Three cats are two too many. So are four dogs and a cat. She doesn’t need a boyfriend, she needs an animal shelter to take care of. In Antarctica.

If your partner sees the need to rather talk to a machine than to you about how he/she feels, you are the problem.

And no level of J.K Rowling style writing is going to change that. Felinus Furiosa Exilium!

Oh stop it. You’re breathtaking!

Wait, 27% for the right-wing extremists in Germany? The strongest party if there were elections today? Some of them publicly state they are the friendly faces of facism?

Oh, oh. I’m in danger.

I like you whisky.

That’s a deal I can get behind.

I will send your administration a request to put your statue on top of the Arc de Trump. If they can pay 400 million for a ballroom, they can spend one for a diamond statue of the man that saved a lot of American lives today.

True heroes don’t always wear capes. Sometimes they have butcher knife’s.

Oh, AGI can turn everyone into matchsticks, but when I talk about turning humans into tasty sausage the internet goes wild.

It’s obviously sarcasm, just for the neurodivergent talent in here panic buying cannibalism safe bunkers now.

/s

That puts me for the rest of my life at a level of fuck you.

And if the system breaks down, I’m just going to hunt and eat you. How big do you think your chance of survival is meeting someone hungry who spent over a decade in war and conflict zones and is still here?

I’m more concerned about the future for your sake than for mine.

What a glorious time to be alive.

Claude really is going to bring pleasure to the people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtO5sebA9U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FkK8ZFE7Y0

The CIA hates that trick.

A lot of our modern human rights today come from the anti-war movement. This is a highly controversial topic, and I read a lot of interesting opinions in this thread. It’s hard to argue for combat readiness for both genders if most people right now witness the abuse of military superpower like in Ukraine by the Russians or in Iran, causing a lot of loss of life and hardship.

I have been through all this before. Young students shouting murderers at the airport, peace signs everywhere. Most of my colleagues were angry, I was happy so many people showed up and made their voice heard without fear or repression. That’s the kind of freedom you fight for. It’s not always pretty if you’re on the receiving end but I considered that part of the job.

Article 12a of the German constitution states:

"(1) Men may be called up for service in the armed forces, the Federal Border Guard, or a civil defence unit upon reaching the age of eighteen."

The current administration has a majority, I think three votes (excuse my inaccuracy), to change the constitution. Women can fight as well, and they do. But there is currently no legal, constitutional way to officially draft them.

Some of the toughest soldiers I trained were women. I got put on my back on international cqc training exchanges by Israeli women more often than by anyone else.

Also, most of the high-profile politicians only have daughters, take the German Chancellor (two daughters) or the Prime Minister of Bavaria (1 1/2 daughters). They don’t have any personal interest that their daughters might get drafted. That’s another dimension to the problem.

Women in general are a great military asset, as they provide a non-male perspective you won’t get only working with testosterone-dominated brains.

It’s not like women don’t want to protect their fellow citizens.

It’s that the German military has huge structural problems to include them into the force properly, and the people in charge also know that, for a lot of men serving, they are still not equal, and a lot of men in the service don’t want to fight alongside a woman and trust them to have their back.

It’s a mix of toxic masculinity bred inside the military and a lack of combat experience alongside women. If you ask any American or Israeli soldier who fought alongside women in actual combat, it will be tough to find anyone to critique their value as soldiers or questioning their equality in the service.

I also appreciate your female perspective on this very much. But Sweden, in terms of gender equality, is miles ahead of Germany in many places. And to be fair, Swedish women live a more independent and less male-reliant model of relationships and live than most people on this planet.

The German defence minister acknowledges this, btw, by often talking about how implementing the "Swedish model" would raise a next generation of soldiers with a more modern view of freedom and responsibility that is more balanced between the genders than the current conservative societal model in Germany that is the man goes to work, the woman stays at home and takes care of the kids and the man fights to protect them if necessary.

You make a few wrong assumptions and come to the wrong conclusions in some points. Others are valid.

I am not defensive, I just didn’t see the value in your comment and asked you to think about it. I could have done that in a more civil way, I’d like to apologize for that. That was a mistake.

