Iran specifically had infrastructure in place to help manage the water for Tehran (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat). The Ayatollahs not only _destroyed_ that infrastructure and the system of humans needed to maintain it, but they also encouraged pumping of water from local aquifers, among other obviously stupid water management techniques: https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/khomeini...
So, you are right, but in Iran's case, the current regime pretty much did the opposite of anything you should have done, while also chopping of their hands to do anything more.
This equals about 1.7 Million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per day, which is an increase of 120% since year 2000 and corresponds to about 2% of the global CO2 emissions.
No nation on earth like Iran, save perhaps for China and Norway, is in such a unique position of power, both economically, socially, and with the engineering knowhow) and political ability to actually do something to prevent climate damage. Instead they are making the situation more difficult.
The closest semi-Westernized country to Iran in the same region is Turkey:
* Highly educated population.
* Remnant of an ancient non-Arab Islamic empire.
* Almost precisely the same population count.
And people don't starve in Turkey. Why would they starve in a Western-aligned Iran? The main problem in the richer half of the world is already obesity.
Climate change is actually a strong reason for better management. The same is true everywhere. More floods? You need to provide better drainage. Drier climate risking more forest fires? You need to manage forests better.
In many cases governments are cutting back on spending on dealing with these sorts of problems because they can avoid blame by saying it is a result of climate change and few people ask why they did not act to mitigate the effects.
What gets me is that the same politicians in the US sat things med to be managed better but also that we always need to be spending less. It’s basically “not my problem, someone else can take care of that.”
I agree with those causes. But climate change is also a cause. It magnifies the consequences of mismanagement, reducing the luxury incompetence margin that an equally incompetent theocrat/autocrat could have relied on 30 years ago.
As climate change gets worse in the future, the margin for error will keep shrinking. More countries will start to experience similar problems. Only the most competent will survive, but eventually regional instability will attack the foundations of that state capacity as a contagion byproduct, making it harder to be the competent outlier.
This all becomes a push driver for migration towards the colder north, as the equator becomes progressively destabilized and uninhabitable. Not only water shortages in dry climates but wet-bulb temperatures in temperate climates that make existing outdoors dangerous for periods of the year.
Yes I agree that climate change is a huge problem but it doesn’t release the leaders of a country of their responsibility to mitigate the effects wherever possible.
This argument is particularly pernicious as it can, in it's general form, always deflect from the issues of climate change and always focus on blaming local governments.
This is what will happen in the future btw - climate change will apply pressure via famine and droughts, but the fallout will always be attributed to the failure of local governments to correctly "manage the change".
We'll go from "climate change is a hoax" to "climate change is just a given and it's your duty to manage it".
I would say the climate change argument is particularly pernicious as its general form implies we all need to submit to more government control, we all need to feel guilt for being alive, and suffer higher prices or all sorts of market manipulation (EV rebates, "green programs", shuttering power plants) while the rich elite fly around on private jets burning hundreds of pounds of fuel per hour. While corporations simply outsource manufacturing to Asia, completely circumventing any environmental laws, cutting jobs, and burning bunker oil to move the product back here.
I recall reading about a paper in SciAm or American Scientist a couple of decades ago, where they had trained a ML model to predict regional conflicts or civil wars. The main input was scarcity of food, mainly through price IIRC.
They trained it on historical data up to the 90s or so, and had it predict the "future" up to the time of the article. And as I recall it did very well. They even included some actual near-future predictions as well which also turned out pretty accurately as I recall.
Which I suppose isn't a huge surprise after all. People don't like to starve.
My memory isn't good enough to recall the name of the paper, however doing some searching I see the field has not stood still. Here[1] is an example of a more recent paper where they've included more variables. A quote from the conclusions:
The closest natural resource–society interaction to predict conflict risk according to our models was food production within its economic and demographic context, e.g., with GDP per capita, unemployment, infant mortality and youth bulge.
while the drought was the last straw, i think the mismanagement of their water resources by the regime (for embezzlement of public funds, direct or indirect, into insider pockets etc) is the true root cause. There's "enough" water to last thru the current drought, if it was better utilized in the past.
