Lol their page finally loaded. They added an example scenario of "Filling in Form 1040" - which made me laugh out loud. That is indeed something most US citizens cannot accurately do even with expensive proprietary tax software services. Kind of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy meme but where the tax code is so complicated we're implementing powerful AIs to be able to do it (hopefully) right.
Sorry guys, our AI superintelligence got bored by your mundane tasks. Please provide them with frontier math problems from time to time, so they will be more aligned to do your taxes as well.
Back in the day, the sentiment was the MySQL was more-performant but the criticized tradeoff of having "cut corners". I still remember when their transaction support InnoDB table engine came out. Anyway Postgres was viewed as slower but more standards compliant - so mature architects preferred that. MySQL, in my opinion, fell into default usage among LAMP stacks and PHP-using kiddies. Postgres took the crown over time.
"There's no such thing as public opinion, merely published opinion". While on the one hand we should never discount the impact of incompetence, gross negligence, or deliberate mismanagement there's a reason this story is circulating. For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
Slightly concerned that there could be an unreported tit-for-tat. China "allegedly" arming/equipping Iran to perhaps the USA coverty planting unbalancing arms and equipment to Taiwan. The Ukraine (and Iran?) theater has shown how drone warfare has changed the game. A nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one (ongoing 2-for-2 at the moment).
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
Wow, yeah, you'd need to have morons at the top of the chain of command and subordinates afraid to speak out in order for something like that to happen. Nothing like the US government today at all.
(Not American, need to preface with this) I think the US military has shown itself to be extremely competent in the last war. Reading about Desert Storm and later the invasion of Iraq it's just insane. It's still possible they miscalculated how rapidly warfare would change, but to call them morons... As far as I can see, there are only three proven militaries in the world, the US, Israel and Ukraine, and the US is orders of magnitude larger than the rest. Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off? Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
I think their point is that it doesn't really matter how competent the lower levels of the command structure are if the ones at the very top are bumbling fools unwilling to listen.
If you don’t have an objective, no amount of military might is going to get you there. This was the USA’s biggest mistake in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran.
> Have we already forgotten what happened to Maduro? What other country in the history of the world could pull something like that off?
Venezuela was a raid, not a full on war. And it was so lopsided it was like putting Michael Jordan against a 10-year-old and based on that performance determining that Jordan is the GOAT. It demonstrated that against a remarkably unprepared and unready opponent the US can do well, which tells you nothing about the US's capabilities in actual warfare against a peer, near peer, or just damned determined opponents.
> Russia tried at Hostomel, didn't go so well.
That was not a comparable action to the Maduro raid. The raid was an in-and-out operation, with no need to control any territory for a significant period. Hostomel was a battle over control of territory.
As a note, while there was no war Russia has already acquired Crimea a few years before and it was only a matter of time before invasion itself was to happen, so Ukraine was preparing for that attack more or less.
It's not a tactical failure of the US; it's a strategic one. The US operates a tremendously powerful military, but that doesn't change the fact that the war with Iran was a tremendous strategic blunder. "Moronic" is a pretty fair characterization.
Is executing a strategy that you (should) know to be impossible to implement because of logistical limitations really a logistics failure?
It’s not as if the US, a few years ago, said it needed way more long-range precision weapons in 2026, and didn’t get them, despite promises to the contrary.
You have tactics and strategy mixed up. Killing Iran leadership was a tactical success. Continually shooting long range missiles into a giant country is a strategic failure.
You think the US has shown itself as to be extremely competent in the Iran war? If you were talking about Iraq, that was completely different leadership.
Not only leadership, war looked different back then. The Ukraine war made everyone throw away the classic war playbook.
At the time of the Iraq war the US was holding all the cards. It had a perfected playbook, the optimal technology, and support from the population. In the Iran war the old playbook is ineffective, the technology is too expensive to keep it up, and the popular support for a war demanded by another country isn't there.
And yes... you have the current crop of leaders who couldn't lead their way out of a wet paper bag.
The son of the elderly Iranian ruler, aligned politically with his father, took over. The war prompted Iran to operate one of the world's largest economic pressure levers, to great effect. The U.S.'s unilateralism, leadership rhetoric, and war crimes (like bombing a school) have lost it a significant amount of global goodwill.
