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US used AI (Claude on Maven) to determine a girl's elementary school as a target in war[0] and then triple tapped it and you're still more worried about hypothetical misuses of the single country responsible for this technology not being concentrated in the hands of a few powerful elite? ffs

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/03/11/...


This was obviously a story - a telltale 'admission' - devised by the military.

Its horrible event, but it was hit because Iranian regime builds schools and hospitals across the street from military bases.

Nothing to do with AI and can happen in any war. Do some research, check sattelite imagery:

https://goo.gl/maps/ZoAXkw1iFwyF7exQ8?g_st=ac

PS: I not trying defend bombing schools, but posting that its "AI" resposible is opposite of what you need to do if you care.

Its military - there been specific people who found this location for the strike, then some senior officers who choose it without checking and specific people who executed it. And its all logged with "paper" trail in chain of command.

It was all people with specific names who are responsible to avoid bombing schools. They failed. Not "AI".


The U.S. operates over 160 public schools physically located on military installations

https://oldcc.gov/our-programs/public-schools-military-insta...

I never said AI is responsible. I pointed out the US is clearly the one using AI in dystopian ways.


Unfortunately this is just the only defense we currently have against powerful interest groups. It's the reason we still have any redwoods today. Absent of a fair replacement, a powerful corporation will, over time, always win even if it's not the net social benefit.

Unfortunately this is an all too common pattern in the history of pesticides. In 1979 DBCP was banned in the US after factory workers became sterile. Dow Chemical happily shipped tons of it to be sprayed directly on banana workers in banana republics[0] by Dole/Chiquita/Del Monte. To this day Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama, and Nicaragua have some of the highest rates of infertility, birth defects, and chronic illnesses in the world

This was just after the Gros Michel had gone basically extinct because of monocropping. The banana companies hired scientists to figure out what to do that almost universally recommended diversifying the crop. But they calculated that it'd actually be cheaper to just double down on pesticide application and start again with another monocrop.

There's an incredible documentary about the banana industry history (and practices that continue to this day like banana companies paying gangs to assassinate local labor leaders) called Bananaland: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoRmtQht8-E

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic


I'd be more scared of publicly criticizing Chiquita than the CIA at this point

All but 2 countries in South America have had the experience of democratically electing a leader only to have them overthrown in a US-backed coup. The US/CIA started with this obsession with the 1954 Guatemalan Coup specifically to maintain Guatemala as a banana republic. Chiquita owned most land in Guatemala and left is uncultivated to stifle competition. Jacobo Árbenz wanted to (slightly) tax this land to reduce poverty. Chiquita hired Edward Bernays (yes, that guy. The father of modern public relations, nephew of Freud, etc) for an influence campaign and eventually got CIA to launch Operation PBSuccess in 1953. The CIA/Chiquita gave very extensive lists of political opponents to murder during the coup.

So what's really the difference?


One way to view current US politics is that the broader banana republic tendency ran out of South American governments to overthrow and moved back to the domestic government, which has now taken on all the corruption and extractive politics of South American CIA-backed dictatorships. The violence levels are not comparable .. yet. But having an explicitly political paramilitary force that's shot a few citizens in the street is not a good sign.

There's a well-known sociological concept called "imperial boomerang" that describes this. It's also seen in surveillance technologies used against oppressed people. As far back as the surveillance apparatus Britain built in Ireland which eventually came to roost on the British people themselves

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang


You can't spell Chiquita without CIA



I’ll never miss an opportunity to plug a very relevant Behind the Bastards - at this point it feels like an Xkcd for Very Bad Things, but I digress - [Part One: The Deadliest School in History](https://open.spotify.com/episode/2N77mwUI0pDOBOP6gIknkU) does a pretty good job of covering the School of the Americas

They also have a few on Bernays because of course they do


It's not pesticides, it's everything. Everything from slavery laws to workers rights, environmental regulations, health and safety regulations. The ruling class has conspired to evade those regulations and crush local competition for 100+ years, by offshoring and globalizing their abuses and exploitation.

What else would they have produced with banana crops that people would’ve wanted?

