Israel and the US are planning a new war on Iran. Historically (in Iran and other places), we saw political and internal crises emerge/staged when the US is planning a regime change in that country.
Iran is an aspiring regional power. Its proxies spread across half a continent. It's involved in foreign meddling in like half a dozen civil and hybrid war fronts. That's the nature of the Middle East, the cradle of the oldest civilisations in literal history.
Iran has protests all the time, as do lots of other countries _including the US_ and France and others and they don't herald US-led regime change. But if you have evidence for your claim that the US and Israel are planning a war in Iran, that would be major international news.
I’m sure it has nothing to do with the fact Iran is so mismanaged and suffering from severe drought they are talking about water rations or evacuations in Tehran.. or the plummeting of their currency [1] .. or the fact that the majority of the country doesn’t even support the current government [2] … no must be a conspiracy. </sarcasm>
We should be disparaging of fear mongering conspiracy theories that have no facts to back them up. Just like if you told me Democrats in the US are controlling hurricanes, or that 5G caused covid.
Just like those? Those examples are highly improbable, whereas the CIA is almost certainly active in Iran right now (that’s their job!), even if there isn’t evidence that they are behind these particular protests.
People are disparaging of dumb conspiracism. This notion that any protest in a dictatorship is a CIA plot is bullshit. The whole “CIA color revolution” concept is bullshit meant to delegitimize and demoralize legitimate grassroots movements against shitty dictatorships. Even the Iranian leadership is publicly acknowledging their legitimacy shortfall and the economic catastrophe, and that’s saying something.
If you don’t believe in protests within dictatorships then you don’t believe in democracy. As simple as that.
"A CIA plot" goes too far, true. But to believe the CIA isn't involved at all in fomenting revolution in a country whose current government is the result of the CIA having done so in the past, and which the US considers part of the "Axis of Evil," and which is an ally to a country the US is currently waging a war of aggression and plunder against (Venezuela) seems naive.
> to believe the CIA isn't involved at all in fomenting revolution in a country
Yes, it’s possible to believe in an incompetent CIA. Particularly when Iran is directly an adversary to multiple countries in the Middle East and further that it’s been fucking with more recently than the 1970s.
It's a pattern I saw more often with claude code, at least in terms of how frequently it says it (much improved now). But it's true that just this pattern alone is not enough to infer the training methods.
"That's when I learned the difference between burnout and disillusionment. Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."
This is an accurate pathology to burnout at least in my experience. I worked on many hard things in my life, from school to obsessing over hard problems on weekends but I never felt burned-out. I felt tired, but content.
It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
> Burnout drains your body; disillusionment erases your purpose. You can recover from exhaustion with rest, but you need something else entirely to recover from meaninglessness."
Burnout isn't exhaustion. Burnout doesn't drain your body, it drains your mind. You could get burnout from comfortably sitting all day long. Exhaustion from doing something you love is exhilarating. Burnout from doing something you hate is mentally draining.
Burnout is a symptom of disillusionment. Disillusionment causes burnout. It's not physical. It's all mental.
> I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
Another phrase I recently heard about is bore-out, where you just lose your motivation because the job is unstimulating or meaningless (but you know you and your job can be better).
> It took 6 months of being stuck after reaching a local maxima in my career. I was working on menial, meaningless, tasks that I knew amounted to nothing while I was doing them. That caused my burnout.
This idea I think about a lot, and I believe another way to describe it is "alienation from labor," or, in the doing of labor, alienation from purpose or meaning. Marx wrote about alienation from labor:
> “If the product of labor is alien to me, if it confronts me as an alien power, to whom, then, does it belong? To a being other than myself.” (Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844)
> "Labour power is...a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why does he sell it? In order to live...the worker, who for twelve hours weaves, spins, drills, turns, builds, shovels, breaks stones, carries loads, etc.--does he consider this twelve hoursí weaving, spinning, drilling, turning, building, shovelling, stone breaking as a manifestation of his life? On the contrary, life begins for him where this activity ceases, at table, in the public house, in bed. The twelve hoursí labour...has no meaning for him...but as earnings, which bring him to the table, to the public house, into bed...." (Wage Labour and Capital, 1847)
Imo though I agree with Graeber that we've gone beyond just alienation from the product of labor and into alienation from all purpose, in a world where a huge swath of labor and productive energy is put towards genuinely useless things.
> "...a bullshit job is a form of employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case." Bullshit Jobs, a Theory
I once worked for a start up that got taken over. In the process all retained staff lost their options.
I don’t think the options were really worth that much so I guess we were supposed to just be happy we still had our jobs.
The pettiness of it though just sucked the life out of the work for me. I found it very hard to concentrate and very hard to give a shit about anything after that.
It’s a massive indicator that it’s time to move on.
