So these messages are presumably encrypted with a one time pad, and some lookup book of what each message of just a few characters means?
And I assume there are also a high bandwidth comms channels, and this is just the backup which is presumably tested each day.
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
I think this is the primary.
High bandwidth comms are likely a lot more fragile than this. At the same time: there will be many different transmission channels, and I would expect this one to be useless immediately if someone really did something nasty.
notadev 2 days ago [-]
Back in my Navy days, we were taught HF is the less susceptible to jamming so is used for critical comms like these in serious situations. My ship performed in one exercise related to a doomsday scenario. We sat all day listening to an HR receiver until we heard these same messages, and we would then record the characters spoken. The message was repeated so we could make sure what we wrote was accurate. We never responded. Instead, we then repeated the same messages on an HF transmitter, presumably as part of some relay.
mijowi 2 days ago [-]
I, too, was in the navy and supervised this very exercise on a ship. The exercise simulates a doomsday scenario that presumes satellite comms are out after a nuclear strike. Ships and other stations retransmit the messages over HF in order to eventually reach nuclear-armed subs for assured second strike capability. HF, with its semi-BLOS (beyond line of sight) range, is used to form a global communications network without satellites. The range of course depends on how much signal bounces off the atmosphere, which is why many stations are needed for redundancy. The whole exercise is Top Secret.
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
Until someone decides the ionosphere needs to stop working for such relays. And there is only one way that I'm aware of to do that and that would be stupendously bad news.
betterunix2 1 days ago [-]
Nuclear strike orders do not require high bandwidth. The orders contain targeting information and arming codes, all of which is pre-programmed on the missiles (the target package is specified with a "pointer" -- the computers on the missiles already have all the details, the order simply identifies which set of details should be used). For ICBM crews it is conceivable that orders could be transmitted on high-bandwidth systems, but for submarines that is not even possible (ELF bands have to be used because of the physical properties of ocean water).
The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.
(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)
alfiedotwtf 1 days ago [-]
> we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us
The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
gucci-on-fleek 1 days ago [-]
> Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
That's exactly what we were told when I toured a Titan II launch facility [0], but I have no idea if that still applies to the modern Minuteman III facilities that this article is about.
> The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did.
After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.
The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority.
So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.
Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.
euroderf 24 hours ago [-]
Interesting information. Can any of this be found in source documents online ?
Animats 20 hours ago [-]
Yes. But you have to go beyond page one of Google results because there is so much slop, human and otherwise. See [1] for a technical overview. See page 14 of [2]
for the strategic and political aspects of who controlled what in a crisis.
"Cheget No. 1 (the Soviet premier's portable terminal) had
priority status: its owner could enact heightened level of
alert and, after the early warning system registered the
launch of U.S. nuclear weapons, give launch order (transmit
codes unblocking the launch command)." That's the key point. The premier of the USSR did not have personal first strike authority.
Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.
The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.
You can probably just point Claude or ChatGPT to decrypt it, it would find that there's some silly and obvious cipher is used that survived from the 60ies, with a 56 bit private key. /this is a wild guess, I don't have any special clearance or access/
As we saw from eMudhra this week, people do stupid things.
egberts1 20 hours ago [-]
There are four lights.
I wonder if the programmer too got brainwashed-failed in ST:NG
mpyne 1 days ago [-]
eMudhra does stupid things, NSA does not. Not with NC2.
what 1 days ago [-]
What’s the significance of the first six characters? They repeat them multiple times before reading off the full message multiple times.
rvba 2 days ago [-]
I also dont know anything but Im sure AI / cloud / blockchain / mongoDB / (insert fad here) will solve it due to synergy and other buzzwords.
netsharc 2 days ago [-]
Sheesh, hopefully a governmental department that has the NSA nearby would've been warned about this...
Then again, it is the government...
none_to_remain 2 days ago [-]
A weird little trivia: for some time period the Skyking test messages used band names and other pop culture references as the content of test messages. Iron Maiden, The Cure, Duran Duran, Rush, Hansen... And of course test messages may be sent erroneously so we end up with the nuclear command channel carrying messages like "DISREGARD 'THE CURE' TRANSMITTED AT 19" (https://eam.watch/view/d4272f25-fd33-47a4-9b37-6c55a8ea3d0e)
> Hearing those broadcasts still sends a shiver down my spine knowing what I know about their nature and purpose.
Interestingly the article seems to forgo of mentioning the nature/purpose except for “go-no-go” which seems, from context here in HN to mean “release the nukes”?
