CMay

Google provided incorrect settings and an imperfect template.

Unsloth modified the template and then finetuned their own version of the model to optimize for some benchmarks as a means of validating quants.

Google and Llama.cpp then adopt template changes by default, so anyone downloading the new model or even using the original model will now automatically be using it incorrectly.

Llama.cpp also uses the same inference setting defaults regardless which version of the model you use and some settings are simply defaults it uses for all models.

Then even if you account for all of these, you have to be using Gemma 4 itself correctly, which many people do not.

All of these little changes and inconsistencies hurt some of the model's original capabilities. Even if you go directly to Google's repo and download the full float 16 weights with the template they have there now, you cannot simply assume you're getting the best results.

For me that moment was Gemma 4 12B QAT. You're not suddenly going to start throwing your hardest programming problems at Gemma 4 12B QAT, it is still 15B parameters less. It's more that, aside from pelican art which isn't what local models are for, I didn't see anything on Simon's post that it couldn't assist with or largely succeed at.

It can run 80-100t/s on a laptop, can understand images natively and do bounding boxes, read tiny text, understands audio natively as well and can transcribe or translate anything you say, can do accurate long context retrieval with pretty large context windows, tool calling, excellent reasoning and is very token efficient.

It's only 7GB including the mmproj or 8GB with MTP. The Qwen 3.8 27B model Simon was using is ~18GB with MTP+mmproj, rather than 17GB alone. The point is not really that you compare these models directly, but that Gemma 4 12B QAT was really a special moment in model releases deserving of a similar reaction relative to its size, but was mutilated by Google themselves, Unsloth and Llama.cpp.

The overall appreciation I think we're seeing this year in particular is that people are easily surprised when multiple things are improving simultaneously which produce seemingly exponential changes. It isn't just that models are getting smaller, or that reasoning is getting better, or that speculative decoding is becoming mainstream, or that models can understand audio and images better now, or that they can reliably call tools which expands their capabilities, or that context windows are getting larger, or that accurate retrieval is improved, or that.... and so on. It's all of them narrowing in at once that is starting to make local models incredible and truly useful for far more use cases on the existing hardware people already have.

The nature of LLM benchmarking is that they seem to saturate public benchmarks so quick, they are a uniquely efficient case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

I'm not asking anyone to take my word, they can believe or not and in practice people should be taking signals from a variety of places and doing their own testing to see how models behave in their own use cases. What I'm measuring and why I'm measuring it may not be the most important metric for your specific use case.

Most other models are simply failing at these tasks. I think the tasks are relevant to overall model capability, but they are not the only metric. You don't give a jellyfish a tool and expect it to produce wonders, so the other capabilities of the model matter.

> In my experience MTP's speed increase doesn't seem to justify the apparent loss of success at the edge

If you set manual MTP settings, you'll override dynamic adjustments the inference engine will try to do. Sometimes the dynamic adjustments aren't optimal. With the settings I use, MTP is always a net win.

> What exactly are you doing that the prompt is eating an entire 65536 window?

I'm not using the full context window.

> Surely it would be better to let it use any number of approaches that call tools to access that in parts and reason/summarize to an output file as it works through the whole thing.

Tools would not help.

So long as they have flash attention enabled, Llama.cpp enables Sliding Window Attention by default for Gemma 4 models. Even if they're using Ollama or LM Studio I would expect those to mostly be doing the right things.

Gemma 4 12B, Gemma 4 12B QAT, Gemma 4 31B, Gemma 4 31B QAT

Gemma 4 26BA4B would get close, but not quite and sometimes even get stuck in loops despite a repeat penalty.

Do not use any newer updated templates or Unsloth fixes. Use older official templates that released with the models on the huggingface repo. The template here worked: https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-12B-it/tree/657684fef0...

llama-server --model "model.gguf" -fa on -np 1 --jinja --ctx-size 262144 -b 768 -ub 768 --cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v q4_0 --repeat-penalty 1.1 --chat-template-file "chat_template.jinja"

If you don't explicitly point to the template file, then llama.cpp will either use the template inside the model file or it will use its own template copy and your results may vary. Obviously some of the template fixes are useful to people, so it depends if you're having problems with tool calling or can't fix the tool calling in other ways for your scenario.

