Oil price below 100 USD, some possible route towards negiotiations, potential for an exit out of wasteful military operations.. Sure, start all over again and go back to square 1. Or am I missing something here? Like a big picture, which makes a strike at this moment in time inevitable?
There was no real route towards negotiations. The two sides remained quite far apart on issues they considered non-negotiable, and neither side is desperate enough yet to make major concessions.
The US strikes on Iran were paused temporarily because Kuwait and Saudi Arabia refused permission to use their bases for that purpose. Now permission to use those bases has been secured (probably in exchange for protection guarantees and other political concessions) so the strikes can resume.
(I'm not claiming that any of this is a good idea, just explaining the state of affairs.)
"Iran launched missiles, drones and small-boat attacks at U.S. warships near the Strait of Hormuz, and that the U.S. responded by intercepting the threats and striking Iranian military sites responsible for the attacks."
Iran attacked, the US blocked and countered, attacking the source of the attacks.
> “Iranian forces launched multiple missiles, drones and small boats as USS Truxtun (DDG 103), USS Rafael Peralta (DDG 115), and USS Mason (DDG 87) transited the international sea passage. No U.S. assets were struck.”
Step 1 appears to have been US ships entering the strait. Iran claims they fired on a tanker but who's to say.
Right. Iran attacked US ships in international waters.
I guess you could say the "first step" was the the ships being there to be shot at, if you were trying really, really hard to spin it as the united states being the aggressor.
During the short stint of "Project Freedom", the US claimed to have attacked seven Iranian ships. Which is still not the first time the US has attacked Iran during a negotiation or ceasefire.
I think what you’re missing is there was never any real progress.
* Oil futures (not spot price) have been completely detached from reality, with credible evidence of corrupt insiders making money by front-running Trump’s social media posts
* Negotiations never went anywhere; despite Trump’s social media claims (see point 1), they barely even got to the negotiation table
* There is no potential for an exit that doesn’t leave us worse off than where we started, because Iran is control of whether the conflict continues, not the US, and it’s in their best interest to continue the conflict until they get major concessions (like permanent ability to tax the straight)
In short, the Trump administration is a clown show whose only really competence is corruption.
They simply want chaos. This distracts from their corruption and authoritarian actions, it enables grift and market manipulation, it worsens conditions in other western countries which benefits them, oil price being high benefits their friend Putin, the list is long and grim.
It also harms US' Asian allies, which makes them more dependent on US energy, increasing US leverage to push them toward proxy war with China. Very similar to the situation in Europe!
Can you please describe this proxy war against China. I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt but you seem to also be implying that the US made Putin invade Ukraine.
> Russia stated that Ukraine joining NATO would start a war. The US began that process knowing Russia's reaction. Russia did what it said it would do.
This has nothing to do with reality. Ukraine wanted to join NATO in 2008, but allies did not support it and that was the end of it. Yet, Russia still invaded in 2014, over the deepening EU-Ukraine economic relations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union%E2%80%93Ukraine...
Russia did not threaten anyone with war over the prospect of NATO membership. In the first years of the war, Russia did not even acknowledge that those were Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Russian government claimed that it was a civil war.
This is an intimidation tactic and not a real threat. If the vague threat is enough to prevent something from happening, then it has served its purpose. If not, then the vagueness gives an exit to do nothing.
Pretty much every country that has joined NATO since the end of the Cold War has seen a flood of such threats, Finland and Sweden most recently[1]:
"Finland's accession to Nato will cause serious damage to bilateral Russian-Finnish relations and the maintaining of stability and security in the Northern European region. Russia will be forced to take retaliatory steps, both of a military-technical and other nature, in order to neutralise the threats to its national security that arise from this."
Russia has attacked only Georgia and Ukraine, the two countries that did not end up joining NATO. There, the threats achieved their goal and shaped the battlefield in favor of Russia, which was then exploited. Elsewhere, the fake act of "We're soooo concerned with our national security" did not yield the desired results, and Russians moved on.
Burns and many other Western diplomats have been surprisingly ignorant of such games, treat Russians as primitive savages who are incapable of manipulating people (despite it being a deeply ingrained feature of their culture), and take their words at face value, which produces the kind of memos Burns wrote. The 2008 decision to deny Georgia and Ukraine entry into NATO is nowadays widely considered a mistake. The views Burns held and promoted in the memo made the war more likely instead of preventing it.
