"AI will write good code because it is economically advantageous to do so. Per our definition of good code, good code is easy to understand and modify from the reduced complexity."
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This doesn't necessarily follow. Yes, there might be economic pressure for AI to produce "good" code, but that doesn't necessarily mean efforts to make this so will succeed. LLM's might never become proficient at producing "good" code for the same reasons that LLM's perform poorly when trained on their own output. A heuristic prediction of what "good" code for a given solution looks like is likely always going to be less "good" than code produced by skilled and deliberate human design.
Just as there is a place for fast and dirty human code, there will be a place for slop code. Likely the same sort of place. However, we may still need humans to produce "good" code that AI can be trained on as well as for solutions that actually need to be "good". AI might not be able to do that for us anytime soon, no matter what the economic imperatives are.
Iran has four times the land area and over three times the population that Iraq did at the start of Bush Jr.'s war, plus they've been preparing for an invasion by the U.S. specifically since 1979. Bush assembled a large coalition of many allies to share the costs, but the U.S. is still struggling with the debt that resulted from the second Iraq war. A land war in Iran would bankrupt the U.S. and the Iranians know it. Occupying the entire country is also the only way to secure the straight of Hormuz by force, because every part of Iran is within drone range of Hormuz. For the IRGC, this is a threat to their very existence. They are very much on what Sun Tzu would consider "desperate ground". For the U.S., this invasion is a "wag the dog" operation that is devoid of concrete policy goals.
To put things in Trump's parlance, Iran has the cards and the U.S. doesn't. If Trump is going to declare victory and TACO, he's going to have to accept Iranian control of Hormuz and pay for the passage of ships. This is going to take epic levels of reality distortion to sell as a win, but the alternative is far worse.
US can just keep bombing Iran into nineteenth century. The very least this will accomplish is no more ballistic missiles for Iran and its affiliated terrorist organizations around the region.
I think Iran getting nukes will probably be the best outcome on balance. It should be a damper on Israeli willy nilly belligerence which is the chief source of issues in that region. Iran hasn't nuked anyone and didn't even particularly wanted to build nukes that hard. Israel is the only country in that region wil illegal nukes so if anyone is an existential threat who must be bombed it should be Israel. But really, rather noboby bomb anyone and to this end Iran getting nukes and perhaps some Arab countries building nukes in response should calm them down.
but backed by nuclear power. Look at the weapons listed in that table, where do you think a cave dwelling terrorist in Yemen gets its hands on a cruise missile, or anti-ship ballistic missile. Its not like they make those in house. It was all Iran.
>Houthi forces began attacking shipping vessels affiliated with Israel passing through the Red Sea on 19 November 2023.
It says but then of course says later on they started attacking more, I am not sure I can take these unreliable persons on face value on the fact that only ships reaching Israel were being targeted. But if that's true I have no problems, I am not Israeli and if they aren't bothering anyone else that will only serve to cool down Israeli warmongering and indiscriminate violence further.
I absolutely do not like any party in this but Israel seems the most misbehaving of the lot. With parties I hate, the best possible outcome is to keep them at razors edge of each others capabilities and busy with each other. In that light, currently I hope Iran bolsters itself and obtains nukes. I doubt it'd increase their belligerence much, rather the more important outcome is that it makes Israel think a bit more before starting brazen invasions of Iran, and should hopefully quickly lead to the gulf countries developing their own nukes causing a balancing of powers. The gulfs weird subservience to Israel would no longer be as much of a geopolitical necessity for them effectively making warmaking quite tough for Israel and silencing most of the violence in the region.
It's fallen below 40% for the first time, per Nate Silver, and that poll was taken before this story came out.
If he follows through on his threat to destroy all of Iran's petroleum infrastructure, fuel prices will rise to unprecedented levels and remain there for a very long time. He will not be able to blame anyone else. People will plaster gas pumps with "I did that!" stickers, only with Trump's picture this time, rather than Biden's.
And it still won't force Iran to open the Strait. He has no good options there. Iran is second only to Russia when it comes to shrugging off staggering losses in wartime. Trump cannot force the Iranians to do much of anything without either invading them or nuking them. If he does the former, the resulting carnage will cost him his remaining support among Republicans at all levels including the MAGA faithful. If he does the latter, he's definitely finished.
Nuking won't accomplish anything anyway. There's no obvious target that would "defeat" Iran given the seemingly decentralized command structure, and using nuclear weapons anywhere near the Strait would render it unusable.
It will cost him some of his remaining support among the MAGA faithful. Some of them are just in love with Trump, or at least with the image Trump presents. Some are in love with Trump's (stated) policies, like "America first" and "no new wars".
And even of those who are in love with Trump's image, this may tarnish the image enough for some of them to fall out of love with it.
It won't cost him all of MAGA. But it will cost him some.
I mean personally even a white Christian european country Ukraine didn't garner much maga support, Iran are "brown Muslims" and the "enemy". I feel it doesn't have much impact except for the truly ideologically antiwar otherwise most magas seem to without much difficulty flit between contradictory opinions, especially if Trump said it. It will cost some of the support yes, but I think that's because of people like Tucker Carlson.
To clarify my point above, I meant "the resulting carnage" among America's armed forces, not Iran's.
MAGA obviously doesn't care about carnage that we dole out to the Iranians, including Iranian children, but they presumably will object to a tide of body bags arising from the actions of a President who promised them "No more foreign wars."
VR surged (mainly in the form of VR cafes) in the late 90's, only to fall into obscurity, much like 3D film surged in the 50's, 80's, and 2010's before subsiding. VR now seems to be subsiding again (the number of new VR titles released on Steam has declined year-over-year for several years now). When will it return, and for how long?
3D film offers an added level of immersion, but the technology has had peaks of popularity interspersed with longer periods where it was very niche. Anaglyph 3D boomed in the 50's, but couldn't handle colour. Polarized 3D boomed in the 80's and could handle colour, but often at the expense of reduced brightness and resolution as well as increased prices. IMAX 3D soldiered on, but 3D was all but absent from mainstream movies until the 2010's, when active shutter 3D become popular alongside polarized 3D. Today, only the occasional movie is offered in 3D, and that's declining. Few cinema's are investing in new hardware for 3D projection.
The pattern repeated because 3D always added drawbacks and expense. Films were either made with it in mind (e.g. By deliberately shoving things into the viewer's face) or they just let it passively enhance things. The former made films gimmicky and limited their audience. The latter left it to audiences to choose whether 3D was worth the drawbacks. Audiences decided it wasn't time and again. A 2D window into another world was immersive enough. Studios keep coming back, roughly every three decades, because it seems like that's how long it takes audiences to start getting excited for the same gimmicks again.
VR is currently expensive, uncomfortable, isolating, and (for some) nausea inducing. Any one of these is worse than the sum total of modern 3D's drawbacks: You have to wear glasses, pay $5 extra, and hope the theatre's projector is bright enough. My bold prediction is that VR and 3D will both eventually succeed and stick (perhaps in the same package!), but only when the technologies are without significant drawbacks or extra expense. VR technology has made exciting progress since the 90's but, like 3D, it's not ready to stick yet.
The harsh reality is that, even if somebody were to make a quantum leap forward in VR technology tomorrow that solves all its major drawbacks, it would probably still be years or decades before audiences are willing to reconsider the opinion of VR they've formed over the last several years. People need to forget before they're willing to reevaluate.
"The researchers used air samplers which are fitted with a metal substrate. Air passes through the sampler, and particles from the atmosphere deposit onto the substrate. Then, using light-based spectroscopy, the researchers are able to determine what kind of particles are found on the substrate.
Clough prepared the substrates while wearing nitrile gloves, which is recommended by the guidance of literature in the microplastics field. But when she examined the substrates to estimate how many microplastics she captured, the results were many thousands of times greater than what she expected to find."
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The very first thing that should have been done is to run results for a substrate that hadn't been placed in the sampler. You need to know what a zero result looks like just to characterize your setup. You'd also want to run samples with known and controlled micro-plastic concentrations. Why didn't they do this? Their results are utterly meaningless if they didn't.
That does seem like an oversight. We routinely run process blanks for elemental analysis at my job. I guess if the metal substrates had specifications on no particles you might skip this, obviously a big mistake if another step (ie. handling with gloves) introduced contamination.
In surface science the baggy clear polyethylene are widely known to be cleaner than other options.
"Plugging anything in required caution; a hasty, blind reach behind the tower to reconnect the keyboard could easily bend the fragile pins inside the round PS/2 connector, leading to delicate surgery with the tip of a pencil."
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PS/2 connectors were actually not bad in terms of durability... The big plastic key in the centre prevented you from jamming it in with the wrong orientation and then twisting, which would have bent pins for sure. Finding the correct orientation was an issue however.
PS/2 connectors can still be found on many brand new motherboards, which is a boon for those of us still using Model-M's.
I like to joke about what sort of idiot designs a round connector that is keyed, the worst of both worlds. Now, a round keyed connector is not necessarily a bad thing, the round shell can be very strong, but the ps/2 mini-din went too far. the shell was too small and the key not assertive enough. It was a bad connector.
The worst I have seen was an old ati all-in-wonder I had where the video input ports were on a dongle with a ps/2-like minidin but high density, with about 10 pins. It only took two insertion operations before I resolved to do everything in my power to never unplug it again. getting all those thin pins aligned was basically impossible.
