It's a false dichotomy - something being "a simple cost/benefit analysis" doesn't remove the ethical dimension, and can absolutely be nefarious. A movie villain saying "it was just business" doesn't make their actions less villainous.
As alluded to in the article, F-14s are the planes popularized by the original Top Gun, and if these were indeed the last operational ones in the world, this is quite the end of a symbolic era.
I think that there's a more general issue here with the US and the West in general having a mindset built up on playing Risk and Civ, which considers the foreign country as a whole as their opponent, whereas in practice, the adversaries are a multitude of individuals, for almost none of whom a surrender is the rational choice, especially (as sibling comments pointed out) when part of their reasoning and authority is based on a divine mandate.
Well, yes (except that Civ isn't a board game). And no, it doesn't make it seem absurd to me.
My argument is that Western strategic thought (with games being a codification thereof, rather than the source of) generally considers countries as mostly atomic actors that can be defeated - the history of European warfare being filled with "gentlemanly" surrenders followed up by peace treaties, with guerrilla warfare being a very rare exception.
On the other side, the reality in the East is that a state's collapse doesn't end the conflict, but just prolongs it. The army doesn't surrender, it goes home with its weapons and reconstitutes as insurgents. I can't actually think of a single proper surrender of an Eastern country ever, except for Japan in 1945.
It is actually several physical board games, the oldest of which is older than (and unrelated to) the computer game [0], as well as being a series of computer games that are basically digital board games.
[0] Well, except for the computer game based on it and its expansion, which, because of the other computer game, had the long-winded title "Avalon Hill's Advanced Civilization".
As an example of an Eastern country? Well touché, I suppose you're historically correct, but what I had in my mind for this distinction is not the line in the middle of Europe (between the First World and Second World), but that between Europe and Asia. Sorry if I miscommunicated.
If there are invaders who are killing everybody around me and telling me that they'll stop and generally let me be if I surrender and agree to live in a democracy, I expect that I'll be very inclined to accept. Maybe afterwards, if I see it's not working out, I may still consider guerrilla resistance down the line, but I don't see the benefit of fighting and most likely dying just for the sake of defiance, and to then allow any survivors a chance to continue in their resistance for another decade or so, until eventually they might be able to start rebuilding a nation from the rabble.
In what world is surrender, keeping our lives and infrastructure, not a more rational approach?
EDIT: To be clear, while I occasionally have pacifistic thoughts on pretty spring days, I'm not arguing for pacifism here - fighting is absolutely rational when you have a clear path to victory, but if you don't, then I think it's just an absolute waste of human lives.
Wasting human lives in war is the goal of jihad. This is the part that westerners have a hard time understanding.
Why does Hamas hold hostages in tunnels under their own civilian populations? Not because they think Israel will hesitate to bomb there, they know they won't.
It's because the death of their own population is a goal in itself.
Fighting is rational when the alternative is being killed.
FDR made a big mistake announcing that he was going for unconditional surrender. This resulted in Germany fighting to the bitter end. Hitler dragged it on to the last few hours - he knew what was going to happen to him when the war ended.
It was not mistake. Nazi dragged because they had to due to own ideology.
But allies had to achieve clear military victory, because of WWI aftermath. Germany did not believed it lost, it believed it was betrayed and wanted do-over. No surrender thing was to prevent next round with WWIII as Germans feel like betrayed again.
The Germans had a saying at the time: "enjoy the war because the peace will be hell".
They were correct.
> Germany did not believed it lost, it believed it was betrayed
The citizens were not that stupid. They knew by 1944 that they were going to lose. All they had to do was look up, and see the ever-growing endless streams of B-17s overhead. They knew what the Red Army was going to do to them. They knew payback was coming from the Allies.
> If there are invaders who are killing everybody around me and telling me that they'll stop and generally let me be if I surrender and agree to live in a democracy
I mean, that is not what is happening or was happening tho. No one is saying they want to build democracy in Iran ... and Iranians would be dumb if they believed such claim. Because of Irans history itself, but also because if Israel history/ideology and because of how USA behaved last year.
And in addition, the only one who can surrender is the Iranian regime itself (not Iranians in general) and that regime would gain nothing in such deal (if such deal was offered).
Yes and its much more rational to see that the invaders are natural born liars and they installed puppet dictatorships while talking "democracy" and very literally a few days ago backstabbed and invaded you while in the pretense of doing peace negotiations. Logically for an Iranian the most rational response would be to always kill Americans or Israelis in this case.
War is about achieving political ends, which killing may or may not be instrumental towards. It's very unclear to me whether Iran's killing of Americans and Israelis, either directly via missiles or via their proxies, had realized any benefits for the nation of Iran, let alone for the average Iranian.
American and Israeli soldiers are invading Iran currently. So just like standard procedure for any war, killing as many enemy combatants as possible is the point and beneficial for Iran as it aids toward repelling the invasion. America at least can be pressured to withdraw as the general populace is ambivalent about the war.
I don't get the idea of giving a claw access to your own mail account, but am now playing with the idea of it having its own email account that I selectively forward to - that offers almost the full benefit, with significantly less risk.
yeah, that's the approach I've taken. I quite liked the idea of giving it full delegated perms on my email account and calendar (eg, dig out that email and reply back to them for me) but the risk profile is just too high, and forwarding emails where needed mostly works.
