The Openrouter website says that y'all do not train on the data, but it does not make it clear that the data is not shared with any 3rd parties (other than the LLM provider) who might train on it.
There is the example of Apple and Google providing transport for push notifications, but claiming to delete the content and only preserve the metadata.
What is Openrouter's policy on this? Is the logging of user data an essential part of the business model, or is the primary business model really facilitating a proxy between multiple services and nothing beyond that? If everything is logged, do y'all store it securely so that if one database is stolen (by China for example) then it's not useful on its own?
With the race for AGI and everyone training on each other's outputs, Openrouter is clearly in a position to abuse all of that even though the major providers weaken their output to limit the value of distilling them.
We have two mechanisms whereby we retain data. Both are opt-in and off by default.
One mechanism where you get a discount and we can use the data (in theory this does mean sell it; but our intent is to use it to make efficient dynamic routing solutions. But absolutely we could one day sell it) and another where we retain it for you so you can see it in your logs. We have no rights to this data in any way. This is similar to how any tracing/logging solution works.
Both and opt-in. If you don’t opt in, we don’t retain anything and are a pass through with regards to your prompt data.
All of this is carefully documented and I encourage you to explore and chat with the docs.
War is never a good idea, but Iran didn't care and they have been waging war for 40 years. Do you just let them perpetually build strength internally while funding terrorism externally? They have been spreading extremism and instability in the region for decades. They surrounded Israel with militants and attacked them.
We knew they could disrupt shipping through the strait, that is a large part of the purpose behind "drill baby drill", stopping Venezuela from invading Guyana where we have oil infrastructure, and increasing oil investment into Venezuela, along with reopening some oil drilling off California.
We also knew we likely couldn't justify the risks and costs of sending in a large invasion force for multiple reasons. If a decent deal couldn't be made, then at least you remove an oil supplier from China and you mow the grass to limit the threat Iran poses in the near future. Even if the strait remains in conflict for years, in the long-term that is a good thing, because it forces an acceleration of bypassing it as an issue which means Iran loses a big button to push in the future.
Meanwhile, with oil prices higher, that is historically good for oil investment which is excellent for Venezuela so more of the fuels that countries rely on come from our hemisphere. We're not new at this game.
- I don't care about removing oil suppliers from China, I don't know anyone who does. I get most of my stuff from them, seems like a bad idea
- I don't care about Venezuela or lies about them being (drug lords|conquering invaders|bad hombres), they are sovereign, the U.S has no right, justification or excuse to be kidnapping their leaders or fucking with their politics.
- The United States has been spreading extremism and instability globally for 40+ years.
- Oil production in the U.S. is not meaningfully higher than it was under Biden, so "drill baby drill" was just another lie that's been lapped up and is now being spit back out
- A decent deal HAD BEEN MADE under Obama, it was pretty good most would say, then Trump tore it up because of his ego and tiny dick/tiny hands syndrome.
- "mowing the grass" sounds like terrorism first and foremost and crimes against humanity second.
- Just because the U.S. and Israel Administrations want to self select into being world police does not make it just or right.
> - I don't care about removing oil suppliers from China, I don't know anyone who does. I get most of my stuff from them, seems like a bad idea
Is that because you don't know what caused World War 2 and you don't have any family who served in World War 2?
> - I don't care about Venezuela or lies about them being (drug lords|conquering invaders|bad hombres), they are sovereign, the U.S has no right, justification or excuse to be kidnapping their leaders or fucking with their politics.
Maduro was an internationally wanted criminal. He was also going to invade his neighbor, Guyana after the UN rejected his claim against it. You don't cross half your hemisphere to arrest someone on legal grounds if you don't have a case. International law is not useful as a concept to keep the world from descending into chaos unless some kind of enforcement occurs. The reasons he was officially arrested for are not the only reasons he was arrested.
> - The United States has been spreading extremism and instability globally for 40+ years.
That is not a strong argument. The US was isolationist until its ships were getting attacked at sea. Then it was isolationist until the world kept descending into wars we had to join to stop. Then we established more world structure that has proven to reduce the occurrence of war. We've been trying to establish the same kind of stability Europe has, in the Middle East.
> - Oil production in the U.S. is not meaningfully higher than it was under Biden, so "drill baby drill" was just another lie that's been lapped up and is now being spit back out
Crude oil - https://www.arescotx.com/2015-2025-us-field-production-crude... shows an increase in 4mil barrels per day. Even in the first term, the Trump administration was pursuing an energy dominance agenda, but it's not all attributable to their policies.
> - A decent deal HAD BEEN MADE under Obama, it was pretty good most would say, then Trump tore it up because of his ego and tiny dick/tiny hands syndrome.
The US has hundreds of millions of people. Trump is not the only person we have. Iran has been seen as a critical threat to the US, to the region and to the world for many decades. The JCPOA did not stop the threat nor sufficiently monitor it. Iran continued building nuclear sites underground and moved their centrifuges underground, meeting with North Korean nuclear missile scientists, etc. The IAEA also requested access to various sites and were denied or delayed by Iran. The IAEA was only reporting Iran's compliance to its commitments under the JCPOA, which was a bad deal and as such, complying with the JCPOA was insufficient.
