We suddenly have a proliferation of new internal tools and resources, nearly all of which are barely functional and largely useless with no discernible impact on the overall business trajectory but sure do seem to help come promo time.

Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

Without good management AI is just a new way to make terrible work in unprecedented quantities.

With good management you will get great work faster.

The distinguishing feature between organisations competing in the AI era is process. AI can automate a lot of the work but the human side owns process. If it’s no good everything collapses. Functional companies become hyper functional while dysfunctional companies will collapse.

Bad ideas used to be warded off by workers who in some shape or form of malicious compliance just would slow down and redirect the work while advocating for better solutions.

That can’t happen as much anymore as your manager or CEO can vibe code stuff and throw it down the pipeline for the workers to fix.

If you have bad processes your company will die, or shrivel or stagnate at best. Companies with good process will beat you.

We had a coworker vibecode an internal tool, do a bunch of marketing to the company at how incredible it is. Then got hired somewhere else.

I just went and deleted it because it's completely broken at every edge case and half of the happy paths too.

My main use of vibecoding is creating dozens of internal tools that have sped up tasks, or made tasks possible that were previously not. These tools would have taken weeks of time to build manually and would have been hard to justify, rather than just struggling with manual processes every now and again. AI has been life-changing in creating these kinda janky tools with janky UI that do everything they're supposed to perfectly, but are ugly as hell.

Are you able to describe any of those internal tools in more detail? How important are they on average? (For example, at a prior job I spent a bit of time creating a slackbot command "/wtf acronym" which would query our company's giant glossary of acronyms and return the definition. It wasn't very popular (read: not very useful/important) but it saved myself some time at least looking things up (saving more time than it took to create I'm sure). I'd expect modern LLMs to be able to recreate it within a few minutes as a one-shot task.)

It's almost always a CRUD app or dashboard that no one uses while being extremely overkill for their use case.

edit: LOL called it, a bunch of useless garbage that no one really cares about but used to justify corporate jobs programs.

Ah but it looks cool and I can put it on my stack ranking perf eval

If it's useless that's a you problem. I've been building CRUDs that would have taken me a month to get perfectly right in the span of 4-5 days which save an enormous number of human tech support hours.

The software industry's value proposition for the vast majority of businesses running the world lies in CRUD apps that properly capture business requirements. That's infinitely more relevant in insurance, pharma, banking and logistics than any technological breakthrough of the past 25 years.

Your rant just shows you don't understand why people pay for software.

I have one that serves a few functions- Tracks certificates and licenses (you can export certs in any of the majorly requested formats), a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring, a user count, a notification system for alerts (otherwise it's a mostly buried Teams channel most people miss), a Downtime Tracker that doesn't require people to input easily calculatable fields, a way for teams to reset their service account password and manage permissions, as well as add, remove, switch which project is sponsoring which person, edit points of contact, verify project statuses, and a lot more. It even has some quick charts that pull from our Jira helpdesk queue- charts that people used to run once a week for a meeting are just live now in one place. It also has application statuses and links, and a lot more.

I'd been fighting to make this for two years and kept getting told no. I got claude to make a PoC in a day, then got management support to continue for a couple weeks. It's super beneficial, and targets so many of our pain points that really bog us down.

>> a dashboard that tells you when licenses and certs are close to expiring

Or, Excel > Data > Sort > by the Date column. No dashboard needed, no app needed.

A lot of businesses can get by just fine with making it one person's responsibility to maintain a spreadsheet for this. It can be fragile though as the company grows and/or the number of items increases, and you have to make sure it's all still centralized and teams aren't randomly purchasing licenses or subscriptions without telling anyone, it needs to be properly handed off if the person leaves/dies/takes a vacation, backed up if not using a cloud spreadsheet... I've probably seen at least a dozen startups come and go over the years purporting to solve this kind of problem, other businesses integrate it into an existing Salesforce/other deployment... it seems like a fine choice for an internal tool, so long as the tool is running on infrastructure that is no less stable than a spreadsheet on someone's machine.

