If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code".

As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write.

Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.

Sure, but that being a failure mode is a design choice. Look at Iran: we've seen how many decapitation strikes now? At this point there shouldn't even anyone be left that was in the original chain of command but clearly they're chugging along quite nicely because they decentralized military operations exactly for a scenario like this, knowing anyone appearing on the US' or Israel's radar too prominently was one bad day away from needing replacement.

> This is how Afghanistan, with basic weapons and religious extremists running around in sandals, managed to defeat not only the US but also the USSR.

Not quite. The US managed to "defeat" Afghanistan. The problem was just that nation building was never really on the menu. The US was extremely hands-off during the occupation because their priority was making sure more US soldiers don't come home toes-first when the war had officially been declared won than to build any kind of legacy. This also led to massive subversion of the supposedly US-backed government. There were very few incentives in supporting the US more than necessary not to get shot at, especially after it became clear the US government had no interest in rewarding the loyalty of most of the people who had risked their lives as translators and negotiators, let alone supporting the people who volunteered to join the new army or police. That's why when the US left the supposed new Afghan state just dropped its weapons and ran away and why the Taliban could pretty much just take over without much resistance.

A good counter-example is Iraq where not only did the US have to do much less work to do (because Iraq already had the concept of a powerful central government rather than effectively being a coalition of often loosely connected tribal communities), they also engaged in a lot more active nation building and had reasons to maintain a long-term presence.

If you want to see how bottle rockets vs modern hardware can also play out, look at whatever the IDF is doing at the moment. Granted, the US military being deployed against US citizens would probably show a lot more hesitance and restraint, but again that's a design choice, not an inherent property.

> And trying to punish the population at large to weed out the militants mostly just tends to backfire and create even more militants.

That assumes militants are a problem, not a calculated risk. Long-term social instability is manageable if you don't rely on popular approval as long as it doesn't disrupt supply chains enough to directly threaten the military's ability to operate. Israel for example arguably flourished for decades while having to continuously deal with militants and responding with large scale violence.

As I understand it, the oil reserves simply weren't built for frequent use. They were built as a backup plan for a global supply chain collapse. Arguably that happened twice in recent history - first with COVID, then with the US deciding to do it itself by getting into a war with the one state where its experts had predicted a war would cause this to happen and that could not readily be defeated because it's literally carved into a vast mountain range and had decades to come up with a plan for defending itself.

Honestly, the war on Iran isn't even in the range of ordinary American politics - even if you come from the most pessimistic "CIA regime change world tour" angle. There's no coherent reason for it to have been executed the way it was that doesn't require assumptions that most people justifiably would dismiss as conspiracy theories (e.g. intentional destroying the global economy for short-term profit through betting & investments).

It's noteworthy that the caverns holding the reserves are on the verge of collapsing. But it's kind of a moot point because there's no way to restore global supply lines in time to refill them when fully drained this time. Tankers are the only viable way to transport large amounts of oil over long distances and it would take months for any shipments out of the region to arrive and there have been practically no shipments for months already.

Unless the US is going to enact rationing, reserves will be gone soon and so will be local supply. Plus if there's any place willing and able to buy oil at a ridiculous markup, that's where the market (and the remaining supply) will go unless the US wants to pivot into outright piracy.

Not to mention that draining them reduces the quality of the remaining oil (much like how you never want to feed an engine from the bottom of a diesel tank).

It's also my understanding that the problem is not just the reserves being drained, let alone drained so much, but also how rapidly they were drained because that again makes things worse.

Or look at how the IDF had to stand by powerlessly as Israelis blocked supply trucks from entering the refugee camps. Or how the IDF had to indiscriminately shoot up Palestinian civilians who crowded a supply truck in Gaza. Or how the IDF had to launch targeted missile strikes against supply trucks in Gaza that had been identified to and were in continuous communication with Israeli authorities. All because Hamas forced the IDF to indiscriminately destroy practically all infrastructure in the Gaza strip, cut access to Israel-controlled utilities, lock down the border to Egypt, send a population of millions on a death march along designated routes it continued bombing, deliberately assassinate news reporters, bomb hospitals, destroy UN and NGO facilities and literally shoot hostages it mistook for Palestinians.

I have to believe you were intentionally trying to be provocative because to float "Hamas seizing food supplies for starving Palestinians" in 2026 without providing context for why those Palestinians are starving, let alone that the original claim has since pretty much been refuted, feels like a deliberate choice:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/26/world/middleeast/hamas-un...

https://www.timesofisrael.com/usaid-finds-no-proof-hamas-sys...

