When I read the article, I was taken aback by the clear references to fraud in the before and after photos.

We're in an absolutely golden age of grift.

Depends on what you mean by "win". It would be possible to go in, topple the regime and secure the nuclear material. But only at astronomical cost and years of blowback

"Regime Change" has become a modern term for vassalization. We should not be surprised that countries with no reason to be a US vassal, and no long-term ties to the US refuse to remain vassals.

So then what would we achieve? nuclear material is cheap (10s of billions) relative to a multi-decade occupation (single digit trillions). It's undoubtedly true that Iran would revert to it's preferred form of government, geopolitical orientation, and nuclear capability once the US left.

Winning a war means achieving your political goals while preventing the enemy from achieving theirs. Most of the time, you've won the war when the enemy effectively admits they lost.

The lack of will to use sufficient force to win a war is fundamentally no different from not having that force in the first place. Both are equally real constraints on your ability to win the war.

How’d that plan work out in Iraq or Afghanistan, both much smaller, less armed countries? Decades and trillions spent, and what exactly did the US “win”?

The US won the removal of a regime in Iraq that strongly opposed Iran. </sarcasm>

All those ships stuck on either side of the Strait of Hormuz and their insurers would beg to differ.

A pipeline will circumvent Iranian tolls, but would be vulnerable to Iranian strikes in a war.

Probably a risk worth taking; defending a pipeline is much easier than escorting huge, slow-moving ships through a 24km-wide Strait laced with mines and peppered by artillery and missiles.

As opposed to a single continuous structure in a well known location, full of flammable liquids?

Pipelines can be protected. Just putting it in the ground for example. Or you build a "bomb" proof shelter over it - Iran's missiles are not bunker busters, we know how powerful they are and can design for that. Air defense systems are getting better too.

I did one of these experiments around 2011, and because it was so obvious that the experiment was contrived, there was a lot of misdirection around the actual experiment, which was testing something totally different from the pretense. Like different responses to font color or something like that.

Or, they actually do have an intuition of the real objective and they skip steps to more efficiently skip to the outcome.

This may be more correct than you know. Chefs actually don't cook food customers eat. They plan the menu and manage the operations. The cooks cook.

They know how to cook and can if needed, but usually don't bother as they have 15 other restaurants to manage.

I lost an audio mixer to a bad surge last year. I don't know whether it was additional load or just really bad fluctuations that damaged the device. Nothing else bit the dust, but the, digital board in this mixer got bricked.

How did you know it was a power surge? Not doubting your comment, just interested in knowing if this ever happened to me

Just saw this days later - I'm not sure if it was a surge specifically, but it got bricked after a really wacky power swing. So maybe not a surge, exactly.

Interesting, so a prompt that causes a couple dozen tool calls will end up costing in the tens of dollars?

It essentially depends on how many back-and-forth calls are required. If the model returns a request for multiple calls at once, then the reply can contain all responses and you only pay once.

If the model requests tool calls one-by-one (e.g. because it needs to see the response from the previous call before deciding on the next) then you have to pay for each back-and-forth.

If you look at popular coding harnesses, they all use careful prompting to try to encourage models to do the former as much as possible. For example opencode shouts "USING THE BATCH TOOL WILL MAKE THE USER HAPPY" [1] and even tells the model it did a good job when it uses it [2].

[1] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/66e8c57ed1077814c... [2] https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/blob/66e8c57ed1077814c...

Not necessarily, take a look at ex OpenApi Responses resource, you can get multiple tool calls in one response and of course reply with multiple results.

I like the idea of smarter filtering. But I wonder how a modal interacts with automatic form filling.

I don't care for the chaotically ordered list of countries after the suggested country.

I think a better version would be nonmodal, but with a modal button to expose more powerful browsing.

I also question why we have to fill out so many forms in the first place. We should have better ways by now to get frequently used bundles of info to counterparties.