Checks out.. I've never seen a fat python.

Sure they did.. they laid of 10s of thousands of employees because they needed to free funds for building data centers. They aren't cheap. And the spending is totally bonkers. No Google, Amazon, Meta, etc.. can afford such an investment without consequences.. so they free up cash by dumping people and cancelling "non-essential" projects.

100s of thousands have lost jobs at this point to fund this.

My hope is that in a year or two the fever will end and they will start reallocating the money to people again. Once the winners are decided.

Russia is protecting Khamenei's son as well.

Iranians that support the regime, support it's campaign of brutality that has been affecting so many Iranians for the last 50 years. Most Iranians in the West escaped or left because of this. But many have family and friends there and know first hand of the sufferings the people have endured.

It's an evil regime, no question about it. They aren't heros. They are people that enjoy mass hangings, torture, rape, and a long list of atrocities that have been long documented.

(that being said.. that doesn't mean the US has shown and smarts in the current War. It's not clear it will lead to anything but more suffering. I hope I'm wrong)

For the US to win there has to be regime change.

For Iran to win, they merely need to get the US to quit attacking them. Then they can continue their purge of opponents and terrorizing the population. They get to keep their power. Which is all they want. And then they can plot a terrorism campaign against the west.

Right now the US is looking weak for reacting against every threat that Iran makes to the gulf states. And the US's inability to secure the Strait. And it's fumbling with it's European allies (that it has spent the last year antagonizing and now wonders why they don't come to their aid).

I'm no military strategist, but unless they can think up something really crafty, their only option is to pour an immense amount of money into this, invade parts of Iran and secure the straight.

Does the US population have the stomach for another protracted war? Will the unconsulted Congress even approve of the funds for that? Certainly the US economy would not react well.

It's a mess.

What Iranians fear the most, is the US backing off (ie. the TACO) and then the regime cracking down twice as hard.

In fact, the regime has been doing exactly that as the US has been bombing. Many political opponents, protesters, and even minorities that have nothing to do with this but are often scapegoated are getting arrested, tortured, and executed. Right now this is happening.

"Normal Iranian people despise their theocratic "leadership". Those 1 million Iranian troops will be no match for the 50 million Iranians standing up to them. You can already start to see it in places where the regular people have taken over police stations and begun to arm themselves for what's coming."

I think you misunderstand the amount of support the mullah's have, and the nature of the support.

In Iraq Saddam Hussein was supported by a political party. The members of his part liked him, but he represented a regime and a source of power. The supporters of Khamenei also probably view it that way. In his immediate circle. But beyond that he represents Islam itself to a substantial portion of the masses.

While the city folk have grown tired of the regime, and want to go back to living a more Western lifestyle like they heard Iran had in the 1970s, the country folk are often bound to a strong tradition of supporting the mullahs, and listening to them and "imitating" then as their religion teaches them to.

Just like there are many ignorant people in other countries that support crazy regimes (some argue the US is one of these countries), there are many ignorant people that will support the mullah's.

The entrenchment of the mullah's didn't start in the 1970s.. it has a very long history. 1979 was only a culmination of that.

So yes. Many of the 50 million are tired and hate the regime. But a strong segment of the populace considers it their absolute religious duty to support the mullahs. These segments of the population have often risen up themselves and taken matters into their own hands when someone was deemed an "enemy of Islam" (their version of it). The fanaticism runs deep in them.

This isn't going away with a few bombs.

A more realistic way this would play out is if some military commander took charge (like Reza Shah did in 1925) and forcibly Westernized the country imposing strong limitations on the mullah's and punishing any that openly oppose.

But it's unclear if such a dictator exists today. And surely that would bring about new problems.

I hope I'm wrong and the IRGC, and the Basij, and the army, and the whole religious establishment's strong grip on the government can be weakened. But the situation doesn't seem that way right now.

What do you expect? Should he jog without a GPS like a savage?

If it's not on Strava it didn't happen!

Frankly, this all looks a bit like grandstanding on the part of the US government. Or maybe just general cluelessness.

The US government is more than capable, and has plenty of funding, to just set up a team that grabs an open source model like .. hmm.. say DeepSeek R2. And gets it to do what they want with a few agents. They have the money, the data centers (or they can rent those), and the technical skill to do all they want.

Not sure why the haven't.

I'm not a big believer in the "dangers of AI".. except of course the only real danger of AI: military use of AI.

That's the big elephant in the room. The governments are going full speed to create autonomous robots to kill people. Nobody seems worried about that obvious danger. And the present government doesn't believe in disarmament treaties.

US won't be successful by promoting War around the world.

And the US military is more than capable of making their own models. In fact they can just base it on open source ones like DeepSeek. Then build their own agents.

Anthropic should have told the Department of Genocide to take a hike.

They buckled to the evil administration's pressure.

A better option would have been to tell the Department of War to go make their own model. And be free of their evil.

This is literally the worst use of AI: AI for weapons manufacturing.

I guess the money is just too juicy.

If AI translation is good enough then readers should use that and leave the submissions in their original form.
International collaboration should be encouraged, not curtailed.

you can't effectively monitor if something was generated by AI.

also, I'm sure Chinese education is very exam heavy.. so less succeptible to AI cheating. But the sad part is then there are less project based evaluations.

Sadly what it means is going backwards from more project based evaluations to more exam based evaluations.

This isn't great. But I don't know how else to solve the problem.

I've always said that one has to earn the right to automation.

Once you understand the material well, then by all means automate. But don't make the tools a crutch in life.