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There are 4 players in this war and they all have very different goals and "victory" conditions.

1. Israel wants to ruin Iran permanently, to turn it into Somalia 2.0, meaning a quasi-state with no organized, central government. Were they to succeed in this it would be a humantarian disaster the likes of which we haven't seen since probably WW2. Tens of millions of refugees that will probably collapse surrounding countries;

2. The US (IMHO) wanted to placate Israel with a cheap decapitation strike that would force regime change and bring in a US-friendly regime, similar to Venezuela. This was completely unrealistic and they completely underestimated Iran's ability to maintain an offensive capability. We don't even know how much Iran's missile and drone capability has been degraded (to the GP's point). I don't even believe it's been degraded 50% (as GP claimed) abut we have no way of knowing. The entire Iranian military is built to resist a strategic bombing campaign;

3. Iran no longer trusts the US as a good faith actor and negotiator after multiple incidents of acting in bad faith, killing their negotiators and bombing an embassy so their goal is to make the price of this war so high economically that the US never thinks about doing this ever again. And that's a cheap thing to do, as you note. Drones can close the Strait and ne devastating to the economies of the Gulf states; and

4. The Gulf States just want to maintain the pre-war status quo. Saudi Arabia in particular just wanted to contain Iran. They're less vulnerable to the Strait being closed but it's still a problem politically as the US and Israel are bombing other Muslims. The Gulf states are learning the the US security guarantee ain't worth shit but they can't break away from being US client states with their own unpopular regimes probably collapsing without US arms. But in a prolonged conflict some of them may collapse anyway, particularly Bahrain and even Iraq.

So Iran just fires a dozen ballistic missiles a day to remind Israel of the war Israel started. An estimated ~50% of missiles get through missile defences now. Otherwise threats and the occasional drone are sufficient to close the Strait and massively disrupt the ME3 airlines. Militarily, Iran can probably keep that up forever. Mobile missile launchers are cheap and drones can be launched from basically any truck. They're also produced and stored in underground basis that are essentially impervious to bombing short of nuclear weapons.

Many believed prior to Trump's speech this week that he would either escalate or pull out. Instead he found a secret third, worse option, which is to tell Europe and Asia "you're on your own" (with the Strait closure) after the US launched a war nobody but Israel wanted or supported. That's an interesting strategy because it's going to cause some serious soul-searching in all of these countries about the wisdom of US allegiance.

I've been building an index of planets and related projects. There's a lot, especially for technical topics, but I also wish there were more.

Ctrl-F for planet: https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/blogrolls/

There's an older list at https://web.archive.org/web/20170823064412/http://planetplan...

Having grown up in and lived most of my life in the Chicago area, the rationality of the grid system is rather nice. If you know your “hunnerts”¹ you can find anything. Every 8 hunnerts is a mile except for the first three miles south of Madison where the streets are numbered.² A handful of suburbs use numbered streets for north-south streets (Cicero and Elmwood Park—maybe others but those are the ones I know). In the city, there was a plan to have north-south streets named with the first letter indicating the distance in miles from the Indiana border, but it only really starts with “K-town”⁴ between Pulaski and Cicero Avenues and while most streets follow the pattern, it’s not universal.

Some distant suburbs (Du Page County and beyond) use a numbering scheme of xxWyyy where the xx is the number of miles west of State Street (the 0 in the cartesian grid of Chicago) and the yyy is the location within that mile. I don’t think they do anything similar for North-South coordinates though.

The diagonal streets in Chicago largely follow the routes of early non-grid roads of the city (many of which were plank roads run as toll-collecting businesses and followed paths used by the native American tribes living in the area before European settlement.

⸻

1. Hunnerts (from hundreds) being Chicago-speak for the location on a grid. E.g., Chicago Avenue is 800 (eight hunnert) north and Western is 2400 (24 hunnert) west.

2. This is a consequence of history. All the missing numbers (Roosevelt at 12 hunnert south is the first mile, Cermak/22nd street at 22 hunnert south is the second and 31st street at 31 hunnert south the third) do exist,³ but the streets were named and numbered before the replatting established the modern hunnert system.

3. There might not be some of the hunnerts in that first mile—the numbered streets only start after Roosevelt.

4. Not to be confused with Los Angeles’s K-town where the K stands for Korea.

We got through it in 2022. We can get through it again.

