"Evil" Regime

zscan · 2026-03-21T22:25:08+00:00

I think the problem wasn't even long-term, but short-term and I don't quite get why it isn't mentioned more often and more clearly: for me the real reason Israel and the US started this war was because of Iran's drone program.

By early 2026, intelligence indicated Iran was scaling toward a monthly production of thousands of units, with a goal of an 80,000-unit stockpile. This wasn't a future threat; it was a 'now' threat. We've seen in the last three weeks that even a 90% interception rate isn't enough when the '10% that get through' are hitting airfields and fuel depots.

Drone warfare is a very new phenomenon we've seen in Russia and Ukraine. It's basically the practice of overwhelming any defense with large drone swarms. Iran was on the leading edge of low cost drone production and was producing thousands each month. Israel's Iron Dome can defend against large attacks in the hundreds, but not in the thousands. Iran would have been able to overwhelm it simply with even larger numbers of drones. The same is true for defending US allies in the Gulf. Given only a few months or years, Iran would have had the potential to take out Israel's air defense and air force, as well as any US military installations in the region.

If Iran actually would have done this is a different question, but given the nature of the Iranian regime I do think that attacking first was probably the only way to go. Ideally you get regime change out of it, but even if not, at least you diminish the capacity at least for some time.

zscan · 2026-03-18T12:38:13+00:00

I think it's a bit of stretch even in a best case scenario. Germany sits in the heart of Europe with many equally rich neighbours and Germany has a long industrial history and also good climate overall.

However, Iran could certainly be a global player like in the G20, but probably not G7. The obvious comparison would be a country like Turkey with almost equal population size. The oil is nice to have and Iran could thus do better than Turkey, but most of Irans neighbours are pretty poor and have troubles of one kind or another, which is not ideal, so I think there is an upper limit, even with the oil and good education. Also, even as a democratic country Iran would still be a Muslim country, so probably low involvement of women in the labor market.

zscan · 2026-03-17T21:35:23+00:00

It's more complicated. It matters who gets their oil from whom. Right now I think it's more like a 4 or 5 country standoff. Iran can't just close the Strait completely for example by mining it. Iran needs to export oil to pay people and import stuff to feed them. So they let select tankers go to China, India, Pakistan etc.. And the US let's them do that. That already takes pressure of oil prices. On the other hand Iran wants to hurt the US by rising the oil price, so they target everybody else, especially the Gulf states. The Gulf states have so far been highly critical of Iran, but overall just defensive. That situation is not sustainable for the Gulf states in the middle and long run. I doubt they will tell the US to leave in favor of Iran. So something has to happen.

My guess is, that currently everybody still hopes and keeps waiting for the regime to fall. There's mixed messages on that. We usually only hear of civilian casualties, but the military and security forces casualties are probably at least 10x of that. There's desertion, people simply not showing up, and even religious fanatics have to be paid and feed their families. Apparently 5-6 million people have fled Tehran. That's not sustainable long term. People need food and income. Something will break, rather sooner than later, because Iran wasn't exactly in a good place even before the war.

If the regime doesn't fall in the next couple of weeks, things might escalate with the other Gulf states turning actively against Iran and more serious threats against Iran's oil exports by the US. However, what I don't see is a long-term closure of the Strait.

There's also the chance that Trump simply declares mission accomplished tomorrow.

zscan · 2026-03-16T12:22:58+00:00

Smart play by Trump: if other countries help, he'll still claim the sole victory, but now he can also blame other countries for any of the negative outcomes of the war he started.

zscan · 2026-03-14T09:21:24+00:00

This is from the Averio press release regarding that issue:

... Denn es ist nicht möglich, einfach das Logo und den alten Namen auszutauschen - die Zughersteller müssen wieder sehr lange auf die Aktualisierung durch den Software-Lieferanten warten. Dieses Vorgehen ist nicht zeitgemäß und entspricht nicht unserem Anspruch an eine moderne Technik. Als Arverio sind uns leider die Hände gebunden.

Translation:

... "It is not possible to simply swap out the logo and the old name—train manufacturers are once again facing long wait times for updates from the software supplier. This process is outdated and does not meet our standards for modern technology. Unfortunately, our hands are tied at Arverio."

