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Trump already said he was just going to bomb all their infrastructure so the economy of the country couldn't function if they didn't negotiate and then it's just going to be a mass refugee crisis. It would be a mass refugee crisis anyway with a protracted ground invasion, but more Americans would die, so Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate.

IMHO, This is pretty much the strategy the Khans used in the 13th century when they encountered arrogant Islamist Sultans emboldened with the bravery of their faith who refused to capitulate. They killed all the islamic people in Baghdad and then proceeded to fill all their canals and burn all their books. This decisively ended the Islamic golden age and Europe was able to survive after a very difficult 14th century where it would probably have been easily crushed by Islamists from the East had the Khans not set them back at least a few centuries. Truly one of the big turning points in World History.

Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes, but the Ukrainians are trying to do it piecemeal.


What this current administration is doing speaks much more of a lack of strategy than what the Khans did in the 13th century.

Not having any sort of counterplay to Iran's one big move (the blocking of the straight), in a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet, speaks volumes of how advisors are clearly not being listened to. The powers of the once mighty Republic have seemingly been vested in the hands of a bunch of incompetent nepo babies.


>in a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet

Found the assumption that caused the issue.


Its not a false assumption. The world today is full of innovative products built with American capital and mostly American minds. If Americans want to do something then they have an rich pool of talent to do it well.

Sure on average, the population of the US is stupid, but that's true of everywhere.


> built with American capital and mostly American minds.

I would say "built with American agency and commercial spirit", not minds.

Most of the things that we have were first built elsewhere (Germany being a prime supplier here with the mp3 or the Zuse), but turning them commercial was the input that came from America.


More "American minds": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartmut_Esslinger

Chief designer at Apple war German.


Bright minds in America aren't working for Trump.

I think this works well with his original point.

Just because you sold your soul to an economic superspreader meme that allows your products and inventions to percolate with the rapidity of an influenza-herpes-ebola hybrid doesnt mean that the minds behind it are brighter than the rest of the world.

I never said that. You're reading what you wanted to hear, not what i wrote. Second time someone has intentionally misread it that wrong way.

We do have very bright minds. It's a shame they don't get voted into policy.

they're not on HackerNews

> a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet

The brightest minds we had working in government have all quit or been fired in the last year.


To wit: Hegseth immediately demanded the loyalty or resignation of the entire officer corps upon taking office. Anyone who would’ve been the voice of reason likely resigned a year ago.

> in a nation of some of the brighest minds on the planet

You mean the people who voted for trump or those who voted for the democrats?

Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries?


> You mean the people who voted for trump or those who voted for the democrats?

I'm not talking about plebs, I'm talking about people who know their shit and work at government level. We could just look at the invention of the past century and pluck out relevant events like the moon landing, electronic computer, transistor or ARPANET. Clearly there are smart people living in that nation. They have the talent to draw from to get good advice about stuff like: what Iran's first response might be to an aerial assault.

> Are there some causal reasons you think americans are smarter than people in other countries?

I never said that. I said America is home to SOME of the brightest minds in the world. That sentence does not apportion all the brightest minds to that nation. What you read is clearly something different from what I wrote. Do you have a chip on your shoulder?


Your argument was that you could use your bright minds to win against the iranians. That implies they are brighter than the iranians.

I think america clearly had better opportunities for bright people in the past. Maybe some moved also there so the proportion is a little higher than in other places.


that wasn't my argument. My argument is that the US has enough intelligent people to wargame what would happen in response to their initial strikes on Iran. That they seemingly have no available counter-play to the blocking of the straight of hormuz implies that they have dismissed any experts from the decision making process and are just winging it. Because... why would you start a war when you're weak to your opponent's first obvious countermove?

So yea, you misread that to assume that I was making some quasi-racist statement about Iran. So my question to you, is why do you think you made that intentional misinterpretation?


Sorry. It's currently late were I live.

I agree that what the US did seems like they didn't ask anyone with expertise and brain to make a plan.

I think I filtered that out since I don't wonder about such things anymore. I live in Germany and what our government did in the last decades was so beyond stupid (like blowing up our nuclear power plants and going out of coal at the same time) that I try to ignore these kinds of things.


