These conversations are always interesting. Most treat the world as a single variable problem when, in reality, it is an exceedingly complex multivariate problem. And the Arab world sure is responsible for a large number of variables to decipher reality from a simple article that ignores so much.
Others have mentioned China as a benevolent actor of sorts. I find this interesting, maybe even laughable. China is not interested in coming to the aid of anyone in the world. I am not saying this to criticize China. I believe this is purely a statement of fact: They don't do that.
If we pulled it forward to modern times, China, for example, would not put it all on the table and lose nearly 500K lives to save Europe in a world war. They exist for one thing, and one thing only: To do business that benefits their nation. And that's it.
Again, not being critical, just stating what I believe to be a fact. I can also say that I envy that focus to some extent. It's "China first" to an extreme level.
OK, so, if we accept my premise: Who in the world would come to the aid of societies in need?
Let's also agree that perfection does not and will note ever exist on this planet. So, insisting on perfect interventions, actions and outcomes is not rational. We are --humanity-- not perfect.
Well, the answer to this is simple. The only nation with the ability and the demonstrated willingness to risk life, limb and treasure is the US. The rest of the American continent cannot and has never taken this role. Europe has self-decimated over the decades in terms of these capabilities. So, they can't. Africa? Asia? Who's left? Nobody.
Without a doubt, the Arab world --or Middle East in general-- has been a complex neighborhood for quite some time. Yet, things have gotten massively worse when a country like Iran sponsors murderous terrorists in the region and --as confirmed by the current conflict-- makes it a point to build-up a Middle-East-Annihilation arsenal of missiles that could have almost no other purpose than to obliterate everything around them and even as far as Europe.
And then you add the potential for some of these missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
And then you add a regime that simply has not been a rational actor.
So, what do you do? Do you wait until they are a nuclear power? Just like we waited for Hitler to come to power and kill millions of Jews and others? How much slack do you give a regime who's publicly stated goals, for decades, have been the complete destruction of others?
Without a doubt, the actions of the last month or so have not been perfect. They will not be. That's just reality. For example, I don't understand how sinking their entire navy, destroying their air force, destroying their anti-aircraft capabilities, some 20,000 sorties and targets later...we still have to make a deal with them to keep Hormuz open.
How does that happen? Drones and missiles, of course. What is remarkable is that you'd think we would have mitigated that danger to the point where the international waters of the strait would no longer be threatened. I don't understand why stupid reporters never ask this question. Well, I answered it right there.
And yet, to go back to the thought: Who else but the US could have even approached setting Iran back far enough to make the neighborhood less of an issue? China? They would never. They have happily been selling Iran weapons hardware and know-how. They do not exist to benefit the rest of the world. China first. That's the policy.
Can anyone imagine just how far worse --horrific, really-- this would be if Iran had gone nuclear in the next few months or couple of years? This would truly be unimaginable. We've already seen that NATO does not seem to be willing to engage and might be largely useless.
So, while not perfect, at this point in time I believe that this is one of those "treating the cancer early" scenarios. Iran was on a straight path to being a nuclear nation run by deranged theocratic lunatics. This, while not ideal, not perfect, not desirable, not pretty, is likely a good thing. Now it has to end with the right outcome, whose minimum definition is to denuclearize Iran. From there, it would be nice to see the wonderful Iranian people get out from under the oppression they have been living under for so long. If you know any Iranians (we have many friends) you know they are actively rooting for the US to succeed and are thankful. Same with Venezuelans, BTW.
> Iran was on a straight path to being a nuclear nation run by deranged theocratic lunatics.
No, they were not. No more than Saddam was close to having WMDs. Your entire premise is based on Israeli lies.
> How much slack do you give a regime whose publicly stated goals, for decades, have been the complete destruction of others?
How about you answer what we are supposed to do with regimes whose actual actions over the last 80 years have been the destruction of others? I'm talking about the US and Israel, btw.
> If you know any Iranians (we have many friends) you know they are actively rooting for the US to succeed and are thankful
How many of them actually live in Iran? I'm sure the monarchists in LA love that the country is being leveled.
You do realize that the Iranian government (whatever remains of it) is actually insisting, as a condition, that their nuclear materials not be removed from the country?
Burden of proof lies on the accuser. There is no proof. Just the same Israeli lie that Iran is weeks away, for years and years.
