I don’t know much about this except that I know perfectly normal or even jacked men with lower than expected testosterone. I suspect messing with hormones based on the results of a test and no actual problems can unnecessarily alter mood.
So my theory—based mostly on conjecture—is that these tests selected people they didn’t expect and the treatments would do more harm than good.
I think it's simpler than that, I think Hanlon's Razor applies here.
Not sure there has been a less capable Secretary of Defence in my lifetime than who they currently have in the role.
Note: not saying less objectionable, I'd put Rumsfeld right alongside for that but as much as I didn't like the man, it was hard to argue he was incapable.
Rumsfeld put in the work and was very smart. His natural disposition was such that, when given the ring of power, things went badly.
The current head of DoD is basically a manosphere influencer that bumbled into this job.
Now, I'm not an endocrinologist, just an aging guy, but from my current vantage point it appears that over the course of my life, many stupid decisions have been made that I have lived to tell about. I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way.
This is all to say that our current "situation" just kinda looks like one insecure guys roid rage when you take a big step back.
> I can't help but feel that my "wisdom of age" might just be testosterone getting out of the way.
I was thinking the same recently, analyzing my life choices then and now. We can't do a double-blinds study with these things, but I believe you might be right.
Which is a little ironic given one of their arguments against DEI policies is that it chooses less qualified people in the name of diversity. If this administration isn't nominating on the basis of merit, what standing do they have to target law firms with DEI policies? [1]
It still irks me that people mocked Rumsfeld's explanation of unknown unknowns. The guy was probably a terrible excuse for a human being, but he wasn't stupid, and that quote was a pretty good explanation for why we shouldn't be overconfident in our knowledge:
"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know."
It's the context that makes it crazy. Someone asked if there was any evidence of a link between Iraq and WMDs, at a press conference, and this is how he avoided giving an answer or taking any accountability.
If it makes you feel any better, think of it more as a catchy synecdoche to communicate “the man was a dangerous incompetent” than a formal verification disproval of his claim.
Rumsfeld heard it from some smart guy in NASA and repackaged it to sell Iraq war. This is similar to the influencers bandying around 'algorithms';
Rumsfeld is more like the Big Lebowski in parroting whatever to make him look smart. Never for a moment he stopped to think about the amount of damage that would haunt the veterans that served there.
He wrote a book about leadership but he lacked balls to do anything about Abu Ghraib for example, nor he did anything to stop the war. IMO he is just another corporate coward.
In his most stunning display of 'leadership', he used autopen to stamp his signature on condolence letters sent to the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Imagine that!
> In his most stunning display of 'leadership', he used autopen to stamp his signature on condolence letters sent to the families of soldiers killed in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
I get what you're saying, but I would take this over our current administration any day of the week.
I think we're saying the same thing. I suspect there were a lot of people saying, "this probably won't work," but the Secretary of Defense pursued it anyways until real problems materialized.
I think True Believer is worse. I would say that if someone is willing to try something while still willing to accept that it might not work but need to confirm they'd be a rational person. A True Believer will not accept that the thing is not working and try to rationalize why others are still wrong.
a while back we had an army private as the secretary of defense.
end of the day, his experience as a private meant nothing towards the job. perhaps he was slightly more able to relate to the needs of the troops.
now we have a reserve captain. who was pushed out of the service for extremest views and body art. his experience means he hates the army, and his selection to the post means his political views have been vindicated.
a master of strategy? leader of men in battle? CEO of the worlds biggest institution? nope. he doesn't even understand those roles.
There's also the relevant details that we don't live at a time in which being extremely muscular and full of aggressiveness (which is what the testosterone policy was meant to cause) makes one a good soldier. Being healthy and able to exert a lot of physical effort is absolutely needed, but beyond that not much is gained.
To put it mildly, no matter how pumped up with hormones one is, one cannot outrun an explosion (much less a thermobaric one), a sniper firing from hundreds of meters away or, for that matter, a drone swarm. For those kinds of challenge other traits are needed.
And these required traits are dismissed as unimportant, just witness all the extremely competent military personal, including medal recipients, who were dismissed or made to "voluntarily" resign due to stuff that had no bearing whatsoever on whether they were good soldiers or not.
Note: I'm not American and, from the perspective of my country's own national interests, which tend to be at odds with the US's more often than not, it's a good thing the US is doing all of this, since it's making itself weaker. But from a personal perspective, that I find it quite sad, I do. I have too many American friends for me not to worry about what this will cause them on the long run.