Iran had a history of breaking international law which continued after the JCPOA. They have never truly established an essential level of trust that would be required to give them the benefit of the doubt that the JCPOA was being complied with, which the inspection process in place could not guarantee. They were also out of compliance with the JCPOA in developing ballistic missiles capable of delivering a nuclear warhead.
> - "mowing the grass" sounds like terrorism first and foremost and crimes against humanity second.
It's just an analogy. The Iranian revolutionaries have dug themselves in to such an extent that going in to change their regime would almost certainly require so much killing that it would practically be genocide. Reducing their military assets and installations is the alternative. This is all a response to terrorism to start with.
> - Just because the U.S. and Israel Administrations want to self select into being world police does not make it just or right.
No, we don't want to. It's simply existential that we do. We would much rather not. I don't care about most of these places halfway around the world. It would be nice if they'd simply live in peace and have their own lives. They do not. History has proven that if we let chaos abroad gain too much momentum, it will eventually lead to some large scale war that we'll get dragged into. Why do we get dragged into them? Why can't we just stay out of the wars? Well, if one country, like Germany, Japan, China or Russia simply continues to expand outward and gain huge power imbalances, they become a threat to freedom. The US had kinds of freedom that even most citizens do not fully appreciate or deeply understand.
Iran, Russia and China deliberately label the US as their enemy. Even Saudi Arabia has effectively referred to Iran as the Nazi Germany of the Middle East. After the communists helped the Iranian Islamic revolutionaries gain power, they killed thousands of communists. Even recently they slaughtered many thousands of their own people. They do not care about human life.
It's very strange to me that you seem to like defending dictators who torture and kill their own people. I guess that's what the globalized internet is these days.
> Is that because you don't know what caused World War 2 and you don't have any family who served in World War 2?
Pretty familiar, also familiar with Vietnam, Korea, Cuba, Libya, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. I can link pictures and articles detailing American Service Members and the women and children they shot, blew up, raped, burned alive, and otherwise mutilated in each of those engagements.
My familiarity with WW2, and it's causes make my deeply uneasy about the idea of going to war with a peer power like China; China who was an ally in WW3, maybe you don't know this and didn't have any family who served in World War 2?
Anyways no idea why you'd bring this up or what point you were trying to make? War is good or something? War can be justified if the orange man on the TV says the (enemy) country is "bigly bad"?
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The amount of delusion here is actually baffling, given https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law I'm not going to respond to all of this. I do think it's incredibly entertaining to watch people/bots defend the convicted felons leading the U.S. by saying it's absolutely imperative we stop crime everywhere else!
Most statements you made are fabricated or right wing talking points not based in any type of reality (JCPOA bad not complying [all evidence is against this]; "Iran is an existential threat" - Not to me or anyone I know of have ever met, not a single day of my life has gone by that I felt directly under threat by anyone in Iran).
It's all the same with you people, try and propagandize the rest of us with threats and doom about the death and destruction that will certainly come from these places half way around the world, while completely ignoring the death and destruction that the U.S. exports globally every single day. It's sickening.
There's a difference between soldiers stepping out of line in war versus behaving according to policy. War is never good. It's not really a strong argument to say hey, I've got all these disturbing photos that show the US is bad. Well, you could also show disturbing photos that make any country look bad. The point is the context and how it got to be that way.
China is sometimes referred to as a peer power, but in many ways they remain extremely far behind. That is both a good thing and a bad thing. Weak countries go to extremes. Strong countries who think they are stronger than they are, could potentially go to similar extremes to make up for that perception.
Not all crimes are equivalent, and not all crimes are actual crimes even if people call them crimes.
It's easier to dismiss people than to engage, but then you stop challenging yourself and navigating the differences to understand the world better. Sometimes I'm wrong, but I try to be correct and not purely for emotional satisfaction.
