I'm not sure if it was any kind of official rule, but I worked at times in a JTAC capacity for troops in contact. I mention the last bit because it's very high stakes where seconds and minutes count a great deal more than when you do coordinated tactical strikes against strategic objectives like weapons caches. When I did that kind of work we had to have three eyes-on forms of contact. Often that was the calling troops, the observer (like an Air officer), and an air asset like a drone. They all had to independently describe the target, its orientation, and surrounding activity.

However you sourced your target is irrelevant to the activity at hand. When I first heard of this news I knew immediately someone skipped target verification or that it was simply no longer a policy of the DOD.

That's a great point, five minute old account.

Every major AI shop has a ton of in-house classifiers already, big, small, generalist, specialized. Some are used in inference pipelines (e.g. safeguards), some are used in data preparation, training, analysis and investigation, research, various one-off and intermediate tasks etc. Offering them on a public API doesn't always make business sense. I don't see much substance to this buzz, looks like people that are new to all this are discovering that classifiers exist, they are more efficient at classification, and many tasks commonly done with generative models are classification in disguise. Which is not bad at all, a fresh look at their use is great to have.

> It’s directionally better to wait for manned missions to Mars so we can bring back tons of rocks or even do the research on Mars itself.

I'm worried it's arguments like this that doomed MSR [0]. Why spend 11 billion to get a couple rocks back in 2040 when Starship will be sending astronauts in 2030? But now it seems the near term goals of the Starship program are changing. At this point, who knows when we'll send people to Mars?

> buying rocks from a contractor with quoted price and lead time

I don't know about you but I'm not hearing anyone say they've reserved Starship mass-to-Mars-and-back. You're right that we should rely on private industry more. The CLPS program is the most comparable example (although time will tell whether it's a good one). But for a mission with the risk tolerance of MSR, the CLPS model doesn't work, IMO.

And meanwhile the Chinese are planning on launching their sample return in 2028. They're gonna beat us by a decade.

[0] My thoughts here are partially from this great blog post: https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/who-is-the-villain-in-mars...

I worked on (a very small part of) the ExoMars rover (now called the Rosalind Franklin[0]).

It was supposed to launch in 2018, then was pushed to the early 2020s on a Russian rocket. For obvious reasons, it got pushed again, now launching in 2028.

The state of the world isn't great for space exploration, but I'm hopeful this mission will be revived at some point in the future.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalind_Franklin_(rover)

Last year people were asking "if AI is so great then where are the new apps?". Then data for 2026 came out and now the IOS app store has a 84% percent year-over-year increase in new app submissions.

For the question where are the alternative OSes? Here is one that I've seen. There's probably more - https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...

For that other stuff you mentioned like the right click menu. Those huge corporate projects suffer more from layers of institutional dysfunction and will be very very slow to show any improvement. Their dysfunction can't be solved with just faster coding.

Using AI to build more features is easier than using AI to improve existing projects. People will gradually figure out how to do latter too, it'll just take longer.

This actually is a result of Meta being forced to obey EU law. Not sure why the article didn't explain things at all, but Regulation (EU) 2024/900 greatly restricts political advertising with typical vagueness, so Meta is enforcing a broad ban to ensure they comply.