I love gimp, it is the only “heavyweight” image editor I ever learned to use, and that choice has saved me so much money in software subscriptions! Thankyou maintainers!
I love the contrast between this and one of the next comments:
>In my honest opinion, GIMP is a horrific piece of software.
Both are absolutely true!
GIMP has been, for many years, the best free graphics software available. At the same time, it's so horribly anti-user (and anti-usability) that if it wasn't free software, the company behind it would have gone bankrupt a long time ago.
"Anti-user' and "anti-usability" are far too harsh. Outdated, yes. A product of 1990s-era UX design, absolutely. But every changelog has some mention of a UX improvement, and actually using the product at version 3.0 is, dare I say, pretty enjoyable once you unlearn things and pretend it's Photoshop 6.0. Single-window mode by default helps a ton.
I have used far worse software from commercial outfits. You would not believe how much aerospace and specialized CAD stuff still uses Motif and doesn't support scroll wheels or extra mouse buttons.
GIMP UI was always bad whereas Paintshop Pro (don't if you remember) and later Paint.NET each had a UI that you'd be up and using without thinking twice.
Don't sleep on the command palette (`/`). It's a really useful tool when even if you don't know _where_ things are, you still know what they are called.
My biggest beef is the UI constantly goes through massive changes at each release. Options moved, mysterious new configs, literally it is as if you're using an entirely new piece of software every few years.
For those of you who daily drive GIMP, well you'll be up to speed quickly. For those of us that use it once a month or so, for a day, it quickly becomes exceptionally annoying.
I'm happy if the UI isn't the best. I frankly don't care what the software looks like, or if the GUI is purdy. I just want it to work, work well, and frankly that menu items don't magically disappear, get merged into other sub-menus, or that now you can suddenly close a tool, and never ever get it back without finding some obscure menu item to re-activate it.
And if you use GIMP frequently, and are about to say "But, that's easy, you just..." then you're not a casual user.
There are more casual users than you think.
(this goes right up there with devs who change config options in files from option= to Option=, and configs= to config=.
I mean, leave it alone. Forever.
"Updated config options to bring them inline with StudlyCaps" or whatever turns my day into a ragefest filled anxiety attack on upgrade.
"Changed all config names to US English from British spelling." What?! OK b112, you now have to deal.
It's funny to hear that, because we get a large number of complaints that we haven't changed GIMP's interface at all from 2.10 to 3.0 and that's why we're "failing".
We try to be respectful of existing users (and again, we get lots of complaints that doing so "holds GIMP back"). If you have some examples of massive changes you've dealt with (and from what version to what version), I'm happy to look into them further.
Please finally implement pie menus, like Blender has had for many years. There have been various pie menu implementations for GTK for decades, and it's always been easy to roll your own if you suffer from NIH so much that you refuse to look at or use anything anyone else has ever done.
I believe GIMP's deep seated NIH syndrome, and refusal to look at or acknowledge anything else, and lack of respect for users' requests and usability itself, are GIMP's actual deep seated problems (which the Blender project so successfully doesn't self-sabotage itself with), and I have no reason to believe it's ever going to change, because it's so deeply baked into the GIMP "culture", if you can call it that.
Photoshop doesn't have pie menus, so if you must, think of pie menus as a way to be even less like Photoshop, if that is what mission drives you instead of usability. But I think your design goals and motivations should focus more on usability and supporting users than simply spiting Photoshop.
But once you finally get tired of spiting Photoshop at the expense of usability, then why don't you finally declare Mission Accomplished, and move on to trying for once to be as good as Blender's user interface and responsiveness to user's needs?
>One example is that Blender embraced the use of pie menus, and Gimp ignored them. The Gimp team is just not open to outside ideas, and gets really annoyed when users of other tools request features from those tools that Gimp refuses to support, and reacts by digging in deeper and clinging to their bad design decisions out of frustration and spite. A really sad culture of NIH and 4Q2.
>In general and with many other things, Gimp could have been so much better and easier to use, but they systematically and spitefully ignored their user's needs and requests about so many things, while Blender did just the opposite, listened to users and improve the user interface and mouse bindings, instead of being stubborn and parochial about it. [...]
