I agree with all of this except the notion that this is a recent change. Infantry being needed to seize and hold territory has been standard military doctrine around the world throughout history. Air power can tip the balance between opposing armies but has never been enough to settle a war alone. I'm confident that every person working in the Pentagon is aware of all this, aside from the SecDef.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
I was thinking the opposite. Using those words might be the best way to provide feedback that actually gets considered.
I've been wondering if all of these companies have some system for flagging upset responses. Those cases seem like they are far more likely than average to point to weaknesses in the model and/or potentially dangerous situations.
Yeah every single time I click on one of those posts the top comments are NTA. A couple times I tried randomly opening a few dozen posts and checking the top comments to see if I could find a single YTA and struck out.
Granted many of the OPs are very biased in the poster's favor. Most I've read fall into one of two buckets: either they want to gripe about some obviously bad behavior, or it's a controved and likely fake story.
The problem with any of these is that they are so incredibly biased towards the author's frame of reality (understandably so).
Who among us are able to 1) Understand a 2nd persons view of a issue we're in and 2) have the ability/courage to write it in a post seeking advice.
My point is that the author will specifically frame the problem clearly on their side. Occasionally redditors will seek additional questions but rarely.
This happened on my work machine. One day I noticed tons of important files had been deleted without my permission after being migrated to OneDrive online only. At no point did I authorize anything like this and it took some time to copy them all back and disable everything I could access related to this.
Utter insanity that this can happen in a major OS. I switched to Linux for personal use years ago and have only gotten more grateful for that decision over time. My head would explode if a Linux distro tried any number of things that Windows regularly does to abuse their users, it's unfathomable.
Are we talking about the same FBI director here? Professional and competent are not how I would describe Kash Patel. Given his overt buffoonishness and the whole administration's disdain for procedure and expertise I would be shocked if he didn't have extremely inappropriate content in his inbox.
The underlying models are improving at the same time as the guardrails and I'm not convinced the guardrails will keep up, especially given the perverse incentives. At some point the endless investor billions will dry up and a whole bunch of folks will be desperate to monetize their AI projects any way possible.
China views the US as an adversary. They would very much like to reduce America's sphere of influence and are cognizant of the fact that we might end up in a war in the medium term future. The US bleeding immense amounts of money and military assets in Iran is great for China's relative strength; it's in their interest to increase those costs in ways that don't escalate immediate tensions with America. Sharing targeting and other intel is one of the more effective ways of doing that.
And what would the US do with that 'tension'? FWIW China is already helping Russia in their war against Ukraine and the West for several years. What did the US do? Nothing at all.
Credible sources claim it's very likely Iran is working with Chinese satellite data (that is also possibly available commercially but they would be unlikely allowed to obtain it without government approval). That of course in addition to Russian help that the US knows very well about and does, again, nothing at all.
I don't know - is allowing the sale of previously sanctioned Russian oil a trade war?
> Isn't the US currently involved in a trade war and toppling various administrations around the world due to these tensions?
Which administrations? They are verbally attacking the UK, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, raising and lowering tariffs randomly, if there is some grand plan in all of this it's hidden very well.
Of course I know about Venezuela and Cuba, but it's quite a stretch to claim that the US is aggressive towards them because of the tensions with Russia or China. If there was a coherent strategy, support for Ukraine would be a big part of that, but US support has ceased in the last year.
> They are verbally attacking the UK, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Canada, raising and lowering tariffs randomly, if there is some grand plan in all of this it's hidden very well.
The tariffs are more than verbal attacks and the ostensible lack of a grand plan doesn't change the reality of what's happening.
> Of course I know about Venezuela and Cuba,
Yes, that's what I was referring to, and Iran obviously.
> it's quite a stretch to claim that the US is aggressive towards them because of the tensions with Russia or China
That claim hasn't been made. I'm just pointing out that they're not the passive spectators unable to take any action like was suggested above with questions like "Well what would they do?" and the suggestions they would do "nothing" like they had done before.
> If there was a coherent strategy,
Again, having a plan or a strategy isn't important for the question at hand.
I disagree. Even though I think the Iranian regime has been extremely incompetent overall their war strategy has been surprisingly lucid. They aren't actually risking much more by attacking neighboring countries that are already cooperating with the US. How much is Qatar's military involvement going to move the needle when you're already facing a full-on war with the US and Israel?
