icegreentea2's comments | Hacker News

US forces have been answering the wake up call for the last few years.

The main weapon that Apache's use to hunt drones are laser guided rockets (APKWS) with a per-shot cost around $30k (https://www.airandspaceforces.com/apkws-base-laser-guided-ro...)

These weapons have been fitted to most US tactical fighters for the counter drone role as well. APKWS is also not a "new" weapon system - it started fielding back to 2012, and was adapted into the counter drone role.

There are other lower cost (compared to legacy systems designed to take on manned aircraft) solutions currently deployed. The US Army has the Coyote, which is in the ~100k range.

Beyond cost of munitions, you have to consider that cheaper systems are going to have less range, and therefore you'll need more launchers, and you can start running up costs that way.

I don't think it's 100% accurate to call the budget "austerity".

The budget projects increases in both revenue and spending, and increases the deficit by ~50% percent.

What the government has asked for is widespread cuts across the board from current programs and operations (and staffing) to try to make more room for new spending in new areas. They are targeting getting to ~$13 billion CAD reduction in annual operations cost by end of decade.

By contrast, there are a lot of major spending programs - ~$10 billion CAD added to the defense budget, ~$5 billion CAD in tariff relief.

American beef imports are heavily driven by how US beef production and consumption is structured. Basically, the US focuses beef production on creating high quality cuts (ie, steaks and other cuts with high marbling/fat), because that's what a large portion of domestic consumption is (and it's highest value). This leaves the US with a very large amount of high fat off cuts that aren't very marketable on their own. Imports are typically ultra lean cuts (which are also not very usable), and these two sources are then combined into ground beef.

Here's one source, but there are plenty of others you can find: https://tscra.org/we-have-94-million-cows-why-do-we-import-b...

Basically, classic value chain optimization.

I think it's right and honest to admit that this is one of the methods that sanctions are supposed to work. But it's also not the only method - and framing the intent as inducing "regime change by internal bad-actors" is also a very slanted way to articulate intent, as well as what is happening on the ground.

On the other hand, without being on the ground, we cannot really say what the real balance of grievances are.

"Sanctions" are just a sanitized way of saying "forced starvation" and "denying basic medical care" because that's what happens. For Cuba, this has been going on so long that the CIA documents about the effect of sanctions and a blockade itself has been declassified (in 2005) [1]. When faced with a UN report that estimated 500,000 children had been killed by US sanctions in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later US Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously said "the price was worth it" [2].

And sanctions don't actually work. Not against enemies anyway. Just like Cuba has endured 60+ years of sanctions and Russia has endured Ukraine-related sanctions, enemies have or build an economy to be resilient to the sanctions to the point that the regime survives, even thrives in the face of perceived exteranl threats.

Probably the only successful use of sanctions was South Africa. Why? Because apartheid South Africa was an ally so the BDS movement crippled the economy.

And most of the time sanctions have no other reason than the affected country dared to not be exploited by the West and Western companies.

[1]: https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R00904A0008000...

[2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iFYaeoE3n4

Even more precisely, human writing contains unpredictability that is either more or less intention (what might be called authors intent), as well as much more subconsciously added (what we might call quirks or imprinted behavior).

The first requires intention, something that as far as we know, LLMs simply cannot truly have or express. The second is something that can be approximated. Perhaps very well, but a mass of people using the same models with the same approximationa still lead to loss of distinction.

Perhaps LLMs that were fully individually trained could sufficiently replicate a person's quirks (I dunno), but that's hardly a scalable process.

Chiplets are different physical chips, potentially from different nodes or processes. They're physically connected prepackaging. It's beneficial compared to sticking them on a board because then you get the shortest interconnects, and you aren't limited by pinout density. This should let you get the best bandwidth to power ratio, and better latency.

Wow, he admits to using two AI tools: He used Claude Code, which failed because the blog was intentionally set up to refuse AI crawlers, so he pasted the page into ChatGPT. Then he blames ChatGPT for paraphrasing the hallucinated quotes.

He makes the claim that he was just using AI to help him put together an outline for his article, when the evidence clearly shows that he used the AI's verbatim output.

There's no federal entitlement to being paid if you're sick, so companies come up with their own policies.

So companies often have a strange concept of "sick days", a specific number of days a year you're allowed to be sick. If you're sick more than that you have to use your vacation days, or unpaid leave when you're sick.

(And of course American companies often have weirdness around vacations too. More so in companies where there is allegedly "unlimited time off". But that's kinda off-topic now.)

During COVID my company had mandatory days off (I think 14) if you reported any COVID symptoms. Those days were unpaid of course. The cherry on top is the people paid the lowest were the ones who couldn't work from home and were most likely to get COVID. This was pretty common at other places too.

Depends entirely on the workplace and the individual. You can tell people not to work when they're sick, but it's not like they're not aware of deadlines for things that, in some cases, only they can reasonably do.

As someone who has deadlines, and is occasionally sick, if I have a high fever I am not working. Nor would my manager thank me for it if I did. If you have a high fever, you’re mentally impaired and shouldn’t be doing anything important if it can possibly be avoided.