My experience with the QAT models was that quantizing v to q4_0 gave me better results than q8_0 or even f16. I think the Gemma QAT models may have been QAT trained to expect a q4_0 quantized v cache. If you're not using a QAT model, I would leave both at f16.

Another thing aside from using the QAT models and a Q4_0 v cache since you're having trouble fitting the models, is that you don't have to use the mmproj if you don't intend to use vision. If you need vision, but are hurting on VRAM, then you should be using --no-mmproj-offload. That will keep the mmproj loaded in system RAM instead of on your GPU. Loading images will be a little bit slower, but it can still be quite fast and you'll have more breathing room on your GPU. If you don't provide the mmproj file on the command line at all, then it won't load it anyway. If you're using some program like LM Studio, a simple thing you can do is move the mmproj and mtp files out of the directory for the model so LM studio can't find them and then it won't load them at all.

For Qwen 3.8 27B, doing any quantizing definitely hurt results a lot, so in my case I used: llama-server --model "Qwen3.8-27B-UD-Q4_K_XL.gguf" --spec-type draft-mtp --spec-draft-p-min 0.35 --spec-draft-n-max 2 -fa on -np 1 --jinja --ctx-size 65536 -b 768 -ub 768 --cache-type-k f16 --cache-type-v f16

Well, I will say:

#1: it does not require deep world knowledge, because that's not what local models are for.

#2: it directly attacks drive-by understanding, overly linear processing training, poor attention mechanisms, poor reasoning patterns or lazy assumptions that ignore very easy low hanging fruit.

#3: it requires solid instruction following in the face of errors. a lot of models will run into errors and then fall back into some kind of error recovery process that bypasses instruction following.

#4: does not require prompt fine tuning to tweak to each individual model. they all seem to understand.

#5: not unfair. almost every model demonstrates in their reasoning that they have the necessary information that if reasoned about appropriately, could arrive at the correct answer.

#6: not designed to add unnecessary complication that it is intended to exhaust reasoning budgets of any sort, so it is not inherently unfair to models that reason a little more or less. for example, it does not require unnecessary reasoning soaks (ie: hiding the prompt inside base-64 encoding)

#7: has real world use and is probably applicable to overall ability to generalize.

#8: can be scaled up as models get better.

#9: is a very good indicator of how bad a model is falling apart under various inference settings.

Yeah, Glimmer is excellent. You don't really test Glimmer with one-shots, because it's explicitly designed for multi-turn solution finding. The way I see it, if I've got a task that could be done either agentic or requires a lot of context (for example, dumping 600KB of API documentation and another 300KB of codebase for a project) then I would reach for Glimmer easy and it seems like it could get there most of the time.

Qwen might be useful to bring out for a second opinion on some more focused details that are largely information complete. Like, use Glimmer to bring together all the relevant critical data and evaluate what the actual problems are, then maybe prototype a solution. If it's still acting up, maybe throw the resulting context at Qwen and let it meditate on it.

I think there was some study done where ideally you would want to throw a bunch of different models at a problem since they don't all have the same perspective or diagnosis on what the problems or the solutions are.

Credit where it's due. Qwen 3.8 27B is only the second local model after Gemma 4 that managed to correctly reason through one of my private benchmarks. It took 5x as many tokens to do it and 12m30s with MTP enabled, but it did do it.

Gemma 4 reasoned through it more implicitly, while Qwen 3.8 reasoned more explicitly. Laguna and Muse Glimmer failed hard on it, though they're useful for other tasks.

The VRAM usage seems way less efficient than Gemma 4 or Glimmer though, with 32K of context taking 2.5GB of VRAM. With those, even with MTP or a DFlash model loaded, you could still fit 256k-768k of context. With Qwen 3.8 27B I can't even fit 128k if I quantize V to Q4_0. Maybe with some trial and error I can find some settings that perform well enough with a larger context window that it's still useful for longer tasks.