> the US has enough intelligent people

'intelligent', yes, big scary performative navy/gear, very very costly, here take most of the tax dollars. This is whats going on since WW2, where are these intelligent people who couldn't understand this?


We don't have to infer that they dismissed the experts. It is a documented fact.

Exactly one year ago, Laura Loomer presented Trump with a "traitor" list, all of whom were fired. That included members of the National Security Council, including director for Iran, Nate Swanson. He has since been writing articles staying exactly what would happen in the event of a conflict.


There are dumb democrats and smart republicans.

We don't have all the intelligence but we do have many institutions to promote such talent. As well as formerly having policy which let other bright minds immigrate into the US.


IQ testing?

Inbreeding as a cultural norm?

Not smarter than the Japanese.


> he was just going to bomb all their infrastructure

That's usually the idea ever since bombs were a thing. It just so happens that it's harder to actually pull off than to say it.


and nor does it result in victory without the follow up of a ground assault.

I'm legit baffled by the US engaging in a war that suffers exactly the same negative properties as the Saudi's war in Yemen. You don't even have to learn from history, the Saudi/Yemeni conflict is still active today. Air campaigns alone are entirely insufficient, especially if your enemy has mountains.


Are we just going to ignore the fact that targeting civilian infrastructure is yet another war crime?

I’m not saying you’re wrong. But man haves lots of people who don’t know what a war crime is really devalued the accusation. So much so I read yours and I just assume it isn’t.(again idk)


Not according to FIFA

Why should a president have this much power?

Shouldn't. But the checks and balances are not checking him.

We'll make Hegseth regret it deeply when the time comes for his trial, but right now I don't know that there's much to do about that fact.

Many said the same thing during the G.W Bush years. Nothing happened.

I and a lot of other centrist-leaning folks are radicalized now in a way we weren't then. Perhaps it still won't happen, I don't have a crystal ball, but right now I will only vote for primary candidates who promise to prosecute Trump's goons and plan to reject the legitimacy of any future government that does not follow through.

>plan to reject the legitimacy of any future government that does not follow through.

How might you do this?


This line of thinking did not end very well for the Roman Republic.

So America can put other countries' leaders on trial - like the Nazis in Nuremberg, or Saddam Hussein - but not their own, for war crimes.

Indeed it did not. But Trump and the members of his administration have announced, repeatedly and explicitly, that they hate me and wish me harm. So I can't accept being governed by them or by a system that tolerates them. If they decide they'd like to apologize, and offer some explanation for how I can be sure they won't return to their misdeeds, perhaps we can hear them out.

> If they decide they'd like to apologize, and offer some explanation for how I can be sure they won't return to their misdeeds, perhaps we can hear them out.

Nothing short of life in prison for the ones that plead guilty will accomplish that.


That's dual use infrastructure. Its also used for military and goverment purposes, right? The same as China providing weapons components to Russia, masking them as "civilian".

"The Russians did it as well" is not a fantastic excuse for a war crime… You might want to think this through a bit more.

What's the problem. The Russians do stuff that you say are "war crimes", and what happens to them? Nothing. So why should anyone care if some person on the internet says these are war crimes? There's obviously no penalty against doing them, so they're not really war crimes.

Not being punished for something doesn't mean it isn't a crime, and doesn't mean it isn't wrong.

Children have a more developed sense of ethics than that.


Remember that war crimes were defined to protect civilians. It's usually better for a civilian to be on the losing side in a war with no war crimes, than the winning side of a war with many war crimes.

> So why should anyone care if some person on the internet says these are war crimes?

Attacking civilian infrastructure is defined as a war crime by the Geneva Conventions. It's not something a person on the internet made up.


That's all nice and well, but what exactly is the point if it's not going to be enforced *at all*? So we can feel smug and superior?

>"That's dual use infrastructure. "

Especially desalination plants (your sunshine promised to bomb those as well).


> Oh yeah, we can't do this to Russia because they have nukes

Why would the US want to bomb an ally?


It's not an alliance - the Russians are supplying Iran with intelligence and material.

It's just that Trump is Putin's biggest fan for some reason.


Ability to recognize sarcasm is missing

In Ukraine, the USA and Russia are definitely allied. So sarcasm misplaced, I think.

Cut the BS please. The only ally US has is itself. The rest are either vassals or adversaries.