Demanding the sovereignty to enrich nuclear materials for energy purposes does not mean they have or want nukes. They won't be able to have the triad anyway, so you can argue having a nuke would be a strategic misstep since they can't guarantee MAD anyway. Better to be able to utilize your large rocket arsenal to wage war and not have people think you are launching a first strike.
Stop trolling. You are speaking like the theocratic Iranian regime were saints building gardens and farms. C'mon. Who do you think you are fooling. They funded nearly all of the terrorism that has been causing so much mayhem in the Middle East and beyond. Now, if you are a Jew hater, so be it. There's nothing I can say to make you accept that Israel could not invent terrorists launching HUNDREDS of missiles into their territory. Yet, you are convinced that Iran is a good actor in world politics that was not within reach of something that could have launched us into and unthinkable version of WW3.
So be it. You are free to believe whatever you wish.
> Yeah, if you only subscribe to the US view of the world, then of course the US are the good guys.
Kindly show me where I said that "the US are the good guys".
There are no good guys in this crap. The world is a mess. And you cannot do any of this without things getting messy.
As for my opinion: As a US citizen, I would be perfectly fine with the US closing down all military bases in Europe and elsewhere. Bring it all home.
If Europe wants to defend their territory, they should do it themselves. The US funds somewhere around 70% of NATO. We should exit that thankless organization. Countries like Spain can face reality on their own. We can use the money at home. I don't know how much we spend on all the bases around the world. I'd shut them all down. Again, <insert country here> can invest their own citizen's taxes to defend themselves.
I'd say the same about the UN. We are spending billions to support that organization. Why? Let someone else host them, we'll gladly show up and vote.
In other words, if all the US has gained at an international level for what we have done, it's time to stop.
I don't have a problem with this at all. It isn't about being an isolationist. It's about what we are paying for and how we are being taken advantage of.
This is very similar with the situation we had with drugs. We pay for the R&D here and Europe (and others) enjoyed low drug prices because they did not have to pay for it. We subsidized low prices around the world. Now that is largely ending. Drug prices are going up around the world because we are no longer going to be taken advantage of in that domain. If you want the drugs we develop, pay your fair share of the R&D.
Is any of the above simple or perfect in concept and execution? No. Of course not. Name anything in international relations that is. Nobody can. It does not exist. But you certainly can try to do the right thing and end-up people hating you for it. Whereas those who do nothing don't have that problem. Funny how that works.
Drug companies pay for the trials, but most R&D is done in public institutions, and a big part in Europe (unless you count adding a piece of plastic to a ventoline cap to avoid loosing it a 'new drug', Europe public universities/labs are the sources of mire new drugs/molecule and techniques than anywhere else)
You have repeatedly stated you’d be happy for the US to shut its bases in Europe and pull their troops out, and stop funding NATO. Do you believe it should take the same stance with Israel? If not, why not?
I think it would be good for the world to see the reality of society around the world. So, yeah. Everything, everywhere at the same time.
Let's see Europe protect itself. Let's see the Middle East decide if they are a region that wants to support world terrorism or --on their own-- achieve peace. Let's see if China helps anybody.
I am perfectly comfortable with at least a one decade pullback. I see no reason for US citizens to subsidize countries all over the world to the tune of over $80 billion dollars and absolutely burn far more than that protecting Europe and others. Pull that back 100% and let's see what the world looks like. Invest that money internally on real infrastructure (not California bullshit projects that never get done), education, healthcare, housing and so many things we need far more than protecting the universe.
Yeah, I'd vote for that. I am sick un thankless nations always pointing a finger at the US. Let's eliminate that target and see how places like Spain and the UK and others do when they need help and we are busy watching it from across the ocean.
Nobody expects China to run the next protection racket. Because no matter how people try to whitewash, a protection racket is not something decent people (or countries) do.
Sure. Read my prior comment. We (the US) should pull out of every nation, NATO and stop funding the UN. If the world needs help, each nation can face it on their own or team-up on a case-by-case basis to deal with their issues.
I don't claim the US to be perfect. Not even close. Yet, we cover 70% of Europe's defense (likely more), fund the UN to the tune of billions, etc.
It's 2026. I think it's time for everyone who thinks the US is evil to just step back and be responsible for their own shit. Fine with me. I'd rather invest that money here for infrastructure, education, affordable housing, healthcare, etc. No more miliary bases outside the US. No more funding for NATO or the UN. No more subsidies for dozens of nations.
