suffering is bad and should be prevented.

the iran war has changed the character of my sleep. and my sleep was not of admirable character to begin with.

i don’t really get, what would be the point of seizing Kharg Island? if it would be to strangle Iran’s ability to generate revenue from oil sales, can’t you just do that the way Iran does it to everyone else, by kettling the ships or disabling the pipelines that would transport the oil?

yeah, some of them have comported themselves pretty well lately.

23 years ago, we never feared that retaliation by Iraq could render the entire region uninhabitable at its current population level or end global market access to Persian Gulf oil for years. even if you are an unreformed GWB-era neocon, the risks-to-benefits ratio here has to be offputting.

a case @masnick.com is making is that returns to scale on LLMs may top out, that beyond a certain level, the difference between a managed-at-scale frontier model and a self-hostable open model may be small enough that the latter is good enough for most users and applications. mb wrong. but possible!

i guess the good in it for the US people is the catastrophic foreign war we avoid getting sucked into and bearing consequences from. A low bar that might have been avoided under the counterfactual of… just not idiotically attacking without a plan! but that is no longer an achievable counterfactual.

Hopeful, but not impossible! The original web seemed liberating, but it had subtle affordances that promoted scale and domination. It might not be likely, but it’s conceivable that the inverse is true of LLMs.

anything is possible if one is sufficiently flexible about the meaning of the things.

Is it a good outcome or a bad outcome if the result of Trump’s Iran venture is “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”, if Trump finds an arrangement mutually beneficial (among corrupt elites) under which both sides accommodate and support one another’s domination of and emoluments from their home states?

brilliant indeed, by @kevinbaker.bsky.social.

the Iranians will cede to Trump Persian Golf in exchange for all their other demands being met.

maybe he meant immanent …

🎶 i’m starting with the man in the mirror… 🎶

a case can be made that the US might have had to take action against Iran if all else failed. but to do so now, with no preparation or planning, no domestic political consensus, perfidiously during negotiations when all else might not have failed, strikes me as indefensible and unlikely to succeed.

from Recoleta Cemetery, Buenos Aires.

an instagram feed of remarkable cemeteries, so people can tombscroll.

from my perspective the stupidity of the choice is baked in, it was just ex ante a terrible decision. if somehow the regime collapses and a new stable friendly liberal govt emerges, the happy ending will seem to overwhelm the stupidity of the choice. i hope i am wrong, but don’t think that likely!