I actually had to fact-check myself because I remember that infernal connector having about 20 or 30 pins, But I looked it up and it "only" had 10.
The worst connector IMO is the HDMI connector. I run the mediatec at an university and the amount of well-shielded cable I have to throw into the bin each semester because yet snother perdon levered off that plug is mindboggling.
On top of that, HDMI tries to be to much and do too much
On that topic, the 8pin modular ethernet plug has a number of downsides, but it has one huge upside that completely redeems it in my books.
It is super easy to field terminate ethernet. I wish all connector ends were as easy to replace. I have this vague boil-the-ocean type idea where we could replace usb with poe ethernet.
I have heard that story, but so far I have yet to see a broken USB-C plug. I have seen broken USB-C receptacles tho, levered off the PCB. But there are sturdy variants of those as well.
"The petition follows months of trepidation about the congress within the math community. “You do not get 1,500 signatures in 10 days without having many, many mathematicians already registering their complaints to their professional societies and to the ICM organizers,” says Ila Varma, a mathematician at the University of Toronto and one of the petition’s co-authors."
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ICM's peak attendance is around four thousand, so 1,500 would-be attendees signing a petition to move the conference in ten days is pretty authoritative.
The global memory shortage is something that will probably end, perhaps even soon. e.g. Google announced Turboquant[1] today. If as described, it would significantly reduce thirst for more RAM at data-centres. Even if it doesn't pan out, data centres aren't being built at the same rate as they're being financed due to the practical, but unavoidable, problem of finding enough power. Demand for memory may actually have a very real bottom that we hit soon.
However, there is another reason to look after and hang onto to certain types of products long-term.
Tariffs.
If the trade barriers that the Trump administration has put up remain long-term, it fundamentally changes what can be built. High volume items (like RAM) are the least likely to be affected. Low-volume, high performance items are what are threatened. Say you're building a very specialized, very low demand item that's simply-the-best. You're probably going to source the best components and materials from several countries, build it in one place, and then ship it globally. You amortize the cost of tooling, etc. across the entire global market.
If a few countries throw up trade barriers, as the U.S. has done, your material costs go up and your access to markets decreases. People on the other side of those trade barriers may suddenly not be able to afford your products. Supply gets more expensive and demand drops. What was marginally profitable in the old world order becomes uneconomic in the new order. Such items aren't going to be magically on-shored to the U.S.. They're just not going to be made anymore.
If you own something that's niche and barely profitable to make, that's what you should look after and take care of, because more of it might not be made for a while if trade barriers don't come back down.
So it's been public knowledge for almost year, and internal Google knowledge for longer. Did Google reduce its capital expenditure plans over the past year? Let's ask Google:
Google is expecting to see a capex of between $175-185 billion in 2026, approximately double that of 2025.
If turboquant can reliably reduce LLM inference RAM requirements by 6x, suddenly reducing total RAM needs by 6x should have a dramatic shift on the hardware market, or at least we can all hope. I know 6x is the key-value cache saving, so I'm not sure if that really translates to 6x total RAM requirements decrease for inference.
"Three clicks convert a data point on the map into a formal detection and move it into a targeting pipeline. These targets then move through columns representing different decision-making processes and rules of engagement. The system recommends how to strike each target – which aircraft, drone or missile to use, which weapon to pair with it – what the military calls a “course of action”. The officer selects from the ranked options, and the system, depending on who is using it, either sends the target package to an officer for approval or moves it to execution."
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Maven is a tool for use in the middle of a war. When both sides are firing, minutes saved can mean lives saved for your side. Those lives, at least partly, balance the risks of hitting a bad target.
This was not a strike made in the middle of a war. If Maven was used in the strike that took out a school, it was being used as part of a sneak attack. Nobody was shooting back while this was being planned. Minutes saved were not lives saved. There should have been a priority placed on getting the targets right. Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means. This clearly didn't happen. The school was obviously a school that even had its own website. Humans would have spotted this if they had done more than make their three clicks and move on to the next target.
Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it. Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse, they are directly responsible for the deaths of those little girls. I sincerely hope there are (although I doubt there will be) consequences for this person beyond taking that guilt to their grave.
> Whether it was overconfidence in their tools or a complete disregard for the lives of civilians that caused this lapse snip
it could be both, but we know no. 2, the complete disregard for the lives of civilians, is in play because, whatever else was going on, america was initiating war for the purpose of destabilizing a country, afaict at least, the reasoning has been unclear. destablize means to try to make things fuck up, and that tends to kill people. what people? how? who knows? things fucking up means out of control. at that point it's up to physics, not people.
it's like, if i set a house on fire, then later defended that action by claiming to have not known where i started the fire was a nursery.
back in the war on terror days america had a habit of blowing up weddings, and then claiming it was an accident. and i would think, accident how? did the missile fire itself?
A quick explanation of how an 'accident' like that can happen (not a justification and not comprehensive of all scenarios, just from my perspective):
Strikes on civilian gatherings are more likely when the only intelligence used to make the decision are IMINT and SIGINT.
SIGINT would typically be radio activity of interest. This could be:
- Known hostile entity using the radio (example: Taliban member known to US intelligence)
- unidentified entities using a known enemy radio frequency (some non-state actors used particular channels for certain communications)
- unknown entities communications indicated hostile association/intent. (example: members of ISIS-K discussed direct involvement in the bombing of a children's hospital)
So an analyst has determined SIGINT of interest. The signal is then geo-located to an accurate enough place in the AOR to warrant additional collection, typically a drone feed.
A reaper or predator is sent it get a direct visual of where the signal was geo-located.
Back in the day, the feeds weren't super high definition. Thus, a wedding or funeral just looks like a bunch of potentially military aged males gathering in one place.
Some things that could cement a strike authorization is seeing somebody a the wedding with a hand held radio, or collecting more SIGINT in the immediate facility. Someone attending the wedding/funeral is talking on the radio again, maybe the person previously identified as associated with the hostile group.
Depending on the conflict, that's more than was needed to authorize a strike and how we wind up reading about these gatherings getting drone striked.
Incomplete intelligence and lax rules of engagement
It's also worth mentioning that in many of the countries where these kinds of 'accidents' happen, firearms can be culturally significant as a rites of passage for males in a community. So a wedding/funeral may also appear as being partially composed of military aged armed males.
I couldn't find a web site for the school when I searched for one and I also noticed that while schools are generally marked on Google Maps in Iran this school was not. Both are IMO not really relevant or reliable sources of targeting data anyways. I found very little evidence searching online for the school but I did find something that looked like a blog about a school trip. Again though the Internet is not a reliable source of data for targeting - should be obvious.
The main way targets should/would be selected is by direct intelligence. E.g. the targets should be identified through satellite or other observations. It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns. You also don't just randomly attack structures in this sort of surprise attack, you're presumably aiming for some specific people or equipment with some priority/military goal in mind, so you really want to have observed the targets and patterns and have up to date information on their usage.
I think what likely happened here is that the entire base was the "unit" of targeting and the mistake was in identifying which buildings were part of the base. In the satellite view the military buildings and the school look very similar (since the building as I understand it used to be part of the base but was repurposed as a school).
It's not true that whoever made the error had all the time in the world. Presumably once the order was given there was time pressure given that the strike was to be timed with the other intelligence.
In theory the US military should/is supposed to have good processes around this stuff. So we are told. Obviously failed in this case. It is a tragedy.
>It's hard to imagine that a building that has operated for some length of time as a school would not have patterns that are visible from satellite vs. military facilities with different patterns.
You might be overestimating how much satellite capacity there is to do this level of analysis for every target.
How many American lives would you sacrifice for that? The people who made the decision to fire a missile at this place didn't decide to start the war, once you have started the war you have to make ugly tradeoffs like being too liberal or too conservative with targeting decisions.
> How many American lives would you sacrifice for that?
For what? Removing a suspected mine or missile stash that had it existed would be used to target ships in the Strait? For that you're in favour of killing 170+ schoolchildren?
> The people who made the decision to fire a missile at this place didn't decide to start the war,
The people that decided to fire missiles are the people that decided to start a war by firing missiles .. during negotiations no less.
The people that drew up a potential target list did so years before .. the people that chose to start a war have had a full 12 months to re vet the target list a remove sites that are now schools ... but they failed to do so.
> The people that drew up a potential target list did so years before
And the building was a military installation years ago. Then Iran made it into a school, nobody is omniscient here, collateral damage will always happen in war.
If things stayed static and simple as you think they are, if Iran let US military spies freely go around and note targets, or if Iran updated USA when they move their military ops around, sure collateral damage would easily get avoided, but the situation isn't like that.
> The people that decided to fire missiles are the people that decided to start a war by firing missiles .. during negotiations no less.
No, the people who made the target list are not the same people who started the war. Trump isn't there picking which building to fire it if you thought that, its guys much further down. Nobody said "we want to kill a bunch of schoolchildren first day!", they tried hard to avoid such events or many more would have died, but you can always do more and its a tragedy that it happened once.
Missing the forest for the trees, are you? Wars of aggression are against UN rules, and US is in the wrong regardless of what it hit.