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israeli-officers-say-hama...

There are of course gangs stealing supplies to resell them at inflated prices on the black market but that tends to come with the territory when the only authorities in place become defunct because the entire region is turned into rubbles by a military force that considers anyone without a Jewish Israeli passport a likely terrorist unless proven otherwise.

Anyway, more on point: countries don't have excess food, economic entities do. And our economic system is generally fairly averse to making economic entities give up any property (even with fair compensation), especially when it comes to large corporations. If you want to form any plan that doesn't start with (literally) "seizing the means of (food) production", I think it would have to include the phrase "create market incentives" but I'm not sure there is a better incentive than "people are willing to give you all their money because your product has become scarce" - though of course that hinges on "all their money" being more than you make now and that doesn't tend to hold up when it comes to the resource extraction economy based parts of the world.

Granted, I've only been using the free version but I've been getting significantly more mileage out of those from ChatGPT and Claude. I guess it might be a feature that Gemini is more often obviously wrong from the start (e.g. by giving sources that don't support its claims whatsoever) but considering this is the AI from the company that had become synonymous with the concept of trying to find information on the Internet, that's pretty damn pathetic.

The expectation of a need for decorum against all evidence almost seems like a quaint remnant of the aristocracy at this point. There's no advantage to being a nice or sensible person if you're a billionaire. People talk about "business" like it's still the 1800s and billionaires are the factory owners. The real economy (i.e. anything involving any pretense of being an exchange of goods and services in any shape or form) is now a minute fraction of the global economy. Everything else is finance. And if the nature of the finance "industry" wasn't obvious enough the US has given up all pretense to the point that members of the US government now intentionally manipulate online betting "markets" directly.

You may have needed some table manners to be able to run a tincan factory. You can let your entire ass hang out on TV 24/7 and still be a billionaire today. And people will still cheer you on like you're the inventor of sliced bread.

The point is less that these people are surrounded by "yes-men" but more that wealth (especially when measured in billions) is power and with sufficient power it becomes easy to forego any question of consent, let alone of whether consent is coerced or not. Remember that power is ultimately about the ability to enact violence and violence can take many forms, most of which are perfectly legal (because the legal system itself exists to regulate how, by who and against whom violence can be used).

You tend to hear "no" a lot less when you always point a gun at the head of the persons you're asking. Note that "wealth" isn't the only way to get there but a certain level of it is usually necessary to get to the point where other options become available - and some of the ways are a lot riskier in the long term (cf. Epstein).

Side note: this is also why I hate the pseudo-intellectual counter argument against "billionaires" of "that doesn't mean they have billions of dollars sitting in a bank account" - it's like arguing that De Beers didn't benefit much from holding a quasi-monopoly on natural diamonds because the diamonds would be devalued if they flooded the market with the ones they had intentionally kept off the market to drive up value: beyond a certain amount money ceases to be about liquidity and starts being about leverage. Unless you happen to be dealing with lower level bureaucracy in Russia, the most efficient way to use wealth to your advantage isn't to just hand people stacks of dollar bills.

A lot of things boiled down to post-hoc ideological justifications for the personal preferences of Hitler and his ilk. Even the racism was incoherent - it's cliché to point this out but Hitler himself infamously looked nothing like an Aryan übermensch despite the Führer cult treating him akin to a divine figure. This is consistent with research indicating disgust as a strong motivating signal in right-wing politics.

Less obviously - apparently - it doesn't mean that you must forego any means that are in any way not optimal at achieving the ends you seek to achieve because which means are available to us also tends to be limited by our material conditions. So the logical consequence is to make do with what we have while we prepare for the path we want to take, rather than diving head-first into certain failure or just giving up and picking "more realistic" short-term ends instead of looking for stepping stones.

Sorry, I guess this was about AI not philosophy.

Also of course the tiny people do not seem to causally interact with their physical environment in any measurable way (at least to observers of the test subject) so that already strongly points towards hallucinations but that kind of thinking isn't how you get a grant.

A simple example would be "work to rule": in many professions work processes are heavily regulated (whether by law or by corporate guidelines) but the unspoken assumption is that you know which rules you should ignore and which ones you actually need to follow - but if you tried to find this out by asking "is this a rule I need to follow or not" you would get the clearly incorrect answer that all rules must be followed; of course if you did follow all the rules (aka "work to rule") you would be disciplined for failing to meet quotas (because you can't be disciplined for following the rules).

