Wall Street Journal:

“The precise size of the U.S. stock of air-defense interceptors—what the Pentagon calls magazine depth—is classified. But repeated conflicts with Iran and its proxies in the Middle East have been eating into the supply of air defenses in the region.”

In 12 day war, some evidence Iran conserved many missiles, including its more capable ones, in case war spiraled.

They understand the missile defense math is on their side and can potentially wait US out.

The problem: Iran drones and missiles are cheap and easy to replace. But missile defense interceptions are expensive and time consuming to build.

US might run out before they do, and they can out produce missiles compared to US interceptor production.

It’s the same broad cost-exchange problem US encountered fighting the Houthis, armed by Iran with similar cheap capabilities. That was less about interceptors/missile defense than premier U.S. guided missiles vs. cheap launchers.

US spent $7 billion bombing Houthis over about 6-7 weeks and failed to degrade Houthis’ ability to attack.

The problem v. Iran is much worse because on top of expensive offensive munitions, US and Israel are burning through defensive munitions (interceptors) too.

Trump says he wanted regime change but it seems like he thought that could happen in a week — or otherwise perhaps hoped remnants of Iran regime would “lay down arms” for “immunity.”

What happens if Iran still attacking Gulf targets a week from now, with interceptor stocks even more critical?

The level of overconfidence coming from the White House and Trump is astounding.

https://wsj.com/world/middle-east/u-s-races-to-accomplish-iran-mission-before-munitions-run-out-c014acbc?mod=author_content_page_1_pos_1

I may have been the only analyst to predict this in advance. Now pls listen to me carefully.

The US and Israel do not have a theory of victory. There was two very hard-to-solve problems with their war planning. 

• US-Israeli war aims are, preferably, to permanently remove Iran from the ranks of the confrontation states by toppling the regime; failing that, to disarm Iran by destroying its missile arsenal.

• Regime change cannot be accomplished by aerial bombardment. It has never been done. Without ground-force partners, there is no way to control political developments on the ground. Air coercion is simply not up to the task.

• What can be accomplished, if one is prepared to expend much of one’s magazine, is crippling and fragmenting the state. But that expands rather than constrains the possibility space. This is not a path to a clear victory for the Western powers.

• The second problem is even more immediate. This is the issue that the Iranian arsenal is simply too large for the US to disarm it. And now that, as I predicted, they are going for counter-value strikes on soft targets, how do you protect the oil monarchies? And if you can’t do that, then how you contain this? How do you prevent Iran from wrecking financial markets, the world economy, the Trump presidency, and the GOP for a generation?

• There are considerable risks of escalation here. The White House needs to game plan the exit plan here. There is no clear path to victory. And the risks are multiplying by the hour. You are not going to like where this ends up.

 

Nadaljujte z branjem→

Stanford just analyzed the privacy policies of the six biggest AI companies in America.

Amazon. Anthropic. Google. Meta. Microsoft. OpenAI.

All six use your conversations to train their models. By default. Without meaningfully asking.

Here’s what the paper actually found.

The researchers at Stanford HAI examined 28 privacy documents across these six companies  not just the main privacy policy, but every linked subpolicy, FAQ, and guidance page accessible from the chat interfaces.

They evaluated all of them against the California Consumer Privacy Act, the most comprehensive privacy law in the United States.

The results are worse than you think.

Every single company collects your chat data and feeds it back into model training by default. Some retain your conversations indefinitely. There is no expiration. No auto-delete. Your data just sits there, forever, feeding future versions of the model.

Some of these companies let human employees read your chat transcripts as part of the training process. Not anonymized summaries. Your actual conversations.

But here’s where it gets genuinely dangerous.

 

For companies like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon companies that also run search engines, social media platforms, e-commerce sites, and cloud services  your AI conversations don’t stay inside the chatbot.

They get merged with everything else those companies already know about you.

Your search history. Your purchase data. Your social media activity. Your uploaded files.

