I'd say more like a loss for the US than a win for Iran.
> 4. Showed everyone in the ME and the world that if anyone messes with them they’ll close the straight. Then gas prices go up. Then your own domestic pop gets pissed. Then your chances of re-election drop.
Everyone knew from the beginning that closing the strait was something Iran would do. But it is current US government that is either inept or too smart for their own good and thought with US producing surplus oil for domestic use, it will not impact them. They didn't care for the consequences and it came back to bite them.
Also, wasn't it that even if the war was stop/ceasefire oil prices will take a long time to recover? If that is true the domestic pop getting pissed might be true even with this ceasefire and it will hurt the current government in their upcoming elections.
> 3. Reminded the anti regime population that they’re not going anywhere and that the US can’t help them.
More like galvanized people against a common enemy. Regime is going to come down hard on the protestors than ever before and some might find it easier to blame the power which claimed to deliver the regime change. Then Americans will talk about how Iranians hate their way of life and the attack was justified.
> thought with US producing surplus oil for domestic use
I have to assume that at least someone in the room was well aware that all oil is not created equal and that US refineries were designed from the beginning for Venezuelan and similar oil rather than US oil.
That's why I said either inept or too smart for their own good because closing of the strait was a real threat before the war and was ignored, leading to the tweet on Easter.
Even if US refineries were designed for US oil to keep domestic prices low one would have to introduce export restrictions because oil is a global commondity. Big oil will not be happy about that and it seems they have a great influence over the respublican party and Trump.
> All policy aimed at preventing nuclear Iran has one goal: buy time. I think it is hard to argue that time has not been bought (though how much and whether the price was right is another question).
Given that Iran has been one week/one month/one year away from acquiring nuclear capabilities since 2014 - first Trump Presidency, and they are not any closer a decade later this "buying time" rhetoric is nothing short of "Iraq has WMD" level of absurdity.
It is not jist Bibi, but also the IAEA and other international organizations. And at least the last 5 US administrations. I suppose they could also all be in Israel's pocket though.
Iran's 60% enriched uranium stockpile is really not up for debate. Iran is happy to tell everyone that they have it. With the proper equipment, 60% can go to 90% in a single month. So the question is how advanced is the Iranian infrastructure for the final enrichment step, and (less commonly talked about) how ready they are to actually make a fission bomb out of that material. The latter task is not considered to be very hard, North Korea did it after all, so the main focus has been on the former. There does seem to be some decent information that the centrifuge array has been under active development at various points, and has been consitently, actively targetted by Mossad/CIA for at least the past 20 years or so. For example, Stuxnet was a joint CIA/Mossad operation that begain in 2005 and continued through both GWBush and Obama.
Unfortunately, even with some nice bribes from Obama, Iran was always a little cagey with the IAEA inspectors, and officially kicked them out in 2021. So after that, the only sources for the state of Irans nuclear infrastructure information effectively became Iran itself and Mossad.
The amount of apologia exists for Musk actions is just mind boggling. It seems to me that people want all the good from the hype Musk brings, but if things go wrong - Why don't people think of the poor workers?
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. If people were so smart where were they when Musk was hyping autonomous vehicles being just around the corner for years? Or the fact that the board of directors kept raising his compensation to insane levels because he kept threatening them that he'll walk out? The company chose to do this. People didn't. Now that he is tanking the valuation, we don't need to separate out Tesla and Musk. They are one and the same.
Every power hungry maniac thinks their power of sycophancy is going to be better. If they had any shred of reflection they wouldn’t be working for this man.
They keep running experiments like free $50 in extra use credits or 2x usage outside certain windows where inference is very slow. You can’t help but think this is all a slowly boiling the frog experiment. Experimenting how much they can charge.
They're boiling the frog pretty quickly, honestly. The token usage has clearly been an issue since using Claude code from the beginning. It just blows through tokens
Laws will be passed to make it "safer". Just like it is happening with the id verification systems. Every image or video gen will require a watermark. Something visible which cannot be removed easily or hidden which can be detected and blocked. Access to models which do not comply will be made harder through id verification checks or something.
There will be some regulatory capture in between.
World will kick into gear only when something really bad happens. Maybe a influential person - rich or politician - fooled into doing something catastrophic due to a deepfake video/image. Until then normal people being affected isn't going to move the needle.
Verification needs to work the other way around, some kind of verifiable chain of trust for photos and videos from real cameras. Watermarking all generated media is impossible.
I don't really understand why this is so hard or why it wasn't just done from the get go.
Just have Apple and Google digitally sign videos and photos recorded from phones and then have Google and Meta, etc display that they are authentic when shown on their platforms.
You're talking about the metadata of the files, which can always be edited and someone will inevitably try to make software to do exactly that. Also, Adobe's proposal for handling generated content is exactly this and they're not able to get buy-in from other companies.
Edit the metadata in what way? It's a cryptographic hash.
If the bits that make up the video as was recorded by the camera don't match the hash anymore, then you know it was modified. That doesn't mean it's fake, it just means use skepticism when viewing. On the other hand the ones that have not been modified and still match can be trusted.
