It was not, it had to be workshopped by Egypt and Pakistan (*edit: and Turkey, sorry for Turkey erasure!) for a day to make it acceptable. We don't, to my knowledge, know how the agreed upon one differ from the original, but it is apparently not the same.
The U.S. envoy told the mediators the 10-point counter-proposal the U.S. had just received from Iran was "a disaster, a catastrophe," a source with direct knowledge said.
That began a "chaotic" day of amendments, with the Pakistani mediators passing new drafts between Witkoff and Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi, and the Egyptian and Turkish foreign ministers trying to help bridge gaps.
By Monday night, the mediators had U.S. approval for an updated proposal for a two-week ceasefire. It was then up to Khamenei — whom the sources said was actively involved in the process on Monday and Tuesday — to make a decision.
Source: https://www.axios.com/2026/04/08/exclusive-how-irans-supreme-leader-reached-a-truce-with-trump
pigeonburger
2d ago
The main advantages to carmakers is that it's a lot easier to make and especially to scale across multiple products and that it's easier to make changes after production, etc, even if you don't add any new functions or telemetry vs, say, 90s cars.
For a car to drive smoothly requires a lot of things to happen just right at the right times, in the right way, like a complex ballet performance. You can get there with exquisitely engineered mechanical parts, electrical parts, electronics, discrete computers or centralized computers (and yeah in a physical way, computers are electronics which are electrical parts, but the degree of complexity and flexibility is different). Having mechanical parts do all of this complex ballet is possible, but difficult; tolerances have to be extremely precise, the materials quasi perfect... It's slightly easier to fudge some of the things with simple electrical parts. For instance, instead of smooth high quality gears and cranks just put an electric motor and limit switches to control a window (it's also easy to make a cheap, bad window crank tho). It's even easier to have electronics like purpose made chips do some of it instead; a servomotor doesn't need to have as much complexity built into it to avoid decapitating a child whose head was out of the window when it started closing. And a computer makes it all even easier, you can start producing the car first and worry about how much strength the motor for the windows are able to push after, and if a regulatory agency changes it (or if different jurisdictions have different limits) you can still use the same part and just change the programming.
The big change from the 90s and early 00s to now is that we're going from multiple discrete computers, which can be limited and hard to access, to less, but more powerful, central computers. That's easier for the dealership to access (according to the industry though, giving independant mechanics access will get women raped in parking garages*).
For consumers, there's some advantages. You can have "modes" that change the throttle response of the car, you can have simulated shifting on CVT transmissions, you can have more complex features for controls like locking window controls for the back row from the front row, more complex security and safety features, a mechnical or electrical car is trivial to hotwire. You can also have features like accident detection that can, on top of calling emergency services on your behalf in some of the more advanced cases, in simpler cases it could automatically unlock the door so it's easier to evacuate. The cases where the consumers are (rightly) complaining is when manufacturers, following Tesla's lead, are replacing physical controls that are easy to use without looking with modal touchscreens (which require more attention from the driver to use). Part of this from the manufacturer is because it's cheaper, part of it is because there's the impression that futuristic means clean means no buttons.
And then of course, they like getting their telemetry data.
*Sadly I can't find the actual ad anymore.
For me personally, there has been a turning point in the last couple of years once I really accepted that the intended experience matters more than the actual physicality of a lot of these things and that authenticity is a lot more artificial and arbitrary than I used to give it credit for. I have been collecting and hoarding retro consoles and retro computers for over a decade. I would pay a lot of money to buy them, have them shipped to me, sometimes have to fix them, then pay a lot for extra equipment to make it more functional in this era, sometimes pay for flash carts or disk emulators and all for what? The C64 I played a bunch with trying to give it more modern capabilities, but in the end even that tends to require some degree of willful blindness; the wifi "adapters" I connected to the C64 were often computers of their own with much higher capabilities than the C64 itself.
And ultimately your Paralympics example is a great analog; we like to think that the two-legged guy with one leg tied is the only one with an artificial limitation, but the one-legged guy as well, in that at any point he could hop on to a (accessibility modified) motorcycle and easily beat the two legged guy. How realistic a recreation of running from Marathon to Athens in Ancient Greece is a modern marathon? The ancient greeks didn't have modern running shoes, energy gels, nipple guards... Why are we restricting motorcycles and not those then? How "realistic" is my "nostalgic experience" with an old computer? Even if I didn't "cheat" by connecting it to more modern equipment, and kept only to vintage accessories so as to not give it capabilities it didn't have back in the days, isn't it STILL cheating if I can access the wealth of ressources of the modern internet that people didn't have access to in the 80s? After all, a large part of the experience, perhaps the most important one!, back then was not so much the equipment people had but the way they had to discover how to use it, by trading floppies with people, going to computer stores, posting on BBSes. The equipment is secondary.
Once I accepted the arbitrary nature of those restrictions, I changed my way of indulging in retro computing/retro gaming nostalgia. I decided that original hardware is not what I really care about, but creating something that makes me feel like original hardware is actually what matters. I put my original hardware away and I'm building up my "retro setup" centered on a MiSTer that has the aesthetic appeal of of the late 80s early 90s, with modern amneties that I feel are not impeding on the feel and aesthetic.
pigeonburger
5d ago
Now, there's a lot of contempt for america in europe, but from what I've seen there's also admiration, especially among the working class. My wife and I went to New York last december and my Spanish in-laws were quite jealous. They wanted as keepsakes american one dollar bills and statue of liberty merch. I think that's because despite all they hear on the news, the US remains a place they admire. Maybe for the people who can afford to visit it, it has less cachet, but from other europeans I know that have visited, I still see that they, on some level, admire it. The USA they hate is a construct created by the news media (both theirs, and the US blue tribe media).
For me, the triangle inverting has been an opportunity to change my tastes. I used to love long story based RPGs. Now it's a genre I cannot find any interest for anymore. Arcade games, and affiliated genres (shmups, fighting games), are my new favorites, although shooters with game lengths under 30 min also work.
Anyway, you enjoyed Tarkov? You should take a look at Marathon. I've been enjoying my time with it a lot, mostly playing solo. Being older yes, at some level my pure "shooting skills" will fall behind that of cracked teens/young adults, but as of now I'm able to compensate by being, as you say, patient. That kind of game usually forces you to alternate between moments of slowing down to listen and observe to identify threats, then boldly making your move, and players are often deficient in one of the two. It also has thick and meaty lore you can enjoy in bite sizes.
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