Also the modern far-right in Germany has an undercurrent of monarchists, we've just lost the political language to label them as such - much like how we unironically refer to conservatives as "centrists" because referring to anyone but a nazi as "right-wing" is often implied to have certain undertones, although the conservative party that helped pass the Enabling Act was literally called the Christian Center Party.

And although the Nazis weren't exactly ideologically coherent - fascists generally aren't - the driving ideology in the modern German far-right (including within the AfD) is actually völkisch nationalism which the Nazis were at least making heavy use of in their propaganda.

I'd even argue remnants of völkisch nationalism even made it into the German constitution: it uses the term Volk and Volkszugehöriger (in Art. 116 Abs. 1 GG) without defining either of them. The definition of Volk instead had to be provided by a constitutional court ruling - German citizens plus Volkszugehörige - and that second term is defined in a seperate law (§ 6 BVFG) which uses a very narrow and arbitrary definition that's clearly a condensed bureaucratic remnant of a much broader ideological pre-existing definition (arguably the consequence of having to deal with a similar problem as laws trying to combat racism that want to avoid validating "race science" by pinning down exact definitions for each relevant category)[0].

Also in German popular culture the colloquial definition of "Deutsch" seems to be very much colored by völkisch ideas: someone who is "ethnically distinct" (e.g. skin color, eye shape) is generally regarded as a "migrant"/"foreigner" even if they are German citizens, speak fluent German, are culturally German and have multiple generations of direct ancestors who lived in Germany.

[0] Source: Bundestag white paper "Zu den Begriffen „deutsches Volk“, „Deutsche“ und deutsche Volkszugehörigkeit“ im Grundgesetz":

https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/643190/7855da277bbd33...

References:

Art. 116 GG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gg/art_116.html

§ 6 BVFG: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/bvfg/__6.html

As an autistic this is painfully obvious to me but: much of human interactions operates on rules that are not only unspoken but often unacknowledged or even outright denied - not just that, but most rules are also highly contextual and rarely treated literally. E.g. corporate guidelines mostly don't exist to be followed (and following them will often result in punishment) but to be able to shift blame - but you need to know for which ones this is the case and for which ones it isn't. This is further complicated because any AI or AI vendor openly making such distinctions would be rejected - AI would not only need to understand all this nuance but also this additional meta layer.

Most moderated spaces these days rely on moderating based on "civility" because it can be excused with jargon like "creating a marketplace of ideas" which ignores the reality that the scope of discussions selects for who participates in them as much as the way they are phrased - a zebra will be less inclined to participate in a "marketplace of ideas" where a recurring topic of discussion is how zebra meat is best prepared for consumption even though that space might be very attractive to lions and tigers.

But I'm not sure if this is truly accidental. Ever since the advent of online advertising, online spaces have been overtaken by corporate interests. Heck, it's even endemic to "social media" given that those platforms themselves have turned into major corporations or at least were acquired by them. I'm not implying any nefarious intent but "civility" is certainly the dominating factor when it comes to what corporations care about when it comes to content moderation - anything beyond that is largely about what target demographic they're trying to attract and what virtue/vice signalling is optimal based on the current social and political environment (cf. various major corporations demonstratively dropping "DEI" initiatives following Trump's election).

I would also argue that in terms of content (rather than tone), corporations are necessarily also much less tolerant of "far left" issues than "far right": all social justice movements at the end steer towards anti-capitalism because they run counter to the perpetuation of social (or economical) hierarchies. This is why we saw so many tech companies (including those formerly described as "very liberal") shut down their DEI initiatives even before Trump got elected - because the political window had shifted to the point where this had become defensible while at the same time many DEI ideas had become so widespread culturally that these initiatives now became a direct threat to the "(old) white men" running those companies. This had been inevitable but DEI was seen as a necessary marketing effort (both internal and external) at the time, not something truly adopted on ideological grounds. This is also why speakers/trainers promoting "white guilt" were more popular - making your white employees feel bad is less threatening than making your marginalized employees think critically about the structures that lead to their marginalization; you want to individualize the problem, not direct attention to the systems underpinning it.

Another factor is that on social media content is mostly moderated "softly" by the algorithm. This is the content moderation you don't get to see because it can exercise editorial control where the simple word filters can't. The word filters create plausible deniability: they "try" to filter unpalatable subjects but those darn kids are just so clever and circumvent it. Meanwhile the algorithms can be fine-tuned so the topics you really don't want to see discussed stay off most people's "for you" pages - or even so those who would be attracted to them still see them and feel elevated and heard despite actually being isolated into their own echo chamber.