Also I have never downvoted a single person on here as far as I am aware, because I don’t believe in suppressing other people’s thoughts, no matter how controversial or contrary they are to what I might think or believe.

I address them and sometimes I am wrong or even learn something new that will change my viewpoint. So every reply is valid and important input for me.

If I wrote in "military speech" half the people here would need a dictionary so I at least try to break complex concepts down to something everyone can understand.

The concept was probably explained to whoever wrote the script like I was taught how to explain it to people outside the military. And I think we can both agree that it’s a pretty good breakdown to explain the core concept in the least amount of words.

> One thing you can do is assume the best intentions of a comment, and respond to that. HN encourages that.

You’re right, but I have some bad days as well and when you are grumpy and have PTSD you’re not always the nicest person. You can be sure I am trying to work on that for the past twenty years and my snarky Sherlock remark wasn’t ok, if I look at it from the point that you meant well and just wanted to point out that the concept found its way into public mainstream via cinema.

I hope you accept my apology and I’ll try to do better next time.

Also read a very interesting piece about the railway system the other day. Thank you for providing a valuable perspective I wouldn’t get access to otherwise and also proposing possible solutions and practical advise for your fellow citizens. Keep up the good work.

It will be published post mortem one day to be butchered by a Trumpflix adoption. I want to be played by Melania Trump cementing my legacy as the wokest soldier to ever exist. LGBTomahawk+.

JK. Half the shit I’ve seen I don’t remember any longer, and not talking about the other half keeps me alive. I am spending my days making fun of idiots on here and perfecting my BBQ skills.

I’m glad if you enjoy my comments tho. Have a good day sir, or lady, or whatever you feel like today. o7

You know that in movies where the military is depicted they have consultants to mix fact with fiction, right?

Does the concept of the tenth man sound like fiction or something that is actually useful in a military context, Sherlock?

But you are simply missing the right perspective.

How would you know that this would have been the most stupid way to kill a person if you don’t want to get caught? You likely never were involved in planning to kill anyone. Like hopefully 99% of the people you know.

The Epstein stuff was crazy to you because you didn’t hang out with billionaires and know what they do for fun. Missing that perspective.

I have not heard a single personal assistant of one speak out about how shocked they are this Epstein thing happened and they are absolutely sure their boss never did something like that.

Strange, or?

We also talk about Hitler, but Hitler didn’t put the Jews into the trains personally. Bureaucrats managed the whole killing machine willingly, looking the other way for personal benefits. Nobody talks about that.

Musk paid off a flight attendant for allegedly offering her horse money for sucking or massaging his spaceship. I don’t remember exactly, it’s probably easy to find. They buy people all the time for fun and make them do stuff just to see how much it takes to buy them.

Soccer players buy small people to fight on their birthday parties. Rich people want experiences others cant get, Epstein just offered a world of opportunities for people who don’t know what to do with their money.

Rich people travelled to Bosnia to kill women and children with sniper rifles. Ask anyone stationed there at the time if they thought that’s crazy. If you been there, you knew.

The NVIDIA parties in the mid-2000s at exhibitions in Europe were basically a trade hub for exhibition hostesses for tech managers. Everyone knew, nobody talked about it unless you were on the guest list, a bunch of tech journalists were there, did you ever read someone write about it?

NVIDIA didn’t plan or intend this, it’s simply what happens if poor young girls meet manager moneybags who have access to a party they would never be able to go to on their own and some pocket money for spending the rest of the night in their hotel, which for them pays off their student credit or a new used car.

In this case, I hung out with professionally trained killers in the military for a few decades. If you know how to plan something like this, you know that it’s unlikely any professional would have killed him that way, if there is a quick and easy way that is a thousand times less risky without creating all of this fuzz.

A lot of shit happens that people find unbelievable unless they have the right perspective. If you think about it, I am sure you’ll find a few more examples of stuff you know from your position or work, that unless you work in that industry with the right people, will be an absolute blind spot for anyone on the outside.

I like to think about things I find interesting and write my thoughts out. This takes me five minutes.

What would I gain from limiting my thought process to accommodate the needs of strangers on the internet used to short form goldfish brain content?

Feel free to block me if you don’t want to read my comments, or simply go fuck yourself. Have a nice day.