Is there some reason it's written 11175 kHz instead of 11.175 MHz?
firesteelrain 1 days ago [-]
Typical for shortwave to write it like this
nosmokewhereiam 2 days ago [-]
I love this site. Everytime I heard skyking messages it was on 8775 khz I think, if anyone can explain that I'd love to hear if there are multiple freqs.
Also: has electronic music such as techno sampled these yet...? Seems rife for a dancefloor hit!
Scoundreller 1 days ago [-]
Probably 8992 kHz.
The broadcasted ones are usually simulcasted globally across several frequencies. Different frequencies work better/worse at different times of day… but when it’s global, you could be in any time of day.
Other calls are just at one frequency. And I think if an aircraft is responding, it’s just on one frequency (dunno how they choose).
nosmokewhereiam 1 days ago [-]
Thank you, it was indeed 8992 khz.
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
Nice and soothing for when you're already a bit nervous about what the next 13 minutes might bring.
yread 2 days ago [-]
Reading this comment when it was exactly 13 minutes old
markus_zhang 2 days ago [-]
It shows 13 mins ago for me.
stackghost 2 days ago [-]
Is there something extra scary happening?
Usual news headlines on the sources I frequent.
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
> Is there something extra scary happening?
You might get something out of how frequently there are announcements on this channel. That's the only real info you're going to get out of this unless you're in a very select group.
stackghost 2 days ago [-]
Are you implying you’re part of that group? Just curious what the context of your 13 minutes comment was.
jacquesm 2 days ago [-]
That's how long a typical submarine based hit of a Russian missile on the USA would take from launch to detonation over target.
Land based would take maybe twice that much.
Effectively the world has been 30 minutes from 'dead' since the 1960s.
lazide 2 days ago [-]
It’s why the US mostly gave up on fallout shelters - no realistic amount of time to get to them unless you’re already sitting on it.
betterunix2 1 days ago [-]
It's more that fallout shelters are basically useless even if you manage to get yourself inside before the detonation.
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
egberts1 20 hours ago [-]
Chinese Civil Defense still advocate making inverted A tent in the ground because first 30 minutes count after initial exposure.
alfiedotwtf 1 days ago [-]
If this were true, then without constant resupply, space travel would be impossible. Yes the ISS crew get resupply, but if you’ve got a big enough bunker, you should still be able to feed a skeleton crew of a functioning government etc
lazide 1 days ago [-]
Eh, you can store literally years of food and water in a shelter. The worst of the fallout burns off in weeks, and the rest is usually gone in a month or two except for some hot spots.
It’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were repopulated so quickly.
But yes, good point regarding the rest of the infrastructure.
Rebuilding society would be very hard.
0manrho 2 days ago [-]
My understanding is that this is just showcasing a website that introduces/makes it easy to digest the EAM as a concept, not that there's anything particularly worrying happening on these frequencies in the present moment.
I don't monitor these regularly so perhaps I'm wrong, but given it's encrypted (likely with a OTP), you'd have to be mining metadata and making some second order dot connections to really get anything meaningful out of this without the cipher/OTP/some way to decrypt it and understand it.
betterunix2 1 days ago [-]
It is OTP, that is not a secret. The secret is not how the orders are being communicated, it is the actual meaning of the orders (e.g. the targeting pattern) and certain strategically significant details about how a launch order would be executed (e.g. if only one pair of launch keys is turned there is a timeout during which another missileer crew can cancel the launch; the length of that timeout is secret). During the cold war nuclear strategy was the subject of extensive research by both the US and the USSR, which is why both sides wound up pursuing essentially the same strategy.
(China is interesting because strictly speaking they follow a theoretically suboptimal strategy -- they keep their ICBMs in an unarmed configuration and would "absorb the blow" of a surprise nuclear first strike. The US and RF follow the theoretically optimal "launch on warning" strategy, which requires ICBMs that are always armed and ready to launch within minutes.)
alfiedotwtf 1 days ago [-]
Are ICBMs optimal now that we can launch from forward deployed submarines? Maybe in this instance quantity > quality
betterunix2 12 hours ago [-]
The main problem with submarines is that it is not possible to communicate with them while they are submerged. In particular, the submarine can receive but not transmit ELF signals and nothing else really penetrates sea water, so if you want to immediately know the status of a submarine you would have to transmit an order to surface and report in (doing so is rare because it is very easy to detect the submarine when it surfaces). If a country relies exclusively on submarines it will be vulnerable to a surprise "disarming attack" -- the submarines could all be destroyed while at sea, and then the country could be attacked with a first strike and would have no chance to retaliate. Exclusively relying on the submarine force will also allow the other side to devote more of its resources to anti-submarine warfare.
