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pbmonster


				

				

				

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pbmonster


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				

				
				
				

				

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				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I mean it's possible that I've been reading propaganda. But what's your explanation why the carriers were inside the Persian Gulf during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but this time they're so far offshore they need to run aerial refueling operations for most strike aircraft to make it back?


It's gotta be anti-ship missiles, right?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm not sure what exactly the Iranians have been building exactly, but they probably don't run refineries with processes as sophisticated as the Golf refineries. The thing that makes suddenly processing large amounts of heavy crude difficult is that you need to build additional cokers, and in the west those are multi billion dollar projects. How much of that is due to economical, ecological or bureaucratic reasons I can't tell. Probably all of the above, and an Iranian refinery will certainly have more slack in all three dimensions.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


maybe the coastline near Bandar Abbas. If this succeeds the US will (after doing minesweeping and patrolling the coast for hidden marine drones and such) declare the strait open, and the next move will belong to the P&I cartel.




This is a pipe dream. Iran has bunkerized anti-ship missiles all along the coast, not only around Bandar Abbas. Same is true for "covert bases" for mine layers (small warehouses in fishing harbors) - you can place seafloor mines from fishing boats/speed boats, after all, at night or in heavy traffic.


Also, with the state of US naval assets and the... current disposition of allied navies, minesweeping of the straight would take forever. If the IRGC gets significant numbers of mines out (and they do seem to have the capability), clearing them would take many months.


And then, once all this is done, the first tanker making a run for it might learn that Iran now actually has integrated rudimentary radar guidance into their shaheds or their 1000+km range ballistic missiles. Locating a tanker on open water using radar is not exactly difficult - its rudimentary WWII tech, radio hobbyist without further technological background can do it.


At which point the cartel will concede that, yes, the straight is actually still closed. Even if that drone/missile was shot down, because everybody knows that sooner or later one will slip through.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


America lacks the refining capacity to handle the domestically produced light crude




It only lacks the refinery capacity to handle it at maximum economic optimization, right? All those gulf refineries could process light crude, maybe with minor retooling. But they're not optimized for it, and a lot of expensive equipment specifically built for heavy crude would sit unused. Going the other way (refining heavy crude in a light crude refinery) is significantly more complex and actually has many years of lead time for the equipment that's required additionally.


So, the interesting question is really: at what cost? You could ban all oil exports, and refine the light crude for domestic consumption in the gulf refineries. But the price at the pump would be difficult to guess.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The AI Labs could all be happy fat tech companies if they just became inference providers.




Yes, but we aren't quite there yet. Not even close, in my opinion, at least when we're talking about serious job displacement. Unless there's a phase change, were looking at years of more insane capex and opex.


And those trillions will need to be payed back with interest. We're not talking about a Netflix or Office 365 licence that every office drone just has. For millions of workers, access to those tools will rival transportation and housing in ongoing cost.


No problem, if your employer already has half the staff on SolidEdge/Ansys/ect licenses and generally does not care what toolboxes everybody gets. For the rest? Small business, low productivity labor, labour limited by hardware throughout (classic example: radiology)? They won't really contribute to paying off that debt, so they won't get a lot of tokens, and none from the good models.


We've gotten used to tech, especially software, being cheap. For the current economics to make any sense, this will come to a hard stop. On the cost side, AI is much more like an excavator than like a shovel, and it really needs to replace just as many workers to make sense building them.


And I can well imagine this never happening. Maybe they'll never get reliable enough for that much unsupervised work, especially work you can't write unit tests for.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 30, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It's materially improved my productivity at work






Then you have people still in 2026 who genuinely think AI will "go away"




Note that both of those can be true at the same time. Total cumulative AI capex will probably cross $2 trillion this year, and cumulative opex is on the same order again. And that's just in the US.


If this "technological revolution" doesn't end up replacing a significant percentage of national labor costs, it actually might fade away - and the only thing remaining will be whatever open weight models can be run on cheap hardware at that point in time. And if the Chinese keep releasing last year's SOTA for free, none of the envisioned business models might hold water.


Either way, there's really only one way costs can go from here. If business AI doesn't go away, those of us still with jobs will get to work with agents costing our employers on the same order as the people they replaced.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It’s more likely that they couldn’t compete with open source models, Chinese offerings, and other companies specialised in video generation.




Which open model is closest in quality?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


But then you drive in with your comrades and do some shooting and see how it goes from there.




Do you imagine you could have gotten the human capital present on January 6th to carry guns, let alone use them, in the Capitol? It's one thing to convince ten thousand people to go protests at the Capitol. Doesn't take much to get 10% of them riled up and caught in peer pressure to storm peacefully walk in the door.


But carrying rifles, towards the sound of (even friendly) gunfire? No way you can do that with random normies. You need to indoctrinate them, train them, and establish a chain of command. This is, of course, the point where you pull every single fed in a 100 mile radius, and now your chances of even getting onto the Capitol grounds go way down, if they don't flat out raid you while you wait for your timing.