Feels like we're talking here about whether rapist should have known that the rapee was a child or an adult, and they had a good reason to believe it was an adult person (there was mother of the girl standing next to it, so, hard to distinguish...), so yeah, obviously a tragedy they raped a child instead, but it happens sometimes when you rape a lot of people at once. A tragedy, but let's get on with raping more...
Iran has been waging war since the Islamic Revolution and the US claims that there was a threat of attack on US bases and US interests and therefore the attack was in self defense. The body that decides is the UNSC and given the US has veto powers it's not going to obviously declare the US attack illegal.
From Israel's perspective there's an even stronger self defense argument given the amount of missiles aimed at Israel from Iran and the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel. So the US argument that they knew Israel was planning the attack and they knew Iran would retaliate against US interests seems at least on the surface to bad valid.
What the US claims is really not a strong source of anything, and I'm saying that as an American. The most compelling reasoning is that Israel was going to do something so US decision makers decided joining was the best worst decision, and I'm being very bend over backwards generous with that. Anything else is just excuses trying to cover it up. It seems obvious now that there was no stopping Israel from their strike on Iranian leadership. It was too ripe of a target, they have been emboldened by current US admin, so at that point it was in for a penny, in for a pound mentality.
If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets, then the world would possibly have some sympathy. No rational person could condone an outright first strike just because we thought something was going to happen. Yet the fact that in the "we think they will do something" spit balling never suggested shutting the down the strait seems very suspect as well.
> If the US thought an Iranian retaliation from an Israeli strike would be to attack US assets
A reasonable belief, because Iran in fact responded to the US+Israeli strikes by attacking US allies and even neutral nations like Qatar.
And why should we doubt that Iran would have closed the Strait of Hormuz even if the US had not attacked, leaving Israel to attack alone? The strategic calculation (threaten the world economy so other nations oppose the war) would have been the same.
But had the US not been part of the first strike, they could have applied much more diplomatic pressure to open the strait. As an active aggressor, they have no wiggle room. It might seem like semantics to you, but there's a huge difference diplomatically.
Pressure from most of the world isn't enough, why would additional pressure from the US (who Iran already regarded as an enemy) have made the difference?
Iran didn't really do anything last year after supposedly having their facilities "totally annihilated". But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict. Sadly, we've done our damnedest to turn that respect into a joke. We used to make deals with people, but the greatest deal maker ripped up all of them and replaced them with nothing on the word better deals were for the taking.
> But it used to be that the US was respected enough that public saber rattling and behind the scenes diplomatic efforts would avoid conflict.
This is isn't true in practice, even if you want to argue it's technically true. Iran has been participating in conflict through proxies continually for decades. US sabre rattling has done nothing to quell that violence.
Houthis open adversaries, Saudi, are aware that they are not really Iranian proxies [0]. Sunnis in Lebanon are Persian Shi'a 'proxy' only since their leadership was assassinated during negotiations in 2024 (also by this very liberal definition of 'proxy', eastern Iranian clans are US/Israel proxies, and killed more Iranians than Hamas killed Israelis, so I'm not sure we really want to get into it). The only proxy Iran had were Iraki Shi'a paramilitary forces, who agreed for a ceasefire to let US troops and diplomats get out of Iraq, and once the evacuation was done, got their leaders bombed. Never trust the US.
Iran gives missiles to the houtis, houtis then use those to fire at American ships. Its the same kind of proxy war as Ukrain, and people call that a proxy.
Thank you, that's my point. If you think Houtis are a proxy, then you think Ukraine is a proxy for the US, as Houtis have to promise concessions to Iran in exchange for armaments. Better yet, they choose their target without iranian input, so they are even less of a proxy than Ukraine who has been forbidden by the US to use the weapons they were given outside of their borders.
If you think Hezbollah are an Iranian proxy, then Israel is an US proxy, and Hamas is a Qatar/Likud proxy (won't be the first time the far right pay agitators to kill their own citizen to stay/be in power, just look at Italy).
It's also been an ally of Iran. Qatar is not neutral in that it stays distant from both sides, it is neutral in that it attempts to maintain good relations with both sides.
Iran has attacked the US base in Qatar before. When they did so in 2025, Iran's Supreme National Security Council issued a statement: "this action does not pose any threat to the friendly and brotherly country, Qatar, and its noble people, and the Islamic Republic of Iran remains committed to maintaining and continuing warm and historic relations with Qatar".
This time Iran attacked Qatar itself, including the Ras Laffan gas facility and Hamad International Airport.
Qatar has never been allied with Iran. It has had economic partnerships, especially around the oil fields that Israel blew up, but that is not an alliance. Iran does not have military bases in Qatar.
Why would Iran need a base in Qatar? It's right next door.
Iran and Qatar do (did?) have military cooperation agreements, not only economic. [1] That's not a NATO style treaty but Qatar doesn't have a NATO style treaty with the US either.
> the enrichment of nuclear material to military grades while constantly threatening the elimination of Israel.
Iran has supported a treaty on elimination of weapons of mass destruction in the middle east, Israel has been the blocker of it, only actor in the region that has nukes, and isn't in the NPT.
As a non-signer of the NPT, military aid to Israel is also illegal under US law, so we play along with strategic ambiguity and pretend they don't have them.
At various times, and potentially via proxies:
Iraq
Saudi Arabia
Israel
Kurdish Rebels
The US
“All countries” via actions against shipping in the Red Sea and the Strait of Hormuz
Iran proxies were extremely active in Syria, as they were close allies of the Assad regime. They are responsible for countless exactions.
In 1992 there was a deadly car bomb attack in Argentina, killing 29 people and injuring 250 more. Then again in 1994 a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires was bombed, killing 87 people. Eventually the investigation demonstrated conclusively that Iran was responsible.
> You have better examples for Iran like Hezbollah and Hamas.
Yes but that was mostly covered already by the comment I was responded to. I was just filling a few gaps in the list.
> Albeit Hamas has been largely propped by Israel itself and Qatar.
Qatar has certainly financed and supported Hamas a great deal.
Israel has absolutely not "propped up" Hamas. I'm aware of the allegations to the contrary, but they are wildly inflated nonsense. Israel and Hamas have been enemies to the death for decades.
Yes it did, big time, there's even a dedicated page on wikipedia [1].
It's quite impressive how most people are unaware of this.
> "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas…"
Benjamin Netanyahu on record. And there's plenty of such quotes.
Long story short: in order to delegitimize the Palestinian Authority various Israeli governments have legitimized and propped Hamas in order to have a scapegoat to not have to sit around the negotiating table.
Israeli actively armed and helped financing of Hamas while helping them suppress moderate Palestinian factions.
And that's only what we know. I wouldn't be surprised if one day we'll also get proof that Israeli intelligence knew about October 7th and still allowed it to happen to go on such an extensive military campaign and crush forever any hope for a Palestinian state at the same time.
> Benjamin Netanyahu on record. And there's plenty of such quotes.
If there are "plenty" of quotes like this, can you identify just one that we know he actually said? (Not the "thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state" quote, which is unverified and denied by him [1].)
In any case, actions speak louder than words. If we look past Wikipedians' spin and look the substance of what Israel actually did, they once facilitated Qatari aid to fund some basic civil services, to prevent societal collapse in Gaza. That's it, that's essentially the sole basis for all the misleading claims about Israel "supporting Hamas".
Correcting misinformation is “shilling”? What does my work have to do with anything?
Your claim was that Netanyahu was "on record" with "plenty" of quotes. If that's true, surely it must be very easy to identify two or three specific quotes that he definitely said? Your link doesn't do that. The first answer doesn't quote Netanyahu. The second says "well he didn't deny the unverified quote", which is obviously false/outdated per my link above.
In any case, is there some particular action Netanyahu took to "support Hamas" that you disagree with? Do you think Israel should have blocked the Qatari aid funds, which were ostensibly necessary to keep basic civil services running and prevent societal collapse?
The problem is that the language you're using—"propped up Hamas"—obscures the fact that for the bulk of the time when Israel was directly supporting Sheikh Ahmed Yassin's efforts, "Hamas" technically didn't exist.
Yes, those early contributions obviously facilitated its emergence, but this is probably why people are disagreeing with you.
On the other hand, that doesn't belie the argument that Israel/Netanyahu's tactics since 1989 (e.g. leveraging Qatari aid) have ulterior motives assigned.
Your original point about Hamas being used as a proxy for Iran was solid. It's a pity that it's since descended into an argument about a secondary remark. But the support that Hamas gets from Iran versus the support than Hamas gets from Qatar (with Israeli/American approval) shouldn't be conflated.
They've colonized the whole region with their proxies, from Lebanon to Yemen to Iraq, previously Syria which they attacked with Hezbollah to support the Russia-backed Assad. About 1 million dead people from all this proxy warfare. Lebanon in particular wants to be a normal liberal democracy but their proxy militia assassinates any politician who stands in their way.
Colonized? Are Hezbollah not Lebanese? Were assadists not Syrian? (assadists invited Hezbollah) And how did Hezbollah come to be?
I think you're simplifying quite a bit. And you're also omitting Israel and other near east countries or groups as a proxies of USA, simply by avoiding a clear and sensible non-discriminatory definition of what a proxy is.
