the vast majority of the population is backing the government. from what i hear the last demonstration was about 3 million people and was pro government. from someone who was actually there, demonstrating, and is not of arab ancestry. there is no doubt a lot in their government that they don't like, and i bet they bitch about it all day long. also, iranian society appears to be slowly becoming more secular. but when other powers go to any length to wreck your country for decades, from sanctions to assasinations (one full residential block at a time) to terror bombing and virulent riots people tend to unite and rally around their government.

btw thanks for the lecture, but what you are suggesting would actually be a problem with fanaticism, not with arabs. or with instrumentalization of fanaticism. you could tell very similar stories about jews. or whites. or christians. or any other cultural/identity group.

then again the question was not for you, but for someone posting yet another variation of the classic zionist fairy tale about how goodhearted israel is and how iranians and israeli live in peace and harmony because ... "they're not even arabs"! i guess you missed the context ...

because they ran out of patriots and slings and whatnot and were getting thoroughly pounded? btw, they never had "air superiority". for all israel loves to flood the media with their military prowess there is exactly one single video of an israeli jet over iranian air space ... off the coast. most of the strikes on iran came from units inside long before infiltrated, from drones and from the borders. and yes, definitely, the initial "surprise" attack was quite successful and the goal was to wreck iran and subdue it. but they failed, iran recovered and gave them hell. netanyahu had to run for trump to intervene, he would have loved the full military assault he has been asking for for years, but all he got was a bombing run mostly for show and a quick closing.

israel didn't win. they burnt out their ace card, they got a bloody nose, they made iran stronger and they showed how vulnerable they actually are.

is there a problem in being arab?

that doesn't really matter, does it? people are people, geopolitics has little to do with that.

the game gives you incentives to make some ruthless decisions for the sake of efficiency. that's endgame sort of stuff, though, you don't need to if you play casually. for me the game stopped being fun way before reaching endgame.

tell me how desperate regular iranian citizens that hardly can buy food got their hands on tens of thousands of starlink terminals, under strict sanctions?

i disagree here, iran descending into chaos like syria is exactly what israel wants if it can't get the better option: iran as a remote controlled puppet state, which seems highly unlikely. a fragmented failed state is manageable. the last thing they want is a stable, unified, sovereign iran they can't control. that's exactly why they did to syria what they did, iran is just the final boss.

and when i say israel i mean israel and some shady powers mostly in the uk and the us. the proverbial colonialist gang.

this sounds about right, and is consistent with his actions so far.

that would not be consistent. a civil war in the us is a possibility but it would be a huge setback. geopolitically that's suicide. he might want to hold on to power but he will surely try other means.

he probably had to, to keep his zionist friends from ripping his guts out. and he's probably not bluffing who we may think he is, but it's still a show: fill the headlines with outrageous statements or put up spectacular fireworks and proclaim victory and obliteration knowing that it isn't going anywhere, but he tried, then on to the next thing: yemen, iran, venezuela, iran again ... it's starting to look like a modus operandi now. ofc in every case there are surely more subtle motives, actors and factors at play. trump has many enemies but it's not at all obvious who the worst of them are. it's all mirrors and smoke.

i guess if he's backing off now it's because the "orange iranian revolution" thing didn't really work out as they thought it would and the media keeps falsely chanting, and straightforward military action on iran without properly disabling it first would be a real clusterfuck. did he know it wouldn't? is this just yet another ruse for another surprise treachery? who knows. in any case this is far from over, his "friends" are unlikely to relent.

i doubt there is any love for another palevi either, he's a joke. the unrest wasn't really against the government, but against the economic situation demanding the government to address it. the latest demonstrations against the riot violence have greatly surpassed those for economic discontent and, in a way, actually singal solid support for the government. iranians by now have learned that there is nothing good to expect from western democracy, even the younger generations that didn't even get to know about the first bloody palevi. the sneaky attack in june last year not only was a complete failure, it blew the masks off and galvanized iranian society, regime change is not going to work.

blocking cia/mi6/mossad violent destabilization of a friendly and strategically critical country would be one, if you're not usrael or a vassal, that is.

not an option. there's no way around educating them in that.