1. The British were stealing Iranian oil (ie the Anglo-Persian Company, which is now BPl;
2. Iran democratically elected Mossadegh who said Iranian resources would be for Iranians;
3. The British freak out. MI6 twice goes to the newly elected Eisenhower administration to get them to intervene. They are rebuffed the first time so the British come back with a fabricated story about how this is communism somehow and the Eisenhower administration takes the bait;
4. Eisenhowever overthrows the democratically elected government of Iran to install the Shah as an autocrat (he was previously a figurehead pretty much);
5. The Shah takes the oil and basically gives it to the Americans so the British didn't even get what they wanted;
6. The Shah was a brutal dictator that included Savak, a secret police that had a history of violence, represseion and disappearing people;
7. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the Shah's regime would fall. The Americans were worried that the Communists would win and Iran would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence so got their puuppet in the region, Saddam Hussein, to expel Khomenei from Iraq in the hopes that the Isalamic fundamentalists would win;
8. The fundamentalists did win. Iran was punished for expelling the American puppet with crippling economic sanctions. Additionally, Saddam Hussein was armed and prompted to go fight a war with Iran. The Iran-Iraq war lasted years, killed over a million people (iranians and Iraqis) and basically had no other change in borders or regimes in the region;
9. After 9/11. Iran gave material aid to the US including rounding up hundreds of al-Qaeda fighters;
10. Despite 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudi, Osama bin Laden being Saudi and al-Qaeda getting material support from Saudi princes and Saudi madrasses (religious schools), Iran got lumped in with Iraq and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil". The reason for this were the hawks in the US administration who believed that George HW Bush messed up not overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991. They had prior to 9/11 urged the Clinton administration and Congress to invade Iran;
11. Iraq was invaded because the neocon hawks, particularly Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, won the policy debate. It is highly believed they thought they would be overthrowing Iran too;
12. North Korea managed to stave off attacks by developing a nuclear weapon. That was the true lesson of the Global War on Terror: only a nuclear weapon will guarantee your survival;
13. Despite that the second Ayatollah, Khamenei, issued a fatwa against developing a nuclear weapon, something which still stands to this day, in 2003;
14. Obama negotitated (with European allies) the JCPOA, a program to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, in exchange for sanctions relief. There is no proof the Iranians ever violated the agreement. They even kept abiding by it for up to a year after Trump tore it up to appease Israel;
15. Israel committed too many hostile acts to enumerate, including the bombing of an embassy in Damascus, targeted assassinations within Iran, the murder of Iranians overseas, etc, pretty much all of which Iran just took on the chin;
16. The US and Israel started an unprovoked war last year, which included killing the Iranian negotiators. This war went so badly that hostilities ended after 12 days. It was widely suspected at the time that supplies of anti-missile munitions were getting critically low. Iran basically acted in good faith here that the Americans would negotiate in good faith; and
17. The Iranians were wrong. America did not act in good faith and started another unprovoked war at Israel's urging that included, for some reason, blowing up a middle school with almost 200 10-12 year old girls in it and killing an 87 year old man who had refused to develop a nuclear weapon (ie Khamenei) who also refused to go into a bunker because his people didn't have the same protections. That strike also killed a whole bunch of his family and the new Ayatollah's family.
18. This brings us to today. From Iran's position, the US cannot be trusted and does not negotiate in good faith. The uS will not restrain Israel in any way, which is an issue given Israel's insatiable appetite for blowing up babies. So Iran has concluded that the only way to guarantee their sovereignty is to make the economic pain so dire that th eUS never thinks about doing this again.
This has been clear for months now and Trump is choosing Israel over the economic pain that has been inflicted and is still coming. Millions will likely starve in the coming year.
But sure, keep repeating your State Department talking points.
Very nice pro-Iranian walk down the memory lane while comfortbly forgetting how piece and people loving Ayatollah killed thousands of Iranians for what good reason?
It's not "pro-Iranian" to acknowledge democracy. The Shah is also responsible for the death, torture and disappearance of thousands of Iranian citizens, with the help of the CIA.
As a US citizen, that concerns me far more than Iran's self-determination. I don't want my tax dollars going towards Yet Another Torture Regime.
> 2. Iran democratically elected Mossadegh who said Iranian resources would be for Iranians;
He was not really democratically elected, and he was not serving democracy. He was converting it into a dictatorship.
> 4. Eisenhowever overthrows the democratically elected government of Iran to install the Shah as an autocrat (he was previously a figurehead pretty much);
Overthrows the dictator, to restore the authority of the shah, you mean.
> 7. By the late 1970s it was becoming clear that the Shah's regime would fall. The Americans were worried that the Communists would win and Iran would fall into the Soviet sphere of influence so got their puuppet in the region, Saddam Hussein, to expel Khomenei from Iraq in the hopes that the Isalamic fundamentalists would win;
That misunderstands the concern that the fundamentalists themselves were a threat to Iraq and Saddam hated communists too. He tortured and killed Iraqi communist party members, systematically.
> 10. Despite 15 of the 19 hijackers being Saudi, Osama bin Laden being Saudi and al-Qaeda getting material support from Saudi princes and Saudi madrasses (religious schools), Iran got lumped in with Iraq and North Korea as the "Axis of Evil". The reason for this were the hawks in the US administration who believed that George HW Bush messed up not overthrowing Saddam Hussein in 1991. They had prior to 9/11 urged the Clinton administration and Congress to invade Iran;
> 11. Iraq was invaded because the neocon hawks, particularly Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, won the policy debate. It is highly believed they thought they would be overthrowing Iran too;
Iraq had invaded its neighbor Kuwait, bombed the World Trade Center once before, tried to assassinate the president and more. Saudi Arabia was an ally and Saudi Arabian citizens were recruited partially because they have easier access to the US, but they were trained in Afghanistan. It might be fair that we wanted a better footprint in the region as a hedge against Iran. It was obviously complicated.