> Burns warned of serious consequences arising from NATO’s eastward expansion to include Ukraine and Georgia
And then Ukraine accession disappeared from the policy menu. Then Putin annexed Crimea. Pretending Putin invaded Ukraine with any more strategic coherence than Trump going into Iran reveals a reality-defying bias in a source.
Was Russia invading South Ossetia and Crimea also engineered by the United States to switch Europe to American energy? Or is it more reasonable to just conclude that Russia is expansionist and Ukraine has been seeking the protection of an organization that has never been attacked by a major power?
Whatever the case, I'd love to hear your Asian proxy war plan. Japan and Korea vs China?
Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war, which it did. It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO to these countries despite Russia's threats of war if this happened. What do you think the US' role was?
Regarding Asia, look at US' vying to have unfettered access for its Air Force over the Strait of Malacca, despite popular disfavor by Indonesians, after a $15 billion energy deal with their government. The US having command over the South Korean military - in what world is that in South Korea's interest? Vietnam's new dependence on US LNG as a result of the attack on Iran. Look at the disputes in the South China Sea despite the disputants having China as their biggest trading partner, and the disputes rising exactly at the time of the US' pivot to Asia. Same pattern with Taiwan - a plan that has been in place for decades but which has become a political token coinciding with the pivot to Asia.
Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it? Why would they pick a fight with their biggest trading partner, who also appears much stronger than them militarily? Surely it's not in their interest right? Yet that's exactly what we've been seeing (belligerence from Japan's PM over Taiwan is a case in point). Does rising belligerence against a key trading partner/US geopolitical rival sound familiar?
Meanwhile Russia can't defeat Ukraine but Europe is convinced it has to arm itself and join the proxy war. This aligns with the 2026 National Defense Strategy - feeding proxies into wars against US rivals, what the US euphemistically refers to as "'burden sharing".
> Georgia acceding to NATO was viewed no differently than Ukraine by Russia and Russia clearly stated that this would cause a war
You put a lot of faith in Russian rhetoric. They've made many hollow declarations before and during the war, particularly around territorial integrity and western support. Meanwhile Putin has made all sorts of claims to contradict this casus belli you cling to, e.g. Russia has a historical right to Ukraine. And I won't even start with Medvedev.
> It's strange to me that you think that the US had nothing to do with expanding NATO
I don't recall saying the US had nothing to do with it. But this wasn't the unilateral action by the US that you asserted. And Russia doesn't have veto power over NATO or Ukraine or Georgia. Their warmongering threats don't suddenly mean their neighbors are no longer sovereign. Nor does it mean "it's someone else's fault that they are forced to invade". And yes, the same also applies to Trump's stupid Monroe Doctrine 2.0.
> Japan and Korea vs China sounds absurd doesn't it?
Yes, it does. And brave rhetoric from politicians doesn't somehow equate to the US puppeteering them into a proxy war. You seem to think that US power is awful and should be resisted but when Russia tells its neighbors not to join a defensive alliance, the smaller countries should oblige. And that Japan has to walk on eggshells around China because of its military inferiority.
In any event, your only evidence of an impeding proxy war is Japanese "belligerence" and US influence. Unremarkable.
> And Russia doesn't have veto power over NATO or Ukraine or Georgia. Their warmongering threats don't suddenly mean their neighbors are no longer sovereign.
both can be true at the same time: russia does not have veto power and nobody can stop russia from invading ukraine if russia wants to keep ukraine from nato. unfortunately, being morally right does not protect you from a bully
I also believe some in the administration want chaos. But also consider that Iran is legitimately hard to negotiate with and the negotiators have no experience with highly technical negotiations around nuclear enrichment. Like, I don’t think Trump wants chaos, actually.
> But also consider that Iran is legitimately hard to negotiate with
It is really strange how when you offer to negotiate with the leaders of a country as a pretext to assassinate them... twice... it becomes difficult to negotiate with those who replace them.
the entire war was looking really pointless and trump was left looking like a chump. none of the negotiations would let him walk away with anything looking like a win. a resumption of hostilities at least paints the illusion of progress towards..something
I agree Iran must be hard to negotiate with but they haven’t even tried.
Obama’s nuclear deal took years of work and involved multiple countries. When Vance didn’t get his way in a single meeting he quit?