Raising the overall costs to the US and its allies is a pretty coherent theory of victory for Iran. Obviously they aren't going to win a conventional fight, but they might be able to inflict enough havoc on energy and commodity markets to the point that it really hurts the US and its allies economically; perhaps enough that they bail out of the war in order to stabilize the global economy.
Trump clearly wanted a quick easy win here and does not want to see massive inflation at home. Sure he personally doesn't give a shit about Americans but the rest of the politicians who enable him do and he's at risk of absolutely torching his own party for years if the war drags on and costs really get out of hand.
All the Iranian regime has to do to win is not lose for enough weeks. If the regime holds out Trump will have to either give up and try to pretend this disaster was a Great Victory, or he'll launch a ground invasion that will almost certainly turn into a quagmire. Bombing civilians makes a popular uprising much less likely, so the US is doing them quite a favor on that front.
well... I actually think even when trump is impeached, the democrats will continue -- even more so, to call mr trump "a weak president"
I mean, can US and its allies exactly stop at status quo?
Iran just learnt it can missile nearby neighbors and demand $2M toll fee on the strait users...
even if US just backs down from "epic wut", will iran become "the good guy" and never missile neighbors and stop demanding that $2M toll?
nope: rather, that would mean US and allies will lose its deterrence against Iran completely
iran'll start bullying more on those neighbors, and the toll fee will go up: $2M to $5M to $10M to... even $100M -- I mean, what's stopping iran from doing so?
anyway, I'm just surprised everyone in this forum is trying their best only to say "trump is such an idiot to start the war (well duh?)", and not to look at what choices each nations had/have after trump's dickhead move
Stop projecting on Iran what USA would do in their place (bullying everybody).
Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war.
Not even after it was bombed last June.
If they had not responded strongly, USA/Israel would keep periodically 'mowing the lawn', not acceptable to any country, especially not for a big and proud nation like Iran.
Btw, the US military bases in Gulf countries are legitimate military targets, and have born the brunt of Iran's attacks. It is just that in our western media the focus is on any civilian damages, and almost all damages to military is hushed up.
Iran has no good way to prevent future attacks (nobody sane would believe any agreement signed by USA), their only way is to make sure beyond any doubt that attacking them again will hurt VERY, VERY much. As a side note, getting rid of USA military bases in the Gulf would be beneficial to them in making any future attacks on them more difficult. Hence the (very true!) messaging 'the USA military bases are not there to protect you, but to help them project power over us (and you!), and are only making you a target, reducing your security, not increasing it'.
>Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
They were funding and arming proxies that were bombing and destabilizing neighborhoods. Nobody in the region likes Iran, that is precisely why the Gulf States want US bases and a Israeli military pact.
And this is not a reactive policy as it is an explicit proactive policy of exporting the Islamic Revolution and gaining regional hegemony. Which no one wants.
> Iran was NOT bombing its neighbours and demanding Hormuz toll before the war. Not even after it was bombed last June.
Iran has a history of launching rockets into Israel, both through it's proxies an directly. It has also invaded the US embassy holding 52 staff hostage, conducted unprovoked attacks against allied interests, attacks merchant ships in international waters and massacred tens of thousands of it's own people for the crime of speaking out against the government.
If using proxies invites invasion, then proportionally the USA should be nuked multiple tims over from the face of the earth given the mass scale of terrorism their proxies have conducted. So this proxy argument is nonsense.
Under a sane president there would be a pretty clear off ramp available in the form of a negotiated settlement. Iran stops attacking neighbors and the strait in exchange for a US promise to not start another unprovoked war, along with another JCPOA type agreement lifting sanctions and limiting their nuclear development. The problem here is that absolutely nobody trusts trump to actually stick to a deal, especially after he was the one who broke the previous deal and then attacked them twice in the middle of negotiations. Trump's stupidity compounds the mess in ways that no other president would.
Without a negotiating partner Iran basically has to settle the issue with force. They are going to try to do as much economic damage as possible in order to deter current and future attacks, or die trying. Without a ground invasion the attacks on both sides will wind down at some point but it's hard to see how we get to a clean cease fire, it's likely to be a messy uneven one that could flare back up at any point.
I think this is one of the biggest tragedies from big tech companies. Their automated approaches usually work great for most people, but will be hopelessly broken for edge cases, often with no recourse. This happens all the time with non-standard location histories.
It's also amazing how badly big tech apps will often fail with poor or no internet connection. Clearly a lot of the developers at these companies never leave the cities they live and work in.
Other industries can be just as bad, but it's particularly grating coming from companies that constantly talk about diversity, individual empowerment, and other nice sounding corporate slop.