Though unfortunately Americans will learn the wrong lesson from this which should be to reduce dependency on oil for every day life. We should be aiming to have fewer cars and car-only transportation as policy, and more sidewalks, trams, bike lanes, and better medium density mixed-use development. But if folks want to have Ford F-250s and drive 15 miles for a loaf of bread, you have to care about the Straight of Hormuz which Iran could threaten to shut down anytime and as they continued to strengthen their military capabilities increasingly likely to shut down in the future.

(1) conventional spell checkers still exist

(2) it's ok to ask "is this grammatical?"

(3) I will bounce ideas off chatbots but I think I've used just once AI generated sentence in the last two years. On one hand it is not my voice and it also sticks out like a sore thumb. I mean, if I hear "you're not a fur, you're a therian" another time I'm going to howl at the moon or something.

I think they're talking about https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hegseth-ousts-army-chief-of-sta...

> Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has asked Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George to step down and take immediate retirement, sources familiar with the decision told CBS News...

> Two other Army officers were removed from their roles, according to three sources familiar with the matter: Gen. David Hodne, who led the Army's Transformation and Training Command, and Maj. Gen. William Green, who headed the Army's Chaplain Corps...

> Hegseth has fired more than a dozen senior military officers, including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. C.Q. Brown, Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff Gen. James Slife and the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse.

I've been using birdnet, but it seems to want an internet connection to do the identification and sometimes that is dicey when there is a bird that I want to identify. (Also birds seem to shut up around the time you get the app open.)

I'm going to give Merlin a try - the app has UI to download the network for offline use.

When it comes to a governing board that's interested in all the intimate details of an office software suite, I strongly suspect you're not going to find anyone under 30.

Is there going to be a new ShieldGemma based on Gemma 4?

I’m reading one of those Blackhawks was shot down. An A-10, F-16, and a refueling plane, in addition to the F-15 so far today. Which, if true, is not a good sign.

My advice (not a lawyer) is to ignore the licensing fees; the patents will all be dead by 2027 anyway.

Also I'm not responsible for whatever happens if you do this.

Except if you penetrate the market with modules that cost 5% of similar US made solutions, you start to win mindshare. At least some of those hobbyists start making a product, and sometimes the determination of whether a product is "safety critical" isn't agreed upon until after it's failed catastrophically.

> In a loopy recursive way, it is.

The primary issue with this is that there is a significant amount of luck involved in acquiring large sums of wealth.

It's hard to get firm numbers around this, but it's estimated around 30-40% of the wealthiest people in the world, derive their wealth almost entirely from inheritance. It's actually very difficult to measure this accurately because a lot of studies will report people as "self-made" even if they started with a small $10 million loan from their parents.

Wealth also follows power laws such that it's significantly easier to acquire more of it once you pass certain thresholds.

Take Mark Cuban - made billions selling some crappy radio service to Yahoo!. Has done effectively nothing since then except for re-investing the proceeds from the buyout. He's technically self-made but it's hard to argue he was anything other than lucky.

this is really mind-boggling to me as someone who grew up on the (old) internet.

I think the reward factor is also a large part of it, for most of the last 10 years young people have seen that unethical behaviour results in success. For a developing brain, it's easy to see how that resulted in the current state of SV.

Really? You think the average user is a TDF user?

[delayed]

In Kenya you can get a Safaricom Smart Neon 4G phone for $22. It's actually not bad at all. It is an operator sponsored phone, but there is no monthly plan. Safaricom sustains its digital payment system (mpesa) with it.

btw any way to reach out to you (twitter, discord?). big fan of your blog. I'd say on par with Time Extension!

Smolnet might be the answer. There really isn't a feasible mechanism for monetizing it. At worst, you could have some text ad embedded. No images. Minimal semantic markup (links, lists, quotes, code, generic text) in the case of gemini/gemtext.

"taking a side is willful ignorance"

So is "neutrality." Neutrality is at best just a third perspective obtained through distance. A foreigner who reports on an ethnic genocide can in many cases be neutral because they're distant from it, but as they learn more about it they'll almost certainly adopt a position, losing their neutrality as their distance to the issue shrinks. Much worse is when the perception of distance coincides with an unspoken bias on an issue. How can an American who grew up in America be neutral on racism and what does that mean?

Nicely done! I didn't catch if you were cited.

Hes also liable for the death sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 2441 — War Crimes Act (1996) & 10 U.S.C. § 950t — Military Commissions Act (more relevent)