That isn't true. The whole point it to quickly pick up statistically significant variations quickly, and with the volume of tests they are doing there is plenty of data.
If you turn on the 95% CI bands you can see there is plenty of statistical significance.
I have a relatively hard personal agentic benchmark, and Mimo v2-Flash scores 8% higher in 109 seconds for $0.003 (0.3 cents!) vs Haiku which took 262 seconds for $0.24 (24 cents)
Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite Preview (yes that is its name) is also a solid choice.
I love AI because I love building things and it lets me build more things I like faster.
If anything it's anti-capitalist: For example I built a software bluetooth proxy for Docker that let me use the underlaying BT device for Home Assistant even though the HA docs said I'd have to buy a new device. There is no way I'd do that without AI.
And I've built many many random project that I'd never have thought about doing without AI.
I think the correct way of viewing this war is around internal White House power games.
I don't think Trump himself particularly cares about Iran (or indeed Israel) - as in I don't think he has strong heartfelt views or moral convictions that cause him to act one way or the other in the strategic sense.
But there are those in the White House who do.
My impression from afar is that JD Vance wouldn't have been very supportive of this war, but his faction lost some power after the success of the Venezuelan adventure.
I think that particular move was Marco Rubio, but I'm not sure he would have been crazy enough to make the jump from that working to thinking that war with Iran was a good idea.
It doesn't seem to have been Stephen Millar's idea either.
So maybe it was a bunch or fairly random people from the pro-Netanyahu faction in the WHite House (not sure of names? Maybe Hegseth?) who really believed that this would be a quick bombing attack to take out the Supreme Leader and degrade some Iranian military capabilities, and it would be quickly over?
Maybe it was just Pete Hegseth trying to seem extra macho and people actually listened?
Writing it down makes it clear how very confusing this it. Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
Of those options I'd guess Hedgseth as he seems to be the one cheering the war and also using Christian rhetoric. Trump has also suggested he may have relied on Hedgseths advice to scapegoats Hedgseth in recent days..
> Maybe no one actually wanted this and they just went along because no one was actively saying it was dumb?
It is possible that the current war launched by the US Department of War by the chairman of the Board of Peace is the result of the Abilene Paradox.[1]
However, this vile collection of idiotic thugs more likely reached a Dunning-Krugerian consensus that this would be a quick and easy win. They all think themselves smarter and even nobler than everyone else.
They are however simply more remorselessly corrupt than most people imagined.
Not sure about the comparison to the SR-71, but the more interesting comparison was with the US XB-70[1] which ended up cancelled but the MIG-25 was designed to intercept[2].
Ironically the XB-70 was also stainless steel - but it still was pretty exotic. It partly relied on compression-lift and highly corrosive fuel to cruise at Mach 3 (in 1961!).
Edit: Wikipedia diving after writing that led me to the Sukhoi T-4 which was the Russian response to the XB-70. Only a prototype, but this one was titanium and it is an amazing, drop-nose machine [3]
I think while these kinds of projects are cool, but I think the point of my parent comment is that volume matters. If you can do something, its interesting and great for bragging rights, but making and operating thousands of airframes (especially considering the breakneck speed with which technology evolved, timeframes were very compressed!).
While the SR71 was more capable than the MIG, if the Air Force would've wanted to build a thousand of those in 5 years, it would've been impossible, not to mention the maintenance burden.
So while the planes you mentioned might've been more capable, in a real conflict they wouldn't have mattered much, as they could not have sustained a volume of strikes to be relevant.
Interesting how quality and quantity have changed over the years: in WW2, giant factories pumped out airplanes on endless production lines by the tens of thousands, yet those planes couldn't drop bombs accurately.
In contrast, 4th gen fighters were made in still significant volumes, and their smart bombs could hit a target accurately enough so that a hundred pound bomb can do the job you would need a WW2 B-29 to drop its entire payload for.
I think that was a peak in quality X quantity in aviation.
Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
> Yes, modern jets have even more tech, and stealth and stuff, but their complexity and and difficulty of manufacture doesn't offset the drop in volume.
> So quality went up, but quantity went way down, and as a result their total effectiveness is less than the generation they're supposed to replace.
Not sure why you think this.
The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
The 4th F-16 (also a great plane!) had 4600 built since 1976.
[1] Yes, despite all the negative press and the amount of time it took to get right, it's a great plane. See eg https://theaviationist.com/2016/03/01/heres-what-ive-learned... where the editorializing is anti-F35 but the pilot who flew it only has positive things to say.
> The 5th generation F-35 is a great airplane[1], and they've made 1300 of them since 2016.
Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
So while I don't dispute that the F35 is individually a great plane, I still don't think the quality X quantity metric of a pure F-35 fleet is higher than a 4th gen fleet.
Which is echoed by US procurement, because if it was, they'd have stopped building other planes, just like the stopped building F-4s not long after 4th gens entered service.
> Because in that time, F14,F15,F18 and F111 variants have been made as well, the total number of which is more than 10k. The testament to the usefullness of these is that they're still being made.
The F-111 is a 3rd generation fighter-bomber jet.
Putting that aside, the F-18 Super Hornet is a 4.5 generation plane that is pretty different to the F-18. It was created as a stop-gap because the F-35 was behind schedule.
The F-16 is in production to sell to air forces that can't afford the F-35.
The F-15 is in production to fill gaps because of slow production of the F-35.
The F-14 isn't in production.
> And the thing is each of these 4th gen planes generally carry significantly more weapons externally, than the F35 does internally.
This isn't true.
The F-35 can carry 22,000 lbs of payload. The F-15 can carry 29,000 lbs, the F-16 15,000 lbs, the F-18 18,000 and the F-14 could only carry 14,000 lbs.
So the F-15 is the only one that can carry slightly more than the F-35 and it is way less stealthy carrying external weapons. The others carry less and are less stealthy.
There is a reason the F-35 has won every fly-off against the Typhoon, Rafael and the Gripen.
Off topic but I can't help but snicker every time someone gets autocorrected into writing Rafael instead of Rafale (which I literally just had to correct, myself).
I agree it is behind - but usually only a few days.
I'm a big fan of the VS Code add-in. Despite the current narrative that IDEs are dead, I find the ability to look at multiple things at once is works much better in some kind of.. GUI editing tool.. than just using a terminal.
Mamba is an architecture for the middle layers of the network (the trunk) which assumes decoding takes place through an autoregressive sequence (popping out tokens in order). This is the SSM they talk about.
Diffusion is an alternative to the autoregressive approach where decoding takes place through iterative refinement on a batch of tokens (instead of one at a time processing and locking each one in only looking forward). This can require different architectures for the trunk, the output heads, and modifications to the objective to make the whole thing trainable. Could mamba like ideas be useful in diffusion networks...maybe but it's a different problem setup.
Mamba doesn't assume auto-regressive decoding, and you can use absolutely use it for diffusion, or pretty much any other common objective. Same with a conventional transformer. For a discrete diffusion language model, the output head is essentially the same as an autoregressive one. But yes, the training/objective/inference setup is different.
I live in Australia and I assure you there is a huge international market for gas. It's one of Australia's major exports.
Also in Europe the Russian sourcing of gas is a major strategic factor in energy policy.
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