So, what solution do you have in mind, if China supplies military support to an adversary? Politely ask them to stop? Let them continue? Seems not so trivial to me, especially since everyone has satellites up there for this purpose, and there's a good chance China would do the same.
If they did supply images, to supporting the attacks, that did or even didn't result in the death of soldiers, then they were first to commit an act of aggression towards a nuclear superpower. This is a measured response to that act of aggression. Asking politely, in that context, doesn't necessarily make sense, especially when you can just burn a few hundred million of their dollars to demonstrate why they shouldn't do that.
I think China would have done the same, but with the usual gaslighting [1].
Don't be naive. If a blind man is asking you where to aim his gun, are you responsible for the death or is the blind man pulling the trigger? In the context of war, BOTH of you are, and both are valid military targets, just as a spotter is, directing a sniper, on the battlefield, because the intention of both of you is to cause death.
You do realize that since the advent of image reconnaissance satellites, imagery has been used to support the wider geopolitical objectives of whoever owns the satellites doing the reconnaissance, up to and including sharing intelligence with geopolitical allies?
In other words: the point of contention here is a tale old as time, and when caught one power usually just registers diplomatic complaints against the other power. Rather than, you know, kick off WW3 by messing with space assets between two nuclear powers.
I'd also like to note that the Soviets literally provided a massive amount of logistical support to North Vietnam. In the Korean War, their own pilots even squared off against Americans. The United States returned the favor when they invaded Afghanistan, our logistical and intelligence support killing scores of Soviets. At no point did either power decide to start blowing up each other's satellites.
It's 2026, Iran I'm sure has a myriad of ways of acquiring imagery via commercial satellite providers. Let alone other intel modalities.
The notion that a giant KC-135 sitting on a tarmac somewhere being otherwise safe were it not for the Chinese sharing intelligence is laughable.
Reads more like incompetent threat assessment and regional asset positioning.
I really wonder if they can fix it. Fable 5.1 claims to speak humanese, but we'll see.
I tend to think this wierd limited vocabulary/style they use is an unwanted side effect of all the the RL training, perhaps also of being trained on their own synthetic content over multiple training cycles.
I agree with your reasoning that coding is a solved problem, or that it very soon will be.
While that has profound implications for the profession, I don't think it kills it outright—rather, it radically shifts the nature of the job.
Some have said that shift is analogous to leadership, creative direction.
Eventually we'll see models that excel at architecture, owing to extensive training on human prompts—harvesting both judgement and creativity.
Meanwhile with the underlying software infrastructure supporting it all, duplication of work is inevitable. On top of that, the feeling everything's cheap slop, nothing has meaning anymore.
It certainly doesn't paint a rosy picture. Is the whole thing a race to the bottom? Maybe.
So, here's my counterpoint:
For most, craftsmanship will no longer live in code going forward. Instead, it will live somewhere else. Where? I'm not entirely sure, but I strongly suspect it will still be part of the profession.
Right now, I’ll be very honest: it feels like a race to the bottom, except for the hardcore engineers working on genuinely difficult problems.
Only a small number of people will get the chance to work at that level as the field changes. I think there will be a radical shift from here.
Altman and Dario know this well. That is probably why the tone has changed from “engineering will disappear” to “engineering will change.” But I think we have already reached the inflection point where a large part of the work is getting automated.
Craftsmanship has already started moving somewhere else. Where exactly it moves depends on the kind of work, and I do not think everyone will figure out what the new end goal is.
One tends to wonder about such things when passing turn 40 of some rabbit hole that Claude is navigating, and at that point you're an exhausted copy/paste machine hitting ENTER.
Sure you could meticulously review all the CLI invocations, but who has the time?
Whoa. This is weird. My friend's dad was an FBI agent for over 20 years. I remember him telling us a story about a case he worked in the early-90s where a Coca Cola exec was embezzling millions from the company. The exec was caught, basically red-handed. After working with his lawyer, the exec provided a story about some South American gang that strong-armed him into washing money for them (threatened to kill him and his family; I think he said they even kidnapped his daughter). My friend's dad said his team worked with the exec for several months to corroborate the story about the South American gang. Apparently he was telling the truth. Then, after gathering intel on the gang, they came up with a plan to go after them. However, a few days before they were set to act on their plan, they were told to stand down. Actually, no, before that they were told by their leadership that there would be no capture (of the gang), only kill. Then the plan was cancelled altogether.
My friend's dad rarely, if ever, talked about his work. However, he got loose lips after retiring, and if he had a few beers in him.
We can talk about this on a legal or a moral basis. I'm not a lawyer, so I'll focus on the moral basis. If company A offloads some of its work to company B, and company B commits atrocities in a foreign company to keep costs down on said work, is company A not morally culpable if it continues to work with company B? Is it different if we think in terms of two people as opposed to two companies (and if so, why?)?
>This is a little indirect? A Colombian bottle company 25% owned by Coke suppressed union activity. awful but hardly what the headlines are stating
Suppressed using right-wing death squads. Three workers doing the organizing were straight up murdered.
Where do you think those death squads came from? My point was that they weren't exactly an organic phenomenon so much as a feature of U.S. foreign policy during that era.
There's one TLA that happens to specialize in their creation so much so that they may as well be the undisputed world champions of the craft.
I've a feeling our satellites are far more expensive and advanced than theirs. Nobody wants a space tit-for-tat that can escalate dramatically.
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