None of that seems like it jibes with your description.
It does. The initial strike, while effective, has proven to achieve absolutely nothing, or less than nothing. Neither Iran's military nor logistic nor even administrative capability was impacted to any serious extent. The population, of which a large proportion was against the regime and potentially on the brink of a revolt, quickly fell in line and became supporters, faced with the external opposition. And Iran has proven its ability to unilaterally close the straight of Hormuz, a crippling blow to the entire world's economy that the USA is simply unable to stop.
So again - the execution shows significant tactical competence. But the strategic direction is absolutely disastrous.
Success or failure isn’t judged by how many explosions or dead bodies each side racks up. Def Sec McNamara admits he made that mistake during the Vietnam war when he repeatedly asserted the US was winning with all sorts of statistics and charts with steep lines pointing up.
The real question is whether political objectives are achieved. In Iran, those were vaguely defined to begin with, but depending on the moment and mood of the President they were:
1. Prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon now or in the foreseeable future (Not Achieved)
3. Maintain international access to key shipping routes (Negative Achieved, much worse than pre-war status quo)
So after spending billions of dollars, depleting stockpiles of our most modern precision weapons against a vastly inferior military technologically, losing 18 American lives and resulting in both global economic disruption and to our Gulf allies, the war has failed to accomplish any objectives and left everyone in a worse position than before the war except the IRGC.
Minimal cost? We’re at about a billion dollars per primary target and rising. Not to mention north of 250 US casualties. I’d hardly call that minimal cost.
Our ability to defend our allies in the region is non existent, and we lost almost all of our radar capabilities which will take a decade minimum to rebuild. That’s assuming hostilities end tomorrow.
Congrats, now even more hardline leadership got power. And it was conclusively proven that US trears accomodating or measured responses as weakness, so the new leadership wont makr the same mistake.
Iran gained straight of hormuz. It gained chuckpaz and confidence too. It is now itching to play major regional power
Yes, but the military exists for the nation, not the other way around, so a military success that turns into a national disaster is not a military success at all.
That's why even in the nuclear Navy, as crazy as they are about reactor safety, they would train and preach continuously that "safety of ship" is more important than reactor safety, because the reactor is not safe if the ship is not safe.
From a military standpoint, yes. You have to have your head buried in the sand to think we didn’t have significant loss of military assets in the region.
A very cursory investigation suggests the Iran war has cost the US approximately 100 billion dollars.
About half in hardware and half in increased costs for citizens.
These costs are continuing since there is no end in sight and it seems the US is running out of some of the equipment it has used.
What were the stated goals and did the US achieve them? The same family still runs Iran in the same way, nothing has changed in a material way as of now.
How many lives has the US lost? What has Iran lost so far in the conflict with the US and Israel (a conflict which is not over)? The propaganda attempting to spin this as setting up as a strategic defeat for the US, is almost comical.
As is, the US can stand-off and torment Iran for a very, very long time.
$31 trillion economy. $94,000 GDP per capita (nearly 3x Japan for reference). The US can spend $100 billion annually on bombing Iran for the next decade entirely without harming its economy in a meaningful way.
The US doesn't have to let off. Iran is pinned, massively eroded, and the US is only losing money. Iran has lost all of its proxies, its military is entirely broken (and fully capable of waging a guerrilla conflict), its navy is gone, its airforce is gone, its military manufacturing is substantially eroded, and Russia is boiling. The reason the US is going back and forth on peace, is for the same exact same reason it's in the US interest to bleed Russia. It's this: let's pretend we want peace, while we endlessly grind Iran down.
One of these things is not like the other. Russia is a threat to Europe, and is in the midst of invading a country with a lot of agricultural, industrial, and cultural upside that should be on the road to EU integration. Bombing the snot out of Russian trenches in eastern Ukraine might even be a good idea.
Perhaps letting Iran, a country ruled by fanatics, build enough military infrastructure to the point that they're able to hold a significant part of the world's energy hostage was the original blunder?
You could argue they'd never use their power unless attacked, but I don't think you can be certain of that. It comes down to if you can accept that a non-rational actor can be allowed to have this power (or nuclear weapons for that matter).