The researchers describe a realistic scenario that should make you pause: You ask an AI chatbot for heart-healthy dinner recipes. The model infers you may have a cardiovascular condition. That classification flows through the company’s broader ecosystem. You start seeing ads for medications. The information reaches insurance databases. The effects compound over time.

You shared a dinner question. The system built a health profile.

It gets worse when you look at children’s data.

Four of the six companies appear to include children’s chat data in their model training. Google announced it would train on teenager data with opt-in consent. Anthropic says it doesn’t collect children’s data but doesn’t verify ages. Microsoft says it collects data from users under 18 but claims not to use it for training.

Children cannot legally consent to this. Most parents don’t know it’s happening.

The opt-out mechanisms are a maze.

Some companies offer opt-outs. Some don’t. The ones that do bury the option deep inside settings pages that most users will never find. The privacy policies themselves are written in dense legal language that researchers  people whose job is reading these documents  found difficult to interpret.

And here’s the structural problem nobody is addressing.

There is no comprehensive federal privacy law in the United States governing how AI companies handle chat data. The patchwork of state laws leaves massive gaps. The researchers specifically call for three things: mandatory federal regulation, affirmative opt-in (not opt-out) for model training, and automatic filtering of personal information from chat inputs before they ever reach a training pipeline.

None of those exist today.

The uncomfortable truth is this: every time you type something into ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Meta AI, Copilot, or Alexa, you are contributing to a training dataset. Your medical questions. Your relationship problems. Your financial details. Your uploaded documents.

You are not the customer. You are the curriculum.

And the companies doing this have made it as hard as possible for you to stop.

Nadaljujte z branjem→

Former UN weapons inspector and US Marine intelligence officer Scott Ritter breaks down Iran’s missile breakthrough in a stunning analysis. He reveals how a prior 12-day war gave Iran the edge to dismantle advanced defenses across the Middle East. This exposes massive vulnerabilities in global security, leaving experts questioning everything.

IRAN’S MISSILE MASTERSTROKE

➡️ Before, Iran needed drone swarms to overwhelm defenses—now, single missiles slip through effortlessly. ➡️ Ritter explains: The 12-day war was Iran’s intel goldmine, studying US and Israeli shields like THAAD and Aegis. A fact that Prof. Marandi @s_m_marandi

  repeatedly emphasised at the time.

➡️ They dissected radar links, F-35 feeds, and unified systems, turning data into unbeatable tactics.

THE CODE CRACKED

➡️ “These are some of the smartest people in the world,” Ritter says, noting Iran’s drone hijacks like the Beast of Kandahar.

➡️ At war’s end, precise “leaker” missiles hit every target, forcing Netanyahu’s shaky truce call to Trump.

➡️ No mass attacks needed now—just superior tech that evades hunters, striking Bahrain, UAE, Qatar, Jordan, Israel, and more.

DEFENSE FAILURE EXPOSED

➡️Casualties mount, including American military in Bahrain, as Iranian missiles overwhelm.

➡️ Ritter warns: This mirrors a US-Russia clash, but with nuclear risks—”Missile defenses don’t work.” 

➡️A $1.5 trillion US defense budget? “An empty fraud,” he declares, swamped by Iran’s precision.

THE SILVER LINING

➡️ Nobody wanted this war, but US humiliation could spark arms control over failed “Golden Dome” pursuits.

🔄 Ritter predicts: “This is the end of the Trump administration,” demanding a diplomacy rethink.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Iran’s tech triumph shatters defense illusions, urging a shift from spending to smart peace. Adapt now, or face irreversible global threats.

Robert A. Pape (Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago):

President Trump is now facing the weight of history.

For over a century, leaders have tried to use airpower to force regime change from the sky. The theory is always the same: strike leadership targets, shock the system, fracture the regime, avoid a ground war.

It feels decisive. Clean. Controlled.

The record is brutal.

Airpower alone has never produced positive regime change. I don’t mean rarely. I mean never.

I document every major case in Bombing to Win, and I’ve returned to this question repeatedly in Foreign Affairs, including last summer in writing on Iran. The pattern is consistent: air campaigns aimed at political transformation almost always harden the target instead.

