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> and spit out swathes of optimizations to try.

Without any guarantees of functional correctness.


11% capacity is not 11% MFU. The first is about actually using the hardware for something in the first place, the latter is about how efficiently you compute. Different things.


It’s good enough to find one known function from libc in programs memory to mount the attack. Moreover, there are automated methods how to leak pointers to functions, etc., without having access to the binary itself.


> damning indictment of the mindset of the vast ineffectual mess that is the cybersecurity industry

Cybersecurity is not about stopping issues but about compliance and liability. Attend RSA once, and you will see it yourself.


It makes sense when you consider the main threat you are protecting yourself from is lawsuits.


The lawsuits come from the issues though.


"We did everything we could, like any decent person would"


Exactly, it's very 'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens


Is Iranian infra centralized on the similar fashion like in Belarus?


It's way more centralized.

Iran has been rolling out the National Information Network (essentially a whitelisted internet) since the Green Revolution [0] back in 2009-12. Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [8], and China [8].

Iran also uses a two-tier SIM card system - ideologically vetted individuals get a "white" SIM which gives full ingress/egress outside the NIN and others have a normal SIM that can be blacklisted from egressing outside the NIN.

Notice how Iranian websites have a page saying "Transferring to Website" - that's the gateway page for the NIN.

[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/

[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa

[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...

[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...

[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545

[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...

[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/

[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home

[8] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...


What are the conditions for .ir domains, though? There are a lot of IR sites still functioning that are obviously hosted outside Iran and they are collecting money for Iranians.


Needs to go thru an institute associated with Iran's nuclear program and his headed by the brother of a cutlet/keema (Ali Larijani).

Not all dual use institutions are directly attacked - it reduces negotiating power.

Negotiations are based on defection and exploiting misaligned incentives.

Not sure what else I can say so I shall not answer other questions.


How does internet shutdown affect bitcoin mining in Iran?


Iran has been under export controls for dual use technology for decades. Getting the amount of GPUs needed to conduct bitcoin mining was nigh impossible.

Bitcoin and Crypto as a shadow financial system was enabled by Qatar and the UAE where there are dedicated deal desks that work on ExAmerica trades.

This is why the IRGC striking Qatar and the UAE was such a bad move. Even companies in the PRC try to follow American sanctions regimes because trade with Japan+SK+ASEAN is higher priority than trade with Russia or Iran.


Is there a reasonable workaround for this?


Starlink or any other sort of satellite internet, but these are relatively easy to jam and detect. There are ways to minimize that but obviously not available to civilians.

The issue is, if you control the Network DMZ, it's extremely difficult to bypass. In Xinjiang and Tibet (which has a similar setup) they used to use smuggled Kazakh, Nepali, and Indian SIM cards but that was cracked down.

A lot of the info from inside Iran that is not regime connected is coming from areas in Iranian Kurdistan where an Iraqi SIM could be smuggled or accessed somewhat easier than other areas.


That’s interesting. Could they somehow do peer-to-peer anonymously until the packages reach the border?


P2P is only as safe as it's nodes. Iran has around 1 million IRGC, Army, and Foreign Shia Militia deployed in a country of around 90 million.

Mind you that organization has been severely degraded, but that only scares civilians even more as functionaries are much more trigger happy (rape [0], summary execution [1], torture [2] are already the norm).

That makes covert P2P much harder.

[0] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/iran-security...

[1] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit...

[2] - https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde13/0673/2026/en/


> Imho IQ scores aren’t a sufficient measure of intelligence

You may be correct. However, if the methodology of IQ scoring didn’t change, the change in score itself is worth of investigation.


Depends on the IQ test i guess?

The one i did at 7 _definitely_ had a cultural component. I think it was 5 different tests, i distinctly during one of them thinking "if my parent didn't educate me on music there is no way i could have answered that, is this bullshit?". Then in the spatialization test i had a tangram, which incidentally, was a game i had since i was 4. Honestly i remember i scored high, but i also told myself how lucky that was that most of the question the psychologist asked me, i already read the answers (which might have been the point), and that they used a tangram because honestly i knew i would have scored poorly on that particular test, i have trouble visualizing stuff (mild aphantasia).