as a matter of fact i do, twice and they're grown ups now, happy and living good lives. ofc there weren't any generative chatbots around back then but, you know, the internets. rather than policing or limiting it i actually encouraged them, from very early age. supervised at first, then progressively letting them fly alone. ofc they were informed and often reminded about what not to trust, what to stay away from, the many potential dangers, the protection of privacy, etc ... but that alone isn't nearly enough. much more important is encouraging open communication about it and paying constant attention, and the best way i knew was sharing the experience with them. i spent many hours online with them doing lots of things, e.g. habbo hotel comes to mind which could be a potential hazard. sharing that with them kept me in the loop even when i wasn't there, as they would spontaneously talk about anything exciting ... or weird they would see there, because i was just another habbo, it was natural. then as they grew up progressively came chats, social media, the whole thing, not to forget adolescence! they did have a few sour experiences but we managed. open communication is the cornerstone. and love! ironically they both have ended up in sw engineering, just like me, although i never encouraged them (ofc i did because i'm a nerd, but they showed very little interest so i let go fairly quickly). they initially pursued totally different careers.

not really. it's complicated but i have no regrets because parenting is really hard. i know now! and i don't consider myself a parent model at all, i did screw up here and there, but this elemental stuff like basic health and safety and basic decency i got right, and so did my parents.

i like it. it has humorous touch, a bit of humor is always good for matters as serious as death.

true. not my brightest post for several other reasons anyway. i didn't rtfa and the abstract cites "we can't reverse-engineer the US's cloud software, whether it's a database, a word processor or a tractor". american cloud infrastructure is not the same as a tractor. there are indeed a lot of different devices that have artificial limitations for users to operate with. i didn't even think of that because those items simply don't exist for me. whatever i buy, be it for home, work or hobby, it will be the version that does not come with unnecessary online requirements, "smart" anything, subscriptions or other gratuitous limitations or attached strings, and if there isn't any i will just seek another brand, the lesser evil, or even go without. my point is that rather than bothering to reverse engineer stuff that is explicitly designed not to be, or even prohibited, we should not be buying it in the first place. manufacturers understand wallets speaking.

good to know. for a moment there it seemed you were unconsciously seeking reinforcement by the tribe to sustain your personal position.

see, this is the point, this kind of binary thinking (that the tribe tends to love so much and cheer, because it's so easy and convenient): if i point out the weak spots in one side ofthe picture i'm automatically campaigning for the other side, even if i'm (explicitly) pointing at that too. i'm not.

this is the typical story, yet again: something tragic happens, a kid hurts himself, maybe even ends its life. it would upset anybody. it shows that something has failed and there's something to be learned. surely a lot has failed. yet emotions carry us away and we seek out some evil to blame, maybe the most obvious, and we claim reparations and punishment, instead of trying to actually understand what happened and why and thus actually learning something.

indeed, except if you are a cheerleader of the fundamentalist copyright police. in that case ofc it's a device of satan or something.

not that allowing reverse engineering would be a bad thing, not at all. but again corey's point is as sensationalist and puerile as ever. reverse engineering is not a hurdle (let alone "the" hurdle) to have a proper it infrastructure and tools. you fricken design and write it, there is no mistery, only hard work and broad support required. and that would be even far easier and sensible than reverse engineering.

but even if it were an answer, who would do it? with what support? the same people who has not even tackled the far easier task in the first place? as if passing some uk legislation would magically conjure a sprawling ecosystem of developers and enable it to do all that.

this guy's forte may be entertainment and science fiction, but technology and software definitely isn't.

most of it is cryptic for me too but i think that's exactly the point: those computations are not actually what we are using to perform these tasks, but the mathematical constructs we use to simulate them on a computer. they are not necessary provided you have a suitable network of neurons that naturally converge on the solution. the trick is in building that network and in this case it was specifically programmed for a set of problems, not the result of training data, and they found it provides acceptable solutions at lower energy costs for all problems in that set.

in biology that network can be a combination of nature and nurture, you start out with a network that is able to rewire itself to a range of different problems which then become trivial and cheap to solve. as you say, the solution is in the history, the wiring, the network topography created via experience. i don't know how much this adds to our understanding of brain function and learning but the implications for computing seem quite promising. this is old-fashioned pre-deep learning ai resucited, and comparing it to analog computing as others point out doesn't seem far-fetched to me.

what's wrong with an ad? is this the wrong place?