Most of the reason I've started losing interest in Rails and the DHH cult is their insistence that their homemade JS solutions (Stimulus, Hotwire, JS import maps) should be the default choice instead of industry standards like Intertia and Vite.
I am maintaining a Rails app with Vite + Interia + Vue, and it's many times easier to manage, develop, especially when working with LLMs that haven't been trained on DHH's new frontend experiments du jour.
Industry standards are not platform standards. React (enabled by Inertia) is in many ways is an industry standard for building UIs on the web today, yet it's not part of the platform. Same with Vite, it's the standard way to bundle on the web.
Decidedly, Import Maps are not used as a standard for dependency management in the web dev industry.
Eventually that is the plan. Like we saw with Claude Code, they want developers to get a taste of that unlimited and unrestrained power of a state of the art model like Opus 4, then slowly limit usage until you fully transition to metered billing and deprecate subscription based billing.
Does it seem plausible to you that during the years of the Syrian civil war, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the Tigray war in Ethiopia, the war in South Sudan and countless others (conflicts which, in total, claimed the lives of millions), Israel would commit war crimes at a ratio of 2:1 against the entire world, combined?
In contrast, the number of deaths from both Israeli and Palestinian sides in the same time period was several hundreds.
I just logged in to Bluesky to see what the left think of this and I wish I hadn't.
I find it extremely disturbing that half the country are people who are very well educated, earning well above average from their white-collar careers, yet they still think political violence is acceptable or funny.
100% serious statement here, who are you looking at on Bluesky or how? Looking at the Discover (so a general feed) my follow which would be unique to me, and the trending ALL I see is people talking about this being bad OR posts showing how everyone is saying Bluesky is celebrating. I truly do not see this celebration happening that people are saying is happening rampantly. Right now, in a private browser going to https://bsky.app/ there is 0 celebration.
(quick edit) And anyone who doesn't believe me go to Bluesky right now and look.
The majority of what I see on Bluesky is people saying that political violence is unacceptable. There are a good number juxtaposing Kirk's saying mass school killings are an acceptable price to pay for the right to bear arms. They are not, however, saying that political violence is acceptable. I haven't seen anyone say that.
I have seen right-wing commenters say that the left was saying this. When I asked for examples I got nothing. I got responses, but the left-of-center commenters they pointed to were in the two categories I describe above: those saying the event is terrible and those saying it's ironic.
Now, I'm sure you can find people saying political violence is okay. I'm just saying I haven't seen it at all and therefore it isn't the central tendency in my feed.
You're drawing comparisons from the most deliberately-inflammatory portion of the internet. It's equally as silly as logging into X and thinking anything you see reflects a real political opinion. It is all ragebait, if you want an opinion that isn't mired in virtue signalling then turn on the news.
This is a chronic problem here in America - nobody knows when to stop anymore. It was plainly apparent January 6th when Ashli Babbitt died, pumping the brakes is hard when nobody listens to reason.
Like everything else, practice. I like to clone repositories of open source tools I use and try to understand how a particular feature is built end to end. I find that reading code aimlessly is not that helpful. Try to read it with a goal in mind. When starting out, pick a tool/application that is very simple and lean on LLMs to explain only the bits you don't understand.
Damn, I really appreciate the decision to do this in a new product. Arc is the best browser I've ever used, and I'd hate to see AI features forced upon me. Thanks Browser Company!
I agree. I think Arc was the biggest innovation in browser UI since Chrome.
I think you will eventually have to switch because it will lack behind given that it's not their priority anymore. Zen browser seems like viable alternative but I haven't used it enough yet to know how well polished it is.
It is impressive what a single person with a vision can achieve hacking away on Firefox, especially considering Mozilla's track record in recent years.
A bus factor of 1 is still a bit red flag on something as involved as browser maintenance. Hopefully a community can emerge around the project.
Yeah, this is the unfortunate part about products kept alive in maintenance mode in a rapidly evolving space.
I guess you could argue (as TBC did) it’s actually not rapidly evolving, and that gives it staying power. But eventually someone will reach parity and eventually eclipse the original product.
Hopefully Zen does that. I’m just tired of moving the same data to the effectively the same product run by a different team for no good reason.
I just couldn't love it, and frankly I don't get the hype around it. I recently found that all my use cases can be served by either:
1. A general purpose LLM chat interface with high reasoning capacity (GPT-5 thinking on web is my go to for now)
2. An agent that has unrestricted token consumption running on my machine (Claude Code with Opus and Amp are my go to for now).
3. A fine-tuned, single purpose LLM like v0 that is really good at one thing, in this case at generating a specific UI component with good design aesthetics from a wireframe in a sandbox.
Everything else seems like getting the worst of all worlds.
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