> Well, the answer to this is simple. The only nation with the ability and the demonstrated willingness to risk life, limb and treasure is the US. The rest of the American continent cannot and has never taken this role.
Canada would like a word.
US deaths in WW2: 420k
US population in 1940: 132000k
US death rate from WW2: 318/100k
Canada deaths in WW2: 43k
Canada population in 1940: 11300k
Canada death rate from WW2: 380/100k
US deaths in WW1: 117k
US population in 1918: 103000k
US death rate from WW2: 114/100k
Canada deaths in WW2: 66k
Canada population in 1918: 8100k
Canada death rate from WW2: 814/100k
More recently, in Afghanistan, Canada sent its military and incurred 0.5 deaths/100k population. The US military incurred deaths of 0.8 deaths/100k. US contractors took a hit of 1.2 deaths/100k.
The military death rates per 100k military members sent were 390/100k for Canada and 290/100k for the US.
Took my first couple of Uber Waymo rides today in Austin. The experience was pleasant, felt perfectly safe and very well implemented. Yes, it did do a couple of interesting things here and there. In all cases it felt like it made decisions in favor of safety, which is good. In fact, the rides felt just like how I taught my kids to drive, patient, safe and looking ahead for planning and making decisions.
I also thought about Tesla's problem, which is interesting: No recognition whatsoever.
This, I think, is critical. If you are in Austin, it is impossible not to see Waymo's driving around seemingly everywhere. You see them, watch them interact, interact with them (crossing the street, etc.) and start thinking "I have to try this".
I have no clue if there are Tesla robot taxi's driving around Austin. Why? Because I can see Waymo's on the road a block away and recognize them due to the very visible hardware stack they carry. Tesla's? They all look the same. no clue what a Tesla autonomous vehicle might look like, much less see them in action and watch them navigate traffic at a distance and close-up.
So, for a few days, the thought was "I have to ride a Waymo" and Tesla did not even remotely own any part of that sentiment.
They have a big problem. It's the lack of non-trivial physical branding.
I thankfully learned that lesson about twenty years go. Google had a product that allowed you to park domains with them for ad insertion to generate some revenue. Owning over 400 domains at the time I though, why not?
The process through which you parked the domains with Google entailed loading a file with the list of domains, after which each one would, in turn, be approved or denied. All 400+ domains were approved.
A few days later I received a cryptic message about unusual click activity on the domains and the Google account I had at the time was shut down immediately without recourse. I visited a few of the pages (not all 400, maybe a dozen) as they were approved to see what they put on them. Of course I did not click on anything. I might be accused of being stupid, but I am not an idiot. Besides, I pretty much knew the income would be a rounding error, maybe a few cups of coffee per year, maybe.
Well, nobody to call, text, email or send smoke signals to. Nothing.
That's when I decided I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else. I can't trust them with anything that is business related and anything personally important.
Gmail? No way. I pay for Zoho mail for all the email accounts for my businesses and I am very happy about the product, the service and the isolation from a despotic company that can shut down your life in a microsecond.
> I would never do business with Google. All I use from them is search. That's it. Nothing else.
Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
> Given that's their main business and they are likely to graveyard whatever domain penny business you've got burnt by anyway, you're still doing a lot of business with them
That's a gross misinterpretation of what "doing business with" means.
Yes I do, that's why I pay for Kagi instead of having ads injected into the top of my results page and a company who's business model is based on me clicking on ads instead of actually finding what I want.
One difference to something like email is that you can change search providers with minimal effort. There’s no server-side context to back up or migrate, no third parties involved: you just use a different URL.
When you get bad results from a search engine, you refine the query. Maybe try a different search engine! You have options. When it's your personal email address you don't have options. You are at the mercy of said email provider. You can run that email yourself, sure, but that isn't for everyone. Does that explain the difference?
Pinterest is useful. I mostly use it to get industrial design ideas on some projects. They do send other email without stupid titles. Those are "like" fine.
> it could also hack your home network, delete your family pictures folder, log into your bank account and wire all your money to shrimp charities.
It's interesting that Jason Calacanis is fully committed to OpenClaw. In a recent podcast he said that at a run rate around $100K a year per agent, if not more. They are providing each agent with a full set of tools, access to online paid LLM accounts, etc.