One reason to maintain an ICBM force is that the ICBM silos protect the missiles against anything less than a direct nuclear strike; by placing the silos far from urban areas you force the opponent to expend many nuclear weapons attacking individual silos, which greatly increases the cost of a first strike. If you were wondering where bomber forces fit in, maintaining both ICBM and bomber forces creates a "synchronization problem" -- both must be destroyed at the same time to prevent retaliation, and by strategically placing the air fields and missile silos a country can make a synchronized attack more difficult (the attack will be detected long before anything is destroyed, but one of the two will have more time to initiate the retaliatory strike). Bombers also force the opponent to expend significant resources on air defense, resources that could otherwise be devoted to offensive weapons. Another reason to have a bomber force is that bombers can be recalled after being ordered to strike; missiles cannot be recalled once launched and even if they could be the other side will detect the launches and immediately retaliate.
The US and USSR developed an entire theory of the nuclear triad during the cold war, and both reached the same basic conclusions about the need for all three legs.
icegreentea2 23 hours ago [-]
If you had the resources to run and maintain a nuclear submarine force, but were also resource limited to a single form of strategic deterrence, then yeah, you would probably go with SLBMs. This is what the UK and France settled into.
But it costs a lot to feel confident in SLBMs, especially if the top of your target list includes the USA.
Otherwise, if you're talking about the USA specifically... ICBMs should probably be considered an expensive hedge.
Finally, "optimal" depends on your definition. China has chosen a public "no first strike", while also avoiding launch on warning likely for a variety reasons. China's publicly stated "minimal deterrence strategy" (which they seem to be walking away from) was probably at least partly a pragmatic choice, driven by resource constraints. Also, for what its worth, it does seem like China is also walking away from a strict "no launch on warning" policy as well.
The lack of launch on warning (this is my speculation) was probably a combination of lack of technical capability (both ISR and C2), wanting to maintain tight central control, and wanting to play up the advantages of being "the third player".
This might be the source of the "DO NOT ANSWER" phrase from Three Body Problem.
vorpalhex 2 days ago [-]
Some context for those not exposed to this previously.
Messages usually mean nothing. An uptick in activity means.. nothing. We're on the tail end of a major exercise so upticks in chatter are probably related to that.
Anyone who posts anything along the lines of "but there were 5x more messages or a really big message so N is going to happen!" is a crazy person. Ignore them.
It's neat, but it's not prophetic.
kjetijor 1 days ago [-]
I sometimes wonder if they've had their stats people do an appropriate randomized schedule with filler messages. Or.. keep-alive's, for some Dr. Strangelove fun.
OhMeadhbh 1 days ago [-]
Isn't that what Detachment 2702 does?
jasonjayr 2 days ago [-]
Riiiiiight. That sounds like something spooks would say to throw you off the trail...... :-) /s
thewanderer1983 2 days ago [-]
It is right. Read about Able Archer 83.
tom89999 1 days ago [-]
Very interesting website and well made. A lot of info i did not know so far.
I have listened to it a while back when the Kerch bridge, Ukraine, was targeted, there was something going on with those messages the day before.
But we cant decrypt those messages, only to listen when they were broadcasted and how many of it. A sudden spike in activity can tell us something, but we dont need to go in panic mode.
pnw 2 days ago [-]
Interested to learn more about the Missileer device listed on the site...
wyldfire 2 days ago [-]
"We cannot launch our missiles unless both you and I agree!"
Re: the partial EAM from "Crimson Tide".
paaloeye 2 days ago [-]
Founding Listener :)
alfiedotwtf 1 days ago [-]
I just want to know why the crew’s chairs have such thick thick head rests? That just seems like a waste of material
aussieguy1234 2 days ago [-]
Ah, some nice white noise to fall asleep to...
Until the apocalypse arrives that is.
FrankWilhoit 2 days ago [-]
Latency.
qaz_plm 2 days ago [-]
“Skyking, Skyking, do not answer…”
rafram 2 days ago [-]
> Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.
> Preformatted is what you can hear: the same shape every time.
> hearing it is all anyone outside the force can do.
> The day has a shape.
I would recommend switching to a newer Claude model.
cowlby 2 days ago [-]
Everyone worried about AI detectors and here I am thinking I can spot Claudenglish in a sentence or two.
