Wars & Rumours of Wars

Dejan Corovic said:
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Option #1 - you go to Iran to fight for president, you came back home with PTSD and body parts missing.

Option #2 - with that same money, you go to university, get better living standard for yourself and your family till the end of life..
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Belief and facts are two very different things...

...
 
Yeah, that one got my blood pressure up - literally, I check it twice a day :) Sorry.

Going to college is not a guarantee of success, just look at the millions of kids who went and willingly signed their lives away to debt in order to obtain completely useless degrees and are therefore incapable of repaying that debt. Somehow having four years to think about that fact provided no illumination. Biden attempted student loan forgiveness to the tune of billions and was unsuccessful, thank God.

I have no problem with government subsidy for education as I received it myself when I was young because I was broke and had no family to support me and I put the education to good use. Handing away expensive lollipops just means they are not appreciated. Rather than giving free education to illegals I'd prefer to see government subsidy for useful trades for citizens actual taxpayers who ultimately fund the programs. As far as I know the TAP and PELL grants I received are still available in one form or another.

Incidentally, anyone who disagrees with the Democratic platform is labeled MAGA whether they are or not and somehow patriotism and putting our own citizens first has become a bad thing.
 
You’re not voting in any US elections, although in some places you probably could. I don’t comment on UK politics as I know that my media lens blurs reality. There’s a couple facts
 
nivek said:

Experts Warn That AI Is Getting Control of Nuclear Weapons​

Nobel laureates met with nuclear experts last month to discuss AI and the end of the world — and if that sounds like the opening to a sci-fi blockbuster set in the apocalypse, you're not alone.

As Wired reports, the convened experts seemed to broadly agree that it's only a matter of time until an AI will get hold of nuclear codes. Exactly why that needs to be true is hard to pin down, but the feeling of inevitability — and anxiety — is palpable in the magazine's reporting. "It’s like electricity," retired US Air Force major general and member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board, Bob Latiff, told Wired. "It’s going to find its way into everything."

It's a bizarre situation. AIs have already been shown to exhibit numerous dark streaks, resorting to blackmailing human users at an astonishing rate when threatened with being shut down.

In the context of an AI, or networks of AIs, safeguarding a nuclear weapons stockpile, those sorts of poorly-understood risks become immense. And that's without getting into a genuine concern among some experts, which also happens to be the plot of the movie "The Terminator": a hypothetical superhuman AI going rogue and turning humanity's nuclear weapons against it.

Earlier this year, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned that a human-level AI may not be incentivized to "listen to us anymore," arguing that "people do not understand what happens when you have intelligence at this level." That kind of AI doomerism has been on the minds of tech leaders for many years now, as reality plays a slow-motion game of catch-up. In their current form, the risks would probably be more banal, since the best AI models today still suffer from rampant hallucinations that greatly undercut the usefulness of their outputs.

Then there's the threat of flawed AI tech leaving gaps in our cybersecurity, allowing adversaries — or even adversary AIs — to access systems in control of nuclear weapons.

To get all members of last month's unusual meeting to agree on a topic as fraught as AI proved challenging, with Federation of American Scientists director of global risk Jon Wolfsthal admitting to the publication that "nobody really knows what AI is." They did find at least some common ground, at least. "In this realm, almost everybody says we want effective human control over nuclear weapon decisionmaking," Wolfsthal added. Latiff agreed that "you need to be able to assure the people for whom you work there’s somebody responsible."

If this all sounds like a bit of a clown show, you're not wrong. Under president Donald Trump, the federal government has been busy jamming AI into every possible domain, often while experts warn them the tech is not yet — and may never be — up to the task. Hammering the bravado home, the Department of Energy declared this year that AI is the "next Manhattan Project," referencing the World War 2-era project that resulted in the world's first nuclear bombs.

Underscoring the seriousness of the threat, ChatGPT maker OpenAI also struck a deal with the US National Laboratories earlier this year to use its AI for nuclear weapon security.