These are experiments you can only run if you can risk cash at those levels and see what happens. Watching it closely.
Interesting. I have worked in ITAR environments with serious security and have never experienced 30 minute lines at the door. In fact, I can't remember lines at all. Hard to understand what happened here.
Was it really a single turnstile for a building with over 10 floors? That's kind of silly, isn't it? Mass transit operations have this figured out. Most recently for me, taking the monorail in Las Vegas for the CES show. No problems for the most part. It would be interesting to know what this company actually installed.
I don't see how any of this wasn't already a problem. In the story, everyone shows up to the office at the same time, how did they use to work out the elevator issue? This story has a bunch of AI telltales so I doubt it's real anyway.
In the story, they implemented table (building) and row (floor) level permissions simultaneously. So you had to swipe into the building, then in the elevator to get the elevator to stop at your floor.
I guess I could see contention possibly happening as described if everybody arrived almost simultaneously and both swiping points had very high latency. But why not keep the door checkpoints armed and disable the elevator swipes? That makes me think it's a contrived example.
> The thing is, what are the parents to do beyond restricting things?
Well, I can't speak for parents (as in all parents). I can, however, tell you what we did.
When two of my kids were young we gave them iPods. The idea was to load a few fun educational applications (I had written and published around 10 at the time). Very soon they asked for Clash of Clans to play for a couple of hours on Saturdays. We said that was OK provided they stuck to that rule.
Fast forward to maybe a couple of months later. After repeated warnings that they were not sticking to the plan and promises to do so, I found them playing CoC under the blankets at 11 PM, when they were supposed to be sleeping and had school the next day.
I did not react and gave no indication of having witnessed that.
A couple of days later I asked each of them to their room and asked them to place their top ten favorite toys on the floor.
I then produced a pair of huge garbage bags and we put the toys in them, one bag for each of the kids.
I also asked for their iPods.
No anger, no scolding, just a conversation at a normal tone.
I asked them to grab the bags and follow me.
We went outside, I opened the garbage bin and told them to throw away their toys. It got emotional very quickly. I also gave them the iPods and told them to toss them into the bin.
After the crying subsided I explained that trust is one of the most delicate things in the world and that this was a consequence of them attempting to deceive us by secretly playing CoC when they knew the rules. This was followed by daily talks around the dinner table to explain just how harmful and addictive this stuff could be, how it made them behave and how important it was to honor promises.
Another week later I asked them to come into the garage with me and showed them that I had rescued their favorite toys from the garbage bin. The iPods were gone forever. And now there was a new rule: They could earn one toy per month by bringing top grades from school, helping around the house, keeping their rooms clean and organized and, in general, being well behaved.
That was followed by ten months of absolutely perfect kids learning about earning something they cherished every month. Of course, the behavior and dedication to their school work persisted well beyond having earned their last toy. Lots of talks, going out to do things and positive feedback of course.
They never got the iPods back. They never got social media accounts. They did not get smart phones until much older.
To this day, now well into university, they thank me for having taken away their iPods.
So, again, I don't know about parents in the aggregate, but I don't think being a good parent is difficult.
You are not there to be an all-enabling friend, you are there to guide a new human through life and into adulthood. You are there to teach them everything and, as I still tell them all the time, aim for them to be better than you.
My parents took the same approach and it helped, but I will anecdotally point out that kids have played video games under covers for a while, even when I was young, I remember getting in trouble for playing this spyro game n' watch clone from mcdonalds at night, or gameboy with one of those lamps that plugged into the serial port. When I become a parent, I think I'd feel understanding of something like this, but would likely still only give them access to hardware like cell-enabled apple watches or DSes. The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful, and push you to spend real money on fake things. I've seen many peers who were engaged in CoC as kids get into online gambling and sports gambling recently, it doesn't sit right.
> The issue I take with modern games like CoC is that they are psychologically engineered to be mentally harmful
Precisely. I am not saying I am perfect as a parent or that this was the best possible approach to the situation we had. Nobody is and perfect parenting is an absolute myth.
I knew full well just how addictive gaming could be because I experienced it in my 20's. Needless to say that the "shock and awe" consequence to their deceit was not the result of a single data point. We had been seeing changes in behavior over time (six months or so). The objective was three fold: Take away the device that delivered the addictive behavior. Take away something of value to them. Make them earn it back with positive behavior.