>[...] All of these ideas could be applied to Gimp too, of course, but I've found the Blender developers to be much more open to entertaining other people's ideas and contributions about user interface design than the Gimp developers, who have been historically NIH-limited and stubborn (especially about changing the name to something less offensive to the general public). At least Blender already supports pie menus well, and changed the default mouse bindings in response to user demand, and has made huge strides in usability lately. At this point I think it would be much easier to just add a great image editor to Blender, integrated with its video editor, than try to change the minds of the Gimp developers. [...]
The one saving grace one might find is that a lot of people trying it already had some experience with e.g. Photoshoot and are already influenced by it. And just because Photoshop does it one way doesn't mean it's the way. But honestly, no, it's just bad bad. Thanks for all the hard work for free, but it's just really difficult to use[1]. It would've been better to do less.
[1]gave up on it 10 years ago, so don't know, maybe things changed
I think that the weakness doesn't lie within GIMP itself.
Imagine that you are a car hobbyist. You know your way around a wrench.
But then you step in to an F1 garage or even your local repair shop run by that one guy who inheritted his father's shop in the 50s and has thrown a tool away since the Reagan administration.
It's going to be possible for you to do everything that you know how to do, and even to learn some things along the way, but you're not going to be anywhere near as efficient as you were in your garage where the only tools you have are the ones you regularly use and you know the locations (perhaps roughly) of everything.
The same could be applied across any number of domains. Knowing your way around and ambulance isn't going to go as far as you might think it would in a surgical suite.
Knowing some python isn't going to get your pulls accepted in Canonical, Debian, etc.
Knowing your professors preffered citation methodology isn't going to gaurantee academically succesful searching of The Library of Congress or even the New York Public Library.
etc etc etc
GIMP represents nearly the totality of knowledge relating to image manipulation, and you can lay it out to perfectly match your personal knowledge and workflow, but it simply is not possible to have it automatically laid out to perfectly match everyone's workflow.
Could it be more intuitive? Perhaps, but moving things around now is liable to break the workflows of tens of thousands who have learned to use and love GIMP the way that it currently is.
For instance, having only ever used GIMP as my primary image manipulation tool, I can and do have some of the same complaints against [insert other software] that people routinely level against GIMP. The last time I tried to use Photoshop I spent more time in tutorials and help pages than doing actual image editting because Photoshop is as unfamiliar to me as GIMP is to a Photoshop user.
I wonder what would it take o implement layout compatibilty packs , to allow the user at install to select which layout they are most comfortable with , v2.0 , Photoshop compatible , stable or experimental. All calling into the same base.
Of course such an effort most likeky would need to be a paid effort fulltime rather than volunteerr work.
It always felt sad to me it never reached the usablility/familiarity that Blender has.
So basically, you could download plug-ins, themes, shortcut presets, etc, directly into GIMP. We have a lot of pieces done - we just need someone to focus on it to finish.
I get where you’re coming from but as somebody who has bounced between three different major NLE’s, a lot of these tools are not radically different from each other.
The differences are pretty substantial sometimes don’t get me wrong, but your previous experience usually carries over in more ways than it doesn’t and you’re able to get up and running with like…80% of proficiency you had on your preferred program after a month I’d say.
GIMP isn’t quite that smooth of a transition and you can feel it. I don’t think it’s necessarily a fault or something they should spend resources addressing, but it is noticeable
Nobody is happy about killing civilians. But Khamenei did more than that every day he was alive. Personally I feel there is some amount of immediate civilian casualty that is worth putting a stop to continuous suffering.
It's easy to excuse the collateral damage of people you will never meet, just remember that this reasoning has unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people, many kids, and it makes you sound like a ghoul.
Hope to hell that you or anyone you care about isn't on the receiving end of such sentiments.
I remember that the alternative has also unleashed hell on Earth for countless innocent people.
At some point, you have to take the path that offers at least some hope for the future. To turn into something that has lost all hope - there is no fixing that.
While this is a minor point; whether or not it was an Iranian misfire doesn't move the moral responsibility away from the invaders. Unless the IRGC took advantage of the chaos to purposefully hit the school (seems unlikely) then the entire situation was teed up by the external aggression and can still pretty reasonably be blamed on them.