Lots more testing to do, though I was getting some decent results out of Muse Glimmer which was more than twice as fast and supported huge context windows, managing to solve some bugs that Gemma 4 struggled with. I can't even begin to throw that task at Qwen, because just the prompt alone would use the entire context window and then it would reason for probably that same amount.

If you've got a 32GB card, it should be a decent model even if it really is memory hungry.

EDIT: Tried a few kv cache quantization settings, but it failed with those. I designed this benchmark to be pretty brutal in the face of KLD and any reasoning quality loss, so it's not too surprising. Gemma 4's QAT held up pretty well, at least and could consistently complete it.

> For example, there is a legal requirement that Congress authorize military action longer than 60 days. They’re advancing a theory that this is unnecessary or magically resets a timer anytime a cease fire is declared but that doesn’t make it lawful, any more than those guys saying they can only be tried in admiralty courts are lawful just because they don’t want to stop what they’re doing.

https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

"With minor variations in emphasis, basically all administrations since the enactment of the War Powers Resolution10 in 1973 have maintained that Con gress cannot constitutionally restrict the President’s commander-in-chief powers grounded in Article II of the Constitution."

This is not new. It is not Republican or Democrat and pressing harder on this point prevents Iran or China from thinking they can simply wait 60 days. That would not be good for the military in harm's way or for encouraging negotiation.

> We’re deterring China by losing to a much weaker opponent while simultaneously giving China a huge economic and political advantage? Giving Iran the ability to tax shipping for the first time and doing it in Chinese yuan is a deterrent in the same sense that you deter a dog by feeding it sausages.

The US attacked Iran to achieve a set of goals. The strait was not really a primary part of the initial goals, but still it's a forced issue. They are losing so badly that their only remaining option is to harass their neighbors, which will further weaken Iran's position in the region for the next 50 years. China was sanction proofing itself so that it could have breathing room to take Taiwan, but attacking Russian oil infrastructure, attacking Venezuela and attacking Iran now has China drawing from its strategic oil reserves. The less reserves they have, the less sanction proofed they are. The less likely they are to make an attempt on Taiwan. Still, we're not attacking Iran only to deter China. Remember, Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu on top of all the other awful things they've done over the past 50 decades.

> I can see why you prefer to believe this but it sure is striking to see that politically-incorrect gun owners have their guns used to justify killing them while politically-correct ones are seen as having a right to carry theirs even when actively making illegal threats.

Look, the number of people that die this way is so infinitely small that it is not a remotely relevant part of life. You are more likely to get struck by lightning or die in a commercial airliner accident. It is not some standard policy to simply go around shooting people who have guns and have some kind of political leaning. That would probably be a hate crime. I don't doubt mistakes happen, but the few people dying this way are generally violent and not innocent. People spread video clips and sound bites that intentionally encourage a certain interpretation in order to promote hate and distrust. It's almost always propaganda. This is not simply some Rublican/Democrat thing, this is propaganda and psychological manipulation funded by countries like Russia, China and Iran.

The number of people that agree with something does not inherently make it good or true. History has proven that.

Many people don't own guns, partially because violent crime in general has declined significantly over the past 200 years. The justifications for ownership still exist, though.

The US is under attack, so the amount of anti-US propaganda is at an extreme. The lies told about the US government or what it's doing or why it's doing it are extreme.

The US is applying unitary executive theory to bypass gridlock in congress while still trying to operate within the law. They are surrounded by lawyers and thinktanks to work through this, which is far from lawless. The reason we're doing this is to deter China and push back against what they're doing in the world.

We're in a moment very much like the moment before World War 2. It's not the same, but it's similar enough that action is warranted.

As for guns, generally if someone is shot while having a gun it's because of all the other things they did that led up to that moment.

Pointless has a couple interpretations and regardless which one you pick, your argument is hard to defend. If you're operating largely in rhetoric and vibe, then it was never logical to start with.

Since you asked my opinion, I will say that it is nuanced and have thought a lot about these topics.

People need to have the power to influence their government and the government largely needs to operate in the interest of the people. It doesn't have to do what the people want, but I think governance needs to understand what the people want and interpret how best to address it. Kind of like how developers think of what users want.