In the startup world something like "every emailed spreadsheet is a business" used to be a motivating phrase, it must be more rough out there when LLMs can business-ify so many spreadsheet processes (whether it's necessary for the business yet or not). And of course with this sort of tool in particular, more eyes seeing "we're paying $x/mo for this service?" naturally leads to "can't we just use our $y/mo LLM to make our own version?". Not sure I'd want to be in small-time b2b right now.

Or better yet just remember it all, no spreadsheet needed either!

If you are using an LLM to actually fetch that data, combine it, and present it to you in an ad hoc way (like you run the same prompt every month or something), I wouldn't trust that at all. It still hallucinates, invents things and takes short cuts too often.

If you are using an LLM to create an application to grab data from heterogeneous sources, combine it and present it, that is much better, but could also basically be the excel spreadsheet they are describing.

Your knowledge of LLMs is outdated by at least a year. For the past three months at least my team has been one-shotting complex SQL queries that are as semantically correct as your ability to describe them.

And why do you diminish the skill of good data wrangling as if it weren’t the most valuable skill in the vast majority of computer programming jobs? Your cynicism doesn’t correspond with the current ground truth in LLM usage.

Well, that is still having the LLM write code which is more like my second scenario. I use SOTA LLMs for coding literally every day. I don't think my knowledge is "outdated by at least a year".

The ones I can mention.. one that watches a specific web site until an offer that is listed expires and then clicks renew (happens about once a day, but there is no automated way in the system to do it and having the app do it saves it being unlisted for hours and saves someone logging in to do it). Several that download specific combinations of documents from several different portals, where the user would just suck it up previously and right-click on each one to save it (this has a bunch of heuristics because it really required a human before to determine which links to click and in what order, but Claude was able to determine a solid algo for it). Another one that opens PDFs and pulls the titles and dates from the first page of the documents, which again was just done manually before, but now sends the docs via Gemma4 free API on Google to extract the data (the docs are a mess of thousands of different layouts).

None of these projects sound like weeks worth of scope w/o AI.

My team has also adopted this - it's much easier to add another layer than to refine or simplify what exists. We have AI skills to help us debug microservices that call microservices that have circular dependencies.

This was possible before but someone would maybe notice the insane spaghetti. Now it's just "we'll fix it with another layer of noodles".

That's so interesting because where I work, the push was to "add one more API" to existing services, turning them into near monoliths for the sake of deployment and access. Still a mess of util and helper functions recursively calling each other, but at least it's one binary in one container.

Unfortunately I saw this pre-AI with microservices, where while empowering developers with their beloved microservices, we create intense complexity and deployment headaches. AI will fix the slop with an obscuring layer of complexity on top.

Are you concerned this will just lead to coupling everywhere like microservices tend to do?

Oh the "micro services" are all coupled. To test anything you have to deploy a constellation of interdependent services with redundant DBs, each generating new IDs for the same underlying resource.

We’re seeing the exact same where I work. Our main Slack channels have become inundated with “new tool announcements!”, multiple per day, often solving duplicate problems or problems that don’t exist. We’ve had to stop using those channels for any real conversation because most people are muting them due to the slop noise.

And what’s worse is that when someone does build a decent tool, you can’t help but be skeptical because of all the absolute slop that has come out. And everyone thinks their slop doesn’t stink, so you can’t take them at their word when they say it doesn’t. Even in this thread, how are you to know who is talking about building something useful vs something they think is useful?

A lot of people that have always wanted to be developers but didn’t have the skills are now empowered to go and build… things. But AI hasn’t equipped them with the skill of understanding if it actually makes sense to build a thing, or how to maintain it, or how to evolve it, or how to integrate it with other tools. And then they get upset when you tell them their tool isn’t the best thing since sliced bread. It’s exhausting, and I think we’ve yet to see the true consequences of the slop firehose.

I'm sorry to hear that you have people abusing their new superpowers.

I run a team and am spending my time/tokens on serious pain points.

Such as?

