mmooss

It's not based on anything, then.

> we shouldn't have to have a JCPOA in the first place, they can just not pursue nuclear weapons like almost every other country on the planet.

Other countries do pursue and have nuclear weapons. Iran has not yet created a full nuclear weapons program - or hadn't before the current war.

Iran, being under constant threat from the US and Israel, with open calls to attack Iran for decades; seeing two neighbors recently deposed by the US (Iraq and Afghanistan); and having had their own government deposed and replaced by a US-friendly one (Mosaddegh in 1953); under constant threat from neighbors and the region (Iraq invaded in the 1980s, Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states are open enemies, Israel of course); may believe that they need nuclear weapons to survive.

Is there another country in a similar position, with the resources to develop nuclear weapons, that doesn't have them? North Korea and Israel both made that choice in similar circumstances.

The US 'nuclear umbrella' covers its allies around the world, a very effective non-proliferation tool. Otherwise, I imagine South Korea, Japan, many NATO countries would build them - there is already discussion of it in the former two countries.

These are well-known, non-controversial facts.

For anyone unfamiliar with the topic, I encourage them to lookup when India, Pakistan, and North Korea developed nuclear weapons - you will find the answers in an instant.

With a seemingly insurmountable workload - maintain an actually secure OS fork - for a small team, I wonder how GrapheneOS prioritizes things like messaging apps? I'm not saying it's wrong at all; I am just interested in the thinking inside a project like that.

I can imagine many reasons to devote resources to it:

* A platform is only as good as its apps. If they want to grow GOS in the general public, it requires a good SMS/MMS messaging app.

* LLM tools greatly reduce development costs, especially for well-known functions like text messaging.

* Without secure messaging (as far as SMS/MMS can be secure), the platform security is greatly reduced.

* GOS got a big donation, or has a volunteer that wants to do messaging ...

But idk what I'm talking about. What is their approach?

> India and Pakistan both rushed their programs back in the 40s/50s

India worked on them on and off for decades and first tested one in 1998, and IIRC Pakistan matched them soon after.

North Korea was in the 2000s.

> So when you sort of set aside countries from prior to, idk, 1980s ish you don't really have anyone at least publicly (to your point) pursuing nuclear weapons.

I'm not going through the comment correcting all of it.

> Iran probably wasn't following the JCPOA

When are you talking about and what is that based on? It was the US that withdrew; the other countries continued. US intelligence concluded that Iran had no nuclear weapons program (or maybe, no active one; I don't recall).

> you'd also have to say you 100% trust American intelligence to verify

Nope, the plan was for the IEA to do their thing with on-the-ground inspectors, sensors, etc. As just one example, nuclear materials leak radiation and they can find indications of it in air, soil, etc., around faciltiies. Edit: Also, many other countries were involved and looking closely, including European powers and Israel.

> an explanation would be that these voices doing the ostracizing/ridiculing [anyone who tries to increase awareness of astroturf] are also astroturf.

I've thought of that too: 1) I haven't seen evidence, and 2) the people who repeat it are so many and so unaware. That doesn't rule it out, but wow.

I guess it shouldn't be surprising - people believe even transparently dangerous nonsense that costs lives by the hundreds of thousands.

They don't announce their secret nuclear weapons programs before they are complete (though they are sometimes discovered), but some countries have violated international law and developed them, precisely to protect their sovereignty:

  - North Korea
  - Israel
  - India
  - Pakistan

All retain their sovereignty, though I can't prove any causal effect and certainly nuclear weapons isn't the only cause.

Others have pursued them, includng Libya, South Africa, etc. Libya agreed to surrender their program, and then their government was deposed with Western help. Ukraine gave up their nuclear weapons (left over from being occupied by the USSR) in exchange for peace from Russia, and you can see what happened. That doesn't encourage the next person to give up theirs.

Attempts to claim that your side is somehow superior and not subject to the same human evils as the other side are never true, and just encourage your own people to commit evil - they are justified and the other side is evil, of course. Somehow everyone thinks that, which should tell you something about the truth of it. But of course for your side, it's actually true!