Eg. USA's Israel "proxy" crucified (literally) a "Palestinian Christian poet, advocate of non-violence and PLO spokesman" in Lebanon and executed a random woman who stood in the way of their operation. This is one of hundreds a lot of the time political assasinations IL did all around the world.
Also Iraq attacked Iran during Iranian revolution in the past. You can hardly call Iraq a victim of Iranian proxy warfare.
You can't ignore history or the long-term USA and Russian meddling in the region.
Seems like significant subset of what you call proxies are locals who formed a group and tighter (Hezbollah) or very loose and inconsequential (Hamas) alliances with Iran, in response to either beligerent occupation/aggression or invasions by some other groups like Israel, Iraq, Saudis - basically in response to wars fought over land and resources.
This is irrelevant to the topic at hand. Not dismissing your point, but it's really not a useful follow up. The two things can be bad at the same time.
The fact is that the US routinely commits acts of perfidy. This was the second time they attacked Iran during negotiations.
I've said before that I'm no fan of the Iranian mullah regime, but the US is basically run by war criminals.
And they're proud of it. Albright and her "murdering 500,000 Iraqi children was worth it," Hillary and her "we came we saw he died," and
Nobel Peace Prize Barack Hussein Obama with his targeting US citizens via drone + 28000 bombing attacks, to this orange monster demolishing the White House (literally and figuratively) and any pretence at being trustworthy or civilised.
The US is a war at the behest of Israel and Israel would like the US to fight as it does.
There are very recent images from the current war of Israel, Israeli mothers commenting on the fact that their children schools have been taken over by the IDF. She walks past the playground and it’s full IDF trucks.
This is in a country that claims it’s legitimate to strike schools and hospitals because they’re being used as cover for the military. Yet what would the response be if Iran was to target is ready children?
In Israel, the double standard doesn’t exist because they see the people they’re fighting as less than fully human. The current administration in the US is moving America towards holding the same view because it’s being led by foreign policy experts, who are uniformly staunch Zionists, with a “Hebrew school“ level of understanding of the regions history.
I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!). Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate. TFA discusses 50 specific strikes all of which missed via automated analysis. That doesn't seem the same.
I don't disagree there. But this is not a case of hallucination, and an existing website is a signal, not a determinant, of the real situation on the ground.
However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated. One that does not seem to be present in TFA or any analysis that I've read. In fact, the article itself quotes those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target.
So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
> there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties
How did you verify this? Because I’ll remind you, the U.S. administration denied responsibility for some time before owning up to this due to public pressure. Absent public pressure, I guess we would’ve had zero mis-strikes.
> so this already is a low error rate
As a father of similarly aged daughters, I can’t express enough how grotesque and disturbing the term “error rate” is here.
We targeted and killed young children. Plain and simple.
> However, you have made a very, very strong assumption that these targets were not carefully evaluated.
Let’s take the opposing assumption that this target was carefully evaluated then. Please reason through the implications now?
> So I read the entire TFA, where do you see “quotes [from] those in the know who believe this should have been eliminated as a target”? I saw no such quotes about the school in TFA. Maybe I missed it.
TFA is from The Guardian while GP you responded to specifically called out the NYT analysis. These are different things. Maybe reading the GP's suggested source would leave you with a different set of questions?
I will try to respond to all these independent threads, but we can't continue all of them at once.
> . “These aren’t just nameless, faceless targets,” he said later. “This is a place where people are going to feel ramifications for a long time.” The targeting cycle had been fast enough to hit 50 buildings and too fast to discover it was hitting the wrong ones.
> The air force’s own targeting guide, in effect during the Iraq war, said this was never supposed to happen. Published in 1998, it described the six functions of targeting as “intertwined”, with the targeteer moving “back” to refine objectives and “forward” to assess feasibility. “The best analysis,” the manual stated, “is reasoned thought with facts and conclusions, not a checklist.”
> A former senior government official asked the obvious question: “The building was on a target list for years. Yet this was missed, and the question is how.”
---
> Please reason through the implications now?
It was a mistake. My girls are about to enter this level of school, as well (cool parent card). A mistake/error/tragedy can all accurately be used to describe this. It's horrible it happened. All I'm saying is that no process is perfect. It is not excusable, but it is unfortunately understandable how it happened in this situation.
> 1000s
1000s is fairly easily understood. 1/1000 is inferred b/c as you say, "public pressure" sprang up immediately after this one bombing. Iran regularly posts pictures and videos online, and human rights orgs are clamoring to find evidence. Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case. Planet labs themselves provided the pictures - they are freely available.
Yes maybe the machine lumbers on, stomping on kids, or maybe we've learned our lesson and are now perfect, but this seems like the kind of mistake that can happen, and it seems likely that the analysts involved here are now benched and I wouldn't be surprised if some corrections are happening internally. These are human beings, despite what the article would have you believe, that are doing the best they can.
> we targeted and killed young children
We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
We're going to quickly get into hypotheticals here. There's a lot of open threads, and believe me I hate with the fullest extent of the word violence against children. We can leave it at that.
It feels like an appreciation for hypotheticals or givens is missing here. One can simultaneously be against the war and the bombing in general, and also accept it as a given and then think about a certain situation being understandable within that given.
I can't answer why they would do it, but I don't think it's unusual for these people to knowingly strike civilian targets that they believe will have children present. In the famous Pete Hegseth leaked Signal chat, they were discussing bombing a residential apartment building in the middle of the night because they thought a single target was there visiting his girlfriend. Obviously that carries a high risk of killing children, and in that particular case the Secretary of Defense and Vice President were intimately involved and celebrated after learning that the building had collapsed. If those at the very top are willing to move forward with bombing civilians asleep in a residential building, I have to believe that everyone below them in the chain of command is expected to follow their lead.
This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself, which is what it would have had to be if this was not just negligence, but intentional, as GP suggested. Parent correctly points out that there's both no political incentive for that, and that it's not realistic from a psychological point of view, given reasonable assumptions about human nature.
The claim I'm responding to is "I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed." I agree it's unusual for anyone in the US military to drop a bomb primarily because they want to kill some children. I think it is not unusual for people involved in bombing campaigns to anticipate killing children and move forward anyway.
> This is very different from targeting civilians as a goal in itself
Targeting a single person which might be a valid target had war been declared, while also intentionally striking many civilians around them, is the same as targeting those civilians. You knew the bomb you dropped was going to kill them, and you pressed the button. It makes no difference who the primary "target" is.
Otherwise, countries would just bomb all the civilians and all their infrastructure and medical facilities and schools with the excuse that they heard from an unnamed source that there was a combatant nearby, like israel does in Palestine.
No evidence has shown up suggesting there was some sort of compelling target in the school. As foul as Trump and Hegseth may be, they aren't cartoon character villains. The Occam's razor explanation is that this was an intelligence failure and a tragic mistake.
There are no cartoon villains in general, that's the point GP is making by using the word "cartoon". Let's use some common sense, it's not like Trump and Hegseth got together and sneaked in the school on the list of targets just because they liked the idea of children being killed. It's naive to suggest this is a possibility worth considering.
Yeah, going to have to go ahead and disagree with you there boss. The man Hegseth in all his 'no quarter' bravado is only affirming his own mother's claim that he is a piece of shit. respectfully of course, I would not put it past him to kill some kids for a political or terrorism reason (the parents).
just because you assume that trump and hegseth aren't cartoonishly evil, doesn't mean they aren't. looking at america's actions for a long time, the occam's razor explanation is that america is cartoonishly evil. the reason you struggle with that is about emotions, not logic. and i get it.
Your first two quotes are about targeting in the Iraq War; specifically how the breakdown in careful analysis, precipitated by the new systems, led to the exact mis-targeting they were trying to solve. That’s what the entire article is about.
And your third quote is from an ex-official commenting on the event after the school strike happened.
These quotes contradict your original point, ie they show how careful analysis has been designed out of the system.
> We killed young kids, but not on purpose. We targeted a building and intent matters. I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
This sounds incredibly naive. For starters, plausible deniability due to diffuse responsibility is a thing.
“Of course we don’t target schools and kill children, this was a system error.” But the message gets sent regardless and meanwhile we have people arguing back-and-forth over grains of sand because they took an action with deliberate plausible deniability.
Of course they didn’t intend to kill the children, they only intended to disperse the strikers by setting their tents on fire. It was simply a mistake.
> I refuse to believe anyone in the decision chain would move forward if they believed kids were going to be killed. If you do - how can you? Why would they?
Because they’re openly callous and contemptful of anyone they don’t consider a heritage American? Because the admin has already abused children to lure out parents in their anti immigrant push?
And that’s before getting into the Epstein file allegations and if he raped and killed kids already.
I’m gonna throw it back on you, how can you believe that this admin cares if foreign kids die?
we are speaking politicians who make a habit of bluster and liking "shows of force" and are openly contemptful of the lives of those who don't agree with or look like them
some of them believe that it is their religious duty to start this war and make it heinous enough to start ww3 and bring forth the return of jesus christ
I think you are ascribing a level of systems thinking and care about consequences which one cannot simply assume is there
if you were to, say, start with an assumption that some of the actors have the mental patterns and world model of an angsty, self-centered teenager, or younger, then you might draw different conclusions
You have evidence in front of you on a weekly basis of these people being that evil and that stupid, and we’re coming up on 2 years of that playing out.