Now that the cat is out of the bag it would be a terrible idea not to finish the job and make sure Iran doesn't have this power ever again.
If you tried, could you make a more vague and abstract example of the sunk cost fallacy? Iran would do what with what to whom? There is literally no better example of a case where we could just stop being stupid and injuring ourselves by being stupid than fighting Iran.
I mean it doesn't, it's just that Iran is ruled by fanatics who'd rather see their country cease to exist than to give up power. If your definition of winning is just infinite willingness to die then Iran definitely won.
I was left scratching my head why Ukraine would be there, but not Iran, on the basis that it too has stood its ground in what the superpower aggressor planned to be short and decisive conflict.
Iran has survived this war so far because the aggressor hasn't made any attempt to actually defeat them. It's very different from Ukraine, which is holding its own against an all-out invasion. Iran might well be able to withstand an all-out invasion by the US, but it hasn't had to yet.
Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission, something that in the entire history of aerial warfare has worked exactly once (and even that one time is debatable).
> Right now, the US is half-heartedly trying to bomb Iran into submission
The title of TFA confirms the attempt is wholehearted: It's just not working as well as it did in Venezuela (where leadership was captured, rather than killed).
If it was wholehearted then the lack of long-range ground-to-ground precision munitions wouldn't be putting a damper on things, we'd be bombing round the clock from the air with way more sorties than are actually being flown.
Venezuela worked because it had much clearer and more limited goals (capture Maduro, vs regime change spark a revolution hammer out an agreement on nukes who knows what) and boots were put on the ground to accomplish those goals. Venezuela was not bombed into submission. Like I said, that has happened exactly once ever (or maybe not even), and that one time involved weapons that nobody is willing to use again (and rightfully so).
Have they? Obviously there have been a ton of issues due to the US’s strategy in Iran. But almost nobody in the US has any affect from this war. Gas prices are up a bit. Mildly inconvenient for the majority of people, and that’s the biggest failure people are mad about.
Zoom in on this year and you'll see it's below $3 a gallon in January and February, then by the end of March it's over $4 and mostly above after that. That's a 33% increase. That's a substantial and sustained hike in a short time.
Gas prices are up a bit? In my area it’s gone up at least $2 from before the war. Which is just another way that everything has gotten so much more expensive recently (not that all of that is caused by the war).
Agreed yes that’s not great. But really if that’s the worst thing you’re noticing in your daily life at home, things must be pretty ok?
You must see the difference between us being unhappy that gas is more expensive, versus somebody living in Iran worrying that their entire government and country is in chaos.
Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
> Obviously this war is bad for a bunch of reasons, but the US is completely fine at home relatively.
With the exception of total wars, the domestic standard of living has very little to do with how well or not a foreign war is going.
How good Americans are living is a non-sequitur with regards to the war objectives set by the political and military leaders in Washington and Tehran. War, being politics by other means, has to be measured by political objectives. The average American didn't even notice when America relinquished control of Afghanistan to the Taliban, amd yet it was a clear-cut failure to achieve GW's stated goals.
Military competence has nothing to do with running low on munitions after months of war. There are four ways to address the issue: have larger stockpiles before the war, ramp up production during the war, end the war, or don't go to war in the first place. None of those can be done by the military. It's all up to the civilian leadership, and the current civilian leadership is catastrophically incompetent. The current commander in chief is a "fucking moron," to quote his former Secretary of State.
Desert Storm was 35 years ago. Almost everyone who fought in it is out of service or dead.
Iraqi invasion was 23 years ago. Again, almost everyone who was part of the initial invasion is out of service. I wouldn't call the occupation of either Afghanistan or Iraq "extremely competent." More like the exact opposite.
(Am an American, don't know if it matters that I preface with this)
The US military is quite powerful.
Donald Trump is a moron.
Pete Hegseth is also a moron whose only qualification is that he looks like what the moron Donald Trump imagines someone playing his role would look like in the movies/TV.
It's been discussed for decades that the US would run out of precision munitions in any multi-week conflict. The presumption was that the US would either be in a nuclear war at that point, or a ground campaign would complete the task along with dumb munitions.