The decision was not planned and the consequences were not communicated in advance. Few things in life are like that. Sometimes people discover the consequences of their actions (or understand them) when they are sprung on them because of something they did. Drunk driving being one possible (though not perfect) example of this.
In this case, it worked. Perhaps we got lucky. Not sure. I also did highlight that I cannot speak for all parents. I did the best I thought made sense at the time. Based on the outcome, many years later, I can say it worked.
To the critics on this thread: Your mileage may vary. Some of the comments sound juvenile, perhaps you'll understand if you ever become a parent and face similar circumstances. Then see what you think of someone who thinks they know better from behind a keyboard than you did in the moment and without having to be responsible for the outcomes (which is a multi-year commitment).
You probably figured, but I am likely the same age to your kids, I agree that the similar "shock and awe" nature with which my parents treated this stuff was warranted, and in fact I wish they went a little further, but even hiding the batteries to all devices and only allowing them out for a couple hours a day was progress. The problem I see coming my way is that the cultural monolith has degraded to the point where an online kid and offline kid can't coexist, it was already pretty strained when I was a high school student in the '10s, isolation isn't the answer, and in my own experience while one can tolerate being "weird", the lack of a shared culture is often dislocating. At this point I'm just hoping there's somewhere I could find with with like-minded parents
What you highlight here is a vexing modern problem. Today, my kids, between 20 and 27, actively socialize with friends through gaming. Seen in isolation gaming is a monumental waste of time. However, there's this social element that I think is pervasive today that cannot be ignored.
Dating myself, I fully experienced the negative side of gaming back around the time of games like Duke Nukem, etc. I worked nights for a few years. I'd get home at 2 AM fully awake from having driven home. I'd sit down and play for four hours, maybe more. No social element at all in those days. I quick when I started to have nightmares and realized it was because of the games. Decades later, with kids, there was no way I was going to let a ten year old destroy their brains with an addictive substance in the form of a game.
Going back to culture and socialization, I don't really know what the answer might be today, much less in the future. Maybe AI friends will be crucially important (I shudder to think this could be true). Some of it comes down to family structure and dynamics. Our cultural makeup means that we are very often in family-and-friends gathering with 20 to 50 people. That does help kids relate to humans more than keyboards, yet the danger is still there.
Maybe this is where schools might need to become far closer to community organizations than (sorry, I have to...) centers for indoctrination. I attended private school most of my young life. One of the interesting aspects of this is that the parents all knew each other and socialized. We would go to each others homes, throw parties, travel together, etc. This is very different from the (again, I'm sorry, I must...) typical US school-as-a-cattle-ranch approach where you have a high school with 4000 students. I know I am being very opinionated and maybe a bit elitist due to my young experience, it should be noted that this was in a third world country...so, when I say "private school" the reader should not imagine what that might mean in the US.
My point is that things are becoming very complex at a social level and we, as a society, need to make sure that kids grow up to be solid adults. Today there are so many opportunities for them get lost in screens that I truly don't know what social problems might come out of this mess. Games are but one part of it.
It's true, having gone to public school and seeing other public schools, you're basically either getting austerity curriculum forced on teachers served in a new deal skeleton with 50 coats of paint or you're at some cargo-cult charter school run like a private prison. I'm sure in a decade or so when I'm ready the answer will be more clear, especially as it seems we're in the middle of several paradigm shifts, but I appreciate your answers. I just hope by then we'll see an end to this pointless peacocking with extracurriculars and activities. I still remember the feeling of wanting to be treated more like an adult as a kid, to do adult things like own a cell phone or use power tools and being given facsimiles, if I could put my kids in a Montessori school maybe that'd be good but they feel like the kind of place that exposes are posted about on HN, maybe worth more research. As the role of college changes from one that makes taste to one that makes money, learning motivation and moderation will be the most important.
I can't tell whether "destroying all your favorite toys" was a clear expectation the kids already had as a possible outcome of their choices.
__________
1. Teach children about consequences... by using clear expectations, timely feedback, and proportional responses.
2. Teach children about consequences... by allowing wrongdoing to become a festering mess until it "justifies" some big punishment that comes as deliberate emotional trauma and surprise.
Separately from asking which one is more "effective" at conditioning an immediate behavior, each choice also affects how those kids are going to behave when they are in any position to set and enforce rules. Being a role-model is hard.
