jonyt

It absolutely is. And anything that's bad for a regime that just recently massacred tens of thousands of its own citizens is a net good.

The WWII article, or the bug hunting story?

Two things, both from this week.

First, I asked Claude to write an article based on an idea I had about WWII. In a passage about the futility (from the German side) of the Battle of Britain it wrote: "The Luftwaffe was fighting to unlock a door that opened onto a wall." I couldn't find any mention of a similar metaphor, and I think it's a great one. Claude has really improved its creative writing skills lately, I wonder if it's an artifact of improvements in other fields, or if Anthropic is working on it specifically.

Second, Claude, with access to DataDog and a code repo, managed to find the reason for a bug, propose an effective temporary fix and a permanent one in code. To be clear, this was something that had multiple engineers stumped.

The article comes off as a laughable attempt to fire the arrow and then paint the target around it. For example the author claims about 9/11 that "the first attack had already achieved its aims: it dragged the U.S. into a protracted war in Afghanistan, pushed the country back into the moral swamp of torture, and, as a bonus, helped goad America into invading Iraq." Bin Laden was a fanatical mass murderer and his aim was to establish a caliphate. I highly, highly, highly doubt that he saw the attacks as an attempt to degrade the morals of the CIA (or any of the other outlandish claptrap that the author claims).

Iran isn't being attacked because it's not nice to its own people (which is a shame really, all dictators and theocrats should worry for their lives). It's being attacked because it has ballistic missiles, a nuclear weapons program, a giant sign in the middle of Tehran counting down the existence of Israel and its leaders have repeatedly called for Israel's destruction. So weapon, opportunity and motive. It's of course free to work towards the destruction of Israel but then it's hardly fair to complain that Israel may try to preempt that.

Iran is a signatory of the NPT so - not approved.

Getting my historical fiction novel published. I finished writing it a couple of months back. Extremely short plot summary: guy deserts from the Roman XI legion, goes back home only to find that his entire province is about to revolt against the Roman Empire at the height of its power. It's one of the most spectacular feats of collective self-immolation in human history and it had a large effect on human history. I think not enough has been written about the role of abject stupidity in human affairs. This book is an attempt to correct that.