That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for later generations. It is not unbelievable that Iran is capable of blocking a dumb bombing campaign indefinitely, or that the viable targets for such a campaign are politically untenable.
> That the US decided to expend it's precision weapon stockpile on a conflict of choice with no ground or dumb bombing campaign to fallback on is a mystery for later generations.
There is no mystery. A dumb bombing campaign requires air superiority, and Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
The US absolutely can achieve that. But it _will_ result in aircraft losses, and it requires detailed planning. Both of these are not acceptable anymore.
> Iran actually has reasonable anti-air defense. They're not a bunch of guys running around with AK-74s.
To help put that in perspective versus Iraq: Iran's GDP today is a ~7x stronger than Iraq's was (in 2003) relative to the US GDP at each time. In other words, bigger economy, better-equipped military.
Plus having ~2x the population, and ~3x the land area.
Also, the most powerful country of the world, with the most advanced medical science, faling to manage a deadly measles outbreak because a conspiracy theoricist and antivax has been chosen as Secretary of Health wouldn't have been readily believable just 12 years ago. Yet here we are.
I guess you view what would be the worst crime against humanity ever to be committed (and yes, I really do mean to include all the previous ones in that statement) to be an acceptable answer to “oh, we have no more smart bombs, let’s just kill everyone in this country”?
Not committing a crime against humanity is not “good will”.
Not killing someone when one can (in a not them or me situation) is not “good will”, it’s one of the most basic ethical principles. I’m surprised you need to ask this question.
How are those things even related? The US has lots of munitions, because US goodwill is the reason Iran isn't glass? That's a complete non-sequitur.
The US's stockpile of conventional precision munitions and the US's nuclear arsenal are two very different things. The depth of one has little to do with the other.
The US hasn't run out of precision conventional munitions, but it is running low. There's no reason this should come as a surprise. The US has been fighting a medium intensity air war for months without making any move to ramp up production of those munitions.
The reason Iran isn't glass is because doing otherwise would be a global catastrophe, and even the assholes in charge don't want to go down as the worst mass murderers in human history.
If my grandmother had wheels, she would have been a bike.
The article didn't mention anything about US strategic or tactical nuclear weapons, though that must be a fantasy of yours (along with the Chimp in the Whitehouse).
I’m absolutely on the record of being against nukes. Not really sure why you posed that personal attack, but it’s about as shitty a thing as you could say.
This doesn't account for the substantial difference between military deception and political (self-)deception.
The Midway water shortage deception was a way to gain a tactical, followed by strategic advantage.
Running out of missiles is an "incovenient truth" for the zionist pro-war crowd. History is littered with innumerable examples of political leaders not adequately considering ground-truth military and logistical realities (Confederates fighting in Pennsylvania, Germans invading Russia, etc.).
Leave it to HN to over-intellectualize and twist something obvious because why not?
The cretins in charge of the country think the problem is that the soldiers don't have enough testosterone and have too much facial hair, and these people are capable of this next-level deception of the enemy? I don't think so.
Their idea of an army is the movie "300" - on oiled up, violent homoerotic phantasy. Soon, that's what's going to be actually left.
> For the most-dominant military power in the world to "whoopsy" run out of weapons because of a low-stakes engagement isn't readily believable.
Sadly, I find it very believable. To build them costs lots of time and money. To use them, not so much. Going low tech might risk more casualties in some cases - and so all the political problems that follow along from that.
We've also seen plenty of wishful thinking from the civilian leaders of the military. I'm sure that in their minds, each strike they launch is surely the one that will finally break Iran, better hit them with the good stuff, shock and awe.
They've also been purging all kinds of top military officers, presumably over culture war issues and insufficient sycophancy.
> nation without a navy can now inexpensively counter a nation with one
I would argue that you are right with Ukraine vs Russia since the former has sunk so many of latter's assets. But that has not been the case with US vs Iran.
Given that all of the advisors who warned against starting something with Iran called this out as a risk (before hegseth cleaned house of anyone competent willing to speak up), why do you think this is so unbelievable?
>For the most-dominant military power in the world
Russia kept saying its the second most powerful military in the world and now it's the second most powerful military in Ukraine. You can't just keep saying words and then think they're true because you keep repeating them.
