Overall, yes. Proving an order illegal is a high bar. Proving it was obviously illegal to the soldier is even harder. International law isn’t US law. But some international law is specifically ratified in US law. But how is a soldier supposed to know which international laws are also US laws. These aren’t lawyers…

So where in that is destroying infrastructure like bridges and power plants? “Unnecessary” is extremely objective.

The key is that the orders have to be obviously illegal. Can’t be much maybe about it. I didn’t see anything in the article saying what makes it a war crime. And I am pretty sure there isn’t anything very explicit doing so. Bombing/disrupting infrastructure has been a staple of war since forever.

There certainly is a group of people who believe in AI strongly. One part of them is just listening to the hype and jumpping on the wagon. Another part however is investing real time to understand it. They work to give it structure and guardrails so that it does what they want it to. And they help others do the same. But currently it still takes a lot of time investment to get good at using. And most people aren’t expecting that.
But as the second group grows, and the methods for them to share the structure they have set up for AI mature, more people will be anle to use it without all the upfront time investment. That is when the pressure on tool vendors to improve their api interfaces will really heat up. AI compliant or whatever buzz word shows up will be a near requirment for a tool to get investor dollars. MCPs were an attempt to put a layer between the apis and the AI. But if the underlieing api sucks, MCP can’t do much. I am not sure what will come next, but something more about the apis themselves is bound to spring up. Maybe even several standards. Thats ok, there can be several because AI can handle the context switching better than humans can.

There are absolutely some economic factors that can have serious impact on it. And they are impossible to predict. If you really could, you would be rich. But, I don’t see it likely to be an assistant. It’s actually pretty terrible at that. My thinking is that it is a tool like any other. It will take a person significant investment to get proficient with it. Down the line, hopefully it will be more streamlined to distribute learnings and such that make it more accessible to those who haven’t invested the time. There is lots of work happening in that area now, but much more needs doing.

My new (to me) “revelation” is that AI needs a ton of structure. It’s like a child who when presented with too many options stops thinking and just randomly chooses one to do so they can be done with whatever it is. From what I can tell, the people who make the most use of AI have it tightly controlled. Rules, hooks, and various other tricks to essentially herd AI into doing what it should do. Kinda like herding cats.
Right now the tools and such for setting up that structure are immature, and best practices are hard to define when the base AI is still changing a lot. For people who are just trying to use AI casually, they have heard the hype, and they think they should expect it to work like a person. When it doesn’t, they just say it sucks. And as a person, it does suck. It’s a tool. And a complex one at that. Seems it requires significant investment to get the most out of it.

But even thiel doesn’t care as much about trivial things like awards and flattery the same way trump does.

Star trek has transporters, holodecks, and amazing medical technology. There are other usniverses that have some of these, but not all 3 in one place. But basically, that is what I would go for.

Well, grafana is an example. They want their own AI agent that you can pay for. So they still need the apis to be good. But they don’t make it easy to get your AI it own api token. Each user would essentially have to have two accounts. Which they probably charge for too. It’s not impossible to work around, but it’s a barrier. I would expect more of that kind of thing. Any tool that doesn’t have a way for AI to work with it is going to be selected against for a while. So there is pressure for them to be accessible.

So I am so ewhat pro AI. But hear me out. I sometimes refer to myself as an automation engineer. I spend a lot of my time automating the set up and use of various software tools. For those who know the term Infrastructure As Code is a part of my job too. And soo many tools have shitty UIs and even shittier apis. The rise of AI is going to add pressure to have better apis because that is what the AI uses. So even if AI falls flat on it’s face in a few years, any improvements in apis is a vig win for me. And since the automation I write is for my coworkers, not external customers, anyone in tech benefits from this.

Now for me personally, I work ina lot of different languages and DSLs. I rarely spend enough time in any one of them to really memorize the syntax. I pretty much can’t write a working program without some sort of reference. So, I can tell AI exactly what I want it to do, and it can code and test until it runs. Then I can use that as my syntax reference and make it do what it is supposed to do. That ends up being much faster than me having to google various syntaxes to see where I need a semicolon vs a comma, or where I need to use [] instead of {}. So it helps me.

And I do love using AI to file my jira tickets. Works great for those of us who’s work is interrupt driven. We often file the ticket after we’ve solved the problem.

So studies on mice have shown that transfusing young blood into old mice has a rejuvenating effect. You may not be far off.

I do think it will improve under vance. He is far more likely to listen to advisors. And far less likely to start a war to distract from him being in the Epstien files.