As someone who was in OSD during all of this, I respectfully but strongly disagree with the author. There were a lot of great guys coming up with good ideas on how to help the Ukrainians, but there was also so much stupidity.

We had to build an aid tracking system from scratch for everything.

For a while they used to have a contractor who's ads were just knock off transformers at the Pentagon stop. Still no idea what they sold, but as a transformers fan I appreciated it.

Gemma 3 is amazing for drones and robotics. Having local models that you can run on a pi has been a big watershed moment for physical system integration.

To be fair, Congress has expressed interest in this; it's just that what sounds simple on paper gets complicated fast. Even saying you just want to watermark synthetic video gets weird, because of how many industries use the underlying techniques and technology in different ways. It's a real mess.

The wiring of Air Force One is a nightmare due to the sheer number of custom payloads and equipment it has. The odds of anything going down that actually affects flight safety are slim to none, so it was likely a procedure and policy move. It's a real pour one out for the maintainers situation.

I don't teach conventional classes anymore, but I've found most students use it pretty well when I give a guest lecture or a demo somewhere. I do EE and hacking stuff, and most of the libraries I work with are poorly documented, so students having a good way to search for stuff is helpful to them.

I think it's going to be impossible to answer this, which is the most terrifying part. It's not just that small nations now believe they need nukes for protection, it's that a lot of them believe they have to keep these programs secret until they're all but there.

That's going to cause issues.

I remember when the bot kit Ashley Madison built got published, and everyone was amazed at how complicated their harvesting setup was to steal photos and posts from young women. They faced no real repercussions for stealing and manipulating those posts and photos. To me, that set the path for this

I think what's crazy is how fast everything has changed. I do deepfake demos for defcon and other hacker conferences, and I didn't think any of us in this space expected companies to not only dive right in, but somehow profit out of this mess. It's a nightmare.

Former govie here, and there's a couple reasons why this makes sense:

Getting ATOs and permission for cloud models is hard for everyone in gov right now, so running local models requires less paperwork. Also Llama2 had been authorized already by several agencies for use in projects.