It’s just dismissive of the idea that you have to learn how use LLMs vs a design flaw in a cell phone that was dismissed as user error.
It’s the same as if he had said “I keep typing HTML into VS code and it keeps not displaying it for me. It just keeps showing the code. But it’s made to make webpages, right? people keep telling me I don’t know how to use it but it’s just not showing me the webpage.”
This is true if you ignore that the US has destabilized relations with Iran at every turn. There have been various times in modern history when relations could have been normalized and every time the US has instead just decided to keep them as a “Bad Guy” to posture against - well one party at least. Yet when they work against the interests of the US everyone is surprised.
Nah, Iran isn't innocent here. Nobody forces them to try and build nuclear bombs, chant death to Jews, or fund literal terrorist groups who do crazy things.
It's fair to be critical of the United States (which was also largely cleaning up European colonial messes in the Middle East), but it's not fair to take away Iran's agency and blame all of its ills on the United States.
I don't recall Israel threatening Arabs in the context of committing genocide or wiping, say, Iraq and Saudi Arabia off the map. Instead it's about getting Iran specifically to stop funding Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and other groups never mind ISIS/ISIL &c.
Israel isn't innocent either. Their actions in Gaza went beyond what was necessary, in my opinion, but I will never accept or entertain a discussion where all the blame just goes to Israel or just goes to the United States.
Neither Israel or the United States are doing what Iran is doing. Iran actively chooses to be belligerent because their authoritarian leaders, who also like to help Russia invade and bomb Ukraine mind you, need an enemy to try and maintain appearances.
I don't know but I don't doubt that Israel has a nuclear bomb. I also don't have a problem with it, because unlike Iran they don't go around threatening their neighbors with nuclear holocaust and destruction, like Iran does.
What does that have to do with Iran? Well, of course besides funding and equipping Hamas to go do dumb things like attack Israel.
Are the Palestinians Iranian citizens? They weren't the last I checked. So no need for Iran to be involved there.
If you want to argue that Israel is "doing things right now" in this broad context against Arabs well, so did Hamas, Hezbollah, and others against Israelis. Iran threatens nuclear holocaust on Israel, Iran also launched ballistic missiles at Israel, funds ISIS/ISIL, Hezbollah, destabilized Syria and tried to destabilize Iraq. Maybe everyone just deserves what is happening to them?
I agree. The United States specifically should get involved and secure Gaza and institute peace, kick out Hamas, and ensure that no weapons from Iran are flowing to the area and causing a humanitarian disaster by encouraging and facilitating continuing bloodshed.
Iran has conflicting values and has never stopped funding groups that violently support their view even when Obama was president so this is a very myopic view to take.
Pareto principle in action - smartphones are good enough for 80% of use cases. And so is AI for a lot of junior-level work.
The problem is, when there are no trainee and junior positions (and, increasingly, intermediate) being filled any more... there is no way for people to rise to senior levels. And that is going to screw up many industries hard.
Many industries have hit this without AI. One example is surveying: it used to be that you’d have a crew of survey techs moving around equipment and measuring reference points, a crew chief, and a licensed surveyor directing and signing off on them. Those techs and crew chief were the future surveyors, as licensed surveyor requires x years working under supervision.
Now there’s one or two guys out there with a total station and/or drone. You’ve gone from 10 techs/junior positions per surveyor to 1. The average surveyor is something like 60 years old and has no successor lined up.
I heard it best described to me that if you put in an hour of work, you get five hours of work out of it. Most people just type at it and don’t put in an hour of planning and discussion and scaffolding. They just expect it to work 100% of the time exactly like they want. But you wouldn’t expect that from a junior developer you would put an hour of work into them, teaching them things showing them where the documentation is your patterns how you do things and then you would set them off and they would probably make mistakes and you would document their mistakes for them so they wouldn’t make them again, but eventually, they’d be pretty good. That’s more or less where we are today that will get you success on a great many tasks.
I get 10-20x done but that’s because most of what I need to get done isn’t particularly difficult.
E.g. I have an aws agent that does all my devops for me. It isn’t doing anything insane but when I need to investigate something or make a terraform change, I send it off and go do something else. I do similar things 20-100 times a day now. Go write this script, do this report, update this documentation, etc.
