Pakistan are the mediators, why would they lie about the explicit terms of the agreement? They would immediately loose all trust if they did.

I'm not saying they're lying, I am just wondering why they don't seem to have a definitive proof of what they say- they say one thing and the US "disagrees"- why can't any of the parties just show the fucking document?

They can. It would be a defeat, but at least it would be a less costly defeat than Afghanistan.

Much more costly--a defeat in effect hands the world to the Iranian-backed terrorists.

Afghanistan was a 20 year long war. It was more costly in terms of troops, material etc.

Why would ending the war mean handing the world to the Iranian regime? That seems exaggerated. The iranians will charge a small toll for oil passing Hormuz, why would the US care? They have oil.

This isn't about the straight. It's about the Iranian-backed terrorists all over the region. It's about the genocides in Africa. Most of the horrible things in the world outside Ukraine are being instigated by Iran.

Open models are good but if you need a $10k GPU to run them then 99% of people are better of subscribing to OAI or CC.

Nowadays I also feel model performance matters less than the design of the tool harness, inference speed, and the other systems that surround a typical coding model.

There are many. It's an umbrella term for a range of circumstances that tend to be correlated with poverty and social issues.

Low trust in society, few opportunities to improve economic situation, higher prevalence of trauma and ptsd, higher probability of substance abuse, low opportunity cost for going to jail, fewer good role models, worse self esteem, worse education outcomes, worse physical health, higher likelihood of being involved in organized crime, higher likelihood of depending on parallel social structures for safety and protection, etc.

Each can be cause or effect in a self reinforcing network. Picking one single root cause isn't really possible.

People file tickets against closed source "black box" systems all the time. You could just as well say: Stop using MS SQL, just use a different tool, it's not that hard.

Equivalent of filing a ticket against the slot machine when you lose more often than expected

Well now you're just being silly and I can't take you seriously.

I'm a bit torn on this. The world changes and education needs to evolve with it. There was a time when recitation was considered a critical part of education. I'm sure there's a ton of cognitive development to be had by learning the entire bible by heart, but we seem to do fine without it.

I do think that digital technology was introduced a bad way in most schools. In my own experience it was less "digital technology education" and more "navigate Microsoft windows UI education". The teachers didn't know much about computers, of course the result was mostly a waste of time. I think the first thing kids should be taught in computer class is touch typing.

> If the US 'flatteNed' Cuba (like Gaza) in response to a few drones - it would 100% make the US 'The Evil Empire' and turn the world 100% against America as a neo fascist entity.

It has already happened. Even in west Europe politicians are discussing how to protect their nations from US imperialism. Every remaining alliance the US has is strictly quid pro quo, there's no trust left anywhere (Israel being the singular exception). Meanwhile 50% of the planet is completely fed up and can't wait to have China take over as leader of the international order.

I use firefox daily and I don't encounter the problems you describe, might be worth looking if there's some other issue.

In this case it's the system that's at fault. No mid level bureaucracy decided to ask disabled people to prove their disability again and again, that's clearly a political directive.

It's more complicated than that.

"The system" almost always consists of mid-level bureaucrats. Maybe not this particular one, but her bosses -- a job which, if she sticks around long enough, she will eventually get promoted into. A large amount of what the government does isn't formally law, it's policy, which is often decided by those mid-level managers.

And like individual bureaucrats, "the system" in this case finds it easy to make demands of people if those demands do not result in increased workload for the agency. But if they do result in increased workload for the agency, then the policies that result in that increased workload often get rethought, or the agencies suddenly discover that they can make allowances, and so on.

In this case, I'm confident that "agency X cannot accept pdf documentation" isn't actually law. It might be guidance issued by an agency lawyer, but that isn't the same thing. It is likely to be a policy decided fundamentally by the IT department, which is estimating a high cost for securing the agency IT system to securely handle pdfs. That cost is compared to the cost of accepting faxes, which is significantly lower, and so a policy is issued that the agency cannot accept pdfs, and the legal guidance is offered as justification.

What is not factored in to the decision is the cost to the taxpayer. That's an externality.

So, if the taxpayers can magically make it much more expensive for the agency to accept faxes, so that it is suddenly not an externality any more -- which is what happened in this case -- then the above calculus changes, and the agency discovers that, you know what, actually we can accept pdfs. The IT department is ordered to make the necessary improvements, and it all works.

In my particular case, we were told for literally decades that we could not telework. It wasn't secure enough. Then COVID happened, and suddenly we had a telework system in place, with all the necessary Microsoft licenses purchased and servers stood up and laptops issued and VPN accounts activated, in less than three weeks, and nobody said anything about telework not being secure enough ever again. Because the original justification wasn't true. Setting up telework was more expensive, so we didn't want to do it, and we came up with reasons why we "couldn't". As soon as it was cheaper, we found out that we could do it after all.

I know for a fact that in my institution (a university) certain things can't be done by sending a pdf because the guidence our adminstration is accountable to (city, state, national) mandates them to have it in paper. All clerks I have talked to find that silly, but they can't change it and since they have to proof things to these superior offices one cannot expect them to forge these document for you as a service.

There are stupid, lazy clerks who take any deviance from "the process" as an excuse to refuse work, but often it is the internal rules that are at fault and not the individual.

It's a big difference. There's vastly less chance someone manages to expose state secrets through their bets on oil futures. The volume is higher, and the prediction is less specific.