LLMs-gone-rogue dominated coverage, but had nothing to do with the targeting. Instead, it was choices made by human beings, over many years, that gave us this atrocity

Hacker News is a community-driven platform for sharing and discussing technology news, startups, and programming-related topics. Through user submissions and comments, Hacker News offers insights into emerging technology trends, industry developments, and entrepreneurial ventures. Readers can participate in discussions, share their insights, and stay informed about the latest advancements in technology and innovation.

Hacker News

A detailed analysis of the US strike on an Iranian school during Operation Epic Fury, arguing that media coverage wrongly blamed Claude (an LLM) while ignoring the real culprit: Palantir's Maven Smart System. Maven is a targeting platform built over years to compress the 'kill chain' — the process from detecting a target to striking it — down to 1,000 decisions per hour. The school was misclassified as a military facility in an outdated database, and the speed of the system left no room for anyone to catch the error. The piece traces a long history of how military targeting systems create 'circular reporting' and eliminate the human deliberation that catches mistakes, drawing on Vietnam's Operation Igloo White, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and Kosovo. It argues that LLMs are a 'charismatic technology' that distort public attention away from the real bureaucratic and political decisions that enabled the atrocity.

AI got the blame for the Iran school bombing. The truth is far more worrying