> 12. North Korea managed to stave off attacks by developing a nuclear weapon. That was the true lesson of the Global War on Terror: only a nuclear weapon will guarantee your survival;
Russia wanted a foothold in Korea to strengthen its aim of acquiring Japanese islands to use as warm water ports, since its northern shores regularly froze. That has been ongoing since the early 1800s. Japan even assassinated a leader of Korea who was warming up to Russia too much back then. Eventually during World War 1, Japan took Korea, but when World War 2 ended they lost it to the US and the Soviet Union.
Similar to west Germany and east Germany, you had communist North Korea, then South Korea, but not really administered by the Korean people until they formed their own governments.
North Korea then got support from Russia and China to invade South Korea. North Korea started the war. North Korea was also the major aggressor even before the war.
A lot of countries don't have nukes and aren't getting invaded by other countries. We didn't invade east Germany, we waited for the Soviet Union to collapse.
> 14. Obama negotitated (with European allies) the JCPOA, a program to inspect Iranian nuclear sites, in exchange for sanctions relief. There is no proof the Iranians ever violated the agreement. They even kept abiding by it for up to a year after Trump tore it up to appease Israel;
The JCPOA set out the terms for compliance. The IAEA says, as far as we know they're complying. This only means compliance with the JCPOA. The JCPOA was a bad deal, so the fact they were mostly observed to be complying with it does not matter much. You don't say JCPOA -> being complied with -> shut off brain, turn off lights, lets go home boys. It was transparency with limits, but there were many other intelligence signals and behaviors from Iran that demonstrated that Iran did not stop being a threat. It was simply growing as a threat with international political cover.
> 15. Israel committed too many hostile acts to enumerate, including the bombing of an embassy in Damascus, targeted assassinations within Iran, the murder of Iranians overseas, etc, pretty much all of which Iran just took on the chin;
Iran has essentially been at war with the US and Israel for many decades. You can't look at an action from Israel or the US in a vacuum, that's very weak logic. Most actions are reactions to things Iran has already done. Iran has been surrounding Israel with funded militants, plus expanding these groups around the region.
> 16. The US and Israel started an unprovoked war last year, which included killing the Iranian negotiators. This war went so badly that hostilities ended after 12 days. It was widely suspected at the time that supplies of anti-missile munitions were getting critically low. Iran basically acted in good faith here that the Americans would negotiate in good faith; and
Iran provoked it by funding Houthi attacks on shipping in 2023 after also funding Hamas to attack Israel shortly before. They were breaking international law by shipping with dark fleets, funding attacks in the region and continuing to develop their nuclear program which the JCPOA allowed them to get a running start on.
They attacked others, so they legitimized attacks against themselves. It wasn't unprovoked. That is a very unreasonable perspective.
> 17. The Iranians were wrong. America did not act in good faith and started another unprovoked war at Israel's urging that included, for some reason, blowing up a middle school with almost 200 10-12 year old girls in it and killing an 87 year old man who had refused to develop a nuclear weapon (ie Khamenei) who also refused to go into a bunker because his people didn't have the same protections. That strike also killed a whole bunch of his family and the new Ayatollah's family.
The school was part of a military compound that may have been repurposed. It wasn't intentional, but it is very common for terrorists to intentionally put innocent people around military targets. Hamas did this regularly in Gaza. International law says civilian targets like this are not valid military targets, unless they are being used by the military. Unfortunately, it was probably both a civilian and valid military target. We don't make it a habit of intentionally killing civilians.
Iran does not have freedom of speech the way the US does. As a result, when information circulates in Iran or comes out from Iran, it is often controlled by the state. They will spread their propaganda, but the information is useless. They will do everything in their power to direct your emotions against the US, rather than themselves for their own behavior that caused these attacks to come.
Unfortunately this nonsense also now fills the internet and people fall for it.
> 18. This brings us to today. From Iran's position, the US cannot be trusted and does not negotiate in good faith. The uS will not restrain Israel in any way, which is an issue given Israel's insatiable appetite for blowing up babies.
Iran was not negotiating in good faith and has not been following international law to start with which are agreements presumably they should be following if they are a good and nice country that just wants to live in peace, International laws greatly benefit peaceful countries. If Iran was peaceful like most other countries, they could be benefiting from those same laws. This isn't only observed by the US and Israel, but by other Middle Eastern countries and Europe too. So you can't really say this is some crazy US Israel thing and Iran is really just being good. Nobody believes that, yet this message spreads online.
> So Iran has concluded that the only way to guarantee their sovereignty is to make the economic pain so dire that th eUS never thinks about doing this again.
We didn't take sovereignty away from Japan, Korea, Iraq, Germany, or Venezuela and so on. Your argument is very weak. We don't want every country, we just want them to be good peaceful countries that let their people live in freedom and peace. That's why we have so many allies. Nobody wants to be like our enemies, because they build their societies on poor logic and nobody is allowed to fix it.
We've been planning interventions in Iran for 40 years and they constantly get revised or updated. Iran is literally one of few countries known for drones, which they based on stolen drone tech from western countries. It's not realistic that we entered this conflict unaware that Iran could harass the strait cheaply.