It's incredible, after all the grotesque stories about rape, torture and murder of children, men and women during the Iraq war, active support of genocide (and 10s of thousands of children murdered by Israel, on purpose), prisoners rape and child imprisonment, a "secretary of war" and president publicly admiting to war crimes and saying things like "negotiate with bombs" you still "refuse to believe" that anyone in decision chain wouldn't do anything like this.
My comment is to say the US has proven how brutal they are consistently through all the wars of aggression they have waged in the past several decades. They do not see their "enemies" as human. I can't fix anything unfortunately.
The terrorists that struck the World Trade Center targeted a building too.
If we aren't going to have a military doctrine that cares about who's in the building, we will be treated the same by our enemies. I don't think we want that.
If I recall we saw two planes. We did not see any individual as such in the planes, did we? We saw some passports; not sure that this proves much at all. We also had WTC 7 going down and the strike on the other building (was it in Washington) but not much aside from this.
I am not saying the-cake-is-a-lie, everything was fabricated, mind you. What I am saying is that IF we are going to make any conclusions, we need to look at what we have, and then find explanations and projections to what is missing. For instance, any follow-up question such as damage to a building, can be calculated by a computer, so this is not a problem. The problem, though, is IF one can not trust a government, to then buy into what they show or present to the viewer. Hitler also used a fake narrative to sell the invasion of Poland, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident
That does not mean everything else is a false flag or fake, per se, but I do not automatically trust any allegation made by any government. You can look back in history and wonder about attempts to sell explanations, such as Warren Commission and a magic bullet switching directions multiple times. Again, that can be calculated via computers, so that's not an issue per se; the issue is if they made claims that are factually incorrect and/or incomplete.
> Either we are really good at suppressing the world except for this one case or there aren't that many schools being bombed. We cannot be simultaneously horrible at picking targets and suppressing evidence and also great at it in every other case.
...is a logical fallacy (false dichotomy). It presumes a level of intent that isn't necessarily present.
For an example of how these might coexist, I'd encourage The Toxoplasma of Rage, which is a long essay that frequently comes up here:
The idea is that rage is its own, self-replicating emotion, and given the medium of the Internet, it's possible that some memes have no purpose other than self-perpetuation. A story about a girls' school being blown up is self-replicating: it gets people riled up enough to share it. A story about a random factory, or some dead person's house, or an empty patch of desert is not really. It's entirely possible that attacks on these happened hundreds of times in the Iran war, but if it did, I would never know about it. I probably wouldn't care about it. Those are not stories that go viral, they don't have enough emotional valence to make people care. And the media knows this, and so they don't bother to seek them out or run them.
And in fact, a handful of illegal targets get hit each day, according to HRANA. HRANA is an Iranian human rights org that was banned in Iran during an election and has since been re-established in the US. They are a reliable source.
If you scroll down to the "Facilities Protected Under International Humanitarian Law", you will see a list of non-military targets. That part is never empty in these reports.
This feels like moving the goalposts. The OP and the preceding comments are pretty clearly talking about the targeting mistake aspect of this incident, not the war itself. You're moving the discussion from the former to the latter to it easier to argue that US is in the wrong, but if the argument is that the war was unjust to begin with, then do you really need a school getting bombed to push you over the edge? After all, even if they bombed an IRGC compound and only killed soldiers, those soldiers are still people's sons, fathers, husbands. Even if there's no deaths, you could still make the macroeconomic argument that any economic losses are impoverishing the Iranian people.
No, I am fine with parent's take. We treat children as absolutely innocent (which they are, regardless of the way anybody tries to spin this or ie Gaza), and killing children is extra heinous crime compared to killing adult, same with rape etc. Children rapist get extra special treatment in jails, often from other murderers and society is largely fine with that.
As a parent, even when cutting off most of the emotions related to this horrible war crime, I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
>I am unfazed and unconvinced by such, even if well meaning whataboutism.
No, it's not whataboutism, it's moving the goalposts. Consider the following exchange:
Alice: "McDonalds mistreats its workers by paying them below the minimum wage"
Bob: "No they don't. They all get paid at or above the local minimum wage"
Charlie: "Well that doesn't matter, because McDonald's still mistreats its workers because it's a capitalist institution, which by definition means they're siphoning the fruits of the worker's labor"
Even if you agree with Charlie's point, at the very least it's in poor taste to bring it up in a conversation specifically talking about the minimum wage. Otherwise every discussion about some aspect of [thing] just turns into a plebiscite about [thing].
The only reason Iranian bombs aren’t hitting America is because their range isn’t long enough. Iran-commanded forces (located in Iran, Lebanon, Yemen) have been targeting civilians for many years.
You believe that anyone who lives on stolen land is not a citizen and deserves to be bombed? Americans live on stolen land too, as does much of the rest of the world population.
If it was 1570, it would absolutely be valid to remove settlers from the Americas. If fact the Pueblo Revolt is considered to be one of the more successful and justified acts of indigenous resistance.
Ok, it sounds the principle here is if any land was stolen in the 20th century the people who live there now aren’t citizens (regardless if they are children or not) and deserve to be bombed? I hope nobody tells the balkans.
Crazy that saying 'all Israeli's and Israel supporters are fair targets to kill' (and later stated this includes children) is not just not dead, but not even downvoted here.
This is just your opinion. The tragedy here is that there are people with similar opinion and bombs at their disposal that feel complete impunity and go around murdering in the world
Also, remembe the CIA co-staged a coup in Iran in 1953. That's one fact, nor just opinion.
I suspect if the IRGC accidentally blew up a school next to a military base in Oklahoma, they would find it in them to condemn those who made such an innocent mistake.
That's all speculation. What we know is that the US agressed Iran without provocation and in the midst of negotiations and started by blowing up a school and not owning up to it. And now they have threatened multiple times with destroying the civilian energy infrastructure, which is a war crime.
Please ask yourself if there is true evil in the world. People who are willing to kill children on purpose, or maim them, or burn them with acid, or commit other bad things I wont get into.
Then ask yourself if bad things can happen despite good intents. Truly horrible things, in fact, despite effort to prevent them.
Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
And ask if we were trying to target people from group A or group B.
This is not an "ends justify the means" argument, I hope. But if you want to count bodies as some kind of justification for or against war because apparently morals can be reduced to addition and subtraction, you might as well at least classify the dead and causes correctly.
> Then, ask if this bombing was part of group A or group B.
false dichotomies are a common rhetorical method (and sometimes useful) to argue your way to a moral justification, but that doesn't make them reflect reality
There is no A and B. You want to force a situation where B is pure good intent and we either have to choose that or choose A where there is only bad intent. The reality is, this war is about ego, power and money as much as it is about any "good intent". The decisions to start the war were made with a full knowledge of the risks and costs it would entail, with almost all of those being externalised to other people than those taking the choices.
Nobody taking those choices should get to just opt out of moral responsibility with some easy "A / B" logic.
We (US) are definitely in Group A. We killed and are continuing to kill more innocent people (including children) than everyone else combined but are always hiding under “oh, we really good guys here, just shit happens while we are bombing around the world for decades for no particular reason until we eventually lose and leave”)
Evil is commiting atrocious acts for self-interest. This is a description of US foreign policy (not exclusively, of course). Killing 150 schoolchildren is unfortunately but a fraction of a drop in the bucket of atrocities committed by either the US or Israel.
No it isn't. You're assuming perfect information, when the reality is nowhere near as clear. I certainly believe that Iran killed a lot of protesters recently. Undoubtedly some of them were innocent. Some others were collaborators; Israel is well known to be engaged in a shadow war with Iran and to have infiltrated a large number of people within the Iranian security apparatus. I'm thus extremely skeptical of any specific claims around numbers for the foreseeable future.
The problem with this simplistic utilitarianism is that assumes a degree of omniscience that doesn't exist. You can excuse any atrocity by claiming it's an unavoidable by product of a high-minded end. Life rarely presents neat classic trolley problems, and even if it did there are many unknowns; for example, are you sacrificing the life of one saint to save five serial killers? Absent this information I'd opt to save one person, but would be doing so with the awareness that I might be making a very bad decision for which I'll have to take responsibility.
In this case, the trolley is in a whole other country. Unilaterally attacking it (while negotiations were ongoing) is regarded by most experts as a blatant violation of international law and that's the primary reason nominally allied countries are refusing to assist.
You're giving the regime far more of the benefit of the doubt than they deserve. Their crimes are well documented.
Aside from that, the risk of accidentally bombing a school is also an unknown quantity. So we're looking at "risk of leaving the regime in place" vs "risk of accidentally bombing kids". Feels plenty trolly-ish to me.
No matter how inept or corrupt the process, the fact is some bombs fell out of the sky and killed a bunch of unelected dictators who just weeks ago murdered thousands of their own countrymen. In my eye, this is an excellent precedent. If it means paying a few more dollars for gas, so be it.
The us has over 150 elementary schools on military bases. If you use a more colloquial definition of military base, many many national guard armories are on the same block as elementary schools or even right next to them.
