that goes in a real-time musical improvisation context it's laughable.
have you actually tried any of the commercial AI music generation tools from the last year, eg suno? not an LLM but rather (probably) diffusion, it made my jaw drop the first time i played with it. but it turns out you can also use diffusion for language models https://www.inceptionlabs.ai/
This is exactly my point. The idea that generating music is the sum total of all the cognition that goes on in real time is totally off base. Can we make crappy simulacrums of recorded music? sure.
Can we make a program that could: work the physical instrument, react in milliseconds to other players, create new work off input it's never heard before, react to things in the room, and do a myriad of other things a performer does on stage in real time? Not even remotely close. THAT is what would be required to call it AGI – thinking (ALL the thinking) on par with a highly trained human. Pretending anything else is AGI is nonsense.
Is it impressive? sure. Frighteningly so even. But it's not AGI and the claims that it is are pure huckersterism. They just round the term down to whatever the hell is convenient for the pitch.
Is it? I wasn’t aware of “playing a physical instrument on stage with millisecond response times” as a criterion. I’m also confused by the implication that professional composers aren’t using intelligence in their work.
You’re talking about what is sometimes called “superhuman AGI”, human level performance in all things. But AGI includes reaching human levels of performance across a range of cognitive tasks, not ALL cognitive tasks.
If someone claimed they had invented AGI because amongst other things, it could churn out a fresh, original, good composition the day after hearing new input - I think it would be fair to argue that is human level performance in composition.
Defining fresh, good, original is what makes it composition. Not whether it was done in real time; that’s just mechanics.
You can conceivably build something that plays live on stage, responding to other players, creating a “new work”, using super fast detection and probabilistic functions without any intelligence at all.
yes, i absolutely believe we are less than two years from what you describe (aside from physically manipulating an instrument -- but robotics seems to be quickly picking up pace too). what you are imagining is only a difference in speed, not kind. this is the 'god of the gaps' argument, over and over, every time some insurmountable previous benchmark is shattered -- well, it will never be able to do my special thing
> thinking (ALL the thinking) on par with a highly trained human
you are mistaking means for ends. "an automobile must be able to perform dressage on par with a fine thoroughbred!"
There is no god of the gaps argument being made. The argument is pretty clear. LLMs are at a local optimum that is quite far from the global optimum of actual general intelligence that humans have achieved.
Some like Penrose even argue that the global optimum of general intelligence and consciousness is a fully physical process, yes, but that involves uncomputable physics and thus permanently out of reach of whatever computers can do.
>but that involves uncomputable physics and thus permanently out of reach of whatever computers can do.
And yet is somehow within reach of a fertilised human egg.
It's time to either invoke mystical dimensions of reality separating us from those barbarian computers, or admit that one day soon they'll be able to do intelligence too.
A fertilized egg doesn’t automatically become able to compute stuff.
Understimulated or feral children don’t automatically become geniuses when given more information.
It takes social engineering and tons of accumulated knowledge over the lifespan of the maturation of these eggs. The social and informational knowledge are then also informed by these individuals (how to work and cooperate with each other, building and discovering knowledge beyond what a single fertilized egg is able to do).
This isn’t simply within reach of a fertilized egg based on its biological properties.
I used to believe this but changed my mind when I learned about that Brazilian orphanage for deaf kids. They were kinda left on their own and in the end developed their own signed language.
That was cool to read about. I don't think we're disagreeing here. Humans (fertilized eggs) have many needs and interactions that give rise to language itself.
Current LLMs seem to be most similar to the linguistic/auditory portion of our cognitive system, and with thinking/reasoning models some bits of the executive function. But my guess is that if we want to see awe-inspiring stuff come out of them, we need stuff like motivation and emotion, which doesn't seem to be the direction we're heading towards.
Unprofitable, full of problems. Maybe 1 in 100,000 might be an awe-inspiring genius, given the right training, environment, and other intelligences (so you might have to train way more than 100K models).
There's no magical thinking involved in discussing the limits of computability. That is a well researched area that was involved in the invention of digital computers.
Penrose's argument is interesting and I am inclined to agree with it. I might very well be wrong, but I don't think the accusation of magical thinking is warranted.
I'm arguing that, if a fertilised egg is really capable of fundamentally more than computers will ever be, then the only possible explanation is that the egg posseses extraphysical properties not possessed by any computer. (And I'm strongly hinting that this "explanation" should be considered laughable in this day and age.)
> the only possible explanation is that the egg posseses extraphysical properties
This is wrong. Computability is by no means the same as physicality. That's the whole point and you're just ignoring it to make some strawman accusation of ridiculousness.
Haven't you understood that my argument is precisely that intelligence comprises more than performing computations?
I know you think this is a gotcha moment so I will just sing off on this note. You think physical = computable. I think physical > computable. I understand your argument and disagree with it but you can't seem to understand mine.
It is completely unclear what you think the difference in capability between humans and computers is.
I've tried to follow your reasoning, which AFAICT comes down to a claim that humans possess something connected to incomputability, and computers do not. But now it seems you hold this difference to be irrelevant.
So again: What do you think the difference in capability between humans and computers is?
They're breathtaking party tricks when you first encounter them, but the similarity in outputs soon becomes apparent. Good luck coercing them to make properly sad or angsty songs.
> The built-in TOTP in Bitwarden password manager is only available to premium Bitwarden subscribers, requires you to have a Bitwarden account, and stores your TOTP codes in Bitwarden's servers.
if you selfhost (eg with vaultwarden) you get all the pay features for free
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