True enough, if only recently

Wtf are you naive?

The states have played a clever game post WW2. But the mask has slipped under Trump.


> Trump is choosing to get it over with the easy way for America at least if they won't negotiate

That is… not the easy way. That’s how you get a nightmare for decades to come, endless waves of refugees and a limitless supply of terrorists.

Though, to be fair, there is no easy way of doing what Trump claims he wants to do. Which is why it’s spectacularly stupid to do it in the first place. I mean, they did not expect retaliation in the strait of Hormuz. Amateur hour does not even begin to describe it. Spectacularly stupid is probably way too kind.

If you must learn from the Khans, you’ll find that decapitation is not enough. You need people to put in place of the former leadership, and enforcers so that the underlying power structure stays in place to serve the new masters. The reason why is that, as the US learnt in Iraq and Afghanistan, it takes a bloody lot of soldiers to keep a whole population in check. Trump does not want to do the former and does not have the latter.


He could use nukes but it would likely create a fallout.

the firebombings of japan were much more destructive and killed more civilians than the nukes did.

there's no reason to think nuking would do anything more than the existing bombing campaign.

what changed in japan was the soviet army arriving


That was standard practice for much of recorded history. Surrender now or we will kill you all. Alexander the Great did it to Tyre and Sidon. The Romans did it to Jerusalem. The Israelis did it to Gaza. The orange madman and his henchmen have made it very clear that they don't give a shit about the rules of warfare.

A security company could set up a honeypot machine that installs new releases of everything automatically and have a separate machine scan its network traffic for suspicious outbound connections.

The problem is what counts as suspicious. StepSecurity are quite clear in their post that they decide what counts as anomalous by comparing lots of open source runs against prior data, so they can't figure it out on their own.

Claude does not know my github ssh key. I'll do the push myself, thank you. Always good to keep around one or two really import things it can't do.

The search space for the game of Go was also thought to be too large for computers to manage.


The blind spot exploiting strategy you link to was found by an adverserial ML model...

Yes and making a horse drawn cart drive itself was thought to be impossible so why don't we have faster than light travel yet...

Yes but "the search space is too large" is something that has been said about innumerable AI-problems that were then solved. So it's not unreasonable that one doubts the merit of the statement when it's said for the umpteenth time.

I should have been more specific then. The problem isn't that the search space is too large to explore. The problem is that the search space is so large that the training procedure actively prefers to restrict the search space to maximise short term rewards, regardless of hyperparameter selection. There is a tradeoff here that could be ignored in the case of chess, but not for general math problems.

This is far from unsolvable. It just means that the "apply RL like AlphaGo" attitude is laughably naive. We need at least one more trick.


The other trick could be bootstrapping through mathlib.

As you said brute forcing the search space as the starting procedure would take way too long for the AI to build intuition.

But if we could give it a million or so lemmas of human math, that would be a great starting point.


Engineering has kind of moved on in a weird way from web frameworks. Now AI just writes document.getElementById('longVariableName') javascript and straight SQL without complaining at all. The abstraction isn't as important as it used to be because AI doesn't mind typing.

> Now AI just writes document.getElementById('longVariableName') javascript and straight SQL without complaining at all

I got a newer model that bypasses all that. It takes out Wireshark and send bytes straight.


North Korea runs like a big organized crime family that specializes in forced labor human trafficking and drugs. I've read that they even operate overseas businesses that send slaves that aren't allowed to leave those businesses such as for timber harvesting in the Russian far east and various businesses in South East Asia.

The Latin American cartels operate almost like miniature North Koreas.


This is why JFK considered it so important for the US to end it's imperial tendencies.

It's like that 90's cocaine commercial. "Where'd you learn to do this?" "I learned it by watching you, allright?!"


They actually learned it from Stalin who ran organized crime gangs before the revolution that did extortion, racketeering, armed robbery, and piracy on the high seas among other things to fund Lenin's revolution. Young Stalin by Montefiore gets really deep into this. It's a very interesting read.


That book is an anti-communist propaganda with 'came to me in a dream' sources.

