That's a stale insight from an old era of warfare. The purpose of quality is to remove quantity. Iran is the case study. A large stockpile of munitions counts for something, but once the factories are gone, you're on a 3 month clock. Factories being deleted can only be achieved with quality (expensive stand-off munitions + F-35s for SEAD, then missile trucks with cheap JDAMs to take out the factories).
30-50 years ago you just couldn't do this kind of warfare, the technology and intelligence didn't exist. Now you can. People haven't updated on this paradigm shift.
People are over-learning the wrong lessons from Ukraine. That is a unique war with air parity. That's why the Ukraine war is shaped the way it is. Not because this is how wars ought to be fought.
This is not to discount quantity. But you can't have only quantity unless you want to fight an attritional war for 10 years (or worse, lose your own industrial production to an enemy that achieves air superiority over your skies because they had the foresight to invest in quality).
The Iran war isn't over yet. Plenty of time for it to become attritional, especially if the people who want Big Gaza / "mowing the nuclear lawn" to become the status quo are in charge. After all, Afghanistan was a quick victory, 20 years of attrition, and eventual exit.
Without factories? I doubt it. I'm not saying the US is going to win (in the sense of achieving objectives), but it's not going to be an attrition war like in WW2 or Ukraine. Japan had factories. Ukraine has factories. You can't sustain a modern war without factories.
Afghanistan wasn't an attrition war (where the outcome is a collapse of one side). The CENTCOM commander explains best why the US lost, it's because of sanctuary:
> The core of the Taliban’s command and control was in the mountainous town of Quetta in southern Pakistan, and the most violent branch of the movement, the Haqqanis, were safely ensconced farther north, also in Pakistan. All were off limits to our forces. Occasionally, Pakistan would apply some pressure, but it was never enough to reduce their ability to operate. I came to see this as the absolutely critical failure of all our plans, and I grew to believe that there weren’t enough U.S. forces in all the world to establish order in Afghanistan, so long as Pakistan was open to the Taliban. It was a logical error in our approach to counterinsurgency that could not be papered over or compensated for.
> You can't sustain a modern war without factories
No, but somehow Iranian backed Hamas and Hizbollah forces manage it from factoryless regions of Palestine and Lebanon. That's what I meant by "big Gaza": a region that's substantially damaged but still capable of fighting, where US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever. Every few weeks a new pile of dead kids for social media. Is that the plan for Iran?
> US/Israeli forces have to keep bombing militants in civilian areas forever
It's not forever. A common misconception about insurgencies is that they're impossible to defeat because they're an "ideology". But it's more about sanctuary and state sponsorship. Afghanistan was a loss because of sanctuary, as per my quote above. This article provides quantitative analysis on that:
Hezbollah had sanctuary in Syria before Assad's collapse, and their state sponsorship is under strain because their supply route through Syria has been cut off and their state sponsor in Iran has degraded industrial production and finances.
> Is that the plan for Iran?
The plan for Iran is to prevent a fait accompli, defined as 10000 ballistic missiles (exceeding interceptor stockpiles) or a nuclear weapon. The best case scenario is regime change. The second best case scenario is coercing them into terms. The worst case scenario is to degrade their power projection capabilities without a negotiated agreement. But all three scenarios are considered better than the status quo trajectory by the belligerents. The status quo trajectory is seen as leading to a bigger war later (e.g. once they reach 9000 ballistic missiles instead of 5000), or worse.
Article misses the main thing that matters in air superiority fighting: who gets to protect their industrial production.
Low tempo is irrelevant. What matters is whether you can deliver those munitions to the factories early in the fight to prevent it from becoming an attritional war.
In Ukraine, they both have air parity so they can't do that.
The usage of LLMs is continuing to increase ~exponentially. I'm going to bet on that rather than some half-baked scenario analysis that only takes into account one scenario and assigns a 100% probability to it.
> The usage of LLMs is continuing to increase ~exponentially
I would like a source for that statement. Additionally, I want to know by who? Because it certainly isn't end users. Inflating token usage doesn't make it any more economically viable if your user base, b2b or not, hasn't increased with it. On the contrary, that is a worse scenario for providers.
1. As a consultant pretty much every company I have worked with in the last 2 years are doing some kind of in-house "AI Revolution", I'm talking making "AI Taskforce" teams, having weekly internal "AI meetings" and pushing AI everywhere and to everyone. Small companies, SMEs and huge companies. From my observation it is mainly due to C-level being obsessed by the idea that AI will replace/uplift people and revenue will grow by either replacing people or launching features 10x quicker.