Really refreshing to see someone owning up to their mistake, that is something rare nowadays.

I don’t totally agree with this. There’s a gap in his story that most journalists wouldn’t leave out like he did. According to his post, the order of events was:

1.) He tried use Claude to generate a list of citations. Claude refused because the article talked about harassment and this breaks its content policy.

2.) He wanted to understand why so he pasted the text into ChatGPT.

3.) ChatGPT generated quotes; he did not verify they were actual quotes.

I don’t see any sign that he actually read the source article. He had an excellent lead in to that - he had Covid and mentioned a lack of sleep so brain fog would have been a valid excuse. He could have said something as simple as ‘I was sick, extremely tired and the brain fog was so deep that I couldn’t remember what I read or even details of the original author’s voice.’ And that would have been more than enough. But there’s nothing.

That’s an odd thing for a journalist to leave out. They’re skilled at crafting narratives that will both explain and persuade and yet the most important part of this whole thing didn’t even warrant a mention.

As a basic rule, if a journalist is covering something that happened via blog posts, you should be able to expect the journalist to read the posts. I’d like to give this writer the benefit of the doubt but it’s hard.

I think there's still something missing here. This is a strange place for ChatGPT to confabulate quotes: extracting short quotes from a short text blog post is about easy as it gets these days. GPT-5.2 Pro can handle tens of thousands of words for me before I start to notice any small omissions or confabulations, and this was confabulating all that at just 1.5k words?

So since he says he was sick and his recollection cannot be trusted (I don't blame him, the second-to-last time I had COVID-19, I can barely remember anything about the worst day - which was Christmas Day), something seems to be missing. He may not have pasted in the blog post like he remembers. Or perhaps he got routed to a cheap model; it wouldn't surprise me if he was using a free tier, that accounts for a lot of these stories where GPT-5 underperforms and would explain a lot of stupidity by the GPT. Or didn't use GPT at all, who knows.

What alternative action could he possibly take? He's owning up to something indisputable.

We operate in an information environment where this is exceedingly rare. Shame is hard to come by these days.

The DOW is at 50,000! 50,000! If you get this reference (and even if you don’t), there are many alternative actions he could have taken, including not acknowledging this at all.

Yeah, but the problem is that by not making it clear that additional actions may be coming, they're barely restoring credibility at all, because the current course of action (pulling the article and saying sorry) is like the bare minimal required to avoid being outright liars - a far cry from being credible journalists. All they've done is leave piles of readers (including Ars subscribers) going "wtf".

If they felt the need to post something in a hurry on the weekend, then the message should acknowledge that, and acknowledge that "investigation continues" or something like that

You don't announce that you're firing people or putting them on a PIP or something. Not only is it gauche but it makes it seem like you're not taking any accountability and putting it all in the employees involved. I assume their AI policy is fine and that the issue was it wasn't implemented/enforced, and I'm not sure what they can do about that other than discipline the people involved and reiterate the policy to everyone else.

What would you have liked to see them announce?

They just needed to expand "At this time, this appears to be an isolated incident." into "We are still investigating, however at this time, this appears to be an isolated incident". No additional details required.

And yes, it looks like Ars is still investigating (bluesky post by one of the authors of the retracted article) https://bsky.app/profile/kyleor.land/post/3mewdlloe7s2j

> Greatly appreciate this direct statement clarifying your standards, and yet another reason that I hope Ars can remain a strong example of quality journalism in a world where that is becoming hard to find

> Kudos to ARS for catching this and very publicly stating it.

> Thank you for upholding your journalistic standards. And a note to our current administration in DC - this is what transparency looks like.

> Thank you for upholding the standards of journalism we appreciate at ars!

> Thank you for your clarity and integrity on your correction. I am a long time reader and ardent supporter of Ars for exactly these reasons. Trust is so rare but also the bedrock of civilization. Thank you for taking it seriously in the age of mass produced lies.

> I like the decisive editorial action. No BS, just high human standards of integrity. That's another reason to stick with ARS over news feeds.

There is some criticism, but there is also quite a lot of incredible glazing.

Yeah, the initial comments are pretty glazey, but go to the second and third pages of comments (ars default sorts by time). I'll pull some quotes:

> If there is a thread for redundant comments, I think this is the one. I, too, will want to see substantially more followup here, ideally this week. My subscription is at stake.

> I know Aurich said that a statement would be coming next week, due to the weekend and a public holiday, so I appreciate that a first statement came earlier. [...] Personally, I would expect Ars to not work with the authors in the future

> (from Jim Salter, a former writer at Ars) That's good to hear. But frankly, this is still the kind of "isolated incident" that should be considered an immediate firing offense.

> Echoing others that I’m waiting to see if Ars properly and publicly reckons with what happened here before I hit the “cancel subscription” button

No reason to trust that the comment section is any more genuine than the deleted fake article. If an Ars employee used genAI to astroturf these comments, they clearly would not be fired for it or even called out by name.