If opposition is limpwristed, divided and feckless enough maybe you can get away with it.




Do you really think it would be? I can't imagine a crisis so severe that it would stop attack helicopter to be there within the hour. At which point you either reveal that the vanguard already has infiltrated the armed forces (realistically, all branches and the DC National Guard, because they all have bases close by), or... I guess you can play hard ball and bring out your hostages and guys with MANPADS while assets from the single USM base you've infiltrated start bombing all the other bases in the area?


There's just no way, right? You'd need an overwhelming majority of the (local) armed forces on your side before you even start.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Do they? Shahed stockpiles alone are reported to be above 6k drones, and production capacity is reported to be at least 3k drones per year, according to conservative OSINT analysts, and both might be as much as 3x higher. Israeli think tanks report 80k and 12k, respectively (lol). Have either of those been degraded significantly?


And that doesn't even start with missile stock piles.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


You can't avoid that without changing girls. [...] "Chicks Dig Jerks"




I think that's confusing a subset with the whole set. Because really, Chicks Dig Confident Men. And jerks are very good at appearing confident. Easy mistake, happens to most women...


But that's good news, teaching boys confidence (and to display confidence) might not be easy, but at least it's straight forward.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
No, that's not the problem. "Prominent researchers" don't ever get close to the contagious ferrets unless it's necessary for a press photo to go with the release of their most recent Nature paper... The people producing the data on the oil rig lab, or in the antarctic darkness or who are stuck on the slow quarantine supply boat are grad students and lab techs. They'll do it for the paper, the title, the story and the love of the game.


The problem is that oil rigs and research labs in Antarctica are more expensive than university basements in cities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Finally got around to test progress on image generation again.


My go-to test is creating an entire fake Instagram influencer from scratch. That nicely tests consistency between images, spacial understanding of the scene, prompt following on minute details, ect. It keeps me up to date on what the problems are when you fake photos of people (or fake entire people in general). I mostly create women, because that's more fun to me and also because this tests model censorship more effectively - the commercial models are a lot more touchy when creating women than when they create men.


The main result of my most recent session is particularly funny: Nano Banana 2 is another significant step forward on photo-realism, but it is exceedingly difficult to get it to produce images of conventionally beautiful people from scratch. Getting just a portrait of a woman that is above a 7 requires a lot of coaxing. If the major focus of the prompt is on some other detail, it will generate the most mid women you've ever seen. Nano Banana 1 was perfectly happy to just spit out 10s. You start the prompt with "photo-realistic full body shot of an attractive female college student..." and you could focus on scene, clothes, body position, camera equipment, ect., and it only needed minor coaxing for some body types and poses (as long as you kept it SFW). But Nano Banana 2 will often simply ignores instructions that coax other models towards conventional beauty. I wonder why. Peak body positivity seems long past. Did earlier models train predominantly on pictures of influencers on social media (because they post so much), and now photos of the rest of humanity have a more proportional ratio in the training data? Or are they trying to stop me, in particular, from creating and monetizing an Instagram e-thot? (I'm not, of course, I've lost interest in image generation, again, very quickly).


Other than that: prompt following is truly impressive now. You can pick scene, clothes, and body positions (either by describing them or supplying reference photos), and it will usually one-shot them down to the correct head tilt angle. Consistency (same person in different images) requires a bit of care, or ideally tons of reference images. We're not completely out of the uncanny valley for faces created completely from scratch, but this is where I notice the most progress (Nano Banana 1 makes beautiful people, but they look like influencers with the filters maxed out in the best case, and like very good paintings in the median case). Around 1% of images still have extra limbs or other easy tells.


Oh, and making images that help explain a technical concept is still hilariously bad. A straight rip-off of an existing image with a liberal dose of detail errors is the best you can expect. Ah, factual correctness in every detail... the old nemesis of AI still lives on.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


They're making super dangerous airborne diseases in ferrets... For no good reason at all. [...]  So there is no value to this research. All we know is that 'this specific disease could be super dangerous' and they helpfully put its genome up on the internet.






But so far as I can tell nobody had anything to gain besides publishing some 'good' papers.




I think this misunderstands what they are trying to do. There has been, for a long time, a large community studying virus evolution and spread. And if you monitor influenza, globally and in different species, you ideally would want to know what you're actually looking for. No use having petabytes of genetic data, but no way to actually analyze it, or really, make some useful predictions.


Gain of function research tries to help with that. Identify which changes/mutations are actually worth watching. Identify what will spread fast, what will go airborne, what will kill, and what might jump to humans. They hope that next time, we'll have a bit more advance warning, or maybe a vaccine approaching the effectiveness of the polio shot. Having so damn much antigenic drift won't safe influenza if the vaccine directly targets what makes this specific strain so successful.


And all this isn't just a "saving humanity" moonshot/insurance against a black swan event. There's very practical applications - it would be nice if we didn't have to destroy 100 million chickens every 5 years because the farms got infected with bird flue, again.


