$1,000? According to ccusage, I used around 3,200 USD worth of API credits last month, but I'm on a plan that only costs around 100 USD per month, and I'm not even a heavy user. At the end of each week, I have typically used about a third of my weekly Claude limit. So either their APIs are heavily overpriced, which seems rather unlikely, or they subsidise subscriptions to the tune of 100x or even more.
Why do you think the API being overpriced is unlikely? Seems pretty likely to me that sub sells at cost and api is the massive markup they force on enterprises.
But since the randomness is obviously borked, it was much better to use v4 and find out about it after just 15K records instead of X million records later.
> but I don’t think violence is funny or justified
Well, that's okay, because even Sam Altman disagrees with you. He absolutely believes that violence, including deadly violence, is justified - hence his contract with the US Department of War to use their systems in kill chains.
Perhaps the problem is that whoever threw the cocktail didn't use AI to select him as a target, or maybe he didn't receive payment for throwing it? Because what other difference is there?
I mostly agree with you - he seemed happy for the chance to play the victim. When the system is working, war is different because it has democratic process behind approval (Iran is obviously showing the system is breaking down)
But just because horrible people exist in positions of power doesn’t mean I have to become horrible myself. I accept that there is a threshold where that changes, but I think we would disagree that we’ve hit that threshold. If anything violence now just gives more excuse to justify further consolidation of power (look I got attacked! The anti AI people are crazy, any criticism of me is just encouraging them!) Imagine if it was a serious attack on sama, they could spin it into some serious gains for them.
Could you explain how the Vietnamese were involved in the US democratic process that resulted in around 3 million of their people dying? Similarly, how are the Iranians currently involved in the US democratic process to veto the use of AI targeting against them? As a German citizen, how can I object to being surveilled by OpenAI products used by US agencies?
It turns out that those affected by this are actually excluded from the process by design.
One of the more curious perks of being a democracy seems to be that you can also democratically (within your own country) decide about the fate of people in other, nondemocratic countries and then get to enforce those decisions by military...
I don't think that OpenAI necessarily enforces or fundamentally respects the democratic process. After the recent Pentagon spat with Anthropic, OpenAI did not change their stance to conditionally demand lawful usage of their product.
OpenAI can market democratic values very easily, I'm sure the White House loves that kind of dog-and-pony show. But it's pretty clear that OpenAI does not genuinely care about Rule of Law, let alone preventing humanitarian disasters from citing ChatGPT as their abettor.
does citizen and German not mean the same thing?
Are EU citizens living permanently in germany even considered to have a duty to either militarily or in civil service serve in war times?
So that article can in theory be used to conscript any man, citizen or not, living in Germany or not.
The Wehrpflichtgesetz, which is a simple law and requires just the 50% Bundestag majority to have it changed, refines this very wide constitutional power in article 1, to require men who hold German citizenship above 18.
Article 3 refines it even further to folks below 45 or 60, depending on the severity of the situation.
But yes, in theory it can be changed to include any non-German citizen man, people aged 80, living inside of Germany since a while or never having been to Germany ever, or just random men who happen to change flights at FRA.
As you said, you can only object if it goes against your conscience, but if you are against it for political reasons (e.g. you don't think its worth it to die for Germany), that's not a valid reason and your objection will be denied. They were also incredibly strict during the Cold War, only easing off a bit afterwards when they wanted a smaller military.
What's a reason that is politically and not against one's conscience? I assumed that one's political beliefs would also manifest in conscience.
The cold war has been over for a very long time. The whole process was reformed in 1984 by removing the mandatory oral hearing. Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995. That's not good enough (should be 100%), but not terrible either.
> What's a reason that is politically and not against one's conscience? I assumed that one's political beliefs would also manifest in conscience.
For example, I don't think it's in my interest to defend or die for the German state. However, I would use violence to protect my life if someone tried to kill me or threatened my life directly. The German state would interpret this as a political objection rather than a conscientious one, since I am willing to use violence in principle. If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.
> Sources say that acceptance rate was above 90% after 1995.
Yes, as I said, after the Cold War, Germany no longer wanted to maintain such a large army, so they started accepting any reasonably well-written argument. But in any war, you can see that nation states will start struggling to recruit new soldiers as it becomes obvious to the population that it's a rather pointless endeavour to die for their state. So, they start forcing people. We've seen that in Russia, Ukraine, Israel, USA, etc.