I think if you are a high level swe it takes a lot of effort to get “better than doing it myself”. If you have a more generalist role, AI is easily a 10x productivity booster if you are knowledgeable about using it.
The nukes are to deter the US. They have been steadily increasing their missile range to first reach regional bases like Guam and now the all the way to the continental USA, and are now even launching a nuclear powered and nuclear armed ballistic missile submarine https://www.hisutton.com/DPRK-SSN-Update.html
The nukes are a bargaining chip (disarmament). Basically, if your country has the human and tech capital to develop a nuke, you probably should because it's free money.
I don't believe that NK's nukes deter the US from doing anything. Would NK nuke Guam and risk getting carpet-bombed with nukes for endless days and nights until even the ants are dead? Artillery on Seoul doesn't matter. The US would just ask SK to evacuate it.
The US doesn't do anything about the DPRK because it's not economically relevant (i.e. it doesn't have the world's largest oil reserves etc). In an ironic way, their economy being closed-off and mostly unintegrated with the Western world maintains the peace.
The nukes have many roles perhaps but I think the fully developed weapons are for retaliatory strike.
They are the North Korean leadership saying that if the US (or China or anyone really) tries to surgically decapitate them (like the US just did in Venezuela) then the nukes are used to take the attackers with them
Yes that's the orthodox doctrine of nuclear deterrent. To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems so that your second-strike capability remains intact through any decapitation attempts.
If you don't have the triad then you need to brandish your capability more ostentatiously, like France does with its deliberate refusal to commit to a no-first-strike policy. This is (one of the many reasons) why North Korea does so much sabre-rattling: they don't have a (publicly known) nuclear triad for deterrence.
Just a note that the importance of the triad is a very American perspective on deterrence and most other countries don't seem to approach this the same way the US does.
The Russians really have a quad (they also have mobile, truck mounted ICBM's that form a significant part of their deterrent, offering some of the guaranteed second-strike advantages that the US gets from SSBN's- and which their SSBN program does not provide nearly as well as the USN does). The Chinese only recently added a manned aircraft leg of their triad with the JL-1. The Indians technically have a triad- just no silo based systems, all of their land based missiles are from TELs, and they only have two SSBN's and do not do alternate crews so more than 1/3 of the time they don't have any deterrent at sea. The Israeli's are not believed to have any sea-based ballistic missiles, their sea-based deterrent would be Popeye cruise missiles and so vulnerable to interception. The Pakistanis are still building their first sea-based deterrent. The French and the UK have no land-based missiles, they are only sea-based and airplanes. The South Africans invested in the Jericho missile more for its space launched capabilities than its warhead delivery abilities, and never really looked at anything sea-based, so far as is publicly known.
I don't think they fill the same strategic purposes, though. The value of silo based missiles to the US is as a missile-sponge, taking most of the warheads from a Russian first strike and keeping them from American cities (forcing any Russian first-strike to be counter-force instead of counter-value). This is not particularly valuable, honestly, which is why only the USSR during the height of the Cold War (largely in reaction to Minuteman) and China very recently have also made the investment into large numbers of ICBM silos.(1)
I won't claim to be as much an expert on Russian doctrine, but they seem to consider their mobile missiles to be a survivable second strike weapon, while silo based missiles are obviously not. Because their boomer fleet does not offer the same assured second strike, they rely on those mobile missiles to play a greater deterrent role then the US does.
1: That is the official justification for the US silos. The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it- ships and planes and even TELs are too expensive. So first the US (worried they were behind because of the Missile Gap) built a thousand Minuteman (then tripled the deployed warheads with MIRV on the Minuteman-III). Then the Soviets responded with 1000 SS-11s of their own. But if you are only building a few hundred warheads total, you don't bother with silos, they don't add as much value as other delivery mechanisms.
I'm saying: Whether or not the Russians consider their silos to be more or less survivable than their truck-based missiles is immaterial, and doesn't change the calculus at the strategic level, because one of two things has to happen in a first-strike situation:
- You blanket the entire country in nuclear detonations and pray that you catch all the trucks scurrying around like nuclear-armed mice
or
- You spam dozens of missiles at a small number of hardened targets and hope you dent them (missile sponge silos)
Either way, you're severely depleting your arsenal to an infeasible level to do this. These are both counter-force attacks where targeting is the only difference, which the Strategic function does not concern itself with. That's a tactical consideration. Survivability of a land-based asset achieved by different means is still survivability of a land-based asset. In other words, it's still functionally a triad.