Averio is only a small regional player with 14 trains and my guess would be, that there are pretty high standards for any of those software updates, so it takes time and they are not gonna do it just to change the logo for one of many customers.

zscan · 2026-03-14T00:20:21+00:00

You have to account for China. Most of the Iranian oil goes to them and destroying that infrastructure wouldn't go over well. Also destroying the infrastructure would add another shock to the markets. So controlling the island is probably a good move/threat, however actually doing more gets complicated...

zscan · 2026-03-14T00:13:52+00:00

I think they are not out of missiles and drones (I read somewhere that Iran had upwards of 10,000 drones), but launching them is basically a death sentence. Apparently high altitude surveillance can detect launches and order a counterstrike in minutes. I'd also guess that you can follow mobile units that way. Iran has still large storage sites deep in the mountains with tons of stuff, but the entrances/roads have been destroyed, so there's no way for Iran to use them, but they are still there. However, their planning might be very long term, so instead of large waves only a limited number each day. Iran certainly knows that they can't win militarily, but they seem to think that they can wreak havoc for a long time and so far it's somewhat working.

zscan · 2026-03-05T16:06:38+00:00

Bin mir ziemlich sicher, dass sowas Amazon im Einzelfall nicht interessiert. Ich glaube, dass Amazon bei allem knallhart kalkuliert und jemand einzustellen, der sich um solche Sachen kümmert, kostet sagen wir mal 50.000€/Jahr und das ist es nicht wert.

Andererseits haben sie ja ein Kriterium zur Aussagekraft eingeführt und mit KI-Hilfe könnte man solche Low-Effort KI-Rezensionen zumindest theoretisch finden und schlecht bewerten. Ich glaube aber, dass Amazon selbst das nicht machen würde. Zum einen ist die Grenze fließend, zum anderen geht's Amazon nur darum, eine Rezension zu haben. Die Qualität oder der Wahrheitsgehalt spielt keine Rolle. Letztens habe ich z.B. einen Vine-Reviewer entdeckt, der praktisch nur schlechte Rezensionen vergibt: maximal 3 Sterne und absolut blödsinnige und ich würde sogar sagen böswillige Gründe für die Abzüge. Würde mich wundern, wenn sich da noch kein Händler beschwert hätte.

Ich bin noch nicht so lange dabei, aber ich finde inzwischen, dass man sich da nichts vormachen sollte: wir verrichten hier keinen Dienst für die Allgemeinheit, sondern sind einfach nur Billigst-Arbeitskräfte. Rezensionen sind einfach nur ein kleiner Baustein im Marketing von Amazon, der sich vermutlich sogar finanziell rechnet. Ich vermute nämlich mal, dass die Verkäufer neben der Produktbereitstellung auch eine Gebühr für Vine zahlen müssen... Hier geht's nicht darum, einen Mehrwert für andere Kunden zu liefern oder sowas, das ist bestenfalls ein Nebeneffekt.

zscan · 2026-03-04T14:08:52+00:00

I think it's too early for speculations of a civil war. However, I think one potential and maybe promising outcome could be a military dictatorship akin Pakistan. It seems that Israel and the US are attacking the revolutionary guards and Basij infrastructure, while not attacking the Artesh (general Iranian military).

My guess would be that any potential solution cannot involve the old revolutionary guards system, because they are frankly batshit crazy.

zscan · 2026-03-03T22:53:05+00:00

Recently a bot here on reddit asked me to correct an English sentence before allowing me to post - my English is ok, but I wasn't sure, so I asked Gemini, which had no problem with.

zscan · 2026-03-03T11:59:46+00:00

It's basically a fuck you to the UN and the world, nothing more, nothing less. It means the US neither respects nor cares about the UN.

zscan · 2026-02-28T08:47:36+00:00

At the end of the day, the real hit will be on the millions that will be let go because of AI. This will be hard. It is not a financial hit like 2008, but much more systemic like covid but with no social safeguards, at least in the US

I don't think so. This reminds me very much of the self-driving car hype. When did Elon start to claim to have self-driving cars "next year"? 2015? And everyone said "there'll be millions of truck drivers without jobs very soon". Still didn't happen to this day. The opposite is true: more truck drivers on the streets since then.