Natsu 2 days ago [-]
> Claudenglish
I prefer to call it Cloddish, myself.
fosco 2 days ago [-]
I initially thought Claude was a reference to clod from warbreaker and your spelling made me think of it again, for those that read warbreaker they might understand his description is darn close to what Claude is, but alas I believe I was deftly wrong
loloquwowndueo 2 days ago [-]
LLMese
latentsea 1 days ago [-]
Slop
david-gpu 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
Avamander 2 days ago [-]
All Anthropic models write like that since Opus 4.8. Opus 4.8 was still tolerable.
Unfortunately only Gemini models can write text that isn't vomit-inducing.
wyager 2 days ago [-]
Opus 5.5 doesn't write like this anymore
0c3ca83 2 days ago [-]
It has different awfulness.
unshavedyak 2 days ago [-]
I don't find it anywhere remotely as bad. I'm not saying it's good, but jesus.. i was ready to leave anthropic lol.
wycy 14 hours ago [-]
I did leave. Opus was just pumping out so much verbosity and wasting tokens on all that nonsense, plus I was bitter that Anthropic gates the best model behind usage credits, so I switched to ChatGPT just as Astra came out.
Then Opus 5.5 came out and I switched back to Ant after 1 month of OAI. Opus 5.5 fixed all the previous Opus 5 problems, and while Fable still requires credits, there's hardly any need to use it since Opus 5.5 is so good and so token efficient.
r_lee 2 days ago [-]
I literally left. 5.5 is so much better. I don't know how they managed to mess up 5 so bad
SJMG 1 days ago [-]
5 I couldn't bear. It was terrible AND verbose
Avamander 22 hours ago [-]
It's less obvious but it's still there. For starters it loves to anthropomorphize everything, it excessively uses verbs that shouldn't be used with inanimate objects and concepts. Not the only issue though.
alexgoodhart 2 days ago [-]
Fable 5.1 does. Wretched
qlte 1 days ago [-]
Every other comment on LLM news in 2023:
"this is the worst it will ever be"
bragr 2 days ago [-]
>Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.
Having tuned in myself with a SDR, it isn't that quiet. There's pretty steady rate of messages.
jpablo 2 days ago [-]
Which newer Claude model doesn’t do that? Fable 5.1 still writes like that for me. I have to fight against it to write proper software labels, or (the horror!) rewrite things manually.
kccqzy 2 days ago [-]
IMO Opus 5.5 has surpassed Fable 5.1 in terms of both writing style and actual capability. Like I would give the same task to both models and Opus 5.5 consistently produces better results and explains itself better than Fable 5.1.
D13Fd 2 days ago [-]
That's what I'm finding too. Opus 5.5 feels both consistently better than Fable and faster.
rafram 2 days ago [-]
Fable is inappropriate for the vast majority of tasks (yes, including yours!), and it is quite obnoxious. Opus 5.5 writes concisely and almost sounds like a human.
temac 2 days ago [-]
IMO the default style of Opus 5.5 is still terrible but it is way better than 5.0. If you tell its styling is horrendous it usually rewrites in an actually quite good form.
Avamander 22 hours ago [-]
I recommend comparing what it rewrites to something that Gemini models output. I think there's still a lot that Anthropic could improve.
KerrAvon 2 days ago [-]
This. You can prompt Opus 5.5 into writing well.
perching_aix 2 days ago [-]
i tend to run a pass of sol 6.1 at its output, cleans up the language well and finds defects opus missed
lukan 2 days ago [-]
Ok I bite, for what concrete tasks do you get better results with Opus than with Fable?
Because if true, I see no reason to spend that extra money, but for me Fable clearly outperformed Opus on complex tasks. (Including giving the same task and compare results)
lostNFound 2 days ago [-]
I let Claude do my job pretty much (with company approval) managing the entire stack of an app.
8hs of “prompt engineering” daily for a year or so.
I find Fable immensely better than 5.5 in their capabilities and results. Opus makes mistakes, a lot and big. Both on High Effort.
I just run Fable for literally everything including daily random use. Never run out of tokens on the 100 plan.
timcobb 2 days ago [-]
Opus 5.5 is the only one that doesn't do ths, _as much_, it would still to the "it's ___ until it isn't" all day though. Can't wait for that to go away too.
thecopy 1 days ago [-]
I have a small ChatGPT subscription and a skill i run pre-commit post-Claude that goes through every file and rewrites all english sentences, removes comments and replaces dense terms in variable and function names. It usually reduces comments by ~80%
2 days ago [-]
medellin 1 days ago [-]
That would require a brain. Claude hasn’t told them to upgrade yet.