I'd challenge that its goal was aggressiveness. Testosterone is positively correlated with many extremely good things - energy, mood, better health, and much more. And it's inversely correlated similarly with depression, other forms of mental illness, persistent fatigue, and so on. Basically what men turn into as they age is, in large part, caused by testosterone reduction which naturally goes down as we age.
If there was some way to ensure the military had a higher end level of testosterone it would almost certainly be a very good idea. But the problem is that testosterone can't be supplemented like other things. When supplemented, your own body's production of t simply shuts down and doesn't necessarily return once the supplements end. So it creates a life-long dependency on testosterone injections, that are fairly expensive, at least in the US.
I think that aspect of it is why they most likely rolled this back. Not only do you have the issue of an army that's now dependent upon supplements for basic functioning, but you're going to have military retirees, who are already often left in a shit situation, now also dependent upon a relatively expensive treatment, forever.
This is also why I'd reform all types of US Military basic training. It's shocking to see how different the treatment is between standard basic training for US grunts vs for example, the UK.
In the UK, the things valued and required of their soldiers are far less focused on "breaking them down and building them up again", there's an order of magnitude less yelling, there's more liberty, and there's less of an "ethos to kill".
Yet the Royal Marines, having gone through this kind of training, can still regularly mog our own special forces troops and has proven that in the Fakland wars, a war they may very well be having a rd 2 in soon.
I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't understand that testosterone can't be 'supplemented' in the normal sense because of how it operates. If somebody gets a testosterone supplement, your own body will stop producing testosterone. And if you ever stop taking the supplement, your own natural production may never return. So it's often a one-way trip. If you're on t-replacement, you're on t-replacement for life.
An army that would fall to pieces without a constant supply of testosterone supplements is probably not going to be the most effective fighting force.
You're giving them too much credit. It's pure incompetence/malfeasance like everything the regime does in the name of "culture wars". Somewhere, some testosterone lab with connections got paid.
I keep getting downvoted for saying this but I still review all of my AI generated code. I feel like I’m sufficiently sped up.
Of course you can go faster if you don’t read the code at all, that’s always been true. But it seems like the ability to emit large quantities of text is already a huge leap in productivity. I don’t think these tools are good enough yet to offload all or our thinking into them.
IMO human-verifying will always be a must, no matter how good the LLMs get. If I'm shipping code that I don't understand and it ends up having major problems, I'm still the one who's responsible for it, not the LLM.
You could ship code without understanding it, it just needs to be treated as throwaway, unreliable and potentially malicious. This is OK for some tasks, e.g. best-effort scraping of a frequently updated website that's actively hostile to automation
Where it really shines for me is when the best solution is explicit and obvious code, but really tedious to write. Now I'll choose to have AI write it instead of me, where before I might have tried to write a bad abstraction. Things like generating a TypedDict for a JSON A document I'm returning as a convenience from a postgres query.
I also review all of my AI-generated code. I feel that it’s disrespectful to my teammates to send unverified slop for review.
I’ve noticed that while my coding skills have very noticeably atrophied (to the point I am consciously scheduling time to manually code, just for practice), my ability to read and comprehend code quickly has actually improved quite dramatically.
I notice style inconsistencies and semantic errors far more quickly and consistently when reviewing both human- and LLM-generated code, as compared to a year ago. Cognitive tradeoff hypothesis and all that…
I find it interesting when people say, “I need time away from the AI to think.” I use AI for development but I would not say I’ve offloaded my thinking to AI. AI is great for pushing text but I haven’t found its system design skills to be that good.
To me the design has always felt like the thinking though.
I felt the same until I actually tried to stop for a week or so. And I could feel the constant temptation and anxiety of not having the coding agents as a sort of safety net. Taking a clean brake made me realize how much I was losing my skills and connection to the actual implementation, not just the high level pieces of it. I also didn’t realize at the time how much of my design thinking is done while working on code, and all the constant small decisions that are actually impactful
Lots of people use the Mac Mini to run the frontier models over night or while traveling. I have a rack in my basement and have thought about throwing one in. You can get a cheaper machine but Apple feels a little more, “rack and forget,” if you have less price sensitivity.
Mac Mini + MacBook Neo w/ ssh can be a better setup than MacBook Pro for many people.