Nadaljujte z branjem→

Članek (s kolegom Dragom Babičem) v Sobotni prilogi Dela:

Slovenija se še vedno rada vidi kot zgodbo o uspehu: kakovost življenja je visoka, socialna varnost solidna, neenakosti razmeroma nizke. A Poročilo o razvoju 2025 razkriva neprijetno resnico – ta blaginja vse bolj stoji na mestu, brez razvojne dinamike, ki bi jo lahko dolgoročno ohranila. Produktivnost že več kot desetletje zaostaja, investicije v znanje, digitalizacijo in ljudi so prenizke, tehnološko prestrukturiranje prepočasno, realna konvergenca z EU pa se po letu 2020 ustavlja. Slovenija se je ujela v paradoks: visoko raven blaginje financira predvsem s prerazporejanjem, ne z ustvarjanjem nove dodane vrednosti.

Nizka (in še pešajoča) gospodarska rast je posledica predvsem nizke rasti produktivnosti, ta pa je posledica nizke investicijske in inovacijske dinamike. Obstoječa gospodarska struktura je zapadla v trajno nizko investicijsko depresijo (investicije glede na BDP so danes za 5 % BDP nižje kot v povprečju let 1995-2008 in celo nižje kot leta 1995.  Slovenija danes ni med tehnološko vodilnimi državami in ne ustvarja lastnih globalno prepoznavnih tehnoloških prvakov; uspešni startupi so redki, po pravilu so zgodaj prodani tujim lastnikom ali se v fazi rasti preselijo v razvojno bolj podporna okolja. Razlog ni pomanjkanje znanja ali talentov, temveč strukturna razdrobljenost inovacijskega sistema, ki ne zagotavlja neprekinjenega toka od izobraževanja in raziskav do gospodarstva, financiranja in rasti.

Potrebna je reforma inovacijskega sistema, ki mora prinesti prehod k zavestnemu oblikovanju sistema, ki spodbuja ustvarjalnost kot temeljni družbeni proces. To zahteva dolgoročno usklajevanje izobraževalne, raziskovalne, gospodarske in finančne politike ter jasno vlogo države kot povezovalnega arhitekta, ki omogoča neprekinjen prehod od ustvarjanja idej do dodane vrednosti. Šele inovacijski sistem, ki ustvarjalnost prepozna kot skupno družbeno infrastrukturo in ne jemlje inovacij kot stranski produkt trga, lahko Sloveniji zagotovi trajno konkurenčnost in ohranjanje blaginje.

Več v Sobotni prilogi Dela.

Mark Zuckerberg is on trial in Los Angeles right now, and Meta’s own internal research is being used against him. Dozens of internal studies, leaked by whistleblowers and unearthed through litigation, show the company documented in their own words what Instagram does to teenagers.

The conclusions are damning. They knew it was addictive. They knew it was harming mental health. They knew teens felt powerless to stop using it. And then they went looking for ways to make it more compelling.

A 2020 internal slideshow cited neuroscience and adolescent brain development… not to protect kids, but to identify “opportunities.”

This is Big Tech’s tobacco moment. And just like tobacco, there’s an internal memo that says exactly that. Read what Meta knew (and when they knew it) in this piece by @smiddendorp22:

Preverba z @grok te trditve potrjuje:

Nadaljujte z branjem→

Iskreno – moraš biti precej usekan, da pomisliš, da bi prehitre dirkače s športnimi avti na cestah lovil z električnim avtom (kjer pritisneš na gas in se ti baterija sprazni kot dyson sesalec pri turbo sesanju) z dosegom 200 km (Tesla Y ima pri pri stalni hitrosti 200 km/h doseg 170–220 km) …

… ali da boš nasprotnika granatiral ali raketiral na “okolju prijazen način” iz električega tanka ali električnega letala.

Trump, karkoli si o njemu mislimo, je na to temo razvil dobro parodijo:

»They want our army tanks to be all electric so that when we go into enemy territory blasting the hell out of everybody we do it… environmentally friendly.«
»The battery is so big you’d have to have a truck behind it…«