“The government blames the current crisis on changing climate [but] the dramatic water security issues of Iran are rooted in decades of disintegrated planning and managerial myopia,” says Keveh Madani, a former deputy head of the country’s environment department and now director of the United Nations University’s Institute of Water, Environment and Health.
It takes a certain kind of self-delusion to blame climate change and at the same time ignore that your own actions has been one of the major drivers, both in the past and today, of that very same climate change.
While you cannot put the blame on climate change onto iran alone (all of humanity has a part in it), the regime wants to deflect the blame conveniently onto climate change so as to absolve themselves of being responsible for their current water crisis.
So it's not really delusion, but irresponsibility and selfishness.
I'm glad to see things like this get built. I hate to admit it but I rarely consider impaired usecases when building things. I wonder how technology is changing this usecase lately both on the user end and the design end. (I know, AI) I imagine an LLM could help discover inadequate UI and build alternative workflows into products more easily.
Whispir is a much better TTS than almost anything else. However, when it gets it wrong, oh boy does it get it wrong.
For everything else? Not really. JS thrashing the DOM is as much a pain as ever. Using ico files instead of either emoji or... Text... Makes UIs painful and inconsistent.
Everyone using Electron and its broken [0] accessibility, including core Windows features...
These aren't things that can be reasoned away with an LLM. An interface is not just text - its a reasoned nodegraph. And when I'm blind (comes and goes), I need the nodegraph. Not an image of the screen reinterpreted.
I find it very hard to know what to do to follow best practice. For example the biggest UK charity for blind people make social media posts about the importance of text descriptions and alt tags that break what I thought was good practice (they duplicate text in post and alt tag) and they seem to encourage this.
I don't recall where, but I've heard that before in the past. Perhaps in the kind of slop that makes the rounds on LinkedIn.
There is sort of a good reason for it, in the past. Before the overhaul, Microsoft Speech used to skip Facebook posts, and read the alt text instead. It is now, however, more sane. Facebook was pretty darn bad at accessibility in its early days. A lot of intermingled broken spans for text, causing stuttering and other issues.
However, today, most reading systems prefer the "title" attribute, to the "alt" one. If title exists, it'll read that and skip alt. Some always skip alt, regardless of it exists or not.
Figure and figcaption are about the only way to get good and consistent behaviour, but you don't really control how those happen on most social media platforms. You throw everything you can at the wall, and see what happens. And it might change tomorrow.
Today, I'd say the above is bad advice. An image description is a good practice. Repeating yourself, isn't.
What are you basing that on? Screen readers tend to not pick those up at least on interactive elements by default, you need to do a bit of "wiggling" to get those to be announced.
Disclaimer: screen reader user
JAWS user, here. It will read both aria-label and title, on a button, which is an interactive element. [0]
It does depend on the verbosity, if you dial that down, you'll probably lose the title element. But for images, which is what I was mentioning, it should pretty much always be read out.
I am ... relatively sure JAWS reads out title attributes of images because people kept erroneously sticking important info there decades ago, I wouldn't say that's a generally accepted recommendation. Not entirely sure what NVDA would do with an image that has only a title but no alt set.
ARIA and the web group define title to be used. [0][1] It's just that many agents just don't use it correctly. JAWS and NVDA do. Microsoft Speech used to ignore it, but I think they fixed that around Windows 11 release. I'm not sure about VoiceOver. Most braille readers I've used... Well, you'll be lucky if they read anything correctly.
With the three big ones, JAWS, NVDA and Speech using it correctly, I'm pretty happy guiding people to use it today.
> The title attribute represents advisory information for the element, such as would be appropriate for a tooltip. On a link, this could be the title or a description of the target resource; on an image, it could be the image credit or a description of the image; on a paragraph, it could be a footnote or commentary on the text; on a citation, it could be further information about the source; on interactive content, it could be a label for, or instructions for, use of the element; and so forth. The value is text.