If it’s purely for experimentation then why not the DGX Spark/GB10? It’s up about 10% from release RRP which is quite good (you might argue it was overpriced then, but prosumer and workstation GPU prices are up 100%). 4TB NVMe is not cheap these days - it’d cost at least $500 for a stick - and you get 128GB at a similar bandwidth to an M5 Pro.
Nevermind that Apple still insists on providing base systems with only 512GB of non-upgradable SSD. The equivalent spec mini (4TB/64/10G) is almost $5k for half the VRAM. Not as good a CPU compared to the M5/6 but you also get 20 cores and full CUDA.
I almost feel like there's some sort of paid campaign going on in Hacker News promoting the Chinese/open models. I feel like every day I'm hearing about how the frontier labs are dead but your experience is the same as mine. My company pays for Claude AND Codex but we never really use the open models for anything critical.
Doesn’t matter if your company pays for Claude, Anthropic and OpenAI valuations and expenditures commitment requires them to win the vast majority of the market to make economical sense. And the Chinese competition makes that very unlikely, to say the least. They likely won’t disappear fully but their “free” lunch as the AI darlings is done, on paper. Will be interesting to see how they adapt
Sure, I'm being "paid" by the fact that it costs pennies a day to use Deepseek and if I could afford the hardware then I could run it locally. Meanwhile, Anthropic is obviously a threat to open weight models and actively lobbies the US Government to have them banned or controlled.
So yeah, I and I guess others, are quite active in whatever little way we have available, to up vote new models and share stories.
I'm not a biochemist and I have been blocked by fable and opus for "cyber" just for doing things like asking it to ssh into one of my servers, look at a CVE, or do work in assembly. Been rejected to their cyber verification program 3 times already.
Democrats tend to get railed for it even though Republican presidents raise the debt more. It gives the impression that only Democrats are trying to fix it and Republicans give it more lip service but often make it worse.
When you become a parent, your risk profile changes immensely. I can hire some of the world’s best people tomorrow if i can promise them equal salary, benefits and retirement accounts for a set number of years. Plus the benefit of a large upside if it works. Most startups offer lower salaries and abysmal benefits. Security matters.
I still don’t get it. It sounds like the business plan is to fund companies so they can offer compelling employment. That’s great but that’s no different than any other VC.
I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.
I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.
AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React.
AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case.
Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business.
Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?
Another nuance: his position is that real economic value hasn't been demonstrated, and that due to how LLMs work, it cannot really be measured. Meaning the AI crowd actual believes are based on vibes and doesn't seem to match reality
(also, of course, that there is a massive, insane misallocation of resources to the AI sector compared to the level of demand)
That's just his own personal belief about the technology, the only relevant part of this is that he doesn't believe there will be enough demand to match the level of expanses. It doesn't matter if AI is useful or not for his arguments. Does the demand exist or is it manufactured by hyperscalers or other actors? Who cares about his take on the future of software
I have both read his blog and listened to his podcasts. Not all of it (the articles are basically books), but enough to understand his positions. The "ai is mostly useless" is very much his position, he will say it again and again and again.
This part:
> I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.
Is not true. I can agree with one of his positions and disagree with the other, but it really is fair to say he repeatedly and confidently states that ai is useless.
Can you provide a link to where he has said that? I’m not an expert on Ed but I don’t recall ever reading him say that it is functionally useless, he doesn’t comment on its function, only the business, whether it has functional use is immaterial unless that generates value for the companies spending obscene money on hosting. The companies implementing AI as consumers can get a huge amount of value from it without a single cent going to any of the big labs, that’s part of why investment in AI infrastructure is so misplaced.
That was the main thesis of his earlier writing. He has since acknowledged that AI is useful in a few use cases so has switched to concentrating on the much more plausible economic thesis.
It pops up fairly frequently on his better offline podcast. If you pick last or second last episode it will be there somewhere. If you pick something few months ago before he had all the financial data he is on a out them now, there is a lot more of it.
But, I am not going to relisten to it now. The episodes are to large extend stream of numbers (kind of like his writing) and I am not in mood for that.
If you like his writing, chances are you will like the podcast btw.
He often says in passing that he doesn't see value in LLMs outside of generating bad software and can help sometimes with search. But it's not really part of the AI bubble thesis itself IMHO, just him adding his personal commentary in interviews
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