I had some of those wool runners for a while and had a mid-twenties lady in the train sitting right next to me one rainy autumn day, and she looked at me until we had eye contact and said, "Sir, don’t take this personally, but your shoes smell like wet dog, it’s awful.” She was right. I bought her coffee on the way out to apologize. Last time I bought Allbirds.

Is that interview awkward?

For sure, but have you seen Zuckerberg in Congress or Musk? Those people are completely lost without a full PR team prepping them for any question that could arise upfront and fall apart when they have to go off script without anyone holding their hand or a dozen lawyers intervening on their behalf.

The whistleblower protection system is dogshit. It is what kills people.

His parents are hurting. Most suicides are snap decisions, and people break under pressure. They couldn’t prevent it, nor did their son allow them to talk him out of it. That’s unbelievably hurtful for the ones left behind. Can you blame them for trying to make sense of that by putting the responsibility on the entity their son was fighting an uphill battle against already?

We all know the movies where the big bad corporate CEO tells his chief of security to get rid of the whistleblower/journalist, but if you look at the plausibility of actually pulling this off unnoticed, in someone’s home, in the middle of the city, it makes it very unlikely.

The article includes a picture of security footage of Balaji entering his apartment with takeaway food before his death. Which means there was video surveillance, everyone and their mother having a ring camera these days.

Lapse in the security footage would have been noticed by the investigators. All donut cops jokes aside, most detectives tasked with solving a potential murder case take it personally if you murder someone in their district.

So to murder this man you have to get unnoticed into the vicinity of the building, you will be seen in an apartment complex, there is a chance someone remembers you especially when you’re not a regular. There are a bunch of grandmas watching every move that happens on a floor through their door spies or door spy cams. If you ever lived in an apartment complex you know the cat ladies on your floor.

Then you have to force entry into the apartment. There are a dozen recording devices in every home. Mobile, stationary, working without electricity from an outlet. The chance that Siri or Alexa is catching a struggle between the people inside the apartment and whoever wants to enter is a real possibility.

Then the victim probably has defence injuries. You tie them up, their wrists will show it from trying to free themselves. Even if you catch them in their sleep, you would have to bring them into a position and situation where shooting themselves is plausible.

Nobody likes to be woken up mid-night by strangers, and cooperation even at gunpoint is unlikely. He would have known they came to murder him, so it doesn’t matter if you get shot in your bed or in your bathroom, but you can make sure it looks like a murder.

Then you have to trick the coroner by making projectile entry and exit plausible. The victim makes a sudden move, best case, you fucked up, worst case, it’s now crawling on the floor, bleeding.

Then you have to make an exit. Again unseen und unheard. This is such a complex operation that Murphy’s law will at some point catch up with you.

I am not saying all of this is impossible, but why the trouble? Just run him over when he picks up takeout. It happens all the time. People run red lights, pedestrians think they can cross when they shouldn’t.

It makes no sense to go to state actor level of complicated if a hit and run serves the same purpose with less risk. As much as it might hurt. It looks like suicide is the most likely thing that happened, and instead of focusing on a potential murder, the priority should be how do we protect whistleblowers better from all the trouble that whistleblowing brings because there is no proper process in place to protect them from the mental pressure they get put under by corporate lawyers and the justice system.

All I was tasked to do was sit in rooms and tents with a moleskin and my little Japanese ball pen workhorse, writing down stuff while coalition commanders were talking about plans, hyping each other up and bragging about who had more tactical success than their counterparts.

Nobody knew who I was or what I did in their strategic meetings. I just sat there, no eye contact, no yeah or mehs, no comments, no interruptions. Whenever they were done with the meeting, I got up, thanked them for their time, wished them a good day and went outside to sit down somewhere else, thinking some more, and then I went to work.

Back in the day, the coalition had a problem with having too many hammers but not a lot of scalpels. For a hammer, after a while, everything starts looking like a nail, and with air superiority, the hammering went fast and hit hard. So it was a quick way to make a name for themselves and collect medals and a pay raise.

Most of the time, those tactical decisions resulted in short and long-term strategic failure.

For example, it was easy to kill a Taliban commander with an airstrike, but the result was that the twenty or so commanders he had overseen and kept in check went on a spree of violence against locals and coalition troops alike in pursuit of the succession of their predecessor.