> if your goal is to solve some specific problem for yourself, your friends/family, community or your team, then the "last step" you mention - the one that "takes majority of time and effort" - is entirely unnecessary, irrelevant, and a waste of time.
To a point, but I think this overstates it by quite a bit. At the moment I'm weighing some tradeoffs around this myself. I'm currently making an app for a niche interest of mine. I have a few acquaintances who would find it useful as well but I'm not sure if I want to take that on. If I keep the project for personal use I can make a lot of simplifying decisions like just running it on my own machine and using the CLI for certain steps.
To deploy this to for non-tech users I need to figure out a whole deployment approach, make the UI more polished, and worry more about bugs and uptime. It sucks to get invested in some software that then constantly starts breaking or crashing. GenAI will help with this somewhat, but certainly won't drop the extra coding time cost down to zero.
People today say "web applications suck", "Electron sucks", etc. They weren't around in the 1990s where IT departments were breaking under the load of maintaining desktop apps, when we were just getting on the security update treadmill, and where most shops that made applications for Windows had a dedicated InstallShield engineer and maybe even a dedicated tester for the install process.
Yeah, we traded managing files and registry entries on desktops for something that violates all the principles of the science-of-systems, the kind of thing Perrow warns about in his book Normal Accidents.
I think that's oversimplifying it a bit. Managing files and registry entries wasn't much of a problem, but supporting an ever-growing matrix of versions across multiple platforms that were released into the wild was an issue. Modern evergreen apps kind of fix this, but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments. Operating a service reliably is of course filled with different problems, but at least you have full control.
This so much. As a user, especially a private user, I want my apps I can install and run locally, no internet connection, nobody forces updates on me for an app that does exactly what I need and I'm used to it.
As a developer, SaaS all the way. I really really love not having to deal with versions, release branches galore, hotfixes on different releases and all that jazz. I'm so glad I could leave that behind and we have a single Cloud "version" i.e. whatever the latest commit on the main branch is. Sure we might be a few commits behind head in what's actually currently deployed to all the production envs but that's so much more manageable than thousands upon thousands of customers on different versions and with direct control over your database. We also have a non-SaaS version we still support and I'm so glad I don't have to deal with it any longer and someone else does. Very bad memories of customers telling you they didn't do something and when you get the logs/database excerpt (finally, after spending way too much times debugging and talking to them already) you can clearly see that they did fudge with the database ...
> but you're still dealing with other people's computers and environments.
We have to differentiate a bit between consumer and enterprise environments a bit here. My comment was in regards to the latter, where other people's computers basically were under our full control.
I wish we had a dedicated InstallShield engineer! I had to design and burn my own discs for the desktop apps I built. And for some reason, the LightScribe drive was installed on the receptionist's computer. I have no idea why, but I was a new hire and I didn't question much.
Classic MacOS was designed to support handling events from the keyboard, mouse and floppy in 1984 and adding events from the internet broke it. It was fun using a Mac and being able to get all your work done without touching a command line, but for a while it crashed, crashed and crashed when you tried to browse the web until that fateful version where they added locks to stop the crashes but then it was beachball... beachball... beachball...
They took investment from Microsoft at their bottom and then they came out with OS X which is as POSIXy as any modern OS and was able to handle running a web browser.
In the 1990s you could also run Linux and at the time I thought Linux was far ahead of Windows in every way. Granted there were many categories of software like office suites that were not available, but installing most software was
./configure
make
sudo make install
but if your system was unusual (Linux in 1994, Solaris in 2004) you might need to patch the source somewhere.
It still sucks for gaming, those are Windows games running on Proton, not much different from running arcade games with MAME, Amiga games with WinUAE,...
I think it is different. As someone joked, "thanks to Wine, Win32 is the 'stable Linux ABI'" -- translating system calls is a lot different than emulating hardware, and the results prove it
And with the R&D that went into the Steam Frame, the difference between x64 and arm64 is becoming negligible. You can target x64 Windows and can reasonably expect it to run on Android via Winlator.
I'm also not aware of a single case in history where a massive bombing campaign from a hostile country resulted in an immediate populist uprising and a regime change that favored that aggressor country. Having your city bombed for weeks on end tends to cause people to shelter where they can, worry solely about how they will survive the wreckage, and bond with their fellow citizens.
The fact that an air campaign and magical thinking was the complete game plan from trump and hegseth shows how utterly unqualified they are for the positions they have.
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