At least that's the dream. Whether that's actually doable and/or worth the risk is another question. Maybe those people should really be send to Antarctica, or onto a decommissioned oil rig only serviced by a very slow ship. Maybe their current security measures are fine, I haven't updated on the COVID lab leak story an a while. But during the thick of it, I found the arguments of the counter-side more convincing.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 15, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Though I know some people say OpenTTD is now the best version of a railroad builder




They must be using a peculiar definition of "best". It's a good game. It's elegant in its simplicity, and it's amazing how large you can make the system using so few rules. The UI is historic, and hilariously bad. It has been hugely influential on transport games.


But it's not Railroad Tycoon 2. The depth and complexity is just much higher there. The game gains so much by having an amazing campaign. It gets genuinely difficult towards the end. It has been more than a decade, but I still remember only beating some of the later missions by starting right out the gate with pump-and-dump stock shenanigans, and using the proceeds to execute a hostile acquisition of one of the competitor railroad companies...


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


we can just look back to what Iran looked like in the 60s and 70s under the US-backed Shah.




Wait, wait, your scheme hinges on Iranian royalists/secularists/liberals fighting your (ground) battles? Ramming through regime change from the air, once again going out to win hearts and minds (successfully this time, for real!), and then having them do the dying? Watch from afar while they de-islamize every single institution and hunt down the mullahs? I'm very skeptical. They don't have history, especially recent history, on their side. And neither the training, the cohesion, nor the morale.


Frankly, the IRGC is going to eat them alive.




the kind of violence you're describing- massive use of MANPADS and sophisticated explosives- doesn't just magically happen. It happens when some other country with sophisticated weapons factories is sending them weapons.




Well, if the IRGC doesn't have absolutely enormous stashes of at least small arms (and probably even drone/rocket parts plus warheads) in the mountains, they didn't plan even a week ahead. I'd be very surprised. Also, I'd expect Russian surplus equipment and Chinese dual use goods to make it across the border. But for any of that to even matter, they'd first have to lose the cities, which would be orders of magnitude more bloody than Mosul or Falludscha.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
How do you imagine the country to look like under US rule?


How do you "easily" stop the IRGC (and its successor insurgency groups) from perpetually setting the oil fields on fire, blowing up the pipelines, attacking every single supply route you run through the mountains, firing MANPADS at every single helicopter and airlifter that dips below 15k feet and generally IED-bombing, droning, mortar-ing and rocketing every US installation in the country? How do you stop them from infesting every town you turn your back on for five minutes?


Is it just a million miles of barbed wire fences with autonomous auto-cannon turrets? Because you certainly can't just kill them all. Trying that always results in recruitment automatically out-pacing your kill rate, and Iran has a - for all intends and purposes - infinite recruitment base.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Overwhelming force; casualty rate will be higher, but achieving ultimate victory will be popular.




Are you sure the US could achieve ultimate victory over Iran and rule it for 100 years? I'm not convinced. Even after removing all rules of engagement, glassing half their cities and sweeping every single mountain valley 10 times, it still would just be insurrection after insurrection.


I'm actually having a hard time thinking of a single combination of society and geography more capable of resisting foreign rule.


The... province would certainly have close to zero economic output. The infrastructure necessary for any sort of economy would be to easily destroyed by insurgents. So what's even left of the idea? Trading army brigades for a thin justification of genocide?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


people who use the phrase use it in the way you would say "late-stage cancer"




Or if they want to make a more historical point: they use it in the way you'd say "Late Republic", the period of the Roman Rebublic that was characterized by civil wars, mass slavery / slave rebellions and internal instability.


Same result, really.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 8, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


IMO you’re better off dove hunting if you want to switch to mostly birds.




Interesting, never met anybody doing that. Those birds are tiny, right? Can you reliably shoot enough for a full meal for multiple adults? Can you fill a freezer to have some for the off-season? Do you need a dog to find the birds, or do you go looking for them yourself?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Same. I think my snobbishness saves me. If I swipe through Youtube shorts, my brain doesn't dump dopamine, it goes "this is shit" over and over again and gets more annoyed with every swipe.


Video is the wrong format for most content, and short form video is the wrong format for very close to absolutely all content. The very few exceptions to that rule where discovered 10 years ago on Vine, and done in thousands of variations since.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
It's coming, and soon. Zero-knowledge proofs for age are in the design of the age-verification framework of the EU Digital Identity Wallet, and in the specs of the Swiss eID law they passed a while back. Both involve an app on your phone holding your ID and your crypto keys and generating ZKP responses to things like age requests.


Both designs are decent in my opinion. Once you've come to terms with the slippery slope that we'll soon have digital ID checks everywhere, all the time, there's not much to criticize. It's probably the best way to do it, if we agree that we need to do any of that. But also, it's pretty far from a "very easy way". This scheme absolutely needs a central authority (probably a national government) doing the final ID/age check and then the issuing of crypto keys. I'll be curious how the US handles this. I expect Google/Apple to take over that task, since the majority probably won't trust the government to do it right...