The right to bear arms is critical. That is a form of power and self defense which can save your life, your neighbors life, or millions of lives from some kind of tyranny. The governmental structure of the US is so good, there is no comparison anywhere else in the world and we're not even remotely close to some sort of totalitarianism like China has.

At the same time, we do have surveillance capitalism accelerating and privacy is a form of power too. Even though I dislike it, in the current moment we're in I feel like it is unavoidable. When the threats against the state increase (whether the power of the people, or otherwise), the defenses increase too. I think most people who gravitated to HN understand the risk of threats leading to safety solutions that kill freedom and privacy a little more each time.

Iran built out a huge camera surveillance network to track their people, then Israel hacked it and used it to track them back. Surveillance capitalism is a double edged sword. You catch some types of crime, terrorism, whatever. That is great. At the same time, it opens up a huge vulnerability allowing the destruction of your whole state.

So then what about open weight models? People really do not understand the enormous scale of the threat. We do not let regular civilians run around with nuclear bombs or develop biological weapons or any number of things. It's not that the people want them and the government doesn't let us, it's that basically universally people do not want any other people to have that power either.

AI is like... mass manufacturing someone smarter than the smartest human that ever lived and allowing an infantile 16 year old with raging hormones to send a swarm of them off to cause chaos like some kind of necromancer. There are things these models know how to do that the citizens of any given country should want to largely be kept in responsible hands.

This is actually a double sided issue too, because you don't simply give everyone infinite power so they can defend against tyranny. If you've ever seen ideological activists, then you know people can be tyrannical too. Silencing you, cancelling you, ending your career, livelihood, disturbing the peace and so on. The government isn't the only threat. If the potential power of AI causes too much chaos, then the government has little choice but to crack down on society in more ways and AI can be the very thing that caused what you wanted to avoid.

I think open weight models are great, up to a point. People should own a gun for self defense and a car to get where they need to go. It's great to be able to ask private health questions to an open weight model in an era where everything you tell your doctors goes into some online database to be stolen by China. AI can help people be better at the essential things and fill in gaps where they're lacking. There are measurable points though, where models are just force multipliers beyond any reasonable norm for problematic types of tasks.

We don't need nukes. I don't need a carrier group and spy satellites. The people who control those swore to defend the constitution, which defends the people. Some people disagree that AI can ever be good enough that these scale of threats are even comparable. It's ok, they're just actually wrong in a fully logical, serious and non-rhetorical sense. The problem is that with open weight models you only have to be wrong once. That floppy someone copied in the 1990s is still floating around somewhere. In that sense it may be inevitable, but if we allow ourselves a head start then perhaps we can manage it better in the future when we're more ready.

There are a couple current mitigating factors, for now. One is that a lot of safety training and filtering is occurring, so even if some companies distill from the big companies they are getting filtered results. Another is that any model big enough to be dangerous is hard enough to run that the threat can't easily scale up in a residential or private company scenario.

None of this is going to help us from countries like China, Russia, Iran, North Korea and so on using powerful models to crack down on their people while accelerating chaos around the world if they choose. So long as countries have nukes and can maintain ways of accurately measuring interference, there will be red lines we tell each other not to cross.

LiquidAI LFM models are amazing, but very situational. IBM Granite series are also unique and interesting for trying to reduce liability and extend local context size. Nvidia ships some and there was also that Inkling model recently. Poolside just released theirs.

Meta might release something this year. X AI's Grok is still due to release a model, if Elon keeps to his word even if they only release a distilled version. Reflection AI has been quiet, but their access to compute is ramping up. Microsoft's MAI is considering releasing some open weight models which would be great to see!

Ilya's SSI is unlikely to release an open model since he's aiming for radical safety. That bet could pay off if the existing approach produces so much chaos within the next 10-20 years that some global ban is achieved and a super safe model is promoted as the compliant route.

We don't get many huge model releases though. I think it's harder and more expensive to safety align them. Even if you do, people will work around the safety and abuse the models. Plus it makes it even easier for Chinese companies to distill things that aren't as easy over filtered APIs.