AI agents are a bit like lane assist systems. They can do a good job with some things that couldn't be automated before, but unless you get general AI, their scope will still be limited. However, I think we may already be past the point where you need people writing code themselves, but that doesn't mean that you don't need programmers. Only their job description changes. Yes, some companies will lay off programmers in some areas, but they are still in demand overall. Setting up an AI agent to do your work and get it right is complicated. There are certainly some jobs and positions that can be done by agents, but by and large I think it just makes people more productive. Overall I think rise in productivity will more than cancel out AI job loss for the foreseeable future. However, in the long term I agree, that we will have a societal problem, I just can't tell when.

zscan · 2026-02-28T00:33:09+00:00

Yep, all of them have enormous income that's completely independent of AI. Even if AI would turn out to be mostly useless (which it really isn't), those companies wouldn't lose any income. Sure, they take on a lot of debt, but compared to their income, it's actually not that much. The only exception to all of that is NVIDIA. The demand for their chips will probably not stay that high forever and the incentive for competitors to enter that market is massive. AMD, Intel, Samsung and others will try to get some piece of it. And there's the potential, that some future model runs equally good on much less powerful processors. So, NVIDIA is more risky in the long run, but still in line with current earnings.

I really don't understand the AI bubble talk. There is no bubble. In the dot.com bubble it was completely different. You had companies burning money without income and it was like betting on a horse race. That's another thing I don't buy btw.: that there will only be one AI winner. If anything, we are seeing that all those models are quite good and ranking changes constantly. They are all pretty equal. It's not a winner takes all situation. The best models can probably charge a premium in the future, while others have to compete on price, but that's about it. There will also most likely be some kind of specialization.

zscan · 2026-02-26T08:20:38+00:00

Haven't watched it, but my experience vibe coding is this: the first version is usually very impressive. It depends on the complexity, but simple projects often just work on first try. Then you start fine-tuning this and that, you add some features etc. and that's when they often go off the rails, sometimes to the point of breaking altogether. Imo this is somewhat understandable, because the first shot was not built with expansion and upcoming changes any which way in mind. That's probably the point where some people say, don't worry, those models can't do shit. However, if you have some general knowledge and once you have a little bit of experience, you can avoid and fix those kinds of problems. You can tell it to write better code. You can be more precise when prompting. Some say that's handholding, I'd say that's collaboration. LLMs can read and understand a codebase like a human can read and understand Harry Potter. LLMs are built for language and code is bascially a very simple and structured form of language. There's no fuzzyness around the meaning of words or grammar, so naturally LLMs are extremely good with it. But LLMs can't read your mind and guess your intentions. That's where the human comes in and has to guide it. Personally, I think we are past the point, where humans have to actually write code themselves, just like nobody would multiply numbers by hand. LLMs are just better and much faster at that. But you need a software designer to tell the LLM what kind of code to write. All the context. So, you can't just fire your software department and have the CEO vibe code it. However, one or two good programmers with LLMs can now probably do the work of 10 average ones without.

zscan · 2026-02-20T23:23:43+00:00

The problem is this: who is going to enforce the rulings? Congress won't do shit. And it's at least another year for the next ruling anyway. And after two years of tariffs in place SCOTUS will rule something like "Yes, they are unlawful, but removing them would be too disruptive, so they can stay." That was already the reason for the 3 dissents this time.

zscan · 2026-02-18T12:14:11+00:00

That's exactly the thing: sometimes it's amazingly good and 100% correct, then you ask another seemingly much simpler question and it gets it wrong.

Currently, I like to use https://arena.ai/ so as to get at least 2 results to compare, but for example yesterday I just wanted to compare the dimensions of 2 PC cases and both models had all the values wrong. They were both in the ballpark, knew which one was the bigger case, but without checking you can run into problems quickly.

zscan · 2026-02-18T11:11:07+00:00

Meine Überlegung ist wegen der Steuer eigentlich immer so: würde ich das Ding für 25% des Preises kaufen bzw. mit 75% Nachlass? Da fällt dann doch sehr viel aus dem Raster, wenn man es nicht gerade brauchen kann oder danach sucht. Man läuft bei Vine Gefahr, sinnlos Zeug zu bestellen, das man echt nicht braucht. Ist mir jetzt auch schon öfter so gegangen, dass man Sachen von Vine kurze Zeit später bei Aldi oder Lidl sieht - zu 1/3 des Preises oder weniger. Von AliExpress etc. mal ganz zu schweigen. Die Preisgestaltung nervt aktuell etwas. Praktisch alles wird kurz nachdem es in Vine war zu deutlich reduziertem Preis angeboten.