In the case of France in particular, the argument I recall reading is that: a) France was entering a period of austerity in defense spending as the Cold War ended, b) its siloed missiles were obsolete and in need of upgrades which promised to be costly, and c) France isn't very large geographically, so the "missile sponges" were limited to that little plateau north of Marseille which is pretty darn close to several major population centers, where an Ivy Mike-sized airburst could endanger Avignon and Marseille, not to mention leave a plume of fallout all the way into Germany.
But I'm just an ex Air Force officer who's been to France a bunch, so idk how accurate that is.
>The real reason for silos is, if you want to build a truly insane number of strategic warheads, silos are the only way to afford it
Yeah, I guess I mentally slot road mobile missiles as more like "less effective SLBM on the cheap," at least for a country the size of Russia (not sure that is as true for someone like North Korea where I speculate there is a larger use-it-or-lose-it penalty). There is definitely more of a continuum here between "missile-soak" and "survivable deterrent"- e.g. at the limit you could, in theory, vaporize all of the oceans with nuclear weapons to kill all the boomers, which turns them into missile soaks, but at a truly insane level.
I've seen open-source estimates that the 33rd Guards Rocket Army can distribute their three divisions of mobile missiles across something like 5,000 square miles of Siberia, mostly steppe/taiga (which the 7917/79221 are supposed to be capable of launching from, again according to open source reporting). That's more than 10% of all of North Korea, to give an idea why it would be different for the two countries. Being open-source, I don't have a good estimate for the survivability of the TEL, but let's somewhat arbitrarily say 5PSI is the limit. A 300kt W87 can put 5PSI over 3 mi^2, so doing 5,000 mi^2 would be about 1700 of them, for a grid-square blanket search. That seems to be impracticable, just for one third of their missiles(1).
So I think it's more about guaranteed second-strike than soaking (e.g. at three warheads per silo you'd need ~600 missiles to soak up that many warheads, instead of the 70-odd from mobile). Which is why I have seen some people consider those missiles as more about assured second-strike than missile-soak, with hints that the Russians consider that their role. The Russian doctrine does not align exactly with the American one (2) for sure and there are hints that the Russians consider road-mobile to be different from silo deployments.
1: I'm not as clear on how much deployment space the 27th Guards Rocket Army, in the European parts of Russia has, and whether they will run into similar problems to the French wrt population centers. There is also a whole separate discussion about how much counter-force and counter-value are truly separate on the receiving end, given, e.g. if Barksdale gets nuked Shreveport is going to be very very sad. But the RAND people were sure they were distinct!
2: At least, as far as this monolingual American can tell. My main source for this is the Arms Control Wonk blog and podcast, which actually does read and report on what the Russians describe as their doctrine, they are my source for the "Russians seem to consider road-mobile as more survivable second-strike than silos."
> To be truly effective you need a triad of land-based ICBMs, nuclear-armed submarines, and aircraft-based delivery systems
The core parts for MAD land-based missile silos (to soak up the enemy's missiles) and submarines (to ensure a second strike). Planes are largely a diplomatic deterrent inasmuch as they're easy to send out and easy to recall.
But Pyongyang isn't playing MAD. It's playing credible threat. And for a credible threat, you just need missiles. (On land or on subs.) The point is that you raise the stakes of e.g. a Maduro operation to risking Los Angeles.
Strategic bombers are just as important because MAD itself is fundamentally a political and diplomatic tool. The reason you have strategic bombers is, as you correctly said, so that you can signal your posture and intent by stationing them, dispersing them, launching them, and (most critically) recalling them.
But again, because MAD first and foremost is a deterrent, you want to provide diplomatic offramps for both you and your adversary. This is crucial. Putting the B-52s on airborne alert sends a very strong message, but so does recalling them from airborne alert.
By their very natures, SSBNs and ICBMs are not capable of playing this role.
It’s the same as if he had said “I keep typing HTML into VS code and it keeps not displaying it for me. It just keeps showing the code. But it’s made to make webpages, right? people keep telling me I don’t know how to use it but it’s just not showing me the webpage.”
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