There is a lot of internet propaganda to the effect that the US is simply unable to release open weight models or that China has so many more AI companies that the US is drowning in Chinese open weight models, but it's more like we're being careful and China doesn't care. If you host a model in China, it has to be censored and downloading any models requires you to provide your identity. Huggingface is banned there. When they release their open models in the west, they don't have to care whether the models are aligned in any way.

There are many things that can have some decent level of automatic verification and those were some of the first for LLMs to excel at, like math and programming. Now, physics involves math, but verification would still often require some form of measurement to make sure that the math relates to the real world meaningfully.

Many extended kinds of verification can be done by LLMs, but they need to be able to follow instructions reliably and agentic task orchestration may be critical to that verification process.

There is no doubt they will surpass us as there is a lot of easy to reason about information that they can verify as incrementally proven by other knowledge. The trick is knowing what can be proven with existing knowledge and what needs human evaluation.

Or are humans more of a bottleneck than before, because to improve on the most complex problems that demonstrate intelligence you need some way to verify that they are correct. If it's hard for humans to even know if something is correct, wouldn't that slow everything down and simply put limits on the scaling speed of models based on human verification?

So instead of relying heavily on human bottlenecks, you focus on agentic task verification since that's the low hanging fruit and verifiable at scale?

I've already seen all those quotes and interviews. You're mischaracterizing them.

He's probably not wrong that you have to be a certain kind of person that can stomach the inherent violence involved, that doesn't mean you want to kill innocent civilians. Yet you do have to be the kind of person who understands that civilian casualties can happen. Life is not kind to the mind that is fragile to the realities of nature. That's accurate.

As for nuclear weapons, he explicitly said he thinks they have done a lot to stabilize the world, which does put some limiters on how extreme war can be, because there is an extra red line that actually matters.

When it comes to chemical weapons, he already stated that no he wouldn't create biological or chemical weapons, but he thinks that there should be a special exception for non-lethal means like tear gas and pepper spray. It's like, a woman can take pepper spray out of her purse and use it against a criminal, but the US military can't use pepper spray to suppress enemies without killing them? Killing people is a more viable option than suppressing them? I think that's the argument he's making.

You should actually watch the stuff you link.

Ok, so that's one reason. It's not the only reason, because we don't commit so many assets for simply one reason. It usually requires many simultaneous overlapping reasons for us to do that. It is not a simple careless whimsical thing to send that much military to a place for no reason.

So let's start with the nuclear thing.

Russia is a bad actor. It treats its own people poorly, doesn't have a free press, doesn't allow free speech, it blocks a bunch of the internet so it's harder for people to find the truth. You get thrown in prison because they don't like you. Under the Soviet Union they killed millions of their own people in stupid famines from poor authoritarian decision making. They throw you at the meat grinder of the front lines of poor wars and destroy everything, because they do not value human life. They got nukes to make their bad behavior invulnerable. Ok, so fine, the world is a little worse off, but that's Russia.

Russia spread communism to Korea, since they have had a long-term strategic interest in Korea as a basing for attacking Japan in order to control more warm water ports. Japan and Russia have had conflict around this since the 1800s. It's not new. So Korean war. Now North Korea has nukes. They make their people suffer. The world is a little worse off, but that's North Korea.

Russia spread communism to China for many reasons too. China killed countless millions of people through poor authoritarian decision making too, through yet more famines. They kill any of their own people who don't agree. They took over Tibet by force. They execute more of their own people than the entire world executes, combined. They started building up the largest military mankind has ever seen and now they have nukes. Now that they feel invulnerable, they engage in the largest influence and interference campaign in world history, manipulating countries at scale and spreading extreme propaganda worldwide. It is all pervasive in social media comments, YouTube and elsewhere. I've seen this shift happen personally, slowly. It is not organic. So fine, the world is a little worse off. That's China.