Why does that seem unlikely? It makes people argue that the price is not worth it. After killing thousands of protesters you think they would shy away from killing some dozens of kids?
If you try to shield your armed forces using children, and then accidentally kill them because you used them as a shield, you can't blame someone else.
... I'm just going of Wikipedia here but it seems to have been a standard small city [0]. Attempting to educate Iranians in Iranian cities isn't really trying to shield armed forces. Is the expectation here that Iran should send their students out into the wilderness to make it more politically convenient for US/Israeli to launch unannounced strikes on them?
Apart from the fact that Iran is a bad place to be right now it actually looks like a pleasant city to visit. Sounds like they have lots of fruit, warm weather and have some interesting history vis a vis the Mongols. Very middle eastern.
Instead of looking at the entire city, just look at the google maps data for proximity of their armed forces to their school.
Look, maybe it was a school specifically for the children of army personnel, but that's a long shot. From the geolocation data, the school was right at their missile launch site.
They had choices.
Locate the school or the launch site elsewhere, for one.
Evacuate the school before they tried to launch munitions, for another.
Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Since you know more than the rest of the world about this, please update Wikipedia with a reliable source for your claim as has already been requested by admins here[1].
> Weird that you're so delighted to shift the blame for the tragedy of children being blown up in school, even more so that you're relying on unsubstantiated claims to do it.
Where in my message does it seem that I am delighted?
No doubt the truth will eventually come out, what I have seen is that the school was sited unusually close to an Iran launch site.
You can judge me all you want for "being delighted", whatever the hell that means, but I'm not advocating that schools be used as shields for rocket launchers, am I?
Okay, I get it - for you this is a laughing matter; your goal is something other than discussion.
But I gotta know - you are talking about a regime that had no problem gunning down thousands of innocent citizens in the streets just a month ago, why are you so sure that they won't use other innocents as shields for their soldiers?
It's not "easy" but it remains true. We can play the moral-decision game and I'll ask you whether killing one child is justified to save 5,000,000. If you answer "yes" then from that point it's just about agreeing on numbers.
What is the alternative you propose? Just to give a hypothetical-but-realistic example, let’s presume that khamenei’s continued existence results in 100 civilian deaths per day. Under that assumption, what one-time cost would you accept to end his life?
Whether or not one would accept deaths of civilians to get rid of Khamenei, I don't think anyone should accept a school full of children being blown up for no obvious reason. If there was somehow a reason why Khameni could not have killed without attacking that school, then those reasons should be plainly spelled out and evidence presented. As things stand with the limited information we have now, it just looks like a war crime with no strategic upside.
I think you’re right that it would be a puppet state under trump. But in three years it will be a puppet state under somebody else! And maybe that somebody would relinquish the strings.
It’s no guarantee, but it is a good opportunity. I’m half-Persian, and certainly not as closely connected as others, but it’s hard to see this as a bad thing. There’s a possibility I can go visit my family in Iran as a result of this. I haven’t had a good chance for that in like 4 years
Removal of the head of state is often a turning point. Either a regime becomes more extreme or the government collapses due to in-fighting as individuals attempt to gain control.
I would hold back on any hopes until we see how the current government handles things. Intervention from other countries does not always lead to positive outcomes.
> I can't think of any time when bombing the shit out of a country and killing their leader has actually worked.
Japan? Although their leader wasn't killed, but same logic. The more civilized a country is the easier it is to reform them into a good state, and Iran is a pretty civilized and structured nation, the dictatorship is the main issue.
Most people in Iran want a democracy and are capable of running it, you just have to let them. That isn't the case in most of these dictatorships that lacks such structure, but it is there in Iran.
I disagree. After the bombing, the Emperor himself broadcasted a surrender message [0] to the people of Japan. The occupation was also for more lighter than in Germany. Japan had full control of its administration and its government continued to operate. In that context whether we like or not, it very much worked.
The American occupation of Japan may have been less punitive than Germany’s, but it was arguably more invasive: Japan’s postwar Constitution was largely drafted by Americans, with minimal Japanese input. By contrast, West Germany’s Basic Law was written by Germans themselves under Allied constraints.
Japanese army officers stormed the emperor's palace and placed him under house arrest in an attempt to prevent him from broadcasting that surrender message. This was after the second bomb, a whole lot of them still had fight left in them.