Can you cite anything that says all iranian military bases are next to elementary schools? If they are on ALL bases, that makes hitting an elementary school on base less forgivable, not more, because if its a fact of every iranian military base, it's a lot harder to claim good intelligence and also that they didn't check that the part of base being bombed was the school.
No. No childs life is worth some hypothetical regime change. There is no greater evil in this scenario than a hypothetical greater good attempts at justifying this.
The people that run hospitals, build safety devices, approve drugs, issue insurance, etc etc all do. I certainly hope the people that drop bombs do too.
Look up Value of a Statistical Life, Value of a Statistical Life Year, and Age Weighting.
> Accidentally killing a bunch of kids would likely be worth it, morally speaking, if it led to the destruction of the Iranian regime.
It most absolutely is not and I struggle to believe you can build a valid argument that links bombing school children as necessary for the fall of Iran’s government.
How you win a war, especially one as lopsided as this invasion is, is as important as winning. I cannot so easily sleep at night knowing we are committing horrific atrocities during an invasion we chose to launch against a country thousands of miles away with zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
Some children being killed is an inevitable part of war. Do you agree with the statement "No war has ever been worth the results."? If yes, then okay end of conversation. But if not then we need to talk about acceptable mistake rates and where this falls, because zero mistakes is not possible. Note that I am not defending the strike here, I'm saying that the criticism needs more depth.
I might not know your personal background, but I have a hard time imagining you come from a lineage that has experience the cost of one of those.
The list of today's remaining colonies is short enough[0] that it is worth considering whether decolonization was "an idea that reached its time" in the late 20th century ; and given that there are examples of peaceful revolutions (eg India and West Africa) it is worth asking whether more places could have undergone peaceful transitions, and whether the cost in human lives and atrocities born within a decade of war doesn't outweigh the cost of the colonial system dying by itself within the same order of magnitude of time.
But then again, I think you're veering us somewhat off-topic as I'd consider a "colonial freedom war" to be a revolution (the people overthrowing their overlord) which is quite different from the topic at hand here, war between nation-states.
Which part do you think is a strawman? Because one of the people that replied to me does appear to think that no war has ever been worth the results. It's a legitimate point of view, and that's why I asked if it was your point of view.
For the rest of this post I'm assuming it's not your point of view.
I'm very much not trying to strawman you, I'm trying to improve your argument. If any wars are considered "worth it, morally speaking", then single mistakes can't be enough to invalidate the war. We need to talk about how many mistakes happen and how they happen. We need to say how much is too much, and "zero mistakes" is not compatible with "some wars are worth it". The idea that we could have both in the real world is self-deception.
1. This isnt an invasion, just a bombing campaign.
2. Of course it would be better to not kill any kids, but thats just not how war works. Mistakes will be made, that doesnt mean eliminating the number one funder of terror in the world isnt worth it. Even if the next regime hates the US/israel just as much they will likely spend much less supporting terror groups because they know theyll just get bombed again.
3. Of course this is all if the bombing campaign actually worked. It didnt, and thats no surprise, which is why the whole thing is pretty clearly immoral imo.
> zero military capacity to harm us here at home.
The houthis harmed the US quite a bit by destroying American ships and harming global trade. In fact their actions were arguably far more harmful to the average american than any domestic terrorist attack could possibly be because of the economic impact that effected every single american.
First, this is completely untrue. Hamas and Hezbollah have been launching missiles at Israel literally nonstop for 20 years. The houithis have and will continue to launch missiles at US assets along the Bab al-Mandab Strait. All of these missiles came directly from the iranian regime. Those groups are an arm of the Iranian government
Thats not the point though. There is no reason for either party to respond proportionally in a war. Going to war against an equal weight class as idiocy, sun tzu figured that one out forever ago.
So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents? Doesnt make sense to me. Thats before we even get to the major economic damage their terrorist network has caused. The US morally must just sit back while Iran funds and arms the group that routinely shuts down global trade and costs americans billions?
> So Iran kills untold innocent children and innocents but because they havent yet launched an attack on american soil(they absolutely could) its immoral to stop them from killing more children and innocents?
israel has killed even more "untold innocent children and innocents", so you should expect to continue finding no global sympathy or solidarity for them as they, an aggressor, initiate a war of choice against someone else.
By your logic, israel has greater causus belli against themselves than iran. Yet we don't see israel warring against itself. The only conclusion is that israel doesn't actually care about kids being killed, and started this war for totally different reasons.
We literally just deployed 5000 troops to Iran after weeks of bombing. We are boots on the ground and our belligerent president literally calls it a war. It is disingenuous to bicker over whether we can call our attack an invasion. If it was happening to us we certainly would call it one.
Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics. Especially when discussing bombing a school.
> Hand wavy “that’s war for ya” nonsense isn’t appropriate for a serious discussion of ethics.
I was responding to whether the "invasion" could have been accomplished without killing the kids. I dont think that's realistic.
The separate question of whether it's worth it morally to topple the regime given kids will die I think is pretty simply yes. Iran's funding of terrorism kills and will continue to kill far more kids than died in this strike. Iran's funding of Hamas has been partially responsible for the terrible conditions Gazans are subject to. Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off. Same with Yemen, if Iranian funding is cut off conditions for the 15 million children there will improve. So yea for me personally Ive got no problem with a bombing campaign that will undoubtedly accidentally kill some civilians if it means the Iranian regime is toppled.
Killing children in an unprovoked attack to stop somebody else from potentially killing children in the future doesn't seem like a moral take to me, even if "someone else" killed more in the past or will in the future. In particular, because it actually sends the message that it's ok to kill children as long as you get what you want in the end. Not a great precedent. Perhaps that is the root of where your utilitarian morals diverge from some others' morals.
Unfortunately for everyone, now the US and israel killed a bunch of kids, and reinforced that precedent for others with these sorts of flimsy justifications, *and* everything will be the same or worse in Iran, especially for civilians. So lose-lose-lose.
> Even if Israel is mostly responsible for that [conditions in the Gaza region of Palestine] I think conditions will improve if Iran cuts Hamas off.
We can already see the outcome of that in the West Bank region of Palestine: no hamas, yet israel still exercises ultimate control via violence, and keeps oppressing and killing Palestinians and taking or destroying their stuff with impunity, especially as of late.
There's no indication israel would be more generous to Palestinians in the Gaza region of Palestine if hamas wasn't there. Palestinians in Gaza see what israel does to Palestinians in the West Bank, and want no part of it. Who can blame them? It's sick.
Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth. If all the million kids in gaza got to live in conditions as good as the west bank kids get the bombing would be worth it for that alone.
> Conditions in the west bank are far better than in gaza for what its worth.
'The brutal apartheid ongoing in the West Bank isn't as bad as the brutal genocide ongoing in Gaza' isn't the best flex for israel, especially since they're perpetrating both.
obviously before the latest wave of israel's genocide in Gaza, the oppression, control, and lack of freedom in the West Bank region of Palestine were worse than Gaza. Plus the West Bank still experiences israel imprisoning and killing Palestinian civilians and taking or destroying their land and stuff with impunity
the observant reader might notice that the common factor behind the misery in both regions of Palestine is not hamas, but israel
also, consider reading the first half of the post to which you responded – we were talking about the wisdom and morality of killing kids to achieve your objectives, and then also miserably failing to achieve your objectives. Your thoughts? Still worth killing the kids when it was for nothing?
And a very very true one. If the US military had maps at least the quality of local tourist ones, or Google Maps, they could have know basically the location of every ice cream shop, supermarket, school, and military building.
I would say that should be pretty much a prerequisite for launching an attack, (at least map out the city block around the target). The US has been eying to strike Iran for decades.
Mapping enemy targets is basically one of the biggest tasks (in scope) intelligence agencies undertake, and can be done in peacetime.
There was no extreme time pressure here, this was just a lack of due diligence and operational sloppiness.
One of the key stated goals of this war, is to have the Iranian people topple their totalitarian government, thereby avoiding having to fight a ground war, and as such, goodwill is extremely important.
The damage this strike did to that goodwill outweighs any potential military advantage the US possibly could get out of it.
Not sure if astonishingly credulous or just pretending.
Iran claims 600 schools have been damaged, with over 1000 students killed. I doubt the veracity of those numbers, but not as much as I doubt the US claims of benign omniscience in targeting and invulnerability from being targeted.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that the US should not be in this war at all. How people have already moved on from that to making monstrous posts like this makes me sick.
Who said there’s only been one mis-strike among 1000s of sorties? There’s been one mis-strike so egregiously wrong that even the western media call it out. There would be many more that don’t make it onto the front pages of first world media.
>>I recommend looking closely at the New York Times analysis. There were factors that might have mitigated this as a strike target, but it also really did look like a part of the compound (and it originally was!).
What a ridiculous take. What does "originally was" mean? Maybe you wanna say "previously was"? That building was converted to a school 10 years ago! The intelligence they relied on is 10 years old!!!!! It's recklessness and stupidity dressed as bravery and courage.
> Yes, with hindsight, we can definitively know, and with sufficient time each target could probably have been positively ID'd, but there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties, so this already is a low error rate.
This is giving them too much credit.
Hegseth has already shown himself to entirely disregard the notion of War Crime, even by the US military's own already controversial standards. The double strike on the boats in the caribbean are literally the textbook example in US military textbooks of what not to do, and that it is a warcrime.