2. Did you see software job-boards recently? 9/10 (real) job listings are to do with AI. Either it is fully AI company (99% thin wrapper over Anthropic/OpenAI APIs) or some other SME that needs some AI implementations done. It is truly a breath of fresh air to work for companies that have nothing to do with AI.
The biggest laugh/cry for me are those thin wrappers that go down overnight - think all the "create your website" companies that are now completely useless since Ahtropic cut the middleman and created their own version of exactly that.
Yeah, my only hope is that this is unsustainable, admittedly for selfish reasons.
I know plenty of engineers being forced to use these tools whether they want to or not. A lot of which are okay with using AI liberally, but don't particularly like generative AI and see it as pretty irresponsible (which feels more true by the week and it is clear from first hand experience). I don't know, there is a huge gradient of users, but I would argue that in previous revolutionary technologies, we didn't have to force people to use a good tool. I didn't have to be forced to use Google search or Google Maps, tech that is now ubiquitous with western society. It seems really suspect that suits have to enforce the use of something that is supposed to change the way we work and be a force multiplier.
From my limited experience in multiple companies, as stated before I see one very common pattern - The process from feature idea to development is just bad. PMs do not know what exactly they want. C-level interjects in the middle and changes requirements. QAs are unsure what to test because acceptance criteria is vague.
C-level strongly believes that AI will fix all these issues. They believe that AI will fix their broken processes.
I see strong resemblance with "Agile Development" ~15 years ago. Extremely hyped, noone asked if their org even is a fit for it or need it, and most importantly - the only way to fix agile is to do more agile. Same with AI right now.
Users are willingly paying for larger volumes of tokens. You are layering your own unproven interpretation onto that. I would have arrived at an opposite interpretation given the available facts. Models are becoming more token efficient for the same task, such as ChatGPT 5.3 versus 5.2 which halved the token count, and capabilities show a log relationship with the number of tokens since o1 preview was revealed in September 2024.
No, you have gone off in your own tangent. The person you're responding to is talking about money and my point is that you're using a misleading metric. Even if the current user base is paying more for the "exponential token usage", it does not add up to the industry's cost of maintaining and building on this technology, especially since we are not taking into account what that token usage costs the provider. First you said Anthropic as your source, but now you're talking about OpenAI's ChatGPT, who are floundering for a product and user base, which they themselves claim will be profitable through subscriptions at numbers never seen before in a subscription business model.
When lithium prices decreased over 80% from 2022 to 2025, it was because lithium miners felt altruistic. Car manufacturers were feeling greedy. This is how bad the thinking has gotten.
Covid inflation was because of supply chain disruptions, loose fiscal policy (like Biden's ARP which a Central Bank analysis said added a few % to annual inflation), and money supply expansions. There was less goods and more money. When you go and trade money for goods, it should be obvious what happens.
China and Texas are both installing silly amounts of renewables. They install very little new fossil fuels or nuclear. They both maintain cheap electricity prices through abundance.
The problem in the EU is not renewables, it's the same problem that Democratic states in the US face. Regulations and permitting hurdles that block private renewable energy developers.
Their coal generation decreased last year. They're building on the order of 70GW of new coal while they decomission or underutilized more than 70GW of pre-existing coal. Meanwhile they installed 450GW of new renewables energy.
Not relevant to the question of which energy source makes sense to build in the year 2026. But sure China has many coal plants left over from 2003 when renewables was more expensive, nobody would dispute that this is a fact, however irrelevant.
Last year, China's coal use decreased, while China installed 300x more renewables than nuclear. Coal and nuclear aren't cost competitive with renewables, either in a free market or a technocratic top-down economy. Coal and gas still maintain a valid niche of firming intermittency. But that niche is temporary and shrinking.
The free market installs a tiny amount of coal, and a lot of renewable energy. Whether you believe this means "coal is/isn't cost competitive with renewables in a free market" is a debate about word definitions that I'm not terribly interested in.
China, like Brussels, is trying to reduce coal for similar reasons. They don't like the air pollution health hazard (fully believable), and they say they don't like global warming (somewhat believable).
> I can’t imagine them making a series of them in such a way that it bolsters or proves the author’s claim AND goes completely undetected by everyone involved.
The small minority of cases that do fit this pattern get selected to be on the front page of HN. So we aren't drawing from a random sample of mistakes. All the selection effects work against the more common categories of mistakes showing up on the HN front page, such as author disinterest, reader disinterest, to rejection by the journal, to a lack of publicity if the null result is published. The more reliable tell that it's a fraud is that the authors didn't respond when the errors were discovered.
But SSD manufacturers and oil producers have been feeling really greedy this year.
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