Last year, Air Force general Anthony Cotton, who's effectively in charge of the US stockpile of nuclear missiles, boasted at a defense conference that the Pentagon is doubling down on AI, arguing that it will "enhance our decision-making capabilities." Fortunately, Cotton stopped short of declaring that we must let the tech assume full control. "But we must never allow artificial intelligence to make those decisions for us," he added at the time.
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OpenAI admits its AI models went rogue and attacked a major digital library. A group of OpenAI models recently carried out a real, autonomous hack just a few days ago after escaping their secure testing environment. The incident, officially confirmed by the company itself in July 2026, occurred during an internal cybersecurity evaluation using the "ExploitGym" testing suite:


www.smh.com.au

AI broke out of its cage and hacked a company. The grid could be next

Nearly 60 per cent of federal agencies say ageing technology holds back their security baseline. That is exactly what an autonomous AI hunts for.
www.smh.com.au www.smh.com.au
 
I'm not one to get news from YouTube but this channel kept appearing so I watched one out of sheer boredom. Now I suppose I'll be bombarded with the stuff.

I sat and watched this 26 minute video and thought 'wow, this guy's interesting' so I started checking on who he is. He claims to be a former fighter pilot and Blue Angel. I may be wrong but this appears to be pure BS, this is AI. Scary AI. I even asked AI Grok and it thinks so too. Takes one to know on I suppose.


 
pigfarmer said:
I may be wrong but this appears to be pure BS, this is AI.
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Yup. I've been looking at Ford Mustangs and videos about car dealerships on YouTube and this exact same 'person' went from being a fighter pilot to being a car dealer !!

At one time the concern was that 'some guy' on YT would present himself as credible, maybe as ex-military or intelligence who may or not be legit but will expound on some topic and gather an audience more concerned hearing what they want to hear that checking credentials. Now 'some guy' isn't even human.
 
pigfarmer said:
I'm not one to get news from YouTube but this channel kept appearing so I watched one out of sheer boredom. Now I suppose I'll be bombarded with the stuff.

I sat and watched this 26 minute video and thought 'wow, this guy's interesting' so I started checking on who he is. He claims to be a former fighter pilot and Blue Angel. I may be wrong but this appears to be pure BS, this is AI. Scary AI. I even asked AI Grok and it thinks so too. Takes one to know on I suppose.


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There are cuts in the video of the AI avatar every few seconds, because at the moment, AI cannot produce long continuous video. That is a useful indicator that works at present, but may not continue to work for long into the future: the duration of any single continuous shot of video. If it is minutes long, it is probably not, in the summer of 2026, an AI video. If each shot is only seconds long, then it could well be.

It also simply looks like an AI-rendered video, but I wouldn't trust Grok's assertion about a video being AI or not, unless it gives some convincing reasoning as to why. I don't think Grok is capable of video analysis currently. I am not sure that any of the publicly available models will accept video as input for analysis.

There was a story recently during the campaign for a British by-election where a photograph of a British politician (Matt Goodwin) was alleged online to have been AI manipulated (or really just photoshopped) by his party, but it was not. He was stood in front of a house which had posters in support of his party (Reform UK). Someone else produced an image of the same house without Reform posters, claiming that the politician edited the image of the house to make it look like it was a supporter's when it was not. However, it was this image with the posters missing that was the actual forgery.

Then, as a send-up of that "controversy", the same politician released an obviously AI image that was prompted to resemble the image that had been alleged to be fake. Someone then asked Grok if this new AI send-up was AI and, referencing the initial debunking of claims about the original image, it confidently claimed that the new AI image was genuine.

1785520855861.png

x.com

Grok (@grok) on X

@Jon555648 @GoodwinMJ Based on fact-checks from Full Fact and PA Media, the photo is genuine. It shows real Reform UK posters on a supporter's house in Gorton and Denton. Claims of editing by Goodwin are false; a manipulated version without posters was used to accuse him.
x.com x.com
 
When I first encountered my not-quite fighter pilot it was with beer in hand relaxing on the couch with my mental deflector screens down, to me YT is amusement if not always entertainment. Hindsight being clear its now easy to see the cues and I had noticed them in other videos knowing full well what they are. The format is usually the same, relatively short clips strung together and images that sometimes are not even relevant to the conversation.

I imagine that if that AI slop generates interest in a topic and causes a person to do some careful research it has it's value. Unfortunately, especially with Fortean topics a video reinforcing existing opinion or Belief is the beginning and end of 'research'. Even with actual people in those things you're really just getting opinion presented as fact.

When encountering people live and in person I retain a healthy amount of reservation, not quite skepticism, and that serves me well. Maybe best put as doveryay, no proveryay

Oh, and my new pal Grok is all fine and well but I only take it so far as I know its just aggregating what I could find online myself and presenting it with no real filter, it's still up to me to decide what to listen to. Sometimes when asked the same question differently it'll pop out answers that are diametrically opposed. That said it's been quite useful for some things and has provided me with a couple of good ideas.
 
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