Oh man. I am running computations on my server that involve computing geodesic distances with the heat method. The job turns out to be a L3 cache thrasher, leaving my cpus underutilized for multi worker jobs .... 208mb instead of my 25 per socket sounds amazing
When I talk to peers and they respond in that way, it is definitely a signal. If I do ask an insightful question, acknowledgment of it can be useful. The problem with LLMs is that they always say it. They don't choose when it IS really appropriate, they just do it over and over, like your biggest fan would. Syncophacy is the worst.
This kind of amateur analysis is not worth being front page of HN. Its not that it doesn't make a few good points, but overall, it just isn't high grade strategic analysis because it lacks a lot of information by the post's own admission.
Nah it's good. It shows exactly how far you can get with just a modest understanding of what strategy actually is at the level of nation states plus publicly available facts from the news.
Especially in the heavily jingoistic american context, where all of the focus is implicitly on the military means and technology and execution, but people have lost sight of, maybe can not even state plainly, what the point of a military is, what considerations are part of deciding to use it to accomplish a goal.
If you're going to accomplish a strategic goal with a military action, that goal had better be achievable through military action and this one plainly isn't. A historian can see it, a blogger can see it, a programmer can see it. Why wasn't it seen by people whose job is ostensibly to see it?
It doesn't even consider potential primary objectives, especially when viewed alongside the recent actions in Venezuela:
1. If US was to replace Iran as the one to control exports of oil through the strait, then thos would gain huge leverage on China via control of energy exports from Iran, Middle East more generally, as they have already done in Venezuela.
2. Making it clear that partnership with Russia and China will not provide security, which was shown to be worthless. This counters “The East is rising and the West is declining”, a go-to Xi Jinping line.
4. Securing South America for near-shoring production, decoupling of supply chains from China. Iran, China, and Russia have lots of
5. Disrupting Iranian ability to support Russia against Ukraine via manufacturing of drones in Iran and in Venezuela.
Whether these points are actually part of the strategy, I do not know, but they have been raised by others in the space, and seemed absent in the article.
If I understand correctly, I see all your points as potential rewards.
These rewards are useful to the US if they accomplish regime change to a friendly regime or at least military occupation of a good strip of land.
The article is about how these two preconditions for obtaining the rewards are unlikely to be fulfilled and, at the same time, non-accomplishment might achieve the opposite:
- Iran (and by necessity, other Gulf states if they want to export oil) align more with China
- US-partnership will not provide security (Arab states, South Korea and other allies are now less secure and the US can't protect them)
- US and allies are in a worse position to secure South America
Huge risk with little chances of a reward. That's the article.
Modifying the rewards does not change the game unless the probability of obtaining them increases or that of the risks decreases.
A good analysis, although many will find its praise of the Trump Administration's foreign policy hard to accept, given Trump's dangerous autocratic tendencies and his Administration's incompetence in domestic governance...but the Pentagon has long been clear eyed and prepared for different geopolitical scenarios, and found a receptive administration at a time of clearly heightened geopolitical struggles. Honestly, the biggest weakness here is the assumption that many of these strategies began with Trump, when in fact many were emerging under Biden...by this, what I mean, is that it has less to do with politics and the current President, and more about the long term planners and strategists coming to clear concensuses on how to proceed
Yes, he's informational but a bit conspiratorial. These people are valid points of interest - it's worth entertaining facts and perspectives that are not well highlighted in the media. Even though they are usually kind of wrong.
The truth is nobody is really fully in charge, there are competing interests everywhere, Trump is making the decisions but even he changes his mind very frequently and objectives are not clear.
It's really hard to understand intentions when decisions have to be made in a reactive manner as well.
Rubio indicated 'we had to attack, because Israel was going to go first, and we were going to lose the element of surprise'. While that is an absurd and crazy reason to 'go to war' - it's actually a very rational tactic for 'when to start' as 'first mover advantage' is enormous in conflict. You can see how 'the most powerful entity on earth' is moved by events beyond it's control.
It's almost better to describe these situations in terms of all of the factions capabilities, influence, power, motivations than it is to say 'this is why it's happening'.
Once conflicts start, they have a way of perpetuating themselves in a 'circularly reactive' way, it fuels itself as both sides have difficulty standing down.
I wouldn't be surprised if the parent's complaint about his academic buddy who didn't read the paper's methods yet declared their findings as true, had misunderstood why his friend did so... which could have well been due to their additional knowledge about similar past findings/studies.
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