This was no mistake. It was the obvious outcome of a pattern of reckless action.
For someone that interested in precision of supporting claims with evidence, you make pretty ridiculous and completely unsupported claims yourself, like "there was precisely one mis-strike in 1000s of sorties".
Why? You just saw I got the point without reading it.
Am aware content of media coming from either side is so normalized there is little value giving either my attention for free. I am not susceptible to Fox News fear mongering and already read 1984 among others. Neither are going to say anything novel. They're just engaged in barter for food and shelter.
I spent the time engaged in more useful endeavors to those around me and myself.
It's almost as if AI's purpose is to shift blame, saying that the 'computer did it', in which case these deliberately unreliable AI systems are used, so that responsibility can be avoided, or smeared across the command chain, so every person was only responsible for an innocious part of the whole disaster.
A computer can never be held accountable Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
The New York Times are the same people who spread the lie about Iraq having WMDs, they are not credible, and in fact have been proven to be incredibly biased when it comes to wars in the Middle East.
Israel and the US targeted many schools in Gaza. They killed tens of thousands of children. This strike was clearly intentional and very much in line with all other Zionist actions.
And fundamentally, this is aUS doctrine issue. The US is willing to strike targets in foreign soul with no boots-on-the-ground confirmation of target nature.
It's how the Obama administration drone-struck a wedding before this and how a missile got dropped on a Chinese embassy before that. The doctrine itself is flawed.
You have clearly articulated what I’ve personally explained to people. Thank you for that. The nature of the strikes as a part of a thoroughly pre-planned surprise attack lays the entire blame at the planners, approvers and those who executed the strike.
The lack of comprehension some people have baffles me, as I’ve had the displeasure of reading several dozens of online posts asking why kids were at school during the strikes. Even giving these people the benefit of the doubt that they do not know that not all countries observe the same weekday/weekend split as in the case of Iran, how in the world is a teacher or a child supposed to know when to hide from a surprise attack?
The easier it gets to give people the tools and power of lethal force, the more preventable injuries and death happen to innocent people. The cover of military conflict should not protect from consequences in cases like this.
Knowing the demographics of this website, it will not make anyone here safer that there is credible proof of Israel using Whatsapp metadata to source location data of adult men, and executing strikes based on that information. Western media already shared stories of how ordinary cell phone metadata was used to conduct strikes that killed innocent civilians. 15-20 years later the exact same deadly inaccurate methods are being used to quench the leaders’ and planners’ thirst for any results. One day a bomb might fall on any of our homes purely based on some circumstantial proof that wouldn’t even be enough for a traffic violation…
We learned that Israel was going to strike, so the US decided to jump on board. Do we know how long of a notice Israel gave the US? What you're attributing to as a thought out plan of attack seems to imply plenty of time. I don't think it's unreasonable for Israel to have learned of the meeting with little notice, deliberated internally for however long, and then told the US about it with not much time. I could totally see where under current Pentagon leadership, three clicks would have been the reaction. Yes, the US had been saber rattling and building pressure. That's probably part of why the Iranian leadership decided to meet. Whatever plans the US might have had went out the window when Israel called up and said we're striking now.
May I suggest a better approach to that situation?
Israel: Hey, we're gonna start bombing Iran in 15 minutes, so pick your targets! Time's a-wastin'!
US: We do not give a fuck who is meeting with who when. If you ever want to see another dime, or another spare part, or another kind word, let alone have us actually do anything, then you aren't gonna do jack shit unless and until we're goddamned good and ready. Otherwise, have fun with the blowback.
You may suggest whatever you want, but it means nothing regardless of how sane and rational of a suggestion it might be. This administration has consistently demonstrated that they are not concerned with that.
I agree with everything you said - but it's also the case that a set of parameters were created that, instead of requiring multi-person validation of target validity and provenance, prioritized speed to provide decision makers with options.
This certainly doesn't absolve the person implementing those parameters, but it is equally the responsibility of the very top of the decision-making structure.
> Whoever made the choice to use Maven to plan a sneak attack without careful checking made an unforced error when they had all the time in the world to prevent it
Who said they had all the time in the world? You can't get most of Irans upper leadership in a single room every day when they were publicly trying to hide.
I'm not sure how true that is. Enemy factories and command centers don't grow out of the ground overnight.
Nor do planes get maintained, armed, fueled and flown to the target zone in the matter of minutes.
In preparing such an operation, I'm sure the critical path even with traditional planning methods, is in other places.
While I agree, that there are certain scenarios where an important enemy commander or an expensive mobile launcher gets detected, and you only have a window of minutes to hours before its gone, this is not one of those cases.
I feel like the military bought some fancy new hammers, and wanted to show the purchase was justified.
I agree with your overall sentiment, but how realistic is it? Israel/US says they've been hitting thousands of targets (so reality might mean ~hundreds, still a lot), how are they supposed to verify this at all?
> Humans should have been double and triple checking every target by other means.
How practically would this happen? The US/Israel don't want people on the ground, and people on the ground is exactly the only way you can actually verify stuff like this, not every place in the world is on Google Maps or have a web presence at all, so the only realistic way to verify this would be to visually inspect it in person, something neither parties who started this war want to do.
Even better, don't make attacks against other soverign nations that don't pose an immediately and critical threat to you, and this whole conflict could have been avoided in the first place.
But no, the president has to be involved in some sort of child-trafficking scheme, so pulling the country into a war seemed preferable to being held responsible, and now we're here, arguing about fucking details that don't matter.
The school literally had its own website. If the AI involved was as smart as the media hype machine makes them out to be, it would have found the website and marked it as a non-target. It never even would have made it to human review.
To be fair, we don't really have the capacity to run satellite surveillance on each and every target we select to engage in a sneak attack.
I think sometimes people watch hollywood movies and get the impression that it represents a kind of cataloging of our military capabilities. A demonstration of what we can do to our enemies. With the underlying subtext being "don't mess with us."
I just want to gently suggest that not everything we see in movies is factual with respect to military or intelligence capabilities.
I'm an old timer. I got off the bus at Quantico in 1991. But even though I'm not in right now, I'd feel confident in betting that we don't have the capacity to surveil that many targets via satellite for, say, 1 week, prior to our attack.
(Of course, when I got off the bus at Quantico in '91 I also would have been just as confident in betting that the US would never engage in a first strike. So what do I know?)
That is true for an active war but I don't believe it is true if you have literally months and months to plan an attack. Unless of course there was no plan until just a few days before and you stupidly threw a ton of your advantage right into the trash.
I live near a military base, and there is a daycare, school, rec center, pub, ice rink, church, and grocery store, open to the public, and not managed by the military. All of it is on land owned by the military, but outside the wire.
The fact that these facilities exist on military land near a base (which a hostile government would surely argue IS the base) does not mean that the people in those buildings have it coming.
Technically the statutes of Rome forbid using human shields.
A nation state bombing US mainland bases sounds rather implausible, although I certainly would prefer that civilian infrastructure to have a minimum distance to military targets, even in the US, even if only to set the right example to the rest of the world.
I do believe there would be value in modernizing the statutes of Rome regarding human shields, which would force nation states to compile machine readable lists of school locations, so that non-existent reported childrens schools and secret childrens schools would be automatically screened.
Keeping the school secret, or reporting a school location too close to a military base would then activate the right of the international community to attack that nation, in order to prevent nation states from using elementary schools etc. as human shields.
IRGC wants nuclear ICBM's. Iran invests heavily in STEM education and physics. The whole population is aware of such goals, the whole population is aware of the adversarial relationship with the Western hemisphere. Imagine your child being allocated the school that was bombed in Iran, but before it was bombed: wouldn't you protest and ask for your child to be allocated to a different school? They risk being the first casualties when the inevitable escalation to war occurs. Clearly in this fun society of Iran, those parents didn't get a choice, and could only pray their kids get through elementary before such a foreign attack occurs.
IMHO, the most damning aspect is that proper, modernized international law clarifying the permitted action-reaction patterns around human shields could have prevented these deaths, by disincentivizing such nations from using kids as human shields.
No one is using human shields. There are just non viable targets next to viable ones. Blowing up a school intentionally because you have bad intel or incompetent staff is tan unmitigated fuckup and war crime. We also don’t give two shits about “Roman statutes”. There is no moral obligation to attack a country that has schools near military facilities based on a dead empire from a couple millennia ago.
On closer reading, this is an insane take on a bunch of levels. Your username being a well known nazi isn’t a mistake is it?
> We also don’t give two shits about “Roman statutes”.
?
It doesn't improve credibility if you openly express disdain for that section of international law that describes human shields as war crimes, which defines the concept of human shields, and then proceed to dictate that nobody uses human shields. Are you claiming this section of law is superfluous because it never happens?
BTW, my user name refers to a well known frozen pizza brand.
The well known food brand was run by a card carrying wafen-SS member name Oetker who used his influence with the party to get sweetheart deals to supply the Wehrmacht. It’s an odd choice.
I’m not expressing disdain for the part of international law that bans human shields. I’m saying that civilian infrastructure near military infrastructure is not that. The “Rome Statute” - the accepted name for the law you are calling the Roman Statutes - does not have anything in it about it being fair game to massacre civilians. The disgusting argument that these girls had it coming since they were being g used as human shields is bunk since they were specifically targeted by precision munitions intended only for the civilian target. The entire tragedy could have been avoided with the same military outcome by just not bombing the school.