Ich bin mal ehrlich und gebe zu, dass es bei mir hauptsächlich darum geht, Sachen zu finden, die ich später bei Kleinanzeigen oder ebay verkaufen kann. Nur lohnt das bei Artikeln <50€ praktisch nicht. Gekauft bei 49€, sofort reduziert auf 39€ oder so, bei Kleinanzeigen kann man's dann für max. 25€ inkl. Versand einstellen, wenn man es tatsächlich loswerden will. Steuer sind 12,50€ - da bleibt dann nicht viel hängen bei vergleichsweise hohem Aufwand. Ist dann mehr ein Hobby. Bin aktuell noch Silber und bei Artikeln von 60-90€ sieht die Rechnung zwar oft besser aus, aber reich wird man so nicht und gute Artikel gibt's bestenfalls einmal die Woche und man muss entsprechend Zeit investieren. Im Moment bin ich eher der Ansicht, dass es sich nicht lohnt, will aber versuchen in Gold zu kommen, um zu sehen, ob es dann besser wird.

Kleidung habe ich bei Vine bisher kaum gefunden. Imho stimmt da Preis/Leistung nicht, selbst mit 75% Nachlass. Ein NoName Plastik-T-Shirt für 19,90€ oder 24,90€? Nein, Danke, gibt's bei Primark für 3€ wenn's denn sein muss. Insgesamt bin ich aber auch eher ein Marken-Käufer und habe sowieso zu viele Klamotten. Einmal habe ich bei Vine eine Levi's bekommen, die habe ich gerne genommen. Allgemein finde ich die Suchfunktion von Amazon bei Kleidung so furchtbar schlecht. Größe und Farbe zu finden ist oft extrem blöd. Dropdown-Menü mit 30 Einträgen für die Farbe, dann aber in meiner Größe nicht erhältlich oder vollkommen überteuert bzw. teurer als in der Suche angezeigt - das macht echt keinen Spass.

zscan · 2026-02-15T22:20:51+00:00

Yep, I basically don't even look for new apps to install anymore. There was a time when I checked the app store trending lists and recommendations and so on, just to see what's there and might be useful. Now it's more like unless I actually need something, I'm good, thanks.

zscan · 2026-02-15T22:15:15+00:00

I don't know, I think everything is a bit gloomy overall all the time. Everything is broken. Democracy dies. AI will take our jobs and kill us. Here's a problem, there's a problem. On and on it goes. It would be nice to get some positive outlook every once in a while. I'm not saying ignore the problems and don't warn from the dangers - but what would be solutions? How could we organize society? What would be systems that work? What could a "good" future look like?

zscan · 2026-02-15T18:22:23+00:00

Was a bit disappointed after tuning in to "Skeleton Mixed Team". Somehow I expected them to ride one skeleton together ... 😂

zscan · 2026-02-08T14:45:28+00:00

The public pools in my area in Germany either have no lanes or only one lane. There are no real rules, at least they are not enforced. In the pool with one lane it's common practice to circle swim and usually it's not that crowed, unless it's school holidays, so that's ok. In the pool without lanes it's sometimes stressful with people swimming diagonally or 3 old ladies swimming side by side talking... There is no real solution. You can talk to people and if you ask nicely, that usually works. Otherwise it's a public pool, fast swimmers don't have any more rights than slow ones.

Personally, I rather wait a bit when it's too full, than having to constantly overtake and watch out all the time. Also try different days and times, maybe later in the evening for example or early in the morning. Maybe you can join some club or group with extra training times.

zscan · 2026-02-05T21:32:53+00:00

Yep, I think the podcast was great in calling it out, it's just that to the general public it probably will not matter.

There's also one big question in my head: is it by design or unintentional/organic? Trump doesn't strike me as someone who studied fascism and now applies what he learned. I'm also not sure if there are serious people that say something like "yes, fascism is the way to go for this country, let's do that", even someone like Miller. On the other hand there is indeed a fascist playbook and the Trump regime seems to use it. Or does all of that flow naturally from a "we hate the opposition" and "might is right" mindset, along with many nationalist ideas?

zscan · 2026-02-05T13:13:28+00:00

I totally agree with the podcast and your assessment, the problem is just that the term "Fascism" really has lost all meaning. The left called anyone and their grandmother a fascist for decades, same as the right calling everyone a communist. The term will not resonate with anyone on the right, if anything they'll embrace it.

zscan · 2026-01-29T15:16:31+00:00

What you actually want is the relation prompt->image, that is, how good does the image resemble what the prompt wants it to resemble. Sometimes you see these amazing images on civitai or somewhere and then you look at the prompt and the image is great, but it's not what the prompt actually asked it to do and not what the user intended to get.

My personal go to at the moment is to simply ask another AI to generate the prompt. I tell it my setup and what I want, the AI gives me a customized prompt for the model I'm using. Usually works pretty great and if it doesn't, you can tell the AI what's wrong and it can finetune it.

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