I'll throw this out as something where it has saved literally weeks of work: debugging pathological behaviour in third-party code. Prompt example: "Today, when I did U, V, and W. I ended up with X happening. I fixed it by doing Y. The second time I tried, Z happened instead (which was the expected behaviour). Can you work out a plausible explanation for why X happened the first time and why Y fixed it? Please keep track of the specific lines of code where the behaviour difference shows up."

This is in a real-time stateful system, not a system where I'd necessarily expect the exact same thing to happen every time. I just wanted to understand why it behaved differently because there wasn't any obvious reason, to me, why it would.

The explanation it came back with was pretty wild. It essentially boiled down to a module not being adequately initialized before it was used the first time and then it maintained its state from then on out. The narrative touched a lot of code, and the source references it provided did an excellent job of walking me through the narrative. I independently validated the explanation using some telemetry data that the LLM didn't have access to. It was correct. This would have taken me a very long time to work out by hand.

Edit: I have done this multiple times and have been blown away each time.

This seems to be a common denominator for what LLMs actually do well: Finding bugs and explaining code. Anything about producing code is still a success to be seen.

The wild part, for me at the time, was how many steps there were from cause and effect and how perfectly they'd been reasoned through. The first time I had that experience was my first real "this LLM stuff might have some legs". My second similar experience several days later was "hmmm that wasn't a fluke..."

I'm still at a stage where I'm not completely sure that I like the code that Codex or Claude wants to write. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it takes 5 or 6 iterations to get it somewhere I'm happy with. But wow, on the front end of the work, they are great design/review/iterate partners; sometimes I let the tools write the first draft and then I find the gaps, sometimes I write the first draft and let the tools find the gaps. Either way has worked really well for making solid debt-free progress.

I answered this in a different comment below, but a lot of the friction is around the amount of time it takes to test/review/submit etc, and a lot of this is centered around tooling that no one has had the time to improve, perf problems in clunky processes that have been around longer than anyone individual, and other things of this nature. Addressing these issues is now approachable and doable in one's "spare time".

The point of that friction is to keep the human in the loop wrt code quality, it's not meant to be meaningless busywork. It's difficult to believe that you sustain the benefit of those systems. Anthropic and Microsoft publicly failed to keep up code quality. They would probably be in a better spot currently if they used neither, no friction, no AI. But that friction exists for a reason and AI doesn't have the "context length" to benefit from it.

This the the difference between intentional and incidental friction, if your CI/CD pipeline is bad it should be improved not sidestepped. The first step in large projects is paving over the lower layer so that all that incidental friction, the kind AI can help with, is removed. If you are constantly going outside that paved area, sure AI will help, but not with the success of the project which is more contingent on the fact that you've failed to lay the groundwork correctly.

For me/my team, I use it to fix DevProd pain points that I would otherwise never get the investment to go solve. Just removed Webpack for Rspack, for example. Could easily do it myself, which is why I can prompt it correctly and review the output properly, but I can let it run while I’m in meetings over more important product or architectural decisions

Creating stakeholder value

Promoting synergy

Creating productivity gain narrtives

Aligning stakeholders

Eating a bagel

>Such as?

it's crazy that the experiences are still so wildly varying that we get people that use this strategy as a 'valid' gotcha.

AI works for the vast majority of nowhere-near-the-edge CS work -- you know, all the stuff the majority of people have to do every day.

I don't touch any kind of SQL manually anymore. I don't touch iptables or UFW. I don't touch polkit, dbus, or any other human-hostile IPC anymore. I don't write cron jobs, or system unit files. I query for documentation rather than slogging through a stupid web wiki or equivalent. a decent LLM model does it all with fairly easy 5-10 word prompts.

ever do real work with a mic and speech-to-text? It's 50x'd by LLM support. Gone are the days of saying "H T T P COLON FORWARD SLASH FORWARD SLASH W W W".

this isn't some untested frontier land anymore. People that embrace it find it really empowering except on the edges, and even those state-of-the-art edge people are using it to do the crap work.

This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.