Russia tried to spread communism to Iran and helped the Islamic radicals overthrow the government, thinking the communists could have some control afterwards or exist as an alternative party. Instead the Islamic revolutionaries kill thousands of communists to say, "no, go away." Now we have an Iran that is explicitly friendly with Russia, China, North Korea and Venezuela, learning from North Korea's nuclear program, sending its scientists there. It engages in Islamic revolution in a way similar to how the Soviet Union was trying to spread communism before World War 2, with armed activist militant communist groups. They infiltrated Yemen and that caused the war there. They infiltrated Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq. Afghanistan HATES Iran, because of their attempts to infiltrate it with their radicals. Iraq went to war with Iran, because Iran was engaging in revolution inside their country. Now Iran had built up a huge conventional military just like its friends Russia, China and North Korea, and aims to get a nuclear weapon to make their bad behavior invulnerable.

Iran can't be compared the same way as other countries that have nuclear programs, because most countries aren't Russia, China and North Korea which Iran is patterning itself after and buys military hardware from.

We're done with "so fine, the world is a little worse off". This is domino theory. This is salami tactics, slicing little bits of the world one at a time until the steamroll is so strong it has passed the tipping point and physics no longer offers a way for you to push back the tide.

That is only 1 reason for attacking Iran and it is highly abbreviated. There are dozens of other reasons for attacking Iran, defending Ukraine and deterring China from attacking Taiwan. Dozens of other reasons for capturing Maduro and trying to reform Cuba.

The US doesn't want to have to do any of this. We'd rather just be left alone and leave others alone, but that is not the world we live in. There are people that seek global domination and they are not the ones that want you to have freedom of speech or value your life.

If killing people is gross (which I agree with), then we should kill the people that kill the people, right? Or should people that kill people run rampant, because nobody should ever kill them?

If they should be killed, then they should be killed with the minimum number of civilian casualties possible.

Countless millions of people died in World War 1 and World War 2. So many people died that we only have estimates, because there were too many to count individually.

If nobody pushed back against Japan, Germany, Russia, North Korea, China, Iraq, Iran and so on, the world would not be a better place. It would be a place where full on global war was legitimized as a viable global domination strategy. And global domination was in fact the goal back then. The problem is, we aren't sure that goal has ever gone away.

As a result, the entire world is a chess board with smaller countries being manipulated or compromised in various ways for some other grand strategy. For many years now we've accepted that there would largely be some sort of equilibrium or status quo. Except these smaller countries also have a mind of their own and their people universally reject being controlled and manipulated.

Russia with Ukraine. China with Taiwan. North Korea with South Korea. Venezuela with Guyana. Iran with Israel, Iraq, Yemen, etc. Now suddenly all of these countries are all the prowl almost simultaneously. If you only look at US action, look at the world we're reacting to. It's not as simple as some political propagandist hitjob soundbite on TV being the complete answer.

It is completely logically unsupportable that the war is pointless, so your claim is so flat and empty that there is no need to do anything other than point out that weakness in your claim.

Go do a couple searches real quick and see what some of the points of the war may be. Many of them will be incorrect or incomplete, but you will come back with at least some reasons that exist.

If you don't understand history or what's going on in the world, everything will seem pointless and you will fall easy prey to anyone telling you what you should believe.

You have so many tools at your disposal for learning, you really have no reason to just have no idea what is going on unless you just don't prioritize your time that way. In which case, it's ok to understand that you don't know, but why hold your opinion so strongly then?

The problem is that China, Russia, Iran and so on have all been accelerating their weapons manufacturing. Go complain to them.

If nobody in the world was manufacturing any weapons and it was fully observable from space, nobody would have cause to manufacture these kinds of weapons. We do not live in that world.

At some point, any reasonable person should agree that if a country exists in an environment that contains many threats it might need to defend itself or others from, then it makes complete sense for it to develop weapons towards that aim. Countries are not people, people are people. So people make the weapons.

It just so happens that Palmer Luckey is a person. He can't sell weapons to any random person or country he wants, he can only sell them to the US or with permission of the US to a country that the US has a strategic interest in defending.

Precision weapons have helped reduce casualties. This is a fact. Please try to contradict this fact in the face of napalm bombing and nuclear bombs of yesteryears. Please try to tell me that precision weapons aren't better than just randomly aiming artillery at the sky and letting'er rip. Please do. I want to hear your well founded argument for this.