The issue with any parent's narrative, including yours, is that it's one-sided. We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement. Some people are going to say what their family wants them to hear and only open up to professionals or a neutral third party.
> We'd need the story told by the children-turned-adults to make any fair judgement.
True enough. Of course, you are not going to get that in this case. All I can say is that those commenting here about potentially cataclysmic consequences are likely precisely the kind of people who will practice the kind of soft "friend class" parenting that can result in really troubled kids. If they even have kids at all, because some of the comments by others sound infantile.
The other narrative that is utterly false is that of role models in the negative sense. Almost all of you are one or two generations away from a culture and style of parenting where beating the kids was considered normal and even good parenting. An era where teachers beating kids in school was also normal and accepted. And yet, that has largely not survived the generational divide except in some segments of some cultures.
Raising kids and being a role model isn't a matter of single events or experiences, it is, like most other things in the human condition, a matter of building a relationship over time and understanding that life usually is a rollercoaster ride, not a straight-and-flat road.
Product management --and managers-- can be, shall we say, interesting.
I was recently involved with a company that wanted us to develop a product that would be disruptive enough to enter an established market, make waves and shock it.
We did just that. We ran a deep survey of all competing products, bought a bunch of them, studied absolutely everything about them, how they were used and their users. Armed with that information, we produced a set of specifications and user experience requirements that far exceeded anything in the market.
We got green-lit to deliver a set of prototypes to present at a trade show. We did that.
The prototypes were presented and they truly blew everyone away. Blogs, vlogs, users, everyone absolutely loved what we created and the sense was that this was a winning product.
And then came reality. Neither the product manager nor the CTO (and we could add the CEO and CFO to the list) had enough understanding and experience in the domain to take the prototypes to market. It would easily have required a year or two of learning before they could function in that domain.
What did they do? They dumbed down the product specification to force it into what they understood and what engineering building blocks they already had. Square peg solidly and violently pounded into a round hole.
The outcome? Oh, they built a product alright. They sure did. And it flopped, horribly flopped, as soon as it was introduced and made available. Nobody wanted it. It was not competitive. It offered nothing disruptive. It was a bad clone of everything already occupying space in that ecosystem. Game over.
The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
When someone says something like "I am not sure that's a good idea for a startup. There's competition." My first though is: Never assume that competitors know what they are doing, are capable and always make the right decisions without making mistakes. You don't always need a better product, you need better execution.
Replace the C levels with AI. The C suite is am impediment to innovation and progress. They are the office politics mentioned in this entire thread. The person with the vision and the strategy is a random person out there that doesn't even work for your company. Hell, you could have done it.
> The point is: Technology companies are not immune to human failings, ego, protectionism/turf guarding, bad decisions, bad management, etc.
They only accidentally succeed in spite of those things. They have those things more than existing businesses precisely because having too much money masks the pressures that would force solid execution and results. When you have 80% profit margins, you can show up drunk.
The video was likely recovered from local flash memory on the camera itself. These kinds of devices are not uploading raw video to the cloud.
There are several reasons for that. The first is that you cannot rely on connectivity 100% of the time. Second, if you can have the camera run image processing and compression locally, you don't have to dedicate a massive amount of processing resources at the data center to run the processing. Imagine ten or a hundred million cameras. Where would you want the image processing to run? Right.
My guess is that they either went to Google to perhaps connect the camera to a sandboxed testing rig that could extract locally-stored video data or they removed the flash device, offloaded the raw data and then extracted video from that data. This last option could also have the advantage of having less compression (architecture dependent).
Decades ago I was personally involved in recovering and helping analyze surveillance video data for the prosecution in the OJ Simpson case. Back then, it was tape.
One of the techniques that was considered (I can't publicly state what was actually done) was to digitize raw data right off the read heads on the VCR's spinning drum. You could then process this data using advanced algorithms which could produce better results than the electronics in even the most expensive professional tape players of he era.
Once you step away from the limitations of a product --meaning, you are not engineering a product, you are mining for information-- all kinds of interesting and creative out-of-the-box opportunities present themselves.
> I truly do not understand the appeal of proto board.
I didn't understand your comment until I looked at the pictures in the article. To me "proto board" has always meant wire-wrapping. I lost count of how many of my designs back in the dark ages started as wire-wrapped protoboards. CPU cards, drive controllers, memory cards, motor drivers, keypads, I/O cards and myriad other projects.