People ask for examples because they want to know what other people are doing. Everything you mention here is VERY reasonable. It's exactly the kind of stuff no one is going to be surprised that you are getting good results with the current AI. But none of that is particularly groundbreaking.

I'm not trying to marginalize your or anyone else's usage of AI. The reason people are saying "such as" is to gauge where the value lies. The US GDP is around 30T. Right now there's is something like ~12T reasonably involved in the current AI economy. That's massive company valuations, data center and infrastructure build out a lot of it is underpinning and heavily influencing traditional sectors of the economy that have a real risk of being going down the wrong path.

So the question isn't what can AI do, it can do a lot, even very cheap models can handle most of what you have listed. The real question is what can the cutting edge state of the art models do so much better that is productively value added to justify such a massive economic presence.

That's all well and good, but what happens when the price to run these AIs goes up 10x or even 100x.

It's the same model as Uber, and I can't afford Uber most of the time anymore. It's become cost prohibitive just to take a short ride, but it used to cost like $7.

It's all fun and games until someone has to pay the bill, and these companies are losing many billions of dollars with no end in sight for the losses.

I doubt the tech and costs for the tech will improve fast enough to stop the flood of money going out, and I doubt people are going to want to pay what it really costs. That $200/month plan might not look so good when it's $2000/month, or more.

Why not try it yourself? Inference providers like BaseTen and AWS Bedrock have perfectly capable open source models as well as some licensed closed source models they host.

You can use "API-style" pricing on these providers which is more transparent to costs. It's very likely to end up more than 200 a month, but the question is, are you going to see more than that in value?

For me, the answer is yes.

What makes you think I haven't tried it myself?

The "costs" are subsidized, it's a loss-leader.

Bedrock and other third party open weight hosted model costs are not subsidized. What could possibly be the investment strategy for being one of twelve fly-by-night openrouter operators hosting the latest Qwen?

It's an important concern for those footing the bill, but I expect companies really in the face of being impacted by it to be able to do a cost-benefit calculation and use a mix of models. For the sorts of things GP described (iptables whatever, recalling how to scan open ports on the network, the sorts of things you usually could answer for yourself with 10-600 seconds in a manpage / help text / google search / stack overflow thread), local/open-weight models are already good enough and fast enough on a lot of commodity hardware to suffice. Whereas now companies might say just offload such queries to the frontier $200/mo plan because why not, tokens are plentiful and it's already being paid for, if in the future it goes to $2000/mo with more limited tokens, you might save them for the actual important or latency-sensitive work and use lower-cost local models for simpler stuff. That lower-cost might involve a $2000 GPU to be really usable, but it pays for itself shortly by comparison. To use your Uber analogy, people might have used it to get to downtown and the airport, but now it's way more expensive, so they'll take a bus or walk or drive downtown instead -- but the airport trip, even though it's more expensive than it used to be, is still attractive in the face of competing alternatives like taxis/long term parking.

None of that is concrete though; it's all alleged speed-ups with no discernable (though a lot of claimed) impact.

> This whole "Yeah, well let me see the proof!" ostrich-head-in-the-sand thing works about as long as it takes for everyone to make you eat their dust.

People will stop asking for the proof when the dust-eating commences.

> but sure do seem to help come promo time.

I personally noticed this. The speed at which development was happening at one gig I had was impossible to keep up with without agentic development, and serious review wasn't really possibile because there wasn't really even time to learn the codebase. Had a huge stack of rules and MCPs to leverage that kinda kept things on the rails and apps were coming out but like, for why? It was like we were all just abandoning the idea of good code and caring about the user and just trying to close tickets and keep management/the client happy, I'm not sure if anyone anywhere on the line was measuring real world outcomes. Apparently the client was thrilled.

It felt like... You know that story where two economists pass each other fifty bucks back and forth and in doing so skyrocket the local GDP? Felt like that.

>Barely an hour goes by without a new 4-page document about something that that everyone is apparently ment to read, digest and respond to, despite its 'author' having done none of those steps, it's starting to feel actively adversarial.

well, isn't that what AI can be used effectively for - to generate [auto]response to the AI generated content.