I disagree with the grandparent too, but still would argue that an OS's goal is to allow its users to manage their applications and work processes rather than their computer.
It's a hard question to figure out what's the proper level of abstraction for this is. And while I strongly resisted it originally, I am becoming more open to the argument that many people don't need to "know" what a file is, to benefit from their computers - that as long as they can "save" their work, and "send" it from one app to another, they'd be able to get all the productivity that they are looking for.
It should be possible to get creative and business work done on a computer while knowing almost nothing about an os but I use Windows at work and the situation with the file save dialogue in office is a farce. I can't imagine how confusing it is for someone who has no conception of what a file is.
Files and folders are already a helpful metaphor taken from paper based office work. You have container folders and you can put different files (pieces of paper) into different folders. The thing thats a bit conceptually hard for regular people is the nesting, that folders can contain folders can contain folders. The real world has some nesting too, like putting folders in drawers but it's more limited in number of levels. This tends to be the thing that supposedly "more user friendly" apps remove and only allow two levels or so. Basically collections or lists, eg playlists. Or tags. But once you understand nesting, files and folders are quite intuitive.
Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
I was particularly referring to Office applications which have a first stage save dialogue with some folders shown but if you want to navigate to another location you need to browse which opens another window. In the physical office metaphor this would be having to change your shoes to look in a different file cabinet
Oh I see, I hate the new UI of Office. I somewhat accept the ribbon, but this new full screen file menu replacement where they try to make you save stuff to the cloud makes me want to go back to the good old File > Save as... > Dialog popup of Office 2003.
> Without the helpful abstraction of files and folders, all we'd have are bytes stored at various addresses or sectors of the hardware.
I agree with most everything else you said, but would slightly push back on that. I actually quite like the idea of non-hierarchical blob storage searchable via arbitrary indexed metadata, as well as the idea of content-addressable storage (e.g. with magnet links). While folders are an elegant abstraction, I really feel that we shouldn't be beholden to it.
This is actually an interesting example. To me it sounds like it actually should be less confusing to a person who has no preconceived notion of what a file should be, and only wants to save their work and reopen it later, not worried about what shape the saved object takes.
On that note, I remember how absolutely ecstatic I was when I first set up Sublime Text and discovered that unsaved editor tabs always reliably survive restarts; it essentially flips the script, whereby I've lost multiple saved files by accidentally deleting them, but I've never accidentally lost work in unsaved tabs, and I've never actually had any interest in figuring out where and how these tabs get persisted - it just works.
I had commented this above, but the OS should be flexible enough to do whatever the user needs it to do. "What it needs to do" is pretty broad, but I think that's the point.
I know it's a bit ironic given TFA's focus on shoving Copilot and Recall down users' throats, but I really do believe that an OS-level AI agent could solve these usability issues. We need to solve a lot of trust issues, but the capabilities are essentially already there for a non-technical user to tell a Samantha-like OS AI "please get this working", and it will.
I would propose a new law of interaction design: Whenever something is promoted as a tool that you wouldn't need to learn, then it's actually designed to use you, and you are the tool.
I read it in the same vein as saying that a sub's sonar enables "seeing" its surroundings. The focus is on having a spatial sensor rather than on the qualia of how that sensation is afterwards processed/felt.
> You don't have to pay VAT on things you fix for yourself, because you don't pay yourself at all.
Just to be clear, if you're a VAT-registered tradie doing a job for yourself, you are obligated to pay VAT for the materials. Diverting vat-reclaimed materials for self-supply is tax evasion (which can be identified by auditing invoices). So legally speaking, the only money saved is the VAT on your own work hours.
Slightly ironically, self-supply is much easier and almost impossible to identify when devs use work-paid subscription services (e.g. Claude Max) on personal side hustles.
Sorry, not VAT - but the value of the benefit you gain from working on your own property (presumably also if you're, say, a car mechanic and work on your own car, etc.) is subject to taxation. Mea culpa.
The obligation to pay tax only kicks in (as far as I can tell, IANAL) if the work is substantial and of a nature which requires professional skills.
Here's a recent link, though in Norwegian, I'm afraid:
Jesus! Spinning this forward, this means: If I'm a professional wealth manager and I manage my own wealth during working hours (because office not busy right now), then I would have to pay taxes because I'm a finance pro applying my own skills on my own stock portfolio?
IANAL, and I have only heard about a couple of cases where people have been taxed under this statute - typically carpenters having built or renovated their own homes or cottages.
(Their obvious disadvantage being, of course, that the result of their labour is very tangible - and that whenever you do any significant building work, you'll need permits and documentation afterwards, making it difficult to discreetly renovate something off the books...)
I have seen very wierd tax laws in other EU countries, but this is really "fresh": In that case I would somehow try to do it without someone noticing (so treat your neighbours well :-D) - this is similar to collect taxes on food that Ive grown on my balcony
I read the Norwegian article that was linked, and it isn't actually similar: you would only have to pay taxes on food you've grown on your balcony (and mean to consume yourself) if you are a farmer, are growing it during regular working hours, and have an insanely huge balcony.
Another thing that makes home construction a bit different in this regard is that you could claim to build a house for yourself, live in it for a bit, and then sell it on a couple of years later. That'd be an easy way to avoid or evade taxes. Not so easy with lettuce -- once you've eaten it, you've eaten it.
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