One classic method is to try to tie it to scripture, but people behave like people regardless of their scriptures, and members of every religion has done plenty of horrible things in the name of their god. The Christian Gospels are about as pacifist as scripture gets and yet many horrible things have been done in Christianities name - often justified because the victims were non-Christian.

There is plenty of religious-sanctioned violence in the Old Testament, including in the Torah, and plenty of violence against non-Jews today - so much that it's a bit bizarre to overlook it.

Per the OP, the Houthis say only Saudi ships are blocked, everyone else is safe.

(2024)

And the actual title doesn't make it a question at all; they assume it's happening and ask how:

"How Big Tech and Silicon Valley are Transforming the Military-Industrial Complex"

I understand that HN auto-removes the leading 'How', but adding the question mark changes the meaning significantly.

The change in non-fiction sales is in the last 10 years, according to the OP; movies and computer games have been around for much longer.

Do you mean, how they were shut down? It is well documented, including in the NY Times.

> There is just more of everything

If that was the cause, 1) book sales would drop overall, and 2) nonfiction books would perform the same as fiction books. The OP says neither are true:

"What has happened in the last ten years is that the overall industry has grown modestly, but fiction and nonfiction have basically flipped positions. In 2015, 6 of the top 25 bestselling hardcover books—this is a not-perfect but useful proxy for new books published—were fiction. In 2025, 18 of the top 25 hardcover books were fiction, meaning only 7 were nonfiction, almost an exact inversion of ten years ago."

They suggest some explanation:

fiction/nonfiction reading habits are extremely gendered, with 80% of women making up the fiction market, and nonfiction being a more 50-50 proposition.

and

Proportionally we are gaining many more women as readers and losing our few men.

EDIT: But they add: "The collapse of nonfiction is less a “male reading crisis” than a massive breakdown in the social fabric of trusting education, expertise, or any authority other than follower count and force of personality."

Also, consider who controls what propogates and what nobody sees.

Social media operators are like news (newspaper, tv news) editors, deciding what gets covered and how, and what doesn't. But they operate on a far larger scale, more powerful scale, and very few realize they do it.

Suddenly at 11:10am PT I can't find this OP in the top 210 HN posts. I'm pretty sure I found it on the front page less then 20 minutes ago.

It doesn't show as flagged. Do other see the same? Anyone know what is going on?

(And now HN is rate-limiting me, so you probably won't see this for a little while.

@mods - mysterious UX issues are starting to suck.)

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if that's how Codex uses LibreOffice.

One way to look at it: Why wouldn't they use this capability? (Moral qualms?)

Powerful interests, including corporations and foreign powers, have long worked effectively to frame public perceptions, even when their access to the members of the public was as limited as newspapers and a few broadcast TV stations, and filtered through editors. And they did it effectively.

Have they stopped for some reason?

And would they be less effective for some reason? The new tools - direct access to billions of individuals, wide bandwidth, no filters - should make them far more effective.

It's amazing to me that the fact of them doing it isn't well-known (there is plenty of research and evidence) and assumed, but still a question even on HN. Bring it up to most people and they will ostracize/ridicule you - an odd response which I can't explain well, given the evidence, likelihood, and very serious consequences which those same people are unhappy with.

Interestingly, over the last several years powerful interests have worked - successfully - to shut down research on this issue, including at places like Stanford and Harvard.

How does that theory explain,

* So many people using the same nonsense talking points at the same time. Did they coincidentally make up the same lies? With no anchor in objective reality, why would they converge on the same talking points?

* The sophistication of the talking points: IME they are often very well-crafted - seemingly professionally crafted - public communication. They effectively frame the debate, shift attention (often attacking the messenger), use powerful emotional impact to bypass reasoned discussion, and acheive the main goal of disinformation - paralyze discussion. Did people invest the time and effort to craft these talking points on their own, and do it so effectively?