What a delightful world we're building.

ideally we'd delegate all mindless/routine stuff to AI, and we'd dedicate ourselves to the higher creative and scientific pursuits. Somehow though i think that ideal will come with some adjustments/distortions/bugs :)

Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.

I guess you gotta look busy. But the stick will come when the shareholders look at the income statement and ask... So I see an increase in operating expenses. Let me go calculate the ROIC. Hm its lower, what to do? Oh I know, lets fire the people who caused this (it wont be the C-Suite or management who takes the fall) lmao.

There is a difference to just noticing and attributing it to and recognizing negative financial outcomes. Right now for most companies they are still adjusting to declining inflation. Their bottom lines are doing quite well because consumer price inflation is much stickier than supply inflation. We are coming off of one of the quickest and largest supply lead inflationary cycles. It may not be immediately apparent for many companies that new expenditures are a drag on profitability.

The real thing to look at is whether or not the future outlook for company AI spend is heading up or down?

What a finance team allocates on spend has nothing to do with what the tokens actually get used for.

Are they peeking over the shoulder of each team and individual? Of course not.

It can be the case that the spend is absolutely wasteful. Numbers don’t lie.

> Do you really think companies have started spending millions on tokens and no one from finance has been involved?

Oh, they were involved all right. They ran their analyses and realized that the increase in Acme Corp's share price from becoming "AI-enabled" will pay for the tokens several times over. For today. They plan to be retired before tomorrow.

That magic trick only works for publicly traded stocks.

Most firms are not a google or a Microsoft - a firms cash balance can become a strategic weapon in the right environment. So wasting money is not a great idea. Lest we forget dividends.

Moreover if you have a budget set re. Spend on tokens - you have rationing. Therefore the firm should be trying to get the most out of token spend. If you are wasting tokens on stuff that doesn’t create a benefit financially for the firm then indeed it is not inline with proper corporate financial theory.

No, it works for any VC-backed companies. Something like 60% of VC funding last year went to AI companies. VCs aren't going to give you a money unless you're building an agentic AI-native agent platform for agents.

CFOs or VPs absolutely benefit by hyping their company up to private investors by allowing tokenmaxxing to go on unchecked. Tender offers, acquisitions, and aquihires all exist. Or just good old fashioned resume padding by saying you "enabled AI transformation" or whatever helps you land a big payday at some other company.

Sounds like they did train in corporate finance.

Sounds like you haven’t had training in corporate finance.

More that there is a poor incentive structure. Just like how PE can make money by leveraged buyouts and running businesses into the ground. Many of the financial instruments that make both that and the current AI bubble possible were legal then made illegal within the lifetimes of the last 16 presidents.

Round-tripping used to be regulated. SPVs used to be regulated. If you need a loan you used to have to go to something called a bank, now it comes from ???? who knows drug cartels, child traffickers, blackstone, russians & chinese oligarchs. Even assuming it doesn't collapse tommorow why should they make double digit returns on AI datacenters built on the backs of Americans?

My issue was not with criticism of the money being spent or how it’s being obtained. I was specifically commenting on this statement:

> “Im convinced none of these people have any training in corporate finance. For if they did they'd realise they were wasting money.”

This isn’t meaningful criticism. This is a vacuous “those guys are so dumb”.

Sounds like a workplace wide DDoS.

'rewrite in C, make sure there are no memory leaks'. You first.

Why is that less realistic than saying 'rewrite in rust, make sure there are no memory leaks'?

My point, which I should have been clearer with, is that we aren't at a state where you can just one shot a rewrite of a complex application into another language and expect some sort of free savings. Once we are at that state, and it's good enough to pull it off, why wouldn't the AI be able to pull it off in C as well?

You don't have to trust the AI to do it with Rust, you just have to ensure certain conventions are followed and you can formally prove you're 'safe' from certain classes of issue, no AI magic dice-roll.

A lot of people are very excited by the idea that now language capabilities (and almost every other technical nuance) somehow don't matter but much like gravity they will continue to assert themselves whether you believe in them or not.