There's no secret US weapons factories hidden away somewhere, the inadequacy of the US industrial base to maintain production for long term war have been known for decades and were in some sense even an intentional shift after the end of the Cold War.
I was thinking about this too because some years ago, there was a ranking article that’s now unavailable by the U.S. News and World Report (more famous for its college and university rankings) that had listed Russia as the strongest military.[1] A lot of people were questioning or poking fun at the ranking because of how Russia was struggling with Ukraine. Also, a lot of people seem to confuse analysis with endorsement or validation. But really it’s important to note that a lot of stuff also has to do with how information is very sensitive and can influence a lot of people. If mainstream media can be believed, the U.S. is also struggling a lot with Iran right now, but you might not realize that if you mainly used Trump’s Truth social posts as your only source of info.
Russia could still trigger a mass extinction and end civilization as we know it.
The thing which has changed is the nuclear threat is almost just, losing interest? Yes any one of a handful of nations could launch a strike that would kill tens of millions and start a war that would kill billions but... why? A teenager could build in their garage that can take down a ship or a particular room in a building a thousand miles away so what's the point of vaporizing civilians? It is exclusively a weapon for genocide now and it seems like mutually assured destruction is an ending doctrine it's a weapon for a madman and there are just so many easier options to accomplish any goal.
Once proper defenses for cheap and slow suicide drones is created (fast small unmanned interceptors with bullets instead of missiles) this temporary drone threat phase of war will be mostly over. The ability to build $1000 drones in everybody's garage was an obvious but unhandled threat, surely it will be though.
The funniest thing I've seen with the Ukraine war (if it's not AI) is an old prop plane with it's canopy removed and the dude in the rear seat shooting down a drone with his automatic rifle. We're going to get Top Gun: RC Mini Edition in the next armed conflict and it's going to seem like a video game.
It will then become just another threat, and one that is managed well enough to no longer be a david v. goliath kind of weapon.
This just in: fallible Humans (un)knowingly produce unreliable data. LLM training on unreliable data impacts accuracy. Some sources of Human-produced data are measurably more reliable than others.
National pride aside, we must decide if competition is good or is it bad. In the west we've been conditioned that competition is good and expect consequences and tradeoffs. In this case we're seeing incumbents trying to lobby government to secure their market share.
People rightfully question if these business models were ever feasible or sustainable to begin with. But isn't that the risk they took? We can certainly recognize that being displaced before realizing profit from your work is like a kick in the pants, but isn't that always supposed to be a possible outcome? I realize that is part of why we have intellectual property rights to reward innovators - but that isn't a universal concept in this global economy.
Which, some might argue, may be the point on the global stage. It is an ideological competition as well.
As with many others among these threads I don't see how the timing works out for K3 to have trained on distilled Fable usage. There should be at least a tacit academic acknowledgment of Kimi's own design efforts.
Distillation itself, however, is still clearly valuable - else competitors wouldn't pay so much to their rival on distillation campaigns or try to circumvent anti-distillation defenses.
As for the morality of it, if you paid for the tokens they're yours. It is already understood that you own the output. Seems to me like a variation of ordinary business arbitrage. Providers might object to certain use-cases or intention and try to craft terms around that, but that's hard to enforce at scale.
"It is already understood that you own the output."
I don't think it's settled that anybody owns the output. There seems to be some question whether LLM output can be copyrighted (and there should be).
I'd rather it weren't possible, actually. I think it's better for humanity if we acknowledge that what was legitimately ingested into these models is our collective commons (and what was illegitimately ingested into these models also shouldn't exclusively profit the people who illegitimately did so). I don't know how that squares with the AI industry recovering its trillion dollars in investment, but I reckon they should have thought of that before.
There's this https://github.com/code-yeongyu/oh-my-openagent which implements the OP article's oracle pattern across 11 roles. Each role has a whole ranking of recommended LLMs across many providers. For example "Sisyphus (claude-opus-4-8 / kimi-k3 / glm-5 ) is your main orchestrator."
Also, you can't use your claude subscription with oh-my-openagent. But you can with Kimi. ALso K3 is on OpenCode GO right now (low limits, but it's possible)
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