Author Archive: Stephen Green

ANYBODY WHO CAN SCREAM OR KEEP REPEATING “I CAN’T BREATHE,” IS BREATHING:

IT’S MY THURSDAY ESSAY FOR VIP SUBSCRIBERS: Here Comes Skynet.

“Our product is used, on occasion, to kill people,” Palantir CEO and cofounder Alex Karp told Axios in 2020, and this year, the company’s artificial intelligence software helps the U.S. military target, sort, locate, and strike Iranian military targets at scale.

“At Palantir we were built to give our warfighters… an unfair advantage,” Karp said at his company’s developer conference last week. “It was, ‘Yeah, we’re going to really F- our enemies.’ And I take great pride in that.”

And he should.

Within a week of President Donald Trump’s GO! order for Operation Epic Fury, the mainstream media was already abuzz with reports of “How Palantir and Anthropic AI helped the US hit 1,000 Iran targets in 24 hours.”

“The platform generated real-time targeting insights and prioritized strike locations,” the Money Control report said, but the reality is so much more impressive than just that.

Much, much more at the link.

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HMM: China AI labs face growing open-source dilemma.

It also underscores a new reality in Silicon Valley and beyond: startups and more established companies alike are increasingly ​eschewing pricey proprietary models from OpenAI and others for free or low-cost Chinese versions which are rapidly closing the performance gap despite Washington’s export ​curbs and sanctions. Rankings on OpenRouter, a platform that lets developers access and use different models, currently show 7 of the 10 most popular offerings are Chinese; companies from Airbnb (ABNB.O), opens new tab to German industrial giant Siemens (SIEGn.DE), opens new tab have made no secret about using models from the People’s Republic.

Chinese tools, however, now have a target on their ​back. On Monday, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission published a report, opens new tab warning that China’s open-source successes “reflect a more fundamental challenge to U.S. ​AI supremacy”. And last month, OpenAI and Anthropic separately accused Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek of improperly using U.S. models to improve their own; both have ‌called ⁠for tougher restrictions on U.S. tech.

There is a simple reason for Chinese companies to pivot away from open-source: Alibaba, Tencent, and rivals are under increasing pressure to show they can monetise their AI models and applications.

Well, “Dump, dominate, and monetize” has been China’s business model for three decades.

NOT ANTIWAR, JUST ON THE OTHER SIDE:

PEOPLE LIKE MULLIN BUILT THIS COUNTRY:

GUNS: The Narrative Uber Alles: Gun-Related Injuries and Juvenile Mental Health.

In a recent medical journal report the authors find that a firearm injury to an adult is associated with a child in the family receiving a psychiatric diagnosis. They imply that distress related to the injury leads to the emergence of psychiatric difficulties and subsequently a psychiatric diagnosis. On its face, this seems plausible.

The authors note some limitations, including relying exclusively on commercial health insurance to obtain data regarding injuries and psychiatric diagnoses. While they utilize a large sample it is perhaps only about 13 percent of the US population. As they note, it excludes families covered by Medicaid, which may be different in important ways from those whose health insurance tends to be through an employer. Additionally, they point out that an alternative explanation for an association between injuries and children’s receiving a psychiatric diagnosis is that the injury prompted a set of interactions with the medical community, thus increasing the likelihood that psychiatric difficulties would be identified and diagnosed in these children. This seems plausible as well.

However, the conclusion that an adult’s injury leads to a child’s diagnosis is undercut by the graph they present showing diagnoses both before and after the injury. While the graph indicates that indeed children’s psychiatric diagnoses increased following the injury, they were on an upward curve before the injury. This might suggest that situational factors led to both the diagnosis and the injury.

Much more at the link, but these days it pays to be extra-skeptical of anything published in medical journals — particularly when it involves firearms.

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CHRISTIAN TOTO: Mark Normand Forced Netflix to Admit This Inconvenient Truth?

The sly stand-up comic traffics in the kind of stereotypes that can get a fella canceled. Or, at the very least, chase mainstream streaming platforms far, far away.

Yet “Mark Normand: None Too Pleased” just bowed on Netflix March 17, and there’s no Cancel Culture-type effort to punish him or the streaming giant.

It helps that Normand has an agreeable nature and cherubic face, both of which defang his incendiary gags. Plus, he expertly toys with stereotypes in ways that are uplifting, even fun.

His intent is always clear. He’s riffing on us without pushing anyone away, and the material is relentlessly first class. Normand works on a level few comedians can touch.

He’s that good.

The comic podcaster has another trick up his sleeve. He understands the power of cultural outrage and corporate cowardice.

Read the whole thing.

BULLIES GONNA BULLY UNTIL THEY GET PUNCHED IN THE MOUTH:

“SHOCKING” ONLY TO A MEMBER OF THE PRESS WHO’S SUPPOSED TO BE AWARE OF THIS KIND OF THING:

BATTLESWARM: Iran Strikes Day 25. “The Iran war continues, with attacks on energy grids and refineries across the Persian Gulf, (maybe) another bunker buster strike, serious regime confusion, countries reporting impending shortages, and part of the 82nd Airborne moving into the theater.”

JUST REMEMBER THAT THE POINT OF HIGH-SPEED RAIL IS TO SPEND THE MONEY, NOT TO BUILD A RAILROAD, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE:

Somebody need to remind Andreessen that even if California does someday, somehow finish the project, the high-speed part still won’t reach Los Angeles or San Francisco.

EVERY SMALL BIT OF RENEWED SPINE HELPS:

NO, THEY WANT TO MAKE IT TOO EXPENSIVE TO SELL THERE: Illinois Dems Want to Serialize Every Round of Ammo Sold in the State. “Even setting aside the constitutional violations, the proposal is wildly impractical. There’s no existing infrastructure capable of mass-producing serialized ammunition at scale. The entire scheme relies on microstamping-style technology that has repeatedly failed in real-world conditions.”

AMAZING, INDEED:

“Lie back and enjoy the diversity,” they said.