I do think this is an interesting topic. You can take the perspective that the government shouldn't have a monopoly on approving who can communicate over the airwaves so long as they aren't committing a crime and also shouldn't be able to outcompete companies trying to make a profit.

At the same time, in a country with many competing localities, radio stations, public broadcast TV, university channels, etc like the US it is quite nice so long as it's balanced. I think in the US it is a legal requirement that any licensed broadcasts legally meet some bar as being "in service to the public". Many companies have a similar philosophy and see themselves as doing a good thing by serving the public, while running a sustainable business at the same time. Not all companies, though.

That's not to say we haven't seen garbage broadcast over the airwaves that I wouldn't consider to be in service to the public, but on average it's alright.

What was Netherlands' reasoning for doing this?

This propaganda against Palmer Luckey completely lacks any critical thinking. Then again, I guess all propaganda is targeted at people who aren't critical thinkers to start with, so that's why it ends up working.

I've seen this astroturfing and spreading of lies increase since he delivered weapons to Taiwan so they can defend themselves. Probably the CCP amping up their influence campaign against him.

He's not a war profiteer, he's a peace profiteer. His philosophy is peace through strength, not profit through death. He even strongly emphasizes saving lives through weapons with better precision, which has been the trajectory of US weapons design for many decades. Russia is over there killing everything in sight and leveling entire cities including thousands of schools.

Your claim is similar to saying nobody should own a gun, because it should be illegal to defend yourself or others. So everyone who owns any kind of weapon is evil and bad? Only bad people are allowed to own weapons and we should just roll over?

Nobody should defend Ukraine from Russia? Anduril has been helping Ukraine since very early on.

Let the guy have his little side modding hobby.

It's about communism, World War 3, Israel _and_ Iraq _and_ Saudi Arabia _and_ UAE and other Middle-Eastern countries, it's about nuclear proliferation, it's about oil trade outside of the USD system, it's about China sanction proofing, it's about Taiwan, it's about terrorism, it's about Russia and many other things.

We usually don't act until the number of reasons to act reaches a threshold. We were slow to get into World War 2 as well. We wanted to act against Iran, but it was never the right time. Now with Russia, China, Venezuela and Cuba threatening war with their neighbors, the cost of not acting is too great if this network solidifies their cooperation against the US. Communists have been getting propped up all over the place, which is what we were seeing before World War 2, as communists believed they needed to achieve total global domination since they could not coexist with capitalism.

Iran has attempted to assassinate the US president multiple times as well as Netanyahu and carried out many assassinations around the world which it denied even when caught undeniably.

Russia got nukes, China got nukes, North Korea got nukes. There was every indication that Iran was aiming for nukes as well. You can't treat them like other countries that have nuclear programs, because most of those countries don't comingle with such bad actors. Similar to the communist party that wanted to control the world, Iran also has a radical group that wants to bring about the apocalypse to resurrect their prophet.

Russia also attacked Ukraine, Iran attacked Israel, but Venezuela was also going to attack its neighbor and Cuba was expanding its interference inside the US. You don't hear much about it, but it was important. It lines up with one of China's strategies to soak up US attention with crises to open up a window to take Taiwan.

If you are asking what actual information the US is acting on and what the underlying reasoning is, THIS is actually the reason. The details are vast and this is a massive abbreviation and some I haven't even mentioned even though they're relevant. People will link you to random junk, but every country has thinktanks and policymakers who get together and decide what is important for the country to act on. Who decide what the threats are and where a country's energies are best spent. These are the actual reasons. It's not simply "Israel" this or "Israel" that.

Nima is a theoretical physicist and many of them have diverged away from hard science. Hard science needs to connect and relate back to classical physics mathematically and ideally have a way of being tested. Not all theoretical physics ever gets there, probably most don't. The best adjusted theoretical physicists are aiming to expand on our understanding of classical physics which we know to be useful and true to the best of our knowledge as opposed to coming up with entirely new untestable theories of physics that are themselves based on top of untested theories.

Psychology is also a soft science, so while clinical psychology can be useful when it is grounded in real instances of human behavior, theoretical psychology is on the softer end of an already soft spectrum of science.