In fact, I still have my OK Industries wire-wrapping gun[0]. I still have pins, sockets, boards, wire, etc. I probably reach for them once every couple of years these days. On those rare occasions when it's the middle of the night or a weekend and I have to wire-up a small board (nothing substantial). It's fast and works well for the right kind of project.
The problem with wire-wrap (and breadboards) is that, once clock frequencies (or frequencies in general in analog designs) rise the capacitive and inductive effects quickly conspire against you and make it impossible to build circuits that work. This is where the OP's approach can provide a bit of a bridge between a full PCB and wire-wrap/breadboard. I have done hand-wired (just like the article) boards with twisted pairs and carefully routed point-to-point connections. I never used magnet wire, just kynar or teflon wire-wrap wire.
[0] Mine is exactly like the one in figure 4 in this article. It works with spools of wire and auto-strips as you wire a board. It is very fast. Not sure why the article shows pre-stripped wire, the tool does the work for you auto-magically. I didn't read the article, maybe they are using a bit that does not strip (why?).
Others have mentioned China as a benevolent actor of sorts. I find this interesting, maybe even laughable. China is not interested in coming to the aid of anyone in the world. I am not saying this to criticize China. I believe this is purely a statement of fact: They don't do that.
If we pulled it forward to modern times, China, for example, would not put it all on the table and lose nearly 500K lives to save Europe in a world war. They exist for one thing, and one thing only: To do business that benefits their nation. And that's it.
Again, not being critical, just stating what I believe to be a fact. I can also say that I envy that focus to some extent. It's "China first" to an extreme level.
OK, so, if we accept my premise: Who in the world would come to the aid of societies in need?
Let's also agree that perfection does not and will note ever exist on this planet. So, insisting on perfect interventions, actions and outcomes is not rational. We are --humanity-- not perfect.
Well, the answer to this is simple. The only nation with the ability and the demonstrated willingness to risk life, limb and treasure is the US. The rest of the American continent cannot and has never taken this role. Europe has self-decimated over the decades in terms of these capabilities. So, they can't. Africa? Asia? Who's left? Nobody.
Without a doubt, the Arab world --or Middle East in general-- has been a complex neighborhood for quite some time. Yet, things have gotten massively worse when a country like Iran sponsors murderous terrorists in the region and --as confirmed by the current conflict-- makes it a point to build-up a Middle-East-Annihilation arsenal of missiles that could have almost no other purpose than to obliterate everything around them and even as far as Europe.
And then you add the potential for some of these missiles carrying nuclear warheads.
And then you add a regime that simply has not been a rational actor.
So, what do you do? Do you wait until they are a nuclear power? Just like we waited for Hitler to come to power and kill millions of Jews and others? How much slack do you give a regime who's publicly stated goals, for decades, have been the complete destruction of others?
Without a doubt, the actions of the last month or so have not been perfect. They will not be. That's just reality. For example, I don't understand how sinking their entire navy, destroying their air force, destroying their anti-aircraft capabilities, some 20,000 sorties and targets later...we still have to make a deal with them to keep Hormuz open.
How does that happen? Drones and missiles, of course. What is remarkable is that you'd think we would have mitigated that danger to the point where the international waters of the strait would no longer be threatened. I don't understand why stupid reporters never ask this question. Well, I answered it right there.
And yet, to go back to the thought: Who else but the US could have even approached setting Iran back far enough to make the neighborhood less of an issue? China? They would never. They have happily been selling Iran weapons hardware and know-how. They do not exist to benefit the rest of the world. China first. That's the policy.
Can anyone imagine just how far worse --horrific, really-- this would be if Iran had gone nuclear in the next few months or couple of years? This would truly be unimaginable. We've already seen that NATO does not seem to be willing to engage and might be largely useless.
So, while not perfect, at this point in time I believe that this is one of those "treating the cancer early" scenarios. Iran was on a straight path to being a nuclear nation run by deranged theocratic lunatics. This, while not ideal, not perfect, not desirable, not pretty, is likely a good thing. Now it has to end with the right outcome, whose minimum definition is to denuclearize Iran. From there, it would be nice to see the wonderful Iranian people get out from under the oppression they have been living under for so long. If you know any Iranians (we have many friends) you know they are actively rooting for the US to succeed and are thankful. Same with Venezuelans, BTW.
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