1) The US is not the only country to deploy chemical weapons. Are you forgetting all of WW1? It's the whole reason chemical weapons are a no-no now.
2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.
Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.
2 - is a little pedantic, they used agent orange to kill foliage to kill people...
They didn't gas people with chlorine or mustard, but they mass destroyed crops and foliage, to kill people.
And "affected US troops as much as Vietnamese" is just completely incorrect, US covered a nation in herbicide, went home, got cancer. Is completely different then having your soil destroyed for decades.
"Can be used as a weapon" applies to nearly everything, and ceases to have any meaning. Even on a tank, they aren't considered a weapon, only the whole take together is the weapon, or the cannon alone.
Chemical weapons didn't work well in WW1. The reason we don't see any chemical weapons around is because they are not really effective. Germans accidentally gassed a bunch of their own guys, while failing to use chemical weapons to achieve anything in the war.
I feel like today's Pentagon would be fine with gassing our own troops to achieve nothing.
"No Tab Pete" has no regard for servicemembers, or previous expertise. Only your testosterone levels, ability to not eat, and blind loyalty to serve political party over country and constitution.
The civilian cost was intentionally not part of the equation. The toxic effects were known and the numbers show that it was not a few isolated accidents but a intentional disregard for the human cost.
The toxic effects also impacted the area where I grew up here in the Southern US - there’s a road that’s known locally as “Chemical Ranch Rd” where there’s a ~100 acre property that was used for testing Agent Orange.
"no see they didn't use it to give people cancer, they merely wanted to make the land they lived in so uninhabitable and devoid of life that staying there would mean death either by starvation or bombing"
I'm not sure what you're responding to. If you are making the claim that Agent Orange was indeed a chemical weapon, I'd disagree, but I think either perspective has points.
WW2 is notable for not seeing widespread deployment of chemical weapons. Hitler had been subject to gas attacks as a foot soldier in WW1 and forbade the use of chemical weapons as inhumane.
Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_chemical_warfare#Wo... this (a) overlooks the widespread use of chemical weapons in the Pacific theater, and (b) ascribes the non-use by Germany to humanitarian reasons, which is largely speculative. Actual quotes from officers discuss far more practical reasons: Germany feared chemical retaliation, and the horses relied upon for logistics could not be outfitted with sufficiently performant gas masks.
Entirely untrue in the Pacific theatre, with the Japanese doing human experiments both with germ and chemical agents. The largest scale use I remember was where they released infected rats (forget where) in a certain Chinese city to cause a plague.
I'm not arguing we were the good guys in Vietnam, just that calling Agent Orange a chemical weapon is a shaky claim. Not sure why you're putting so many other words in my mouth.
> We must pursue advancements in AI to protect us against advancements in AI
Is this not true of technology as a whole? Very little of technology's breadth exists at the human interface. Most of it is made specifically to interface with other technologies, either to make them safer or increase their capabilities. That AI is making AI safer and more useful is no more notable than trucks being used to build roads.
You can't ignore the impact of China also becoming a better place to live as well. China is a different place no than it was 20 years ago, and the need to go overseas anywhere is probably felt less today than back then.
The arguments can be the same but have entirely different hidden variables that make it fine to use the argument in one context and not the other.
Also, this ignores that the government works for citizens, no matter their race. Promoting racial equality among citizens is a function that the government might undertake. Pursuing policies that favor citizens over non-citizens falls in line with that same reasoning.
More likely that any ideas AI comes up with will be "mid" and face the same implementation obstacles that already exist, coupled with the majority of energy burnt up by AI will go to frivolous ends, making personalised dog whistles, derivitive elevator muzak, et al.
So you're abandoning your earlier argument about us bumping up against the laws of physics and instead arguing that AI won't make the economy more efficient due to frivolous usage?
That's plainly false, as that's just not how markets work over the long term. We only see distortions like this iver the short term due to investor subsidies.
I use Claude and I find that it speaks in a very obfuscated manner when explaining things. It seems to make up jargon as it goes on top of spending a lot of tokens dancing around a point. I often find myself having to ask it to rephrase things, or speak directly about mechanism or consequence, in order to understand the point.
Im starting to believe it is exactly that...obfuscation. it started after it was known Chinese were generating models that were much smaller and more accurate from the llms response. The more generally articulated the answer is along with its accuracy in what it is and not what it isn't along with many strange never written before English euphemisms that dont make sense is definitely semantical obfuscation probably added in as a post processing transform to prevent these types of actors from being able to get easy to digest answers, and leave watermarks in their models to detect.
Using Claude for any kind of technical writing makes me feel like it was trained on snarky Huffington Post articles written by a 23 year old mixed media arts graduate and then was told to intentionally obfuscate the most important elements of any text by extensively rambling about what was not done and for what reason.
Me and a Cofounder are building something along these lines on top of K8s. The wisdom that "if give the LLM clear boundaries and you get better results" definitely holds IME, even with frontier models like fable. It's impossible to specify all the guardrails you need to keep models from violating priors without writing the code yourself, so the only move is to remove their ability to do so, or to even recognize that the option exists.
Per capita stats are computed based on population, not per treatment or per person eligible for treatment. The US spends more per head on giving only a fraction of them subsidised healthcare than other nations manage on universal health, [more years of] education, [more generous] welfare payments etc. Some of that is down to medical professional salary discrepancies, but some of it is down to a terrible system...
>"Per capita stats are computed based on population, not per treatment or per person eligible for treatment. "
Your point is correct, but since the majority of healthcare spending occurs in the last 18 months of life, and the vast majority are on either Medicare or Medicaid during that time of their life (either due to age or ailment-related incapacity), it doesn't make a huge difference.
The spending per capita, unless I’m mistaken, is just “per person in the country” not “per person insured by the government”.
That means that even though government insurance in the US only covers a relatively small percent of the population, we pay more than other countries that cover the whole population.
2) The US didn't use chemicals weapons in Vietnam. Agent Orange was used to kill off foliage, not as a weapon against people, and the side effects were unintentional and affected US troops as much as Vietnamese.
Edit: I originally noted WW2, but I was thinking of WW1's widespread use of things like mustard gas, and the resulting Geneva agreements.
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