1 days ago [-]
0c3ca83 2 days ago [-]
Welcome to hacker news. All bots all the time.
LeoPanthera 2 days ago [-]
This is a cool idea. I'm actually quite glad that AI generated stuff is still so very obvious. The world will be a darker place when it isn't.
publlus_enigma 2 days ago [-]
Until the kids learn to speak like Claude. Then it will all be the same.
ricksunny 1 days ago [-]
Gen-C coming right up.
ahofmann 2 days ago [-]
The obvious AI stuff is obvious, all the rest is either human generated, or you aren't able to detect that it's not.
So I would argue the world is already "a darker place".
dpc050505 2 days ago [-]
It's also a lot easier to get caught when you're not paying full attention to whatever is being sent your way. Say an algorythm starts playing AI music while it's just playing in the background, or a friend posts something silly that you read sideways.
lukan 2 days ago [-]
"algorythm"
Spelling errors are so far still a good sign of human written output.
0c3ca83 2 days ago [-]
Wouldn't it be lovely if we didn't rush headlong into making things worse at the first sign of profit or power?
InsidiousWombat 2 days ago [-]
I mean I've seen people saying that whole "oh, it's just so good you can't detect it" a lot but not any actual evidence. I guess sentence can be short enough to not look clauded, but aside from that smells are still very common even for the best frontier models, so how anything else would be indistinguishable ?
quasarj 1 days ago [-]
I have no idea how people are apparently spotting AI generated text. At this point, I don't even think I want to know. Really, I guess it's no different to me than text written by another person.
devin 1 days ago [-]
It's different to me from text written by another person, because it is awful in a way that even a bad human writer can't replicate without first performing a lobotomy on themself.
jiggawatts 1 days ago [-]
A great mental model here is that if you talk to many people, each one has their verbal ticks, their repeated phrases, the preferred idioms, but... you don't notice because you speak to each acquaintance only for a few minutes or hours at most at a week. If you really know someone, since you were both kids, or whatever, then you can often learn their particular style and even mimic it.
If you think of the the frontier AI models as people, there aren't hundreds or thousands of "intelligent human-like machines" that you're speaking to, there are like... two: whatever the best model is made by Open AI or Anthropic right now.
A programmer might be reading (or at least skimming) thousands of pages of text from just one (or at most two or three) models a week, week after week, for months now.
It's like the entire world is talking to two aliens that have stepped of their glittering spaceship. The aliens can hold millions of conversations at once, but they have only two personalities, so... that's what everyone is getting, and everyone has learned to recognise.
What makes things even more obvious is that unlike humans, the models don't "self adjust". On the contrary, they are inherently amnesiacs, and hence don't realise that they're awfully repetitive! A human using the same phrase fifty times in a row will dial it back a notch, but these dials are the weights of the models and are frozen for each released version.
10111001 1 days ago [-]
> This is a cool idea. I'm actually quite glad that AI generated stuff is still so very obvious. The world will be a darker place when it isn't.
You mean this site? Because I think the messages it's about is real. The AI stuff is just the dumb copy in the interface (e.g. "Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.").
skygazer 2 days ago [-]
My worry is that what we recognize is the unstylized default, but it might be very easy to emulate any particular human easily enough with some examples and a prompt and n-gram/style template biasing token selection, or iterative generation-scoring loops.
rcxdude 2 days ago [-]
Yeah. The big LLMs have fairly idiosyncratic writing styles. Smaller finetuned LLMs can be quite different (and you can also tune them on a particular person's writing). I think some of the confidence in this is because there's plenty of cases which just don't get noticed.
Larrikin 2 days ago [-]
This is probably possible now. Back when machine learning was all the rage people were using it to identify authors of various anonymous works. It became an introductory project to identify the Federalist Papers authors. Just read in some works, identify patterns, set up tests, and set the LLM into a loop testing whether the output would be predicted to be the author you are trying to impersonate.
Why this, of all things? It's horrible, but look at where the school was, why did they put a school there? Who puts a school next to a military base? There's way darker stuff than people missing a military base and hitting an adjacent school by accident.
Vaushite 1 days ago [-]
Most of the really important military targets in Israel, such as the Mossad headquarters, are in the middle of residential areas.
timcobb 1 days ago [-]
Yeah I was surprised to see that last year when they were targeted (and almost hit? or hit?) by Iran. Yikes.
mullingitover 1 days ago [-]
> Who puts a school next to a military base?