So someone very smart in the upper echelons of the coalition decided to implement the tenth man rule.

It basically said if nine men look at the same information and arrive at the exact same conclusion, it is the duty of the tenth man to disagree. No matter how improbable it may seem, the tenth man has to start digging with the assumption that the other nine are wrong.

8/10 times, I did find those short or long-term strategic errors in the planned tactical operations, and whenever I did, everyone who was with me in the room that day had to prove why I am wrong and their approach is right. 9/10 times they couldn’t.

You can imagine those people all have giant egos and do not like it if someone outsmarts them, so they got rid of me by the end of 2009.

Officially, I was pulled to sit in more boring rooms with boring people.

Inofficially, I was told by a General that commanders were about to revolt because I was undermining their morale and they would often question themselves and their planning, instead of acting quickly and decisively, which would slow down their "efficiency" and the efficiency of the campaign.

When you look at the timeline this article showcases and think about that the inner circle of the President got replaced by yes men and a Secretary that wants a more deadly and less "woke" force that simply does what the Commander-in-Chief tells them without thinking for themselves, I wonder if the current situation the US has maneuvered itself into is because of the complete absence of soldiers that do what I did 18 years ago.

Outsourcing the strategic thinking process to a technology that is wrong 35% of the time by design is maybe the biggest strategic long-term failure the US military ever did. I see why this is necessary because replacing competent minds with loyalists above else makes this a viable approach.

Dumbing down the US Military and every position that has access to the President that could intervene stupidity looks less and less like an unintended consequence of the Secretary’s "rebuilding" of the military and more like an intended goal.

In my humble opinion, this doesn’t serve the American people nor the good men and women that serve their country and whose life is relying on people taking the time and effort to dig in with the assumption that everyone in the room, including a President, is wrong.

I’m retired, so all I can do now is point my fingers at idiots and tell you guys, look at this idiot and what he is doing.

But I no longer have access to rooms where big decisions are made and rely on your ability to make good decisions who you give the power to annihilate whole continents and whom not just like the rest of the normal people out there.

We live in interesting times.

And then the cam zooms to a picture of the silhouette of the scientist standing on a wall with the back to the audience, pissing into the sea, and then pans back to Preacher’s face, and he goes totally unimpressed:

"How smart can he be? He is pissing against the wind."

The scientist dies btw, because he was indeed less smart than everyone thought he is, but you need to watch the movie to see that. Not gonna spoil how, it was amusing tho.

That’s Altman. He is pissing against the wind.

Everyone is talking about how AI will displace jobs. Oracle just fired 30k people with an email because of their AI investment. LinkedIn CEOs bragging every day how AI replaced some of their teams.

Losing your job, especially in the US without a proper social system to dampen the fall for a large part of people who have saved less than a grand in the bank, means they lose their home, they lose the ability to pay for their healthcare, which means they lose their ability to earn money and compete for jobs on the market with people who simply had the luck of being healthy.

For those people, AI, how it is currently projected, is indeed a matter of life and death. And none of them want to basically get murdered by proxy.

If Altman really was that smart, OpenAI would have pushed for everyone losing their jobs because of AI having a path in front of them they can walk without falling off the cliff and drowning into the sea below, before talking about how many humans this technology is going to replace to make rich people even richer.

But he didn’t, neither did any of the other CEOs who have the ear of the President and frequently dine with him.

What billionaires value more than money is their freedom. That’s something the people can take away from them. You can develop your ai future throwing average Joe under the bus from a bunker, but no longer leave your home or send your kids to school. Without proper external stimuli, those "great minds" will just wilt away.

When Brazil threatened Musk with an international arrest warrant, which would have gotten him stuck in the US for an unforeseeable amount of time, he backed off really fast from mobilising his X army, causing trouble for Brazilian judges.

You and I would probably use the Democracy toolbox to fight against Altman if we had to, but I bet we two are also not starving or no longer able to buy a simple asthma inhaler to keep breathing when we lose our jobs.

This is a problem AI companies created for themselves, and I wonder why they can’t solve it with AI.

Would be a great use case, wouldn’t it?