So far humans have proven unable to write large apps in C without those issues, given their work is the training basis for LLMs this creates two problems, one being that they don't 'know' what a safe app looks like either and any humans reviewing the outputted code will be unable to validate that either.

Documentation and testing used to be mildly important, you better have them, but the quality of the tests didn't matter as much, since you have to get the implementation right, no matter how good or bad your tests are.

Now that the work is delegated to an LLM, the test and documentation quality ultimately decides the quality of the product.

Since you as the programmer no longer have to deal with the language's annoyances directly and force the LLM to perform the drudgery for you, you can build a language that makes a trade off between drudgery and quality and receive a software quality upgrade essentially for free.

LLMs are really good at producing tokens faster than developers, so make those tokens count.

There are classes of bug that are easy to write in C that are impossible to express in Rust.

    let foo = [1, 2, 3];
    unsafe {
        *foo.get_unchecked_mut(4) = 5;
    }

Not sure why Rust evangelists always seem to ignore that unsafe exists.

Hmmm... where could the oob access possibly be I can't tell

Easy to spot in a contrived example is not:

> impossible to express in Rust

I’m not going to argue with Rust folks who misrepresent the language.

You can prevent unsafe from being used in a repo with linter rules.

Minivans cause minivans?

Or cars usually fit 2 child seats because that's the common number they get from customer research.

Oh there's a huge (and wildly depressing) market for people endlessly scrolling video slop, it's just the barriers to entry and expectations of the market are so low you can't really differentiate with 'slightly better branded slop'.

Don't worry, they'll buy your boss's boss nice dinners and box seats at sports games until they see the light.

This theory of how the US loses in Iran is looking increasingly likely: https://kasperbenjamin.substack.com/p/why-the-us-will-lose-t...

It's going to be incredibly difficult to stop Iran being able to kneecap both the global economy and in particular the gulf states, who are going to be motivated to put maximum pressure on the US to sue for peace. Incredible hubris and a lobotomised diplomatic and intelligence infrastructure in the name of ideological purity, quite the combination.

Wars are hard to predict and the economy is hard to predict. There's easy money in the making for those who are sure the oil price is going to continue way up.

The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one. It's very much not 2-3 million dollars to $50k. Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.

Most of the heavy lifting in suppressing these attacks is done by other drones patrolling the skies and attacking anything that tries to fire. Those also don't use extremely expensive munitions.

"Iran produces approximately 500 of these drones per day and holds a stockpile estimated at around 80,000 units.". Both these are false today. I'd also question if they were true when Iran was attacked. These figures don't pass the smell test and either way any stockpile is an instant target.

Everyone seems to be an expert today.

It's obviously not great that the Hormuz straits are more or less closed. We've seen in Yemen that a ragtag force can be massively attacked and still manage to fire at ships on a much larger body of water. That said we didn't really see if they can sustain it for months under heavy attack which is a possible premise here.

There are some pipelines bypassing the straits but their capacity is much smaller. It's also about 20% of the world supply so definitely other suppliers can make up for some of the loss at a cost.

I'm not an expert. But the current oil price reflects what the experts think best. And that price is still below what it was for about half of 2022. And fluctuating. What will matter is the price over months.

> The blog you reference has inaccuracies. Drones are generally not shot by THAAD is a glaring one

It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot, which are indeed used against drones. You can tell that by the missle cost the author mentions, which is 1/10th of the THAAD missle. As the argument is a cost effectiveness argument the logic holds, just replace THAAD with Patriot.

Even though Ukraine offered their cost effective solution, they have a war to fight so any serious capacity increase will probably take months if not years and these things are not static and are quickly shaped on the battlefield so the Gulf states and Israel and USA will need to develop talent that is on the battlefield, like Russia and Ukraine did.

We're likely to see Ukraine some of their own domestic anti drone capability for Gulf State Patriots.

Gulf States trading dollar for dollar with Ukraine on Patriots and anti drone capability is likely to leave both parties very happy.

