The companies with billions on the line didn't seem to think Iran's threats to attack ships were impotent.
Their military capabilities are diminished in the short term, but if their ability to impose a toll on the Strait of Hormuz holds then that's a massive win for Iran in the medium/long term. A mere $2M per ship represents 10% of Iran's GDP. They would become the only country in the world to impose a toll on international waters, and they would have established a defensive deterrent almost as effective as having a nuclear bomb.
They took on the most powerful military ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's hard to spin that as a loss for Iran.
The thing to remember about Iran is it's a country run by religious fanatics. Ask a secular democracy if they would trade the lives of most of their political and military leaders for a 10% boost to GDP and they would look at you like you're insane. Ask 86 year old Ali Khamenei if he would trade dying from an Israeli bomb landing on his house for Iran establishing a stranglehold on global oil trade and securing $100 billion in annual toll revenue, and he would have been ecstatic.
Yes, we basically pressed a magic button that eliminated two layers of leadership (as well as hundreds if not thousands of civilians). Now, what strategic objectives have we accomplished?
My initial experiments are not encouraging. I have a basic planning prompt that includes instructions not to edit any files or implement anything. Qwen-3.6-Plus will consistently ignore that completely and proceed with implementation. I expect that kind of behavior from small models I run locally, not a hosted closed model claiming to compete with the frontier models.
The helium that goes into balloons is mostly a byproduct of industrial grade helium production that would otherwise just go to waste. It's not pure enough for industrial uses.
You could always purify it, it's just uneconomic to do so at a smaller scale. But if the price rises enough, that will change and no one will be using helium for party balloons.
Ty for sharing and agree. I think there is confusion with some folks in the comments for this post confusing inference profitability and plan profitability. Most plans as we can tell are probably teetering the line of profitability and that’s why we have seen some like Cursor really tighten how many tokens you get.
Assuming the AI maximalist digital god bros are wrong, there will always be some demand for programmers, the question is how much. It's not hard to see a future where programming goes the way of farming where the demand for small-scale farming still exists but at a tiny fraction of what it once was.
Well you're trying to convince them to reject their actual experience. Better tooling and better models have indeed solved a lot of the limitations models faced a couple years ago.
I also believe coding isn't going to disappear, but AI skeptics have been mostly doing a combination of moving the goalposts and straight up denial over the last few years.
I've been trying out AI over the past month (mostly because of management trying to force it down my throat), and have not found it to be terribly conducive to actually helping me on most tasks. It still evidences a lot of the failure modes I was talking about 3 years ago. And yet the entire time, it's the AI boosters who keep trying to say that any skepticism is invalid because it's totally different than how it was three months ago.
I haven't seen a lot of goalpost moving on either side; the closest I've seen is from the most hyperbolic of AI supporters, who are keeping the timeline to supposed AGI or AI superintelligence or whatnot a fairly consistent X months from now (which isn't really goalpost-moving).
pi.dev is worth checking out. The basic idea is they provide a minimalist coding agent that's designed to be easy to extend, so you can tailor the harness to suit your needs without any bloat.
One of the best features is they haven't been noticed by Anthropic yet so you can still use your Claude subscription.
Being a net exporter of a global commodity is only relevant in an extremely acute crisis (e.g. WWIII).
Plus one of the reasons why we export so much oil is because it's cheaper to import oil to a refinery in New Jersey from Saudi Arabia than to get it there from Texas due to some very stupid US laws.
The Jones Act requires that all goods transported by water between US ports be carried on ships that were built in the US, fly the US flag, and crewed by US citizens. That effectively makes it impossible to ship oil between US states at scale without a direct pipeline.
Though to be clear I believe we would still be a net exporter without the Jones Act, it's just one of those weird things about the US oil industry.
Their military capabilities are diminished in the short term, but if their ability to impose a toll on the Strait of Hormuz holds then that's a massive win for Iran in the medium/long term. A mere $2M per ship represents 10% of Iran's GDP. They would become the only country in the world to impose a toll on international waters, and they would have established a defensive deterrent almost as effective as having a nuclear bomb.
They took on the most powerful military ever seen and lived to tell the tale. It's hard to spin that as a loss for Iran.
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