Also maybe Trump doesn’t want chaos but I doubt he runs the show so much at this point.
I wonder how much what Trump wants matters any more w.r.t. Iran. Trump kicked a hornets' nest. Now it's the hornets' turn to decide when (or if) they'll let him walk away.
I mean, what's Trump going to do? Murder Iranian leaders harder?
Let's see, how this will improve the daily soc work. I still don't see, what's the big difference between Mythos and Opus, security wise. I'm confident, that this kind of vul detection is a long-term improvement. But does specifically Mythos makes such a big difference to "normal" models? I would love to see, what's the actual difference.
Quantifying the abilities of an LLM is a hard research problem, so I'm not sure if I can describe it in any great way, but Mythos did seem to be fairly clever about putting together things from different domains to find problems.
For instance, in one of the included bugs (2022034) it figured out that a floating point value being sent over IPC could be modified by an attacker in such a way that it would be interpreted by the JS engine as an arbitrary pointer, due to the way the JS engine uses a clever representation of values called NaN-boxing. This is not beyond the realm of a human researcher to find, but it did nicely combine different domains of security.
As the person responsible for accidentally introducing that security problem (and then fixing it after the Mythos report), while I am aware of NaN-boxing (despite not being a JS engine expert), I was focused more on the other more complex parts of this IPC deserialization code so I hadn't really thought about the potential problems in this context. It is just a floating point value, what could go wrong?
Okay, so far it makes sense to me. But is the deal with JS and floating point values, which isn't soemthing super special super rare stuff, only detected and identfied by Mythos while Opus wouldn't get to this point?
There doesn't have to be a huge qualitative discontinuity between Opus and Mythos. It's just that Mythos has reached a threshold where it's finally smart enough that putting it in a loop and asking it to find bugs is suddenly really effective. Especially at the beginning, Mozilla wasn't doing anything particularly clever with prompts. Mythos is just smart enough that the hit rate on obvious prompts is high enough to matter. (Maybe you can get similar performance out of Opus 4.6 with really smart prompts, but AFAICT nobody had managed it until Mythos.)
Among other things, Mythos seems better at "let me find, weaponize, and stack vulnerabilities until I get end-to-end from untrusted content to root", rather than just finding one thing in a specific identified area.
Results similar to mythos have been duplicated by weaker models.
Think it's more a care of mythos raising widespread awareness that tireless LLMs can be weaponized to dig through code and find that one tiny flaw nobody spotted
The report I saw kind of seemed to be pointing at a flaw and asking "do you see it?" which is not the same thing. I felt a pretty large difference between Opus 4.6's results and Mythos's, so I would be surprised if even weaker models did anywhere near as well. I'd like to see these results, if they are using a decent methodology.
Of course, even the reports with flawed methodology could be suggesting that a great harness + weak model might achieve a similar level of results as a mediocre harness + strong model. But I'd want to see solid evidence for that.
There is a phase transition where LLMs match or exceed humans' ability to do something, and from that point on, even if the difference between its previous version is small, it will go from something people use rarely, to something that people use all the time.
There was a time when the entire transportation infrastructure in the US was built around horses. Even after cars were invented, the cars weren't obviously better than horses for most people, especially because there wasn't any infrastructure to support them, but the infrastructure and the cars kept improving to the point where it was better for some people at some things, then suddenly it was better at most things, and then people stopped using horses, and we re-organized our entire transportation network around cars.
But there was never a revolutionary technological change. The technology of cars in the 1930s was the same fundamental technology as the cars in the 1890s. Just at some point it became "good enough" and that was it.
I think when people say that AI is a bubble, they are assuming that anything economically useful that LLMs cannot perform today is _qualitatively_ different from what LLMs can do right now, and that LLMs cannot do it even in theory, without some major technological innovation. But I have a suspicion that there are a large number of valuable things, that once LLMs advance just a little bit more, and harnesses and infra around them is improved a little bit more will just be completely taken over by LLMs.
Another bait for grabbing user emails, another opportunity for a leaked database of as such! Why are there still sites, where you have to sign up with a disposable email address and waste everyones time? If you AI slop a website on your way to work, at least keep it accessible.
I have a bad feeling, that the impact will be quite severe for some services, as monitoring, performance, and security services might get disrupted. and just cleaning up is a big mess.. Worst case, some ot will experience outage and / or damage. But maybe I am just overestimating the severity of this.
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