The problem is that Israel bombed their entire leadership structure and there's seemingly nobody to deal with now. It's fragmented between people who want to make deals, people who can even facilitate any kinds of agreement and the radicals who simply want the world to burn and will throw any human in the way to die for that end.
We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
At the same time, showing the vulnerabilities in getting oil from that region means China is now buying more oil in USD and even directly from the US via the Pacific which helps further deter World War 3. In the case that something did still happen as part of a global strategy by China, Iran no longer exists as a lever that can be pulled to expand the chaos of a war with the aim of further diffusing the US military away from the Pacific.
If we wanted to fully end this mess, we would probably have to send the military in on the ground, which nobody wants except Iran. They are extremists in general and willing to die over this nuclear issue.
Barring that, we've largely neutered their capacity to make war and reorganized oil trade further in favor of the US. We will have to wait to see if Iran's leadership structure sorts itself out and they come to the table. Until then, if Iran wants to prevent their neighbors from benefiting from international shipping, Iran can be denied that too. Countries are developing workarounds to rely less on the strait, so the longer Iran sticks with this strategy the weaker it will get over the years.
It's popular to say the US lost this or the US lost that and it's a ridiculous country, but it's usually some kind of political gymnastics or financial judgement as it pertains to cost vs benefit. We always lose fewer soldiers and generally come out of it better than if we hadn't done anything at all. We almost always go into something for many more reasons than are publicly stated. A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now.
Sometimes doing the right thing is unpopular, but you should still do it.
> We can absolutely continue destroying their capacity to do things, but the terrorists do not care about their own people or the world. They will use human shields and continue seeking nuclear weapons. They do not value human life or rules. This is why they can never have a nuclear weapon.
It's the US and Israel that are the "terrorists" and yet both have nuclear weapons. You literally say yourself that we can "continue destroying their capacity to do things", and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
Iran has been terrorizing the entire region, exporting radicalism and funding terrorism. Many of the wars that have occurred in the middle east were caused by Iran. If you look at the history of Israeli attacks, they have essentially been reactions to Iran-backed terrorist attacks against Israel.
Why did Saudi Arabia attack Yemen? For fun? No, they were reacting to Iran-backed terrorist groups. Why did Iraq attack Iran, for fun? No, even back then they were reacting to Iran exporting their terrorism to Iraq.
Their strategy has been to try to look innocent by avoiding direct attacks from Iran and have diplomats that pretend Iran is a nice actor on the international stage, while using their country as a stable foundation for exporting terrorism. This isn't exclusively a strategy for achieving state power, it is a religious imperative to achieve a radical vision of global Islam.
The US has worked with the Middle East for many years to settle on some kind of peace after thousands of years of conflict (which was also the case for Europe). There can never be peace as long as Iran manufactures conflict regularly.
When the US does things, there is usually a strong and valuable logic behind it, even if it is not expressed publicly. For Iran, the reasons tend to be religious. Their goals and behaviors are not the same as you would expect from a rational state actor.
You can’t just label all of Israel’s enemies “terrorists”. The history of the Zionist colony is well know at this point. I’m a US citizen and fully aligned with Iran against Israel and the US presence in the Middle East.
I never said that. Only terrorists are terrorists. It has a real definition and it just happens that many of the people opposed to Israel use a terrorist form of attack against Israel. The Iranian government has been officially designated as a terrorist regime by many countries, because they have been actively promoting terrorist strategies all over the region. Most of the people in Iran are not terrorists. There are a lot of great Iranian people in the US.
People will think all kinds of things and there are many people with different ideas. Not everyone can be right all the time. It often comes down to how you were taught, what kind of media you consume, whether you seek the truth and logic or prefer emotion, and what your emotions lean toward. All I can say is from a purely logical perspective, Iran is not on the right side of this, even if it is fair to say that Israel has been extreme in its own way in reacting to aggression.
This isn't only about Israel. Iran has rubbed all of its neighbors wrong for 40+ years. If this was only about Israel and no other country, then there would be more to dig into there, but it is more than that.
At least we are free to express our ideas in the US and Israel. In Iran, they do not have free speech. The government can and will punish you for speaking against the government. They can make anything seem true just by imprisoning anyone who says otherwise.
Attacking Israel is never terrorism. They are invaders on stolen land. It's always legitimate resistance.
> At least we are free to express our ideas in the US and Israel. In Iran, they do not have free speech. The government can and will punish you for speaking against the government. They can make anything seem true just by imprisoning anyone who says otherwise.
Whether this is true or not, is none of my concern. What is my concern is a US backed invasion of other people's territory and Israel's influence on my government. Including Zionist attacks on free speech.
Terrorism is never justified, it's even against international law during war itself. And has terrorism against Israel been a successful strategy? Clearly not. It doesn't work and it's bad.
Israel doesn't control the US any more than the UK controls the US. We're all allies and countries that have shared interests can all influence each other in various ways.