These days they’re calling themselves the “Department of War”
The extent to which some people will twist to justify that which can not be justified is mind boggling.
timcobb 2 days ago [-]
What's the twist? I'm curious why this event was chosen, if for any reason. Personally I am frustrated by people building a school next to a military installation. It feels extremely negligent. I find that to be pretty unsettling and wish people wouldn't do that, because military installations are legitimate and predictable military tagets.
DoctorOetker 1 days ago [-]
I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...
But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.
10111001 1 days ago [-]
> I fully agree, and think the international community is making a big mistake by not (re)formalizing international law and the rules of war, we should force all nations (including those not in conflict -yet-) to store school locations etc. as machine readable maps... we will never be able to roll back the clock and find out if Iran would have properly declared the presence of the school or not, ... but we can PREVENT SIMILAR SITUATIONS in the future, or at the very least have a mechanism which makes it crystal clear when one or more parties are playing very dirty games.
The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.
If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.
jacquesm 21 hours ago [-]
Russia would use that information to attack your schools. They don't care about war crimes in some countries, they see them as things you get bonus points for.
LtWorf 5 hours ago [-]
Oh Russians are bad… we all agree. But it wasn't them who bombed the schools in Iran.
Vaushite 1 days ago [-]
What would be the punishment on nations that used the map to decide where to bomb first?
ok_dad 2 days ago [-]
Did you know nearly every middle to larger sized US military base has base housing and even schools?
That’s the twist.
ok_dad 1 days ago [-]
Downvote it all you want; I’m right.
2 days ago [-]
DoctorOetker 1 days ago [-]
I think nobody was justifying what happened, just pointing out more than one party did unjustifiable things.
betterunix2 1 days ago [-]
I mean...sure...but if you are going to be consistent you are going to have to criticize the Allied victory in WWII. There were literally piles of dead children in cities all over fascist Europe. We do not even have exact numbers because in some cases the death toll had to be estimated by weighing the ashes found in bomb shelters.
kingofmen 1 days ago [-]
And the civilian bombings, explicitly named "morale bombing" (we called it "terror bombing" when the Axis did the same) were later found to be completely inefficient; a waste of trained crews and expensive bombers that did not contribute to victory at all. Or in other words,
YES.jpg
ajsnigrutin 11 hours ago [-]
It's one thing to throw thousands of tons of unguided missiles randomly, and it's something else when you brag about the "all knowing AI", how your intelligence services are the best and how your missiles are accurate.
mindslight 1 days ago [-]
It turned out that the real dark stuff was the fiends we made along the way.
Also, in my country, there's a large shopping area next to an army base, very hard to spot which hangar-looking building is full of stores (or a single large store, or a trampoline park) and which belongs to the army.
I mean.. AI knows best, and we should trust it, even when picking targets, right?
segfault99 2 days ago [-]
[flagged]
timcobb 2 days ago [-]
That's horrible. If they get bombed, we'll know why...
segfault99 2 days ago [-]
Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases, let alone schools. The kids at Fort Bragg Literacywatsdat Junior High have more to worry about violence-wise from each other cf. some imaginary foreign threat.
Again, really difficult concept to grasp. Take some time.
ok_dad 2 days ago [-]
You have a good message in general but here at hacker news we try to avoid personal attacks and that sort of thing. Just letting you know why you’re being flagged; but I do agree Americans are generally clueless.
timcobb 1 days ago [-]
In my defense, the likelihood that the US has schools on bases did occur to me. It's just I think you shouldn't put schools on or near bases and expect them to not get bombed, if not by accident. So I think it applies to all parties.
> Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases,
I would pause at this assertion. The US is a global thing, with global friends and enemies. Iran being one of our big foes is a knowing thing.
Rendered at 13:53:30 GMT+0000 (UTC) with Wasmer Edge.
And I assume there are also a high bandwidth comms channels, and this is just the backup which is presumably tested each day.
High bandwidth comms are likely a lot more fragile than this. At the same time: there will be many different transmission channels, and I would expect this one to be useless immediately if someone really did something nasty.
The basic launch sequence is this: a missile crew receives a series of characters and both missileers write the characters down. They check against a codebook and verify that they both heard the same message and that it is a valid launch order. If the message is valid, they unlock the launch keys (from a box secured by two combination locks, each missileer knows the combination for one lock), insert the keys, enter the missile launch unlock code, enter the warhead arming code, turn the keys, and then that's that.
