Better to have smart bombs than dumb ones. Or rather, better to have 1 smart bomb than 1000 dumb ones spread across an entire city in order to pick off the particular building, vehicle, or person you want.
> With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled “Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge”, the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat’s products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people.
> I don’t think there’s something inherently wrong with working together with your nation’s military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies’ products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense
The core purpose of a military is to destroy things and kill people, and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others. You can put all the "defense" and "disaster aid" lipstick on that you like but that doesn't change what they train for and what their real purpose is.
Besides external PR, does anyone know how this affects internal morale?
Some of the earlier Red Hat people I knew would not be OK with working on weapons systems even under the most legitimate circumstances. And they'd be much more opposed to collaborating with fascist regimes. And I think horrified by the idea of shoveling AI slop and grifter hype into life&death decisions.
Of course the tech industry makeup has changed (overall culture transitioning from hacker idealists, to finance bros), and some IBM-ification of Red Hat has has also happened. But I'd like to think Red Hat still attracts a more principled pool of talent than FAANG.
>The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion).
Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.
Words have meaning, and their emotional force derives from that meaning. The knowing misuse of a term like “genocide” for its emotional force is manipulative sophistry.
It's weird to me that this is "suddenly" an issue.
It has been known for decades that Red Hat Inc's largest customer is the U.S. Army[1]. It's a very large part of the reason why Red Hat took over development of SELinux and made it on by default in their distros.
And the Army isn't exactly known for handing out cupcakes...
[1] "Red Hat’s partnership with the U.S. Army spans 10 years
starting with the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in
2002 and, to this day, the U.S. Army remains one of Red Hat’s
largest customers by volume."
As someone who works for the DoD, the so called "disturbing" language in the paper is very commonplace in this industry. Idk if or why Red Hat is trying to redact the paper, but I'm sure it's not because they're embarrassed their software is killing people. That's par for the course for defense contractors.
This post looks artificially buried on page 3 now, and the topic is one of the most important things that tech company workers should be thinking about right now.
75. Team from ETH Zurich make high quality quantum swap gate using a geometric phase (ethz.ch)
231 points by joko42 1 day ago | flag | hide | 54 comments
76. The disturbing white paper Red Hat is trying to erase from the internet (osnews.com)
153 points by choult 6 hours ago | flag | hide | 51 comments
77. Code is run more than read (2023) (olano.dev)
137 points by facundo_olano 1 day ago | flag | hide | 102 comments
17 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 36.4 ms ] threadIt appears IBM learned no lessons after WWII: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
That book will need a sequel soon.
Archive URL to original paper
The core purpose of a military is to destroy things and kill people, and the world is controlled by the people who can do that better than others. You can put all the "defense" and "disaster aid" lipstick on that you like but that doesn't change what they train for and what their real purpose is.
Can we rename this "RedHat removes paper from website on using their software to 'shrink the kill-chain'"
Some of the earlier Red Hat people I knew would not be OK with working on weapons systems even under the most legitimate circumstances. And they'd be much more opposed to collaborating with fascist regimes. And I think horrified by the idea of shoveling AI slop and grifter hype into life&death decisions.
Of course the tech industry makeup has changed (overall culture transitioning from hacker idealists, to finance bros), and some IBM-ification of Red Hat has has also happened. But I'd like to think Red Hat still attracts a more principled pool of talent than FAANG.
Carving out the particular military engagements your company deems less than justified sounds nice but isn't workable in practice. You have to swallow the whole pill if you want to sell to the DoD.
Population: ~2,050,000
Density: 15,455.8/sq mi
Words have meaning, and their emotional force derives from that meaning. The knowing misuse of a term like “genocide” for its emotional force is manipulative sophistry.
It has been known for decades that Red Hat Inc's largest customer is the U.S. Army[1]. It's a very large part of the reason why Red Hat took over development of SELinux and made it on by default in their distros.
And the Army isn't exactly known for handing out cupcakes...
[1] https://unixdigest.com/includes/files/Army-RedHat-Whitepaper...
[1] "Red Hat’s partnership with the U.S. Army spans 10 years starting with the deployment of Red Hat Enterprise Linux in 2002 and, to this day, the U.S. Army remains one of Red Hat’s largest customers by volume."
Any productivity improvement software in the wrong hands could make doing bad things more efficient.