> It's obvious that the author doesn't mean THAAD but Patriot

That's a bit sloppy.

> Helicopter gunships shoot down drones with bullets these days is very common and there are other economic means of bringing them down.

> Everyone seems to be an expert today.

Pot meet kettle?

Speaking as a former helicopter gunship weapons and tactics instructor (WTI), this is a VERY broad generalization. Sure, a gunship can shoot down a drone with 20mm or 30mm but you have to get pretty close. And first you have to find it.

Other factors 1. target altitude 2. air superiority (MANPADS is a real threat over land) 3. marksmanship

It might be more effective to throw AIM-9s on helos and target drones that way...but depending on the generation of missile those run ~$300k each and the inventory is limited.

I have heard the Ukrainians are using APKWS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Precision_Kill_Weapon...) against drone to good effect from ground and air platforms.

In Israel helicopters are routinely taking down these drones. There are many videos of them chasing them down. There was an incident where some houses were hit by that cannon fire as well. They are finding them (presumably with radar).

You're probably more of an expert than me so educate me on how this works. But it is working.

But yes, some drones are also being taken down with air to air missiles.

[EDIT: at least the videos from Israel] Those drones are typically shot down over your territory so air superiority and MANPADS are less of an issue.

My main point was it's not the $2M THAAD missile taking down a $50k drone.

EDIT: https://www.twz.com/air/ah-64-apache-is-getting-proximity-fu...

https://en.defence-ua.com/news/ukrainian_naval_aviation_heli...

https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-shot-down-3-200-shahed-t...

https://theaviationist.com/2026/03/10/uae-ah-64-apaches-coun...

https://taskandpurpose.com/tech-tactics/us-apache-pilots-dro...

Wow, proximity fused 30mm. Never heard of that, but I've been out for a while and technology has really accelerated in the last 3-4 years.

Thanks for sharing.

And yes, find and fix with a strategic radar platform. It's tough to set up DCA (defensive counter-air) lanes with helicopters; they're slow and most need to refuel on the ground (an argument could be made for using H-60's. Some variants can refuel in the air).

Depending on the threat picture, it could be feasible to set helos up to defend naval assets or use them like Israel has been to defend land-based high-value assets.

Israel is a pretty small country as I'm sure you know. The northern border is about 60km wide. As I understand it the big problem with drones coming from the north is that they are programmed to fly through valleys and the topography is mountainous which makes them hard to detect. Drones from Iran or Yemen have large stretches of open flat desert and have to cross very large distances. Another purely speculative thought is that the F-35s act as an airborne radar to help with detection.

Israelis get advanced warning for (most) drone attacks and have to go into shelters/safe rooms just like with missiles. There is a specific/different kind of warning.

AFAIK in the big attack last year these Shaed drones were shot down by jets with air-to-air missiles.

I served in the IAF on that northern border (not a pilot or anything like that but a somewhat relevant role) so at least I'm familiar with the topography and distances.

The other thing coming into play in Israel these days is the laser system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Beam I think it already shot down at least one drone.

Also- Thanks for your service and for the "insider" perspective.

Random btw popped up on my YT: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gz0z8_hkY8c

some footage of AH-64 blowing up drones.

Absolutely agree there's both some dubious suppositions and hand-waving there. The real question is I suspect how much pressure the GCC can withstand and how much pressure they can apply to Trump directly given business ties etc. If they lose a serious chunk of desalination capacity for example the situation becomes dire extremely quickly. For Dubai simply not having a decent supply of fresh food would alone be an economic catastrophe, every day this drags on is doing reputational damage that'll take years to fully recover from long after the hotel facades are patched up.

Why type so much with not a single drop of sourced information?

> Everyone seems to be an expert today.

> I'm not an expert. But

Is this post intended as a joke?

It's intended as my informed opinion as a response to the parent less informed opinion with questionable sources.

I'm not the one writing a blog and pretending to be an expert. I have some knowledge and I can write what I want.