Don't forget crypto fraud as well (maybe the least bad, out of all of these)




I mean you're all going to get killed by fully autonomous China AI war robots in 10 years anyway if you're not pure blood Han Chinese, but hey at least you'll provide something to laugh at for future Chinese Communist party history scholars. They will say, "Look at the stupid Baizuos, our propaganda ops convinced them all to commit collective suicide. Stupid barbarians. They proved they are an inferior race."

Not joking, I've heard from sources that hardliners in the CCP think they can exterminate all white people followed later by all non-Han, but just keep on going along disarming yourselves for woke points. This is like unilaterally destroying all your nuclear weapons in 1946 and hoping the Soviets do to.


I think what most people don't realize is running an agent 24/7 fully automated is burning a huge hole in their profitability. Who even knows how big it is. It could be getting it on the 8/9 figures a day for all we know.

There's this pervasive idea left over from the pre-llm days that compute is free. You want to rent your own H200x8 to run your Claude model, that's literally going to cost $24/hour. People are just not thinking like that. I have my home PC, it does this stuff I can run it 24/7 for free.


there are usage limits preventing you from running it 24/7 on all subscriptions tiers


This bolster's OP's point, to an extent


I understand you mean for free in the sense that you don't pay a third party to use it, however let's no forget that you still use the power grid and that's not free. Also worth to note that energy prices have increased worldwide.


Depending on utilisation and good use of low-power or sleep (or full off) states when things aren't actively processing, it can still be a _lot_ cheaper to run things at home than on a rented service. Power costs have increased a lot in recent years, but so have compute-per-watt ratios and you are not paying the that indirect compute price when the processors are asleep or off whereas with subscription access to LLMs you are paying at least the base subscription each month even if you don't use it at all in that period. Much the same as the choice between self-hosting an open-source project or paying for a hosted instance - and in both cases people don't tend to consider the admin cost (for some of us the admin is “play time”!) so the self-hosted option it does practically feel free.


Maintaining hardware also isn't free. Time is money.


Time is money if you have another good use of that time. If you like spending that time doing something, then it's literally free.


Sure it's $24/hour, but it'll crank through tens of thousands of tokens per second --- those beefy GPUs are meant for large amounts of parallel workflow. You'll never _get_ that many tokens for a single request. That's why the mathematics work when you get dozens or hundreds of people using it.

No. The sauce is in KV caching: when to evict, when to keep, how to pre-empt an active agent loop vs someone who are showing signs of inactivity at their pc, etc.


Coder doing the coding should use subscription, and now they ban the choice of your preferred ide for agentc coding. API is for automation not coding. I'm going to cancel their subscription today, I already use codex with opencode.


This is honestly the key difference here. I’m morally okay with using Claude Max Whatever with something like OpenCode because it’s literally the same thing from the usage pattern perspective. Plugging Nanoclaw into it is a whole another thing.


It probably doesn't help that the creator of OpenClaw just got hired by Anthropic's competitor.

This sounds like engineering, finance, and legal got together and decided they were in an untenable position if OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic (or just never optimize) + continually updated workarounds to using subscription auth. But I'm sure OpenAI would never do something like that...

At the end of the day, it's the same 'fixed price plan for variable use on a constrained resource' cellular problem: profitability becomes directly linked to actual average usage.


> OpenAI started nudging OpenClaw to burn even more tokens on Anthropic

Not possible: OpenClaw is run by a foundation, and is open source, which means OpenAI has no leverage to do such a thing.


Because open source has always been completely independent of unrelated corporate entities who employ people to work on it?


Because anyone can actually check the code, which means if there's any funny business, someone will come across it eventually and blow it open.


There probably wouldn’t be anything funny-looking – it might look like a genuine mistake in implementation that burns 2× or 3× tokens somehow (which, considering OpenClaw is vibe coded in the purest sense of this term, would blend right in).


Regardless, such things would eventually be found. Just as OpenClaw was tasked with finding and improving science repos (though unwelcome), it could - and very likely will - be tasked with improving its own codebase.


The bug that was causing the crazy token burn was added on Feb 15. It was claimed to have been fixed on Feb 19 (see https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pull/20597 ) but it's unclear to me whether that fix has been rolled out yet or if it completely solved the problem. (see https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/issues/21785 )

TLDR: the commit broke caching so the entire conversation history was being treated as new input on each call instead of most of the conversation being cached.


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