There are some influential Jewish people in US culture and in politics and of course our countries share intelligence, but we have a shared interest in stabilizing the Middle East. Iran is the biggest destabilizer in the region, not Israel.
> and like your definition of terrorists, the US/Israel are using us (US citizens) as human shields.
No they don't, that is ridiculous. In what way could US citizens take collateral damage in this war? They aren't in harms way at all. You could argue they use Israeli and Arab civilians as human shields since they are the ones taking the attacks, but not American ones. And even for the Arabs that has US bases there are no girl schools inside those US bases like Iran puts in theirs. (the girl school was inside the walls of an irgc base, probably an old repurposed house)
> A lot of the benefits of intervening in Iran seem to be paying off right now
I, umm, disagree fairly wholeheartedly.
Maybe there's some long term <something> that has changed direction slightly as a result, but right now literally everything immediate is worse than it was beforehand.
The US is not xenophobic. That is ridiculous. Any time you say stuff like that, you discredit the things you say that actually make sense. I'm with you on the privacy aspect, but there are multiple dimensions of that which you're ignoring. I'd much prefer taking my chances in the US than in the EU, where they are constantly trying to push companies to weaken privacy.
Europe has way stronger data protection laws than the US. EU has GDPR, strict requirements, large fines. US only has a couple states protecting personal data, with HIPAA for health data, and that's it. We require you to unlock all your devices within 100 miles of a border (inland) so we can look at all your data. Of course our intelligence service also hoovers up the metadata of US citizens in contact with anyone overseas, which is borderline illegal. All our states are now passing "age verification" which is mass surveillance under a different name.
And US absolutely has been xenophobic for years, by official federal policy. I'm really surprised you're not aware of it, but here's a small selection of examples:
- Both our elected and appointed leaders are white nationalists. Our president called all Mexicans murderers and rapists, said African migrants were eating random pets in a rural US town (they weren't, obviously, but it was intended to exacerbate xenophobia)
- Our federal government has a mandate using ICE to try to eject anyone with a Hispanic name from the country (has already deported US citizens based on being hispanic/latino). We even boot people seeing asylum, often exporting them to foreign prisons even if they've never had a criminal record. We have concentration camps now, filled entirely with foreigners, and people who have lived here for decades but were foreigners.
- We stopped accepting new visas from 75 countries. We may even expel you for social media posts we don't like, or for attending a protest that our citizens can attend. We increased travel bans for people from majority Muslim countries. H1-B visas have been rolled back to only the highest paying jobs, and you may need to pay a $15,000 bond. We also now collect and store foreigners' biometric data indefinitely.
- Let's not forget the tariffs on virtually all other nations, to say nothing of "America First" and the new "Greater North America doctrine".
The US accepts immigrants from 200+ countries around the world with the top 5 being Mexico, Cuba, India, Dominican Republic and China. None of that has changed under Trump.
I think you got lost in the rhetoric somewhere.
Tariffs are just the US adjusting to reality which other countries are slow to do. Free trade died all on its own, because the pandemic showed that critical industries were hollowed out by free trade in a way that could be appreciated from a national security perspective. That situation was favoring China too much, so we need to unwind that some.
Tariffs already existed in many countries in practice, so it's not like the US reinvented modern tariffs.
Putting some numbers into the discussion census.gov [0] is tracking a sharp decline in net immigration due to both, a decrease in immigration and an increase in emmigration, from the start of 2025 to the present. Trending towards a net negative.
Pew [1] suggests that the changes around the start of 2025 were due increased restrictions on asylum applications under the previous admin and EOs by the current one to restrict new immigration. Given the rough numbers [2] of about 40k asylum grants per year in the early 2020s, I doubt the previous admin's actions are playing much of a role here.
Stating that none of it (immigration acceptance) changed under this administration might technically be true - with respect to the number of countries applying, but misses this point.
No doubt some changes were made by both Biden and Trump, but the argument being made is that this was fundamentally xenophobia, which is not supported.
Are you seriously trying to reframe the largest tariff war in 100 years, targeting 180 countries and territories, as a readjustment against China? And in both of Trump's terms he's radically changed immigration more than at any time since the 1960's. Either this is a great troll, or you need help, man.
Free trade isn't only a China issue, no. It's only the most important one partly as a function of China propping up massive state companies while also trying to avoid becoming a consumption led economy.
If you feel like formulating a good argument about immigration, I'll listen, but you haven't provided one.
Privacy is a concern everywhere, but the center of gravity of the issue moves further up or down the chain depending on the country.
The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history. No country in Europe or Europe as a whole is even competitive by comparison. The main issue we're facing is that we are by far the primary target for foreign funded activism and systemic attacks, because China and Russia hated NGOs promoting color revolutions.
That is also part of the rule of law issue, but the system is overall managing quite well. It's all moving in slow motion, but many important metrics are going in the right direction, which we need as that's part of deterring China.