Yes, this is an underrated point and why I’m holding out hope for a positive outcome. I’m convinced that, before the revolution, Iran was on the same trajectory as European monarchies that had become democracies. At that point, countries like Denmark had been democracies for less than 75 years.
And then France sent Khomeini back to Iran on a chartered Air France 747 & stifled that. France also built Dimona nuclear plant in Israel in 1963 and then tested multiple times nuclear weapons in Algeria from 1960-1966 in the Algerian Sahara & mountains & allowed Israel to observe these explosions.
From my understanding, it wasn't the bombing that motivated Japan to surrender even though this is commonly taught, it was the recent Soviet declaration of war and fear of invasion/occupation.
> Has there been a regime which has collapsed due to an external strike like this where it hasn't resulted in some decades long civil war nightmare?
People have already mentioned the post WW2 occupation of Germany and Japan.
There’s also the Roman occupation of Greece (and other Hellenistic territories), and even perhaps the Norman occupation of England. Not that either of these didn’t cause some strife and rebellion in both cases, but still there was a concerted effort to build up both territories.
The party was forbidden, the symbols were forbidden. They hung the main leaders, quite publicly. It became a huge taboo, the ideology effectively died (for decades). A strong democracy was established, older democratic parties took over.
Yes a bunch of previous nazis made it back into power and politics, but they didn't call themselves nazis or acted like nazis. But also, the country as a whole took a very different path after wwii.
>I can't think of any time when bombing the shit out of a country and killing their leader has actually worked.
This happened just weeks ago in Venezuela, though in that case the removal was by abduction and foreign trial. (The U.S. struck Venezuela and abducted its President at the time, bringing him to trial in the United States. I've just now asked ChatGPT for a research report on his current status, you can read it here[1].)
This led to immediate and definitive regime change, the U.S. now has an excellent relationship with the new President of Venezuela.
Naval blockade and the military capacity to simply siege you from afar. Tactically , why America didn’t do more of that is … well who knows. I mean, what if we literally parked our carrier group off of Iraq and sieged them until
A) Put in a government we like
B) Population behave or quality of life will be bad, you see, the simple life is difficult with cruise missiles coming at you
If that’s as effective as sending 250k ground troops (which … actually wasn’t effective), one could make the observation that Trump is a military genius.
Someone please talk sense to me because I cannot believe what I am saying.
Trump seems to have thought it through a bit. Recent post:
>...This is the single greatest chance for the Iranian people to take back their Country. We are hearing that many of their IRGC, Military, and other Security and Police Forces, no longer want to fight, and are looking for Immunity from us. As I said last night, “Now they can have Immunity, later they only get Death!” Hopefully, the IRGC and Police will peacefully merge with the Iranian Patriots, and work together as a unit to bring back the Country to the Greatness it deserves...
The merge peacefully or die thing may motivate them.
Uh huh, and if you are an Iranian Policeman are you more concerned that the funny orange man yelling on the tv/phone is going to get you, or the mob forming outside your window? They might see it in their personal self interest to stay lock step with the former regime as a better form of self preservation than just surrendering to the population they've been abusing. It's not like the U.S. can offer them any actual immunity lmao.
I'd probably think about which side is going to end up in power and try to get along with whoever that is. The US's demonstrated willingness to kill the leader will probably have an influence there.
“Which side”? What other side is there in Iran? You think there’s some shadow government that can realistically topple the mullahs from within? The only way the Shah comes back is with US boots on the ground, which would be a disaster for other reasons. Until that happens this is just reckless action that makes the regime even more radical than it already is.
There are a lot of well educated people in iran who were unhappy. Iran killed more than 30,000 protesters last month, and there are who knows how many more left.
only time will tell. I give iran much better than average odds this is for the better. Though the average is really bad: bad results would not surprise me.
Few of Iran's neighbours are in a position to do this.
Afghanistan? No. Lacks means, motive, or organisation.
Iraq? Probably not, despite past history of conflict, too much internal strife.
Turkmenistan? Very unlikely.
Pakistan? Has the capability perhaps, but little motive AFAIU.
Azerbaijan, Aremenia, Turkey? Again, unlikely.