More banana varieties. The reason Panama Disease was so successful is because of the practice of cloning. Every single crop is the same genetics. Researchers warned that starting over with the Cavendish would result in the exact same thing again and the clear solution was to stop cloning the exact same plant and grow more types of bananas (there are more than 1,000 species of banana and tens of thousands of varieties around the world).

Now we're dealing with TR4 because of the Cavendish being grown in the exact same way but with an even heavier reliance on pesticides, slavery, and violent control over local power.


That was a fun bit of trivia I learned from Balatro - the Gros Michel has a one in six chance of being destroyed after a round. However, if it is destroyed (the game displays Extinct! when it perishes), then the Cavendish can appear randomly in the shop and has a one in one-thousand chance of being destroyed.

And they aren't even cloning anything even close to the tastiest bananas, just the ones best suited for transport/storage.

I don't eat bananas I can buy in Europe, not after doing some travels. They are extremely bland, doesn't matter where I buy them. Now when traveling in exotic countries, what a beautiful experience to taste one!

"Exotic countries" lol. There's at least a few species in the banana genus that grow in almost every single country in the global south

1. Cromwell family donated 87 acres to nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation in 1999

2. City sold 53 of those acres to Blueprint for $10 million in 2024. In addition, the city gave Blueprint 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years and a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases

3. Local neighbors sue to stop the violation of the deed. Judge dismisses the case on "no standing" in 2025.

https://old.reddit.com/r/InterstellarKinetics/comments/1u0cf...


The full 87 acres were donated to the nonprofit Texas Parks and Wildlife Foundation. The city sold 53 acres for $10 million to the developer. In addition:

> The Taylor City Council and the EDC are giving Blueprint a 50% rebate on property taxes for 10 years on each of the three phases of construction for the $1 billion project. In addition, the company would get a 50% rebate on local sales-and-use tax collected on construction material purchases.

https://www.taylorpress.net/article/10705


The HN crowd is much less anti-AI than the rest of the country. But that's a low bar

A Quinnipiac poll showed 80% of Americans are "very" or "somewhat" concerned about artificial intelligence, with only 35% feeling excited about it

https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3955

Gallup found that 71% of Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their local communities.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/709772/americans-oppose-data-ce...

A Fox News Poll indicated that 80% of voters believe protecting the public's interests and enacting regulations should be prioritized over unchecked technological innovation.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/fox-news-poll-voters-see-ai...

And Pew Research found that the majority of Americans are "more concerned than excited" about AI, with that number increasing over the years

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findi...


Ah yes, The Country.

Fair point. I looked it up and I didn't realize that possibly only around 40-50% of HN traffic is from the US

https://marcotm.com/articles/stats-of-being-on-the-hacker-ne...

I do wonder what similar polling/surveys would find in other countries


Most posts are fairly US centric so I don't think it's odd to assume it's mostly Americans who visit.

I guess you can think of torrents as sharing. The modern shareware

Invisibilia's episode was my first exposure to it.

https://www.npr.org/programs/invisibilia/378577902/how-to-be...

The man posits that clicking is instinctual for blind people but they are told to quiet down in class and most never develop their echolocation abilities


Gov't spending is 38% and that's totally normal, if a bit low. France is at 57%, the UK at 44%, and Japan at 39%

I think TypeScript can feel like there's too many gaps because not enough people take it seriously enough to truly learn it. Hardly anyone reads a book about best practices/design the way many do about C/Java/Rust.

It's actually a very powerful tool when used thoughtfully. Although it wasn't the first structurally typed language I tried, it's the one that made me fall in love with structural type systems


I like the strutural typing as well. But I hesitate to use TypeScript because AI tells me this:

It Catches: Mismatched function arguments, missing object properties, and typos in variable names.

It Misses: Invalid JSON from an API, unexpected database outputs, and bad user input.


You use Zod if you want runtime features. I'd say it's pretty industry standard. On the type level there's no reason it couldn't account for any of the examples you pointed out. And since Zod supports all the expressiveness of the actual language, you can certainly have those as runtime checks

I would also just like to point out that the "It Misses" your robot pointed out aren't actually flaws with TypeScript but flaws with JavaScript.


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