Critics of the Iran and Venezuela strikes who warn they will lead to another Iraq or Afghanistan are making the wrong analogy, and don’t grasp how much the failures of Iraq and Afghanistan changed the way the US wages war. The closer model is Israel’s “mowing the grass.”
Trump is no pacifist, but he criticized the Iraq war because he understood the US public has a low tolerance for casualties, and that soldiers coming home in caskets, or with PTSD and missing limbs, demoralizes voters. Thus his preferred means of hard power is pushbutton warfare: airstrikes, drone attacks and assassinations at a safe distance, with no follow up ground invasion. There’s no plan for an extended occupation, and no ambitions for post-conflict reconstruction, state-building or democratization. It’s a model of coercing cooperation through threats of violence aimed at individual leaders and key security institutions. It presumes regime continuity, not transition, in order to have a negotiating partner with the credible power to enforce the US’s demands.
Without an occupation force, this model can’t secure permanent changes in government, only temporary changes in government behavior. In Venezuela, this was done through a reshuffling of leadership, and that depended on identifying and negotiating with a friendly official to take Maduro’s place. So far there doesn’t appear to be any Delcy Rodriguez waiting in the wings in Iran, which makes this attack appear even less likely to change anything. How do airstrikes lead to a voluntary coordinated effort among all state institutions - clerics, military, bureaucracy - to dissolve the state?
Given that this is the third airstrike by Trump targeting Iran or Iranian officials, and the first two didn’t achieve a change in hostilities, much less in government, we can expect the regime to remain and for more strikes in the future. This is akin to Israel’s policy of periodic bombardments of Gaza; ostensibly to degrade Hamas’s military capabilities, but more practically to create a regular war spectacle for voters that conveniently distracts from Netanyahu’s corruption scandals. The idea is not to overthrow Hamas but to maintain it as a constant but managed threat that is useful for domestic political purposes.
Both the Venezuela and Iran attacks succeeded in knocking the Epstein files out of the news for a while. They killed or kidnapped individual dictators without ending the dictatorships. For the populations who have suffered under both regimes, including exiles, this is cold comfort. The killing of Khamenei sparked celebrations, justifiably so given the tens of thousands his security forces killed in recent months. I wonder though how long the celebrations will continue when it becomes apparent that the same security forces are still in charge, and possibly making some kind of deal with the US, or just the Trump family.
Just watched a 7 year old talk on the v8 GC
I finally get why RAM usage keeps growing for chrome or electron based app.
They run a smart algo to increase heap usage until it hits a sweep spot for old generation GC where usage & clean up is stretched
But clean up doesn't free heap, it keeps heap pages reserved so future allocations are faster
@ericw_ai the silicon valley over evaluates growth rates and undervalues durability.
This line is so on point even back then, so many investments where I keep thinking, is this shit gonna be around in 4-6 years?
Who procrastinated today?
What did you do instead of shipping? ⛵️
Do you feel guilty?
I start:
- Me
- YT 2h and a pitch competition 4h
- Yep, been struggling on/off for the past weeks
But we still had our daily evening meet and will keep kickin the ball tomorrow. I think this is also part of the build in public journey sometimes.
Playing around with image models to generate a cute avatar for our distraction blocker.
Any recs for generating visual assets one can use?
Aiming for something with character like Duo.
Tried free tools like AI studio and GPT but not super happy with the results.
Day 2 of 7 of building the smartest distraction blocker as a distraction
extension now blocks..too much
need to rework the prompt
Thinking about integrating a beaver mascot who builds dams to pretend people from accessing distractive sites.
Interested? https://t.co/VbAYXdhjaR
why the upgrade? what changed on v2?
v1 worked, but two things didn’t scale:
-Proceeds distribution: coupons relied on per-investor accounting, which doesn’t scale and isn’t set-verifiable onchain.
-Bond Token distribution: also used per-user state and loops.
Also, we needed a Bond Token that is multichain, fungible, and composable but without adding any financial risks on top of our battle-tested v1.
(v1 remains backward-compatible: if you haven’t claimed yet, you can go to Bondi v1 on our app; you can also inspect the distribution contract from the landing page’s Track Record section.)
With v2 Bondi is multichain and Bond Tokens are native crypto assets (modified ERC20s with full fungibility and composability):
-Incentives + liquidity on partner chains (Funding Phase participation incentives, plus secondary market liquidity for early exits)
-One Distribution.sol for Bond Tokens, incentives, coupons, principal
-Funding participation is tracked with fpUSD tokens: Bond Token distribution is calculated directly with an exchange rate
-Proceeds via deposit-time snapshots + a single Merkle root (anyone can rebuild); interest (coupon) payments are automated afterwards with a relayer service. Bond Tokens stay lean for DEX/collateral
With v2 we also have a new landing page, improved web app and docs for all Bondi details. All this and a detailed technical overview article links are in the replies below