I’m not going to get into the weeds on semantic details with someone who coincidentally uses a nazi username and claims a moral imperative to bomb countries for placing a school within an arbitrary radius of a defense facility.
Your takes are wholesale indefensible, regardless of any quibbles about details.
There is never a justification for intentionally bombing a grade school. Period.
> There is never a justification for intentionally bombing a grade school. Period.
let me focus on this word "intentionally", intent.
When I take the ladder I hid somewhere else under the bridge, and climb in my secret homeless bum nest, I am taking that ladder with intent. So I know intent exists. When I intend thin gs I do them intentionally, and sometimes I don't intend things like accidentally knocking over someone else's glass of drink, then I know I didn't do it intentionally.
Whenever theres a conflict before the courts, and whenever the relevant laws refer to presence or absence of intent, there will be an interest for both the plaintiff and the defendant to make claims on intent: the plaintiff might claim the defendant did such and such with intent, while the defendant has an incentive to claim such and such happened without intent. People take risks, plaintiff took risks, defendant took risks. Often both are co-responsible for a sequence of events, the law (at least on paper) is not monocausal. It is important to be able to attribute faults with causal links to damages, but an even more important role of law is to align incentives such that all parties avoid ending up in these situations. The law serves more than remediation, it serves a prevention role!
I believe it is important to prevent tragic events like girls schools being bombed.
I simply believe it is more effective to prevent harm by focusing on provable facts at hand.
How can a judge verify if something happens with or without intent?
Suppose your loved one was on the Iran Air flight that was downed, do you really care if it was with or without intent? Your loved one is now gone. Wouldn't it be wiser to leave the world in a better place, and have intent-oriented language eliminated so that the international community can promise to act strongly and swiftly when a nation state violates certain intent-agnostic conditions. Keep the (war) crime criteria objective without reference to intent, and don't do reckless stuff which can result in downing civilian air craft (whether its Iran Air or the Dutch plane above Ukraine).
Don't do reckless stuff like have a military complex, then change one of the buildings into civilian use and not marking this change on places like OpenStreetMap.
At the very least a global international list of all childrens schools, universities, etc. And unconditional permission for the international community to use ground penetrating radar, acousting sounding etc to investigate claims of colocated military compounds. International community coffers that can only be used to investigate claimed colocations (human shields). A disincentivation mechanism to prevent malicious parties constantly calling wolf to drain this coffer to prevent investigation of themselves.
Why do people believe that we somehow already have the optimum of all possible laws? Do you sincerely believe no better system of laws can be designed that prevents most of these tragedies?
To be precise:
1. I used to work in a car factory
2. Somehow a conversation with colleagues turned to my diet
3. I told them I like to eat frozen pizza
4. They started calling me Doctor Oetker half the time, and "StreetFighter" the other half of the time.
5. Thats how I got a nickname.
Whats your story, apart from shooting down ideas on how to restore objectivity in international law, because any subjectivity will result in entities believing they can get away by playing the infinite "was too! was not! was too! was not!"-game on the topic of intent...
EDIT: also I just looked up more about the history of Dr. Oetker; and you seem to conflate a couple of things
you state:
> The well known food brand was run by a card carrying wafen-SS member name Oetker who used his influence with the party to get sweetheart deals to supply the Wehrmacht. It’s an odd choice.
But Oetker didn't run this company during the war, his stepfather did. On wikipedia I read he was an SS party member though, and organized support groups for SS members and other Nazi apologetism, which is disgusting indeed...
That’s a lot of words trying to reason around destroying several hundred families by liquifying their children due to negligent intel.
Here’s how we handle this: fuck semantics. If your missile is targeted at and destroys a school, you should be held responsible. In fact, you can remove the school from the equation. If you aim a weapon at something, and fire the weapon, you are responsible for the outcome. If the outcome is a destroyed military base, congrats, you get credit for that. If the outcome is children being returned to their parents in closed caskets, you better believe you get the blame for that. Bad targeting data is the responsibility of those doing the targeting, not the people being targeted.
We already have laws around all this. The school bombing was unequivocally a war crime.
I’m not going to hear any more stupid ideas about how we can change laws to shift the responsibility for not getting obliterated by a missile onto civilians.
Does that make it not a school, somehow? Or are we cool with killing kids just because their parents might be in the military? I'm not clear what the excuse being made actually is.
It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base.
Not saying this specific attack was justified, but whoever allowed this, let alone if it was done intentionally as a strategy, also has blood on their hands.
Where do you think the children of our armed forces go to school? There are hundreds of schools on or adjacent to military installations in the US. The only people with blood on their hands for bombing a school are the people who bombed the school. It’s really not more complicated than that.
> It's definitely not cool to have a school adjacent to a military base. Not saying this specific attack was justified
I mean, you kind of are saying it was justified, given the entirety of your focus is on justifying it. The blood is solely on the hands of the useless, dumbshit military that couldn't identify a school and avoid bombing it. And that's the charitable interpretation of their actions.
"A Walmart spokesperson confirmed to Ars Technica that Walmart accounts will be mandatory on “select new Vizio OS TVs” for owners to complete onboarding and to use smart TV features."
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Some questions prospective buyers should ask:
1. Is "onboarding" necessary for this "Smart TV" to function as a "dumb screen"? i.e. Would a user need to get a Walmart account just to access video settings?
2. Does it inject ads or phone home to share screen captures from HDMI input?
3. Is not giving it access to WiFi sufficient, or does this thing have alternative ways of getting "updates"?
Whether these claims are real or not, they do illustrate one of the crazy things about technological progress. Capabilities that are difficult for states to develop eventually become something corporations can easily implement, and from there they become affordable for private citizens, first to buy, and then to DIY.
Two obvious and concerning corollaries are that state capabilities eventually become easy to obtain for non-state terrorist groups and, later on, unbalanced individuals. Consider what ISIS would have done with these, and then think about what the unabomber would have done.
I'd fully expect this particular company to face multiple hurdles in actually exporting any of these missiles. They might not be able to actually deliver at the quoted price-point. China might not permit it, due to the political blow-back. Israel and the U.S. obviously have an interest in making sure none of these missiles wind up in Iranian hands. The execs of this company are probably feeling a bit like a target has been painted on their heads right now.
However, controlling technology like this is ultimately a game of whack-a-mole. If this company fails, gets regulated, decapitated, sucked up by the Chinese military, etc., ten other companies will pop up all over the place that can produce the same thing or better, cheaper. There's also a supply chain of components behind this company that can now export critical parts to those building their own. We've simply reached (or are about to reach) the point where missiles of this sort can be made very cheaply.
Here's hoping missile defence gets better and cheaper fast.
Relevant philosophy paper: "The Vulnerable World Hypothesis" by Nick Bostrom [0].
In that paper, Bostrom floats the idea that it might be in humanity's best interest to have a strong global government with mass surveillance to prevent technological catastrophes. It's more of a thought experiment than a "we should definitely do this" kind of argument, but it's worth taking the idea seriously and thinking hard about what alternatives we have for maintaining global stability.
Cheap hypersonics don't threaten global stability, they threaten global hegemony. Which is really what I suspect irks most people afraid of them.
We've seen a shift towards cheap offensive capacity that gives middle powers or even smaller actors the capacity to hit hegemons where it hurts, very visible in Ukraine and the Middle East now. This leads to instability only temporarily until you end up in a new equilibrium where smaller players will have significantly more say and capacity to retaliate, effectively a MAD strategy on a budget for everyone.
GP's point was broader than that, it was about technological progress and the possibility of terrorist groups or mentally ill individuals getting their hands on weapons that can easily kill millions of people. That's also what the paper I linked is about.
Consider a future where individuals can relatively easily engineer a pathogen or manufacture a nuclear weapon. It's not hard to imagine how that would threaten global stability.
The US won the cold war because the expensive defense programs were subsidized by the consumer market. The USSR lost because it wasn't. They cloned a lot of western ICs but never cost effectively because they only ended up in military products.
Yeah after seeing what tiny DIY "racing quadcopters" can do I am really amazed that we haven't seen a swarm of them used for a non-state-actor ("terrorist" or otherwise) attack.
These things are way faster and more maneuverable than in the slaughterbots video. Those were like birds. These are like hummingbirds on meth.
They are totally noncommercial hobbyist/DIY products -- there's no firmware lockdown or geofencing like on the commercial products. You can fab the PCBs yourself.
Firmware controls on drones were always a silly strategy anyways.
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This doesn't necessarily follow. Yes, there might be economic pressure for AI to produce "good" code, but that doesn't necessarily mean efforts to make this so will succeed. LLM's might never become proficient at producing "good" code for the same reasons that LLM's perform poorly when trained on their own output. A heuristic prediction of what "good" code for a given solution looks like is likely always going to be less "good" than code produced by skilled and deliberate human design.
Just as there is a place for fast and dirty human code, there will be a place for slop code. Likely the same sort of place. However, we may still need humans to produce "good" code that AI can be trained on as well as for solutions that actually need to be "good". AI might not be able to do that for us anytime soon, no matter what the economic imperatives are.
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