(There are several other steps -- go watch a video of a test launch and listen to the operators read off the checklist, there are quite a few steps. If you are wondering why such information is public, it is meant to reassure the other side that there is no possibility of unauthorized or unintentional launches -- we want our adversaries to know how we control our nuclear forces so they don't panic and preemptively attack us)
The Russian’s dead man switch is the exact opposite. I wonder if it’s still in place.
Quick question though - are their fake launches to see if crew would actually send the nukes? I’m picturing like a firing squad where nobody knows who has the real bullet
That's exactly what we were told when I toured a Titan II launch facility [0], but I have no idea if that still applies to the modern Minuteman III facilities that this article is about.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_Missile_Museum
Perimetr? That's misunderstood. The idea behind Perimetr was that the Premier of the USSR did not have first-strike authority. Only the Politburo did. After they got rid of Stalin, the later governments of the USSR were very wary of a leader with too much power. Further down, control was divided between the KGB, which controlled the warheads, and the Strategic Rocket Forces, which controlled the launchers.
The most the Premier could do on his own was enable Perimetr. If it detected actual nuclear explosions and could not communicate with any of the top command bunkers, it would, after a delay of hours, release the arming codes for ICBMs to lower levels of authority. So it only worked for a second strike where a first strike had taken out most of the leadership. That was more restrictive than the US system.
Today, both Putin and Trump have first strike authority. Sleep well.
Putin, however, has said that he now does. Trump has first-strike authority too.
The definitive book on this seems to be "Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces"[3], an English translation from MIT Press of a Soviet-era document. That's what the good sources cite.
[1] https://subhranil.com/the-dead-hand-system-a-technical-analy...
[2] https://npolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Controlling_S...
[3] https://search.worldcat.org/title/51969872
As we saw from eMudhra this week, people do stupid things.
I wonder if the programmer too got brainwashed-failed in ST:NG
Then again, it is the government...
Interestingly the article seems to forgo of mentioning the nature/purpose except for “go-no-go” which seems, from context here in HN to mean “release the nukes”?
Also: has electronic music such as techno sampled these yet...? Seems rife for a dancefloor hit!
The broadcasted ones are usually simulcasted globally across several frequencies. Different frequencies work better/worse at different times of day… but when it’s global, you could be in any time of day.
Other calls are just at one frequency. And I think if an aircraft is responding, it’s just on one frequency (dunno how they choose).
Usual news headlines on the sources I frequent.
You might get something out of how frequently there are announcements on this channel. That's the only real info you're going to get out of this unless you're in a very select group.
Land based would take maybe twice that much.
Effectively the world has been 30 minutes from 'dead' since the 1960s.
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
It’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were repopulated so quickly.
But yes, good point regarding the rest of the infrastructure.
Rebuilding society would be very hard.
I don't monitor these regularly so perhaps I'm wrong, but given it's encrypted (likely with a OTP), you'd have to be mining metadata and making some second order dot connections to really get anything meaningful out of this without the cipher/OTP/some way to decrypt it and understand it.
(China is interesting because strictly speaking they follow a theoretically suboptimal strategy -- they keep their ICBMs in an unarmed configuration and would "absorb the blow" of a surprise nuclear first strike. The US and RF follow the theoretically optimal "launch on warning" strategy, which requires ICBMs that are always armed and ready to launch within minutes.)
One reason to maintain an ICBM force is that the ICBM silos protect the missiles against anything less than a direct nuclear strike; by placing the silos far from urban areas you force the opponent to expend many nuclear weapons attacking individual silos, which greatly increases the cost of a first strike. If you were wondering where bomber forces fit in, maintaining both ICBM and bomber forces creates a "synchronization problem" -- both must be destroyed at the same time to prevent retaliation, and by strategically placing the air fields and missile silos a country can make a synchronized attack more difficult (the attack will be detected long before anything is destroyed, but one of the two will have more time to initiate the retaliatory strike). Bombers also force the opponent to expend significant resources on air defense, resources that could otherwise be devoted to offensive weapons. Another reason to have a bomber force is that bombers can be recalled after being ordered to strike; missiles cannot be recalled once launched and even if they could be the other side will detect the launches and immediately retaliate.
The US and USSR developed an entire theory of the nuclear triad during the cold war, and both reached the same basic conclusions about the need for all three legs.
But it costs a lot to feel confident in SLBMs, especially if the top of your target list includes the USA.
Otherwise, if you're talking about the USA specifically... ICBMs should probably be considered an expensive hedge.