> Most host languages provide an attribute that could be used to name the element (e.g., the title attribute in HTML), yet this could present a browser tooltip. In the cases where DOM content or a tooltip is undesirable, authors MAY set the accessible name of the element using aria-label, if the element does not prohibit use of the attribute.
I imagine this is where LLMs could really help actually. LLMs are natively surfing the web now so I suspect LLM descriptions of sites or even having them re-render a site in a more usable way is becoming much more possible.
Visually impaired people are more than willing to tell everyone what they need as far as accessible UIs, myself included. Barely anyone listens. Let’s not let LLMs be the next thing that people that don’t understand the actual problem try shoving in as a solution.
Wheelchair users / people with mobility impairments rightfully scoff at the myriad “concepts” you see now and again of mech suits, wheelchairs that can climb stairs, etc. “Just give us a ramp! This is a solved problem. Your alternative is just sci-fi fetishism!” Still, it keeps happening. LLMs are increasingly becoming the same thing for people with visual impairments.
I don't need the text of the page. Thats easy, and I already have it.
But information has a hierarchy, usually visual, and that hierarchy needs to be reflected. LLMs are famously bad at structure, especially any tree with significant depth. RAG is not enough - hallucinations become common at depth.
My response now, to you, is in a semi-structured node graph. I know a reply has happened, because of the dangling children. I know who made it, and what they said, by cell attributes in the spans, surrounding it.
Don't worry - AI is being shoved down accessibility's throat, like everywhere else. FSCompanion for JAWS, NVDA has an OpenAI plugin, and VoiceOver has it builtin.
Why do I hate it? Because when it _doesn't work_, you can't tell. You don't know if it is hallucinating data, and cannot verify the response. If it is the mode of communication, it is all you have, making every failure a catastrophic failure.
'Honestly this is a people problem more than a tech problem. We have the tech. We're just not using it.
I'd say LLMs COULD make it easier to implement accessibility, it also couldn't, always a coinflip with those, but I'd say LLMs actually succeeding is probably unlikely given how much shitty code is probably in its training data :P
Anyone in the US military that has bought 'military grade' Bates shoes and pulled them out of a locker after a year just to see the soles disintegrate can likely tell you the value of 'military grade'.
There's gotta be more to it than that. I've got a pair of dress shoes I wear maybe thee times a year at most, and I've had them for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, perhaps longer.
The soles (rubber because winter) are in perfect condition, and the leather isn't too bad either, though I've not really conditioned it enough and it's starting to show.
Both can be true. I have specifically heard that shoe glue needs to be repeatedly compressed to be maintained or it will disintegrate. Anecdotally as well, I had a pair of quality, lightly used, but old, hiking boots that had the sole completely separate after a day of heavy use. The runber sole completely detached from the leather shell inner shoe. The crazy thing was that BOTH boots failed within 20 minutes of each other.
Environmental factors can be very picky on what gets attacked and what doesn't.
In one of the oddest losses of a pair of shoes, I had fire ants break into my closet and eat the foam rubber out of one pair of extra lite running shoes. Turned the damned things to swiss cheese. Nothing else was messed with. They didn't want leather or rubber, just whatever those shoes were made of.
Not the topic of the article, but security of opening anything up in my network is always super concerning. I really want a zero-advertise way to find and connect to my network. So, for instance, there could be a trusted server that I advertise my IP to so that I can find it when I am off my local network. Not dynamic dns, something that requires me to send them a key so that only my devices can get the IP. Then, some form of port knocking could hide the connection port actually used like I send a sequence of knocks based on my key encoding the port I will use to actually try to connect my VPN so that I can rotate that around. A bit overkill but I am paranoid now. It is a jungle out there and security is hard for experts much less people like me.
But that is a totally different problem which requires far fewer bytes to represent. For that problem you are just considering of the valid pieces which made a move and what board that came from. Storing a single move is far cheaper than an entire board state.
Not when you include transpositions, where you arrive at the same position from a different move order, in which case saving board states instead of moves could be very valuable.