> normalizing document formats for analysis

What do you mean here? Normalizing it into ODF format? Does that limit which tools/libraries you can use to analyze it?

> valuable features to many people!

Which products that sell this are broadly popular? I can see some people on HN wanting it, but people I know who are outside that bubble don't even think of it as an issue.

You don't mention generating code from scratch; is that on purpose? Perhaps a developer could add many constraints that would have been too expensive previously - e.g., code in Spark, use only these ___ system calls, never use this riskier capability, use only these ___ libraries, etc.

The LLM might take longer than otherwise, but still be fast enough. The new technology, like every useful one, changes the tradeoff equation.

? It's not hard to find material based on primary evidence and direct observations of it. That is fundamental to all scholarship and also, to a significant degree, journalism, law, etc.

> Most software isn't built that way. It can't be because the priorities of developers and customers work against it.

The most significant such priority may be the costs of paying developers and of time to delivery.

The dramatic reductions in those costs due to LLMs enable us to produce much more quantity and/or quality. Many complain now about quantity, so perhaps we are finally at a stage where we don't need much more software, and can focus on quality. Also, LLM attackers create demand for higher quality.

In other words, LLMs might enable us to some of these things that were impossible before.

That's theoretically arguable. Still, for the many reCaptcha users in the world, Google dropped it on them and they are at least temporarily stuck with it. Not everyone has the time or energy to implement another solution, and what solution is better? Cloudflare's infinite turnstile?

That's Google's reCaptcha service, which archive.is happens to use, not archive.is itself.

Currently their attorneys cost much more than yours. That doesn't appear to be sufficient.

Remember that depicting their software as out of control is part of their marketing - our software is extremely powerful, our organization is very cutting edge.

And with these radical, disruptive narratives they are getting people accustomed to the organization doing radical, disruptive things. It removes social and political constraints on their power.

They control it very well when they want to - especially when they want to invest resources. Their software isn't doing things that destroy their company. Has it hacked into OpenAI executives' and partners' personal data yet, and exposed it to the world? Blackmailed them? (Maybe that will be an upcoming move.)

> They survive because someone cared enough about it to make a copy.

Sometimes, and sometimes we have the originals. And to make a copy, you need an original, and sometimes the copies were made >100 years after the original.

> Burrowing stuff sometimes works, however, a lot is lost. Even when we attempt to save things, it often doesn't work.

So let's not even try, much less try to solve this reliability problem.

That misapplies systems thinking: It's necessary to have both the software and the hardware, so it is necessary to have the hardware.

By the above comment's reasoning, you wouldn't invest in hardware because you'll lack the software, and then you wouldn't invest in the software because you'll lack the hardware.

This false (IMHO) equivalency is weapon people like to keep handy these days, ready to shoot at any target.

There is all the difference in the world between the scenarios. The argument's popularity seems to be born in the argument, more popular on HN, that American white / Christian / males (or some subset of those factors) face discrimination by programs to benefit minorities / women.

What is the difference? It is power. Punching up or protecting the politically vulnerable is a completely different act than punching down or empowering the already powerful and oppressing the vulnerable. Punching down causes the vulnerable to be oppressed (jailed or otherwise restricted in who, where, what, when, etc they can do and be), impoverished, and killed - by definition, they are vulnerable. The powerful have their power challenged, which is many times appropriate among free people where 'all are created equal' and have the same rights.

In the case of artistic media - songs, books, etc. - private people downloading art to use it as art are spreading art and empowering themselves at the expense of powerful interest who have seized control of the art. That's much different than powerful people taking the art to increase their own profit and power, and to significantly displace and distort the art.

(I'm oversimplifying for these purposes: The fact that artists don't get paid by the former, and that it's anarchy used for bad things too, are serious problems.)

> socialistic

You're giving away your biases. Only a certain group calls everything they don't like 'socialism'. It's libertarianism or anarchism. Socialists might say, for example, the state should control distribution of media.