The first IQ test was developed by Binet and Simon in France, and it was all about predicting academic success of children. Virtually all IQ tests are predicting academic success. Cultural component is a big part of it. For example music education is associated with better grades. Maybe no one knows how it works, but it does.

No one knows what intelligence is, all the tests are like "lets identify a group of smart people (normally it is something like a group of high performing students), find correlates and build a test measuring correlates". No good definition of intelligence and no casual reasoning, just a correlative one.

How IQ 100 becomes a median? Lets take a big enough sample, get their test score and then normalize numbers so median will be 100 exactly. The creators of tests know that you can't compare IQ numbers from different populations. You can investigate the difference, but a direct comparison is nonsense. Even comparisons between different age cohorts of the same population are questionable at very least.

It doesn't mean that iq numbers are meaningless, but we shouldn't confuse them with intelligence, and we definitely shouldn't treat them as absolute numbers. They are relative measure.


AFAIK, the one in Qatar was paid by Qatar and operated by US.


> it might not be worth the effort since production will catch up.

Sounds unlikely.

Unless RAM use would impact financial metrics, it would be hard to justify the work on memory footprint if customer doesn’t complain a lot.


> 2008 Financial Crisis was triggered by Oil prices.

Not by the subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse?


I thought it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse.


> it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse

It was interconnected derivatives and structured products linked to banks that caused a liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter.

Meanwhile: "In the letter, Morgan Stanley said the fund wasn’t designed to offer full liquidity because of the nature of its investments, and that credit fundamentals across the underlying portfolio have been broadly stable. The bank's shares fell 2% in premarket trading Thursday" [1].

[1] https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5...


> liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter

Wait what? Your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?

Isn't the proximal to distal chain of events government encouraged subprime loans -> inaacurately valued MBS -> exponential, unregulated derivative instruments -> leveraged contagion. What does market confidence have to do with any of that?


> your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?

It's absolutely proximally true and it's not just my thesis. From Wikipedia: "The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries" [1].

> government encouraged subprime loans -> inaacurately valued MBS -> exponential, unregulated derivative instruments -> leveraged contagion

The subprime crisis shouldn't have been bigger than the S&L crisis [2]. What turned it into a financial crisis was the credit crunch that followed. That crunch was caused by folks running on banks that had sponsored these products.

On "inaccurately valued MBS," note that the paper marked AAA mostly paid out like a AAA security. It would be like if you were perfectly good for your word and I lent you money, but then I wanted to sell on that debt to a third party who didn't trust you at a 50% discount. What does "properly valued" mean in that context? It's ambiguous in a dangerous way. (In this analogy, you wind up paying back the debt at face value. But years later, albeit on schedule.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_financial_crisis

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis


That was the structural problem. Definitely bad. A weak economy propped up by some 'fake' money.

Oil was more of the outside force that put a shock to that weak system.


I think the GP is trying to say that oil prices where the nudge that pushed the bad loans and derivatives out of stability.

I don't remember oil getting expensive back then, but it's a long time ago.


it did. GFC was a financial recession no doubt, but oil prices was one of the final things that tipped everything over. Oil prices climbed high, slowed economic activity a bit, and the whole financial that teetering just collapsed.


Now the subprime credit of entire cities is being sold bank to bank. I'd argue that's a direct escalation of the 2008 credit crisis.


There were many involved factors, but the 2008 financial crisis was started when Ben Bernanke raised interest rates.


That was the structural problem.

But it was swept under the rug, it was hidden by market constantly going up.

Ponzi schemes can hide in a market going up, because nobody is trying to pull money back out.

Suddenly everyone wanting their money, and the shortfall suddenly become apparent.

Oil prices suddenly made everyone try to pull money out, and 'woops there is nothing here'.


I did make a snarky derivatives comment elsewhere in the thread, but I do see you're not wrong about oil prices peaking at $138 in June 2008 (Lehman collapsed in September 2008): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILBRENTEU


> But I do not see them as the international turbo villains they've been painted as.

Iran founded Hizbalah in Lebanon. You can read what Hizb had done to Lebanon on the internet. Iran exported its ideology all over the Middle East right now: Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, etc. It is a mistake to thing about Islamic Revolution as something not interested in spreading itself.


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