There are transposition tables for that though. They don't store the board state actually. For Stockfish, transposition table entries are 10 bytes each, 16 bits of which are the low bits(or high? Can't remember) of a zobrist hash of the board state. The other 48 bits of the hash are used for addressing into the hash table, but aren't stored in it. The rest of the entry will be stuff like the best move found during the previous search(16 bits), the depth of that search(8 bits), evaluation(2 different ones at 16 bits each), and various bits of data like node type and age of the entry(for deciding which entry to replace, because this table is always full). Collisions can occasionally happen, but saving a full board state to eliminate them would cost far too much, since no matter how big you make the table, it'll never be big enough to cache all the board states a search visits.
In Stockfish, there will only be one full-fledged board state in memory per search thread. So the size of the board state is pretty much irrelevant to performance. What's important is reducing the overhead of generating possible moves, applying those moves to the board state, and hashing the board state, which is what magic bitboards are for.
This is fun. Of course this problem is also a fun way to consider an upper bound on the total number of board states and therefore how hard it is to 'solve' chess compared to a game like checkers. Hitting the calculator 26 bytes works out to chess being no more than 4.113761393×10⁶² possible states. I'll start my GPU solving that right now!
[edit]
This made me look for articles estimating this and I found this one [1] which confirms the above is in the right ballpark. Actual study (according to the article) says 4.822 x10^44 is their upper bounds
> a fun way to consider an upper bound on the total number of board states and therefore how hard it is to 'solve' chess compared to a game like checkers
That and therefore doesn’t follow. As a counterexample, consider a NIM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim) game starting with a googolplex number of piles of size 1. That has way more board states than chess or go, but is easily solved, as the game is trivial.
When constraining an entire game being that close as an initial dart throw is pretty good I think. It is also good to use as a check on the plausibility of the author's algorithm. If they had found an encoding that was well below the current estimates for total board states then it likely would have indicated a major flaw (or a major breakthrough worthy of several papers and broader recognition!) At least that is what I meant by 'in the right ballpark'.
Agreed. Long term economic health is always tied to long term social health. We should be, ultimately, trying to look at a broader index than some simplistic view of just money. It is a hard problem though to pin down an index for social health. As soon as we name a measure or index it becomes a target and its value drops. I tried to think of a more 'universal' index, one that could be applied to civilizations in the past and present and the best I could come up with is the healthier a civilization the more people can live together, longer, without killing each other. Not rigorous, but in general when I view history it seems to fit reasonably well.
Just shows how much you are worth as a product to them, and how little competition is in the cell market, that all these devices can get lifetime cell connections while we are paying, how much a month? Actually, lawsuits about privacy for devices like this should quote how much the infrastructure costs are to support their tech. The network, services, people, etc are all a good estimate of actual value, in dollars, they are deriving from selling you as a product.
We use a crap ton of calls/sms/data over the same period, expect decent QoS on well performing bands, and have a TON more customer management and onboarding overheard over the same 5-10 year period. Meanwhile devices with embedded telemetry might get a plan as low as 500 MB total over 10 years and have hundreds of thousands in a single sale with no customer support overheard, SIM reactivation on new phones, etc.
Are you getting as good a deal? No, probably not, but trying to compare them to the cellular service you pay for is problematic in many ways. You too can get a $14 10 year prepaid plan from 1NCE for your Pi to send sensor telemetry from on occasion if that's what you want instead of "normal" cell service.
I wouldn't mind companies having to disclose everything and anything about the telemetry they collect though. Just putting the dollar figure on it is unlikely to shock anyone as it is low for you to do the same thing too.
This is evolution in action. An ecosystem is generating with different things populating it. Is there a better method than captcha out there? For instance, hide things in html comments that only bots would see and if they are reacted to then flag that as a bot account and silently hide their comments (so that another account isn't created)? Do this randomly so that it is hard to find but bot code would catch it. Or other things like text with the same background color so only a bot could have seen it. Basically, instead of staying defensive, go on the attack?
One of the main concerns of astronomers, and one of the benefits of Chandra and James Webb being in orbit aboard sattelites, is the prevelance of commercial sattelite constellations ruining the view of the cosmos. (1)
https://www.npr.org/2025/08/17/nx-s1-5500318/iranian-officia...
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