Finally, "optimal" depends on your definition. China has chosen a public "no first strike", while also avoiding launch on warning likely for a variety reasons. China's publicly stated "minimal deterrence strategy" (which they seem to be walking away from) was probably at least partly a pragmatic choice, driven by resource constraints. Also, for what its worth, it does seem like China is also walking away from a strict "no launch on warning" policy as well.
The lack of launch on warning (this is my speculation) was probably a combination of lack of technical capability (both ISR and C2), wanting to maintain tight central control, and wanting to play up the advantages of being "the third player".
Here's a whole recent report on China's nuclear force: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2025.2...
This might be the source of the "DO NOT ANSWER" phrase from Three Body Problem.
Messages usually mean nothing. An uptick in activity means.. nothing. We're on the tail end of a major exercise so upticks in chatter are probably related to that.
Anyone who posts anything along the lines of "but there were 5x more messages or a really big message so N is going to happen!" is a crazy person. Ignore them.
It's neat, but it's not prophetic.
Re: the partial EAM from "Crimson Tide".
Until the apocalypse arrives that is.
> Preformatted is what you can hear: the same shape every time.
> hearing it is all anyone outside the force can do.
> The day has a shape.
I would recommend switching to a newer Claude model.
I prefer to call it Cloddish, myself.
Unfortunately only Gemini models can write text that isn't vomit-inducing.
Then Opus 5.5 came out and I switched back to Ant after 1 month of OAI. Opus 5.5 fixed all the previous Opus 5 problems, and while Fable still requires credits, there's hardly any need to use it since Opus 5.5 is so good and so token efficient.
"this is the worst it will ever be"
Having tuned in myself with a SDR, it isn't that quiet. There's pretty steady rate of messages.
Because if true, I see no reason to spend that extra money, but for me Fable clearly outperformed Opus on complex tasks. (Including giving the same task and compare results)
8hs of “prompt engineering” daily for a year or so.
I find Fable immensely better than 5.5 in their capabilities and results. Opus makes mistakes, a lot and big. Both on High Effort.
I just run Fable for literally everything including daily random use. Never run out of tokens on the 100 plan.
So I would argue the world is already "a darker place".
Spelling errors are so far still a good sign of human written output.
If you think of the the frontier AI models as people, there aren't hundreds or thousands of "intelligent human-like machines" that you're speaking to, there are like... two: whatever the best model is made by Open AI or Anthropic right now.
A programmer might be reading (or at least skimming) thousands of pages of text from just one (or at most two or three) models a week, week after week, for months now.
It's like the entire world is talking to two aliens that have stepped of their glittering spaceship. The aliens can hold millions of conversations at once, but they have only two personalities, so... that's what everyone is getting, and everyone has learned to recognise.
What makes things even more obvious is that unlike humans, the models don't "self adjust". On the contrary, they are inherently amnesiacs, and hence don't realise that they're awfully repetitive! A human using the same phrase fifty times in a row will dial it back a notch, but these dials are the weights of the models and are frozen for each released version.
You mean this site? Because I think the messages it's about is real. The AI stuff is just the dumb copy in the interface (e.g. "Mostly static. The net is quiet until it isn't.").
https://towardsdatascience.com/hamilton-a-text-analysis-of-t...
These days they’re calling themselves the “Department of War”
yup :)
Wouldn't it be much nicer to live in a first world with more clarity, where it is immediately obvious which nation either knowingly bombed a kids school, or what other nation knowingly uses some poor children as human shieds...
But thats not the world we live in: apparently we live in the world where the event also happened, but where the rules weren't set up to provide such clarity a priori. And this second world is IMHO darker than the also dark first world.
The problem with that idea isn't that a country like Iran would fail to properly declare all of its schools, it's that it would improperly declare military targets as being schools. No one could trust the maps.
If you really wanted to do something like that, the maps would have to be compiled by some neutral 3rd party with on-the-ground verification.
That’s the twist.
YES.jpg
https://www.militaryonesource.mil/education-employment/for-c...
Americans it seems.
Also, in my country, there's a large shopping area next to an army base, very hard to spot which hangar-looking building is full of stores (or a single large store, or a trampoline park) and which belongs to the army.
I mean.. AI knows best, and we should trust it, even when picking targets, right?
Again, really difficult concept to grasp. Take some time.
> Not every nation thinks it has a God-given right to go half-way around the world and bomb other nation's bases,
I would pause at this assertion. The US is a global thing, with global friends and enemies. Iran being one of our big foes is a knowing thing.