Essentially 0% of professional photography or videography uses "straight out of the camera" (SOOC) JPEGs or video. It's always raw photos or "log" video, then edited to look like what the photographer actually saw. The signal would be so noisy as to be useless.
Sure they could, but then you trim the video by 2 seconds, tweak the colors, or just send it over WhatsApp, which recompresses the file with its own encoder. The hash breaks instantly. Cryptography protects bits, but video is about visual meaning. The slightest pixel modification kills the hardware signature. Plus, it does absolutely nothing to fix the "analog hole" problem - a scammer can just point that cryptographically signed iphone camera at a high-quality deepfake playing on a monitor
I would assume whatsapp would read the hash and verify it when the video is chosen to be sent to someone, so the reciever would see that the video that was selected by the sender was indeed authentic. Assuming you trust meta to re-encode it and not mess with it.
As far as recording a monitor, I guess, but I feel like you can tell that someone is recording a monitor.
As far as editing, no it wont work in those cases, but the point here is not to verify ALL videos, but to have an easy way for people to verify important videos. People will learn that if you edit it, it won't be verified, so they will be less inclined to edit it if they want to make it clear it's an authentic video. Think like people recording some event going down on the streets etc or recording a video message for family and friends.
If AI video generation is going to get that good, don't you think it would be a good idea to have a way to record provably authentic videos if we need? Like a police interaction or something. There is no real reason to need to edit that.
Also, could a video hash just be computed every X seconds, and give the user the choice to trim the video at each of those intervals?
Hashing every X seconds is just a Merkle tree, the tech for that has been around forever. But cryptography only protects the container, not the semantic meaning inside it. If verifying a video requires spinning up this massive crypto infrastructure that can just be trivially bypassed with a hardware camera spoofer anyway, that defense is completely worthless for the mass market. Scammers would bypass it in their sleep.
It becomes a hard problem quickly when you introduce editing, and most photos and videos on social media are edited. I'm not sure how it would work. It seems more feasible than universal watermarks, though.
> Laws will be passed to make it "safer". Just like it is happening with the id verification systems. Every image or video gen will require a watermark. Something visible which cannot be removed easily or hidden which can be detected and blocked. Access to models which do not comply will be made harder through id verification checks or something.
i've thought about this off and on and how to implement it. Not easily, was my general takeaway.
or rather, it's easily to implement but you're in a adversarial relationship with bad actors and easy implementations may be easily broken
e.g. your certs gotta come from somewhere and stay protected, and how do you update and control them. key management for every single camera on every phone, etc.
On one hand he had "No new wars", he also was pretty clear on his disdain for Middle Eastern countries - the ones not giving him millions in bribes.
People knew that he was incoherent and inconsistent. He proved that during his first Presidency. So, I don't think it is a case of "not what people voted for". People are getting exactly what they voted for - chaos and incoherence.
As you said, Congress doesn't want to do anything due to elections. And courts have declared that President actions are always justified.
Choices beyond losing election requires either of these branches to act. Without that, wait for the next election.
> And courts have declared that President actions are always justified.
To be more specific, the SCOTUS has only declared one particular President's actions as always justified. I would be willing to bet any amount of money that they suddenly reverse this opinion as soon as someone from the other team becomes president.
You mean the guy who kept talking about bringing back jobs to US - jobs requiring Americans to screw iPhone parts - wasn't debating in bad faith, like you are doing here? I am shocked, I tell you. I am really shocked.
I understand Presidential pardons are abused but I wouldn't say at least this is not "both sides", this is worse.
For years there were corporate overlords lobbying and corruption. That was "both sides".
Now this "side" has been railing against corruption by the "other side" and how they are going to put every corrupt person in jail and most "transparent" government.
Turns out they are much worse. Don't even know how to be corrupt properly. Just blatantly corrupt. When corned keep doing whataboutism - forgetting that even if the "other side" was corrupt it doesn't mean they can be corrupt too. Worse yet they still get support from their base.
Make no mistake - this is making US a low trust society on par with a third world country.
That was the OP's intent -- it's meant to be sarcastic. That's why "both sides" was in quotes. It's a common form of argument: I can do (very bad thing) because you did (slightly bad thing).
> 4. Showed everyone in the ME and the world that if anyone messes with them they’ll close the straight. Then gas prices go up. Then your own domestic pop gets pissed. Then your chances of re-election drop.
Everyone knew from the beginning that closing the strait was something Iran would do. But it is current US government that is either inept or too smart for their own good and thought with US producing surplus oil for domestic use, it will not impact them. They didn't care for the consequences and it came back to bite them.
Also, wasn't it that even if the war was stop/ceasefire oil prices will take a long time to recover? If that is true the domestic pop getting pissed might be true even with this ceasefire and it will hurt the current government in their upcoming elections.
> 3. Reminded the anti regime population that they’re not going anywhere and that the US can’t help them.
More like galvanized people against a common enemy. Regime is going to come down hard on the protestors than ever before and some might find it easier to blame the power which claimed to deliver the regime change. Then Americans will talk about how Iranians hate their way of life and the attack was justified.
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