The most likely beligerents would be Israel (already involved, but not seeking occupation in all likelihood), and Saudi Arabia. But both those also seem unlikely. Both benefit by a weakened and submissive Iran, but occupation would be an extraordinary undertaking and highly problematic.
Non-bordering countries might be considerations (India likely tops that list) but again the upsides seem slight given costs.
It's likely the regime will be denied use of heavy weaponry by the US and Israel. This means any actual popular revolt in some sense could be supported by massive air power.
Without doxxing yourself, why were you unable to visit? I have known Persian expats a few times in my life, and they were always able to visit without issue.
If they have said anything against the regime on social media, they would be wise not to visit. I personally know many Persian expats who meet family in Turkey and have been anxious about going back.
Honestly I’m not sure I should say, sorry. Recent years have been worse than normal though, with lots of human rights violations, protests, protestors being tortured/killed, foreign nationals being held in prison/killed, etc.
A friend of mine, EU member, hasn't been able to visit USA because he was cricizing us gov (under BIdden), still not allowed. Ban and censorship isn't specific to Iran, many western nations love it too.
There’s a difference between the ban where they don’t give you visa vs. censorship where they disappear you if you publicize your dissent. One must not conflate.
If Israel & the US prevail, Israel will treat Iran as the do their other neighbors, bombing them whenever they feel like it and murdering your relatives there. Take a look at Syria where they installed the head of Al-Qaeda/HTS. The IDF has carried out 600 attacks there since 2024 till present. They have attacked the following areas since 2023: Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, Syria & Yemen.
It is too early to know what "Venezuela-style cooperation" looks like. It hasn't even been 6 months since the US kidnapped Maduro; the base case is that Venezuela's leadership does more or less what they were going to do anyway under US diplomatic pressure.
The US actually did something fairly similar in Iran; Trump had Soleimani blown up back in 2020. As we can see from the present situation, it failed to influence Iran in ways that the US thought were acceptable. It is rare for assassinations to have positive geopolitical ramifications.
Adding Iranian oil back to the market will lower prices everywhere, including Russia. I'm not so sure the extra-heavy Venezuelan oil will be affected as much.
India used to use Venezuelan crude before the 2019 sanctions [0][1]
India only shifted to using Russian oil in 2022 [2] after Venezuelan [3] and Iranian [4] oil sanctions were enacted, which was when both began increasing engagement with China.
It's a similar story for South Korea [5] and Japan [6].
This helps reduce prices for ONG, as India is shifting back to Venezuelan crude which gives slack which South Korea and Japan can take advantage of, as India, Japan, and South Korea represent 3 of the 5 largest oil consumers globally.
Reminder: extra heavy oil means that there is more processing required to get useful materials out of it, which in turn becomes higher operational cost. So, if Iranian oil entered the market, prices would go down making Venezuelan oil non competitive (I believe the break even price for Venezuelan oil was close to 80$). At this moment the numbers don't add up to make companies go back into Venezuela given the price, uncertainty and past expiriences.
In Romania it took some 10 years to reach some degree of functional democracy after the fall of communism and the execution on Ceaușescu, who coincidentally, just returned from the crowning of Khamenei, while learning, dictator-to-dictator, how to suppress a revolution: 1006 killed, though most of them not by the initial "Revolutionary Guards" reprisal but in the semi-civil war that followed.
And that in a country/region without Islamic radicals trying to take over. So far, apart from Israel, no Middle East country has managed to function as a democracy. Turkey, the only Muslim majority who has the faintest chance of joining the European Union, only keeps stuff under control due to the army enforcing a secular state, which the liberal patsies in the West can't take, because authoritarianism is bad and diversity in accepting radical Islam creeping into our homeland is our strength.
As another Iranian living the West, I wish he would have been captured alive and stood trial.
He should have answered for every single drop of blood on his hands.
My 21 year old cousin was captured during the Mahsa uprising, she was sent to Evin prison, tortured for months. After she was released, we brought her to Canada and she was hospitalized for over a year. She will never be able to live a normal life again.
Well he’s been slain like the dog that he was, alongside some family members - same as the families of those who were slain and tortured on his theocratic watch. Perhaps this is good evidence that Allah is just, even if Allah’s justice has to be delivered by the hands of the Israelis.
