@simonpratt
Political scientist at the University of Melbourne. Formerly of other places. Research: war, intelligence, innovation, and normative change in international politics. Cat paparazzo. He/Him 🇨🇦🏳️🌈✡️
A very slippery slope. This expansion is part of the AI logic, as I explain in my text on military AI governance: "once a system is sufficiently ubiquitous in any context, the question shifts from:'should I use this system', to 'how can I use the system more widely'" blogs.icrc.org/law-and-poli...
pretty convinced at this point that Joss is just an Omelas trap, except instead of paradise in exchange for a tortured child you get mid-plus to very good genre television in exchange for an unknown number of victimized actresses
No, thank you!
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Reuters Exclusive
"U.S. military investigators believe it is likely that U.S. forces were responsible for an apparent strike on an Iranian girls' school."
"The strike would rank among the worst cases of civilian casualties in decades of U.S. conflicts in the Middle East."
You do.
Shameful on multiple levels. She whitewashes Hezbollah’s crimes and invokes well known, established antisemitic tropes. A harmful disservice to our people. We deserve better representation than what she is constantly offering up. It’s also intellectually unsound.
www.middlebury.edu/institute/ac...
Man. Why did the FBI bother interviewing my family and 10 years of people I’d ever met and literally interrogating me over some weed usage in college when I could have just been a 19-year old with a ChatGPT account and gotten into the SCIF at work with no one watching
Ugh what’s the point of being in Switzerland if you’re gonna sell users out to the FBI anyway
It's good to see investigations of this coming from more reliable outlets than the somewhat notoriously problematic MEE.
“Academics studying the field say AI is collapsing the planning time required for complex strikes – a phenomenon known as “decision compression”, which some fear could result in human military and legal experts merely rubber-stamping automated strike plans.”
www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Given that his administration leaks like a sieve I think we'd know pretty quick
“The IDF “in close cooperation with the U.S. Army, worked for thousands of hours to build as valuable and extensive a target bank as possible,” they said in a statement shortly after operations began.”
Would be interesting to see how this is similar or different from the interlocking AI systems the IDF used for their targeting in Gaza during the very intensive opening phase of the war
Headline of a Q&A in New Yorker formatting Headline: A panicked middle-aged man refuses to tell me directions to the bathroom. Subhed: Please, I just have to pee. I'm in a hurry. By Isaac Chotiner March 4, 2026
Excuse me. Oh, God. Oh, no. Holy shit. Get away from me. I was wondering if you knew where the bathrooms are. Look, I'm ... it's not a crime to scroll through your high school girlfriend's Instagram account. We remained friends after high school! I was at her wedding! It's only natural to see how she's doing.
I'm in a bit of a hurry, and I'm afraid that if I choose the wrong corridor, I'll be late for my train. I think they're down that way, but I'm actually from out of town. Please stop talking to me.
Real quick, though. I agree that it's natural to be interested in an old friend, but aren't you afraid about the message you might be sending by liking a picture of her at the beach from 2015? If that did happen, and I'm only going off your word, it was probably an accident. They put the ... scroll bars or whatever ... close to the thumbs up button. People have been complaining about that for years. I've been complaining about that for years.
Three days into a war of choice with no public support, the billions are adding up quickly: "Pentagon may seek around $50 billion supplemental budget for Middle East operations." $50 billion!
www.reuters.com/business/aer...
This is good
Anthropic and Palantir tech was used by the US military to target lethal strikes in Iran www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
LLM prose is everywhere now. How did it happen so quickly? A 25-year-old essay about Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy accidentally diagnosed the whole thing. new post
1. A short thread on a Bluesky phenomenon that might be described as "They are a dead-eyed cultist who must be cast out lest the heresy take root!" OP has blocked me for mocking them - I'd usually obscure their name but since they themselves were quote-dunking to demand someone else be blocked ...
The level of motivated reasoning required for some pundits to convince themselves that Netanyahu, Adelson, et al. did not actually understand their own interests when they strongly favored Trump to win is beyond my comprehension
One little detail at the end of the piece to note, if he is picked
So this would be a leader whose father, mother, wife, and one of his sons were all killed in U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on his country
I’m sure he’ll be eager to compromise
The proliferation of blood and soil arguments about who belongs on a land has become seriously disturbing. Even those on the left are adopting such narratives.
My point is that this is not a war Hezbollah wants to fight, and resuming rocket attacks legitimates Israeli advances in a way that the previous situation didn't.
I wrote on whether Gulf states are running out of interceptors, which they deny. Their day 1/2 consumption was v high relative to estimated pre-war stocks & annual production, but Iranian launches seem to be slowing. AD integration also proving an issue. www.economist.com/middle-east-...
On the one hand, there's a real "wheels coming off the train" level of chaos out of the Trump administration right now.
On the other, he's president for 35 more months, and he's clearly established already that he considers Congress superfluous even under bicameral Republican control.
"The premise of the war rests on a profound misreading of the Islamic Republic...Iran’s formative experience was the 8-year conflict with Iraq, when it was diplomatically isolated and militarily outgunned, yet survived through a combination of ideological mobilisation and asymmetrical adaptation."
I think the point is that he's a pliable figure whom the IRGC can control
And what, pray tell, is that supposed to achieve?
Iran has like 10 million Kurds, a deeply oppressed regional minority. We expect their militias to defeat the Iranian regime and the IRGC (even if it‘s battered) and then rule over 50 million Persians?