From Wikipedia, United States government and policy, citing several democratic institutes:
"The United States was the most prominent liberal democracy for much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, but has undergone significant democratic backsliding and a shift toward a hybrid regime—a political system combining autocratic and democratic features.[185][186][237] There is an ongoing debate among political scientists on whether the country is more appropriately classified as an electoral autocracy or illiberal democracy, with few still considering it a robust liberal democracy.[238]"
> The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history. No country in Europe or Europe as a whole is even competitive by comparison.
How do you figure? I hear you have roving gangs of masked thugs beating up random citizens with the backing of your government, that doesn't sound very democratically secure, especially with what healthcare costs over there.
> The structure of the US makes it basically the single most secure democracy anywhere right now or in history.
This is just not true. It is failing visibly and loudly fast. It used to fail slowly but the process speeded up.
American administration supports Russia now. It praises Russian, Chinese, Belarus leaders again and again. It praises Orban. It hates last bastion of democracy - Europe.
China is not detered. Its power is growing while American one is going down. Trump openly admires its leader. China is celebrating current state of America.
That's not really accurate. The US is structured so that it is self-reinforcing from the bottom up and the top down simultaneously. State laws cannot violate the U.S. constitution and many types of elections cannot be gerrymandered. Even gerrymandered legislatures have limits on what they can do. You can't simply have one party change a state's constitution. Even congress can't be entirely gerrymandered.
Also, we have guns. LOTS of guns. The U.S. military's first and sole responsibility is to the constitution itself. If any state or the federal government tries to get rid of their constitutions, the military can rightfully take it over and re-establish a constitution.
There is no other country that's even remotely close to this secure.
It used to be named the Department of War and Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did. It's just another part of changing the posture to match the philosophy that the best defensive is a good offense. It seems to be working pretty well, if you know what we're defending against.
For a few years before it was the Department of Defense it was the National Military Establishment (with an initialism with a very unfortunate pronunciation given its function) and before that it didn't exist at all.
Now, before the National Military Establishment was formed to unify the nations military bureaucracy, there were two separate cabinet level departments, the Department of War (which oversaw the Army) and the Department of the Navy (which oversaw the Navy, including the Marine Corps.) When the NME was created, the Army was split into the Army and the Air Force, and the Department of War was likewise split into the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force. Both of these new Departments and the Department of the Navy remained (briefly) cabinet-level departments with their own Secretaries, while the NME was headed by the new Secretary of Defense.
Very quickly, though, further reforms were adopted in law and the NME became the Department of Defense and the service secretaries were formally subordinated to the Secretary of Defense and were now subcabinet positions (which is how the DoD got its unique, within the US executive branch, Department with its own cabinet level Secretary with subordinate Departments headed by a subcabinet level Secretaries organization.)
TLDR: The Department of War was not an earlier name for the Department of Defense, it was the name for the Department of the Army before the Air Force was split out from it.
> Palmer Luckey suggested naming it back. People agreed, so they did.
Well, again, it couldn’t be named back to “Department of War”, because its only previous name was “National Military Establishment.” And while some people obviously agreed that it should be called “Department of War”, they didn’t actually rename it. The name in law of the organization named “The Department of Defense” in 1949 by amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 remains “The Department of Defense”. It hasn’t been renamed. The present executive branch leadership has adopted nicknames for the department and the titles of its officials ("secondary titles” in the language of EO 14347 which formalized the system of nicknames [and also recounts as if true the false history that “Department of War” was previously the name of the Department of Defense].)
There are technicalities around all of this yes, but we used to have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it. Now we have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it. It's only named by executive order, which in practice is almost indistinguishable outside of some paperwork that few people will ever see. It's largely the spirit of the thing and the shift in communications posture.
> we used to have a Department of War with multiple branches of the military under it.
No, we didn't. When the Department of War existed, it had exactly one branch under it, the Army. The Navy (including the Marine Corps)—as well as, in time of war only, the Coast Guard—was under the Department of the Navy, which was a separate cabinet level department.
When the US Army Air Forces, which were not a separate branch of the military, was turned into the US Air Force, which was a separate branch—by the National Security Act of 1947—the Department of War was abolished, and replaced with the Department of the Army (which had only the Army under it, just as the old Department of War had) and the Department of the Air Force (which had only the brand new Air Force under it.) There was never was Department of War with more than one branch under it.
This was also the same time that the National Military Establishment, headed by the Secretary of Defense, was created to provide unified structure within which the three military departments (Army, Air Force, and Navy) were embedded (but not, initially, actually subordinated: all three service secretaries were still cabinet-level officers.)
Two years later, amendments were passed to the National Security Act of 1947 which renamed the NME to the Department of Defense, and formally subordinated the service secretaries and their associated departments to the Secretary and Department of Defense, and, but for some minor changes like the creation of the Space Force as a separate branch within the Department of the Air Force, remains the structure in law today.
The only cabinet-level departments that ever had multiple branches of the military under them were the Department of Navy and the Department of Defense. (The Department of the Air Force, as noted in the preceding paragraph, has for the last few years also had multiple branches, but did not in the brief time it was a cabinet level department.) The Department of War, and the Department of the Army that replaced it a (both as cabinet level departments and when the latter was a subcabinet department) have only ever had the Army.