It's fascinating to me that this decision was set for 5 pm ET on a friday, and I think it may be more responsible to set big deadlines like this for a time while the stock market is open. I imagine this will negatively impact confidence in the US economy at large, and stock markets will reflect that. But since the market is closed, we'll have to wait till Monday, with the tension/anticipation of a drop building. If the deadline had been set for say, midday thursday, the market would have responded immediately, but at least you wouldn't have the building anxiety over the weekend. Of course the result wasn't known ahead of time, and I imagine some people will argue that the weekend will give investors time to cool off instead of following their gut reaction. But personally I don't find those arguments very convincing.
Is there a reason that is done, beyond just tradition? I’m genuinely very curious whether there’s a positive, negative, or negligible impact on economic decision making
There are several reasons. Most obviously it's because the markets are closed which keeps immediate panic from affecting stock prices. It's also at the start of the weekend so the idea is that people might be more focused on weekend activities instead of the news. Also, news coverage on the weekend is often reheated stories written during the week meaning that a Friday story is less likely to get picked up.
Right, but these “common sense” reasons aren’t very satisfying, it’s easy to imagine scenarios where they’d be wrong. Eg, this is a pretty significant change of US policy, and I can imagine that the weekend will just allow tension to build. I’m more interested in proper studies
Wow, and the only restrictions Anthropic asked for are (1) no mass domestic surveillance and (2) require human-in-the-loop for killing [1]. Those seem exceptionally reasonable, and even rather weak, lol :|
Anthropic had these conditions in their contract from the very beginning, in contracts negotiated under Biden. It is their actual principled stance, not maneuvering.
Their intention is to turn it against the American people. Hegseth literally wrote a book about eliminating democrats from the US, and this surprises people.
Trump doesn't want another election to happen. He needs some powerful tools to ensure that happens, ie, massive scale ai surveillance and manipulation. Eg, like Xi uses in China. I bet anyone here he starts a war as his excuse
Don’t become numb. They want normal people to be depoliticized, silent, and withdrawn. We’re so much easier to subjugate and exploit that way: hopeless and spineless. They take more and more each day.
In an interview with Zelinsky Trump asks "why haven't you had an election? " Zelensky
: "because we are at war" you can see the idea percolating then. People think I'm a nutter for suggesting there just won't be another election but that's where my money is. I'm waiting for his version of the Gestapo, ICE seems to be a proving ground
An important detail here is that Ukraine's constitution says they can't have an election while they're at war. The US constitution does not say that, and the USA has had elections during wars several times.
You're not a nutter. Trump constantly projects what he's going to do and no one takes him seriously because what he says is so beyond the pale. I explicitly remember the exact instance you're talking about because I thought the same thing as you are thinking.
There will be a sham election, like in Russia, but a sizable number of people will be unable to vote. Trump only need to steal the election in a few key districts
People like married women who changed their name, or foreign sounding people, they will be prevented to vote in 2026. ICE will guard polls to physically make people unable to reach the ballots
Specifically, he would need the US Congress to draft and pass legislation moving the date of the election. I don't know how eager they are, though, to create an unnecessary constitutional crisis.
That's the restrictions for now. New restrictions could be added later or the situation of the world could change where those no longer seem reasonable. The military needs that ability to move fast and not be held back.
Even the most cockeyed reading of history will tell you that it is absolutely vital to the survival of humanity and all that is good on this earth that the US military be tied down and held back.
There are enough idiots involved who "heard about this AI thing" that would demand someone make a Claude-based kill bot. Do not underestimate the disconnect from reality of senior military leadership. They easily forget that everyone who works for them are legally obligated to laugh at their jokes.
Anthropic specifically called out systems "that take humans out of the loop entirely and automate selecting and engaging targets".
I take that to mean they don't want the military using Claude to decide who to kill. As a hyperbolic yet frankly realistic example, they don't want Claude to make a mistake and direct the military to kill innocent children accidentally identified as narco-terrorists.
At least, that's the most charitable interpretation of everything going on. I suspect they are also worried that the sitting administration wants to use AI to help them execute a full autocratic takeover of the United States, so they're attempting to kill one of the world's most innovative companies to set an example and pressure other AI labs into letting their technology be used for such purposes.