>If I could convince them that I would let someone kill me without defending myself because I categorically reject violence for any reason, they might consider that a conscientious objection.
That is a complete fantasy of yours. Political convictions are explicitly stated as a valid type of justification for conscientious objection by the Act on Conscientious Objection to Military Service. It even states the reasons do not have to be logical or objectively comprehensible, which easily covers your "I'm not opposed to all violence in all theoretically cases, but I fundamentally reject service for the German state".
Thanks for clarifying! I did some own research and apparaently in those oral hearings, objectors were often tricked into contradicting themselves with quite absurd scenarios.
All nation states are like that. They monopolise power and violence, and will defend that monopoly by sacrificing their citizens' lives if another state tries to infringe upon it.
I think it's clear that the interests of citizens and their state typically do not align. Unfortunately, most states have cultivated and propagated a different idea for decades, which is why so many people have a different perception of their state than the reality.
Honestly, I don't think the problem with war is that not enough women die in it. It makes more sense to argue against forcing anyone against their will to fight in a war.
Well women are the rate limiting factor in having more men produced for war fodder.
It probably makes more sense to ban birth control at the same time men are required to die for the war machine as both would then be playing out their slavery-induced biological role in ensuring survival of the nation. That is if you're down with the whole slavery for war thing.
That’s essentially what the commenter is proposing when talking about banning birth control. This would be equivalent to compelling women to reproduce (or forego sexual relations, which in reality most people won’t do).
Most actively wars are over long before the replacement rate starts to matter, and women that get pregnant or raise children will in all likelihood get an excemption from frontline duty.
How so? Why isn't the question 'Why is anyone being forced at all?' Their question assumes that someone has to be forced, which I fundamentally disagree with, so they should justify that assumption first.
> And the answer is that women are equal to men in all things, except when things get serious, and then all of a sudden biology matters again
Correct. They are equal, so I don't think either men or women should be forced.
Not only violence. There are plenty of concerning situations in which you all of a sudden stop putting middle-manager women in email jobs or HR/DEI finger-wagging jobs.
When things get existential, the jobs favored by men multiply and the jobs favored by women decrease. And nowhere more than in countries and societies which are highly feminist and supportive of women, which seems counterintuitive but isn't.
That was also true of much of the feudal or monarchist European wars in the centuries before WWI. In the near term before the "democratic" era around WWI wars war largely seen as wars of the aristocracy and armed forces. Merchants could usually ~freely come and go between countries at war and you could generally pass to a country you were at war with without common people seeing you as an enemy. Wars also tended to be less "all or nothing" where the other side was evil and had to be destroyed and were seen more as property and rights disputes of the elite where armed force was a negotiating tactic or strategic use to assert some particular right.
It wasn't until the scam of 'democracy' fooled people into thinking war was against the actual people of the other country that they not only scammed everyone into having such buy-in and stakes for the war but also to view the other countrymen themselves as the enemy. People started viewing the nation of themselves because their laughable miniscule influence of their vote somehow means the government is of them. (Note this was a resurface of course, there were times in history where war was seen as against a peoples rather than of the elite).
Stop reading Curtis Yarvin's pseudo-history. Like 8 million people died in the Thirty Years War before modern democratic states, and there's plenty of other examples.
Figures I’ve seen say over 700,000 casualties in the British Army alone.
3.7 million served in the Army, which is a fairly high proportion when compared to the age range suitable for military service. Add in the Navy and RAF and you get to nearly six million. Those that didn’t serve were generally needed at home - roles like doctors, miners, police, or were too young or too old to fight.
The British, unlike many European countries, had time to mobilise those forces. Had they lost the Battle of Britain and had Germany commenced a land invasion of Britain then it’s likely the numbers would have been a lot lower.
In the case of a typical war of conquest, fighting pretty much stops as soon as one nation surrenders. However, no nation state in the world asks, 'How can we save the most lives?', instead asking, 'Do we have enough people to send to their deaths to potentially preserve our monopoly of power?'
Of course, at the beginning of every war, some people genuinely believe that joining and defending the nation they live in is in their best interests, but these numbers quickly drop over time. As history and current events show, states start to use forced conscription in every prolonged war at some point.
Well, I will enjoy it while it lasts.