Again, you're missing the spirit. What we would consider today's Air Force and Navy were both under the same Department of War around the founding of the country and we're having the 250th anniversary of the U.S. It's clear that between the anniversary of the country and the threats the country is trying to deter, there is a clear purpose behind these changes and they are rooted in some history. I can get pushing back a little on imprecise language, but whatever LLM you're using is missing the point and wasting time.
In small tribes you don't need as much organization, but the larger the scale the more organization you need. Weak and powerless people are usually that way, because it is natural to them. It is nonsense to say that only a tiny number of people have any influence over the world. Some people have more influence than others, yes, but that exists even in tribes.
Every country that ever aspired to communism had people who were at the top and people who were at the bottom, far more so than free market countries.
How many of the famous names you can think of that changed the modern world started off from old money? A lot of these things come from new money private investors or government incentives and grants, or they just bootstrapped themselves and grew organically.
It might be fair to say that we should do more to preserve inexpensive rural life as a viable alternative to many people, because a lot of people born in cities today may more realistically be better suited to the pace and burden of rural life.
Alternatively, we should renormalize people living together in larger numbers the way they did in the 1800s and early 1900s (though not to the same extreme). Individualism is expensive, but many people preserve a more individualistic lifestyle even if their personal finances don't easily support it and then they blame everything outside of their life rather than their own choices.
You're sculpting out a bit of a zietgeist that has some accuracy and nostalgia to it, but I do think there's more to it. Starting a business and selling software can be a bigger trust signal than free or open source for some kinds of things, for both individuals and businesses depending on what it is.
"I don't have enough confidence in this thing to sell it", or "there might be something wrong with it and I don't want to be on the emotional hook" with actual customers to worry about it. It's not necessarily those things, but those doubts can exist.
There's also a subtle rejection of patent risk in open source, as if you are less encumbered with the stress around having to research what might step on some company's toes. Companies can solve some of that risk with professional liability insurance.
Realistically, I think a lot of people just don't want to run a company, getting committed to something they can't drop at a moment's notice, or they don't know where to start and it's easier to build reputation rather than dollars. It's more complicated than not doing it in many cases, and less complicated than not doing in other cases.
The other side of your argument is that almost none of the big things got into your pocket without some company trying to run a business which gave them the capital to direct that capital towards change. The number of examples of open source or free things that wouldn't exist today if they didn't sit on top of the foundation of a business making money is huge. The world would suck more.
Let me frame it like this. Let's say there is a non-profit organization. The mission is X. They are mildly successful at their mission. They believe in it, they're passionate. It's mostly local, mostly volunteer, the amount of time dedicated to it by all is constrained, budgets are constrained. Demographics mean the people who were naturally interested in the mission are fading off and younger people aren't as captivated by the non-profit.
Meanwhile, some company who has excess capital yet believed in a similar mission achieved 9x the success in that same non-profit motivation, because they could direct the energies they've gathered towards a purpose.
It doesn't have to be an emotional or moral struggle between whether people should be low energy potential and poor, but idealistically purposed, or high energy potential and rich, but lacking in any sort of philosophy as to what goodness is.
We went through too many years of communism in the world that paints dollar bills as having evil fangs on them and I think it rubbed off a little on the internet and some open source communities.
Fundamentally, it comes down to logic. Many things rely on someone else's money to become a success or catch on. In terms of sustainability, in many ways that applies to software as well. If some idea can economically sustain the personal investment into itself, it might grow to reach its potential in a way some weekend warrior project does not after it gets discarded.
At the same time, it is nice and liberating to simply do something fun and interesting, to put it out there like the demo scene or like when bit torrent dropped or some new compression algorithm. When those kinds of things excite you, it makes you want others to feel that way too. It just depends what you're after.
I watched this video earlier today and came away unconvinced. Labeling this HN post as debunking feels a bit leading as that is not the title of the video. They did not follow all of the necessary logic to debunk it.
They boiled it down to: might be technically possible, but it's improbable, if you make assumptions we're making that are unreasonable.
Whether the video was just sloppy and weak by chance, or they're trying to bury this, or it legitimately doesn't work, I don't know. This video doesn't answer that.
Doesn't this need line of sight? If a fire starts outside of the line of sight, that's the time the fire needs to get out of control and you would have to test this system in that scenario. Sprinklers will soak everything and make it harder for the fire to spread.
There is the example of Apple and Google providing transport for push notifications, but claiming to delete the content and only preserve the metadata.
What is Openrouter's policy on this? Is the logging of user data an essential part of the business model, or is the primary business model really facilitating a proxy between multiple services and nothing beyond that? If everything is logged, do y'all store it securely so that if one database is stolen (by China for example) then it's not useful on its own?
With the race for AGI and everyone training on each other's outputs, Openrouter is clearly in a position to abuse all of that even though the major providers weaken their output to limit the value of distilling them.
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