I don't know what you're referencing, but it doesn't matter. I judge people by their actions more than their words. The actions in this case are simple: Anthropic doesn't want their models to be used for fully autonomous weapons or mass surveillance of American citizens, but everything else is fair game; in response, the sitting administration is attempting to kill the company (since a strict reading of the security risk order would force most of their partners, suppliers, etc., to cut them off completely).
Giving precedence to words over actions is how you get taken advantage, abused, deceived, etc.
> Whatever they were asked to do, they should just be upfront about.
Anthropic is not being asked to do anything, except renegotiate the contracts. The DoW Claude models run on government AWS. Anthropic has minimal access to these systems and does not see the classified data that is being ingested as prompts. It is very unlikely that Dario actually knows what the DoW wants to do with these models. But even if he did, it would be classified information that he is not at liberty to disclose.
However the product they provide likely has safety filters that cause some prompts to not be processed if it is violates the two contractual conditions. That is what the DoW wants removed.
He didn't talk around it. He wrote down specifically what the two issues were, which is precisely why now the entire world knows what's actually going on. If risking your company's existence to prevent a (potential) atrocity is weakness, I don't know what strength is.
Strength is saying what they were asked to do. I want to know!
Did the DoW ask them to make kill drones? Because if so THAT IS A REALLY BIG DEAL.
The vagueness is irritating. He’s saying they won’t do something, the DoW is saying they don’t even want them to do that, which should resolve the issue, but hasn’t. There is obviously something else at play here.
You're confused because you're taking everything the people involved are saying literally and trusting everything plainly at face value. The existence of the contradiction you're pointing out should be evidence that you need to think a level deeper, i.e., that you need to look at actions more than words. There's an incredibly easy resolution of the contradiction that is troubling you, and it's already been pointed out clearly above.
The DoD is explicitly asking for those things, by forcing contract renegotiation towards a contract that is identical in every way, except removing the prohibition on those things.
If the DoD did not want those things, it would not be forcing a contract renegotiation to include them, at great cost to the government.
> The Department of War has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans (which is illegal) nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement.
Tomorrow he could change his mind to "we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement." the issue is that he wants Anthropic to change the use terms because "We will not let ANY company dictate the terms regarding how we make operational decisions."
And yet, if that statement were true, and not a lie, we would not be here right now, discussing their insistence upon being able to use software for precisely those things.
Is a pundit/politician lying to you a new experience?
Because mass surveillance has been happening by every tech company under every president since George W. Bush, and despite everybody trying to stop it they haven’t been able to.
OpenAI has already said that they’ll give up whatever info the government wants if they’re issued a subpoena; they don’t have a choice.
Companies have to comply with subpoenas (unless they can beat them in court, and with an alternative of going to jail). Subpoenas are supposed to be targeted at individuals and need some kind of process, usually judicial, each time one is issued. Mass surveillance - the Anthropic blog post raises the possibility of using AI to classify the political loyalties of every citizen - is a different thing.
A subpoena isn't "simply asking." Subpoena literally means "under penalty" in Latin. If the company does not comply they will be held in contempt of court and someone may well go to jail.
You make a valid point. Dario suggests that DoD wants to have the capacity to do domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. Sean Parnell said the DoD doesn't want those capacities. These statements are in conflict. Them talking past each other is one possibility. Without much evidence except the track record of the Trump administration, I think it is much more likely that Sean Parnell is lying.
Some of the additional expense would be due to an individual risk profile, and some of the expense would be due to lack of bargaining power. The expense due to individual risk profile is a feature. The expense due to lack of bargaining power is not.
I don’t know if you’re familiar with how bargaining works, but you only get the price break if you can come in as a large unified group. Having millions of individuals doesn’t result in a price break. Eg There are millions of private individuals buying health insurance in the US, but they have no bargaining power unless they purchase as a unified block. Individual health insurance policies are notoriously expensive.
Reading about these cases immediately makes me wonder how much I could get away with before being caught. I've never gambled on any of the prediction markets, but immediately I see the appeal of the game ("the game" being win the most money without being caught). The fact that I see the fun, really drives home to me how dangerous this can be.
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