Simulation theory isn't very convincing and it's really just the opposite end of the spectrum of people demonstrating proof of god. Both types of arguments are almost universally logically flawed. It doesn't prove or disprove them, it's just bad logic.

Is this a misunderstanding of what the double slit experiment actually means, or am I misinterpreting it? If this is based on the idea that reality changes strictly as a result of a conscious observer existing and it is somehow related to consciousness, etc, that is not accurate.

I learned this years ago from Philip Ball, one of the editors of Nature. There have been other scientists helping to clear up the confusion recently, though.

Here is Sean Carroll explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNOJV4G7Ips

Here is Sabine Hossenfelder explaining it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npc6Mn2CZV8

Philip Ball explained it in Beyond Weird: https://www.audible.com/pd/Beyond-Weird-Audiobook/B07L5XK4BL

> Which ones? FONAV is not restored to the Strait, attacks on shipping have not been eliminated

Neither of those were primary or secondary goals, we didn't even attack Iran for those reasons. Those only arose after the fact.

The highest goal overall was to stop World War 3 from happening or at least delay it until the metrics can shift so dramatically that China cannot deny that the environment is not in its favor. Even though there are critical differences, there are also dangerous similarities in what China is doing today to what the Soviet Union was doing that sparked World War 2. Huge military build-up, purging its military and weaponizing communism abroad. The Venezuela, Cuba, Russia, Iran chain was a message that we see the network. Expanding our military operations aggressively in South America to unwind China's leftist expansion there was a message.

One aspect of that is to reduce the capacity of these countries to engage in coordinated interference or conventional attacks. All of these countries are heavily involved in interference inside the US, but they were also attacking their neighbors or threatening to.

Another aspect is simply re-establishing deterrence. There had been so much propaganda spreading that the US is worthless, evil and in decline when in relative terms none of those are true. If countries think they won't face any real opposition, they feel emboldened to do whatever they want. Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela were all establishing themselves to feel invincible. It was their time and the US is done. The international order is done. Plenty of this propaganda still exists, but the propagandists themselves now mostly know better when before they were drinking their own kool-aid.

Next, Iran attempted to assassinate the US president numerous times and even again recently. They also made attempts to assassinate Netanyahu. In addition, Iranian leadership engaged in indiscriminate mass killing of their own civilians. There was also intelligence gathering that contradicts the stated position of Iranian leadership not wanting to obtain a nuclear bomb. There has historically been an even more radical element in Iran that believed they needed to bring about something akin to the end times to cause the resurrection of their prophet. Officially they were suppressed and deinfluenced.

Beyond that, they were involved in countless assassinations around the world and essentially caught red handed, yet still denied it. So a critical primary objective was to take out multiple layers of leadership to demonstrate "do unto others as you would have them do unto you". I think everyone agrees you shouldn't be running around indiscriminately killing world leaders, so usually when it does occur it is the result of them attempting to kill other leaders or engaging in some other kind of deeply condemned actions.

A follow on primary objective is to disrupt their nuclear program and ballistic missile program to prevent them from establishing a North Korea style nuclear immunity. An extension of that was to set back their space program for developing long range ballistic missiles and launching military satellites which would further allow them to identify targets and deliver nuclear weapons. Their nuclear material is buried and whenever they try to dig things up we blow them up. That can continue without requiring carrier groups. While their nuclear program was already bombed, there were other nuclear related labs and facilities which were intentionally not bombed to leave something to discuss, but that wasn't fruitful and now those have been hit too.

Neither their navy or air force were really much of a threat and they were largely useless outside of their neighborhood or managing the strait, but destroying them does reduce their conventional options for harassing their neighbors, weakens morale, deflates their internal prestige narrative and so on. Using a submarine to destroy one of the ships was unnecessary, but intentionally communicates that our silent service does still exist and have the experience to act. It was historic and would make undeniable news.

There were more primary and plenty of secondary objectives like weakening capacity to fund their radical militias abroad, attacking regime financing, complicating their industrial supply chain, slowing their drone production and supply to Russia, increasing public understanding of the links between Iran and China and so many more.

Something comprehensive would probably be many pages long.