I know THAAD is against ballistic missiles and not against drones. I know Israeli helicopters have been bringing down drones. So I write that. It's true and I don't need to "source it". This isn't Wikipedia.

Whatever points this author was trying to make were completely obliterated by the LLM it was run through or used to generate it.

A shame because it seems to have interesting points, but was too wordy and LLMified to keep attention. Stop telling me what it's not every other sentence, and just say what you mean. I wish folks would just use their own words.

1/ When authors use AI for editing, it reduces their credibility.

2/ As much as I don't like the current administration (and Israel leadership), there is absolutely no way the assumptions this article makes about them are false.

There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:

- the straight would be closed

- a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.

Everything that has happened so far (in regards to Iran attacking neighbors) has been extremely predictable. There is just no way these weren't calculated in.

>there is just no way these weren't calculated in.

the American government is publishing war footage intercut with Call of Duty scenes. The American secretary of defense is a former television personality with more tattoos than people in a trailer park. He said rules of engagement are stupid because they stop you from "winning" while the US bombed a girl's school.

They literally fired the people who calculate things and wage war based on memes, vibes and chatgpt recommendations

> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that: ... the straight would be closed

It has always had this potential, as it has happened before: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Earnest_Will (1987). But based on this history I would assume that many in the admin did not find the threat as credible as it was then. We dont seem to have a good grasp on how things have gone in the black sea. We clearly did not anticipate the level of drone attacks that have been put out by Iran.

Nothing says "we did not have a plan" when easing Russian sanctions while you ask Ukraine for help with defenses.

> a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.

I could see making a bet that with the current water crisis there the this would tip them into an "Arab spring" moment. For any one aware of the history there, it was a poor one at best.

If the US decided that stopping oil production in Iran was important (restricting global oil supply), what other options does the US have ease the impact on oil prices other than Russian sanction easement?

Yeah, it looks bad, but there just isn't really any other ways for the US to magically pump more oil out of the ground instantaneously to compensate for the war.

That's exactly what we are doing, releasing the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

The fact that it's both a record release and still not sufficient suggests they underestimated how bad it would be. But the US did prepare for this eventuality. And now we're throwing away our ability to be prepared for any upcoming crisis.

This is why starting a war with Iran right now was a bad idea.

Maybe the US military commanders, generals and Pentagon knew this but the civilian leadership at the top chose to completely ignore it and can't really articulate a plan or what the plan ever was.

All reports are saying the US generals were against this. And a UD senator (Graham I think) just admitted he lobbied trump for the war, comparing him to Roosevelt, and coached Netanyahou on how to lobby trump. Just look at the article:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/senator-lindsey-graham-brags-a...

> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that:

I don't really believe the buffoons in US leadership calculate much. It's all vibes.

I firmly believe it will become a case study in how many ways a comically incompetent government can damage a country.

As for Israel... I think their calculation is simple. They don't really care about how much damage they cause to the world economy, as long as they get to kill Muslims in general and Iranians in particular. They want death.

Israel will aggressively destroy anyone who attacks or intends to attack them. They have peaceful relations with Muslim nations, Jordan and Egypt especially. I acknowledge Israel's current two decade strategy with the Palestinians is not kind, but they aren't cartoon villains that just want to kill Muslims.

If its all vibes, then how does trump hungry for a world peace prize vibe with the war? Or the many clips of Trump trashing Obama and Biden for potentially starting a war in Iran?

No, this was a calculated decision.

Trump calling something bad but doing the exact same thing he talked against? No, I can't believe it. What a surprise. This definitely never happened before. At least before December 2025.

They were calculated in, but the decision was made by someone who did not give a fuck about the math.

> There is no way the US

Eppur si muove.

These folks are not our best and brightest.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/u-s-plan-to-unblock-strait-of-ho...

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is reported to have recommended against further air strikes on Iran[1].

----------

"Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General Dan Caine, has warned that strikes against Iran could be risky, potentially drawing the US into a prolonged conflict, US media report.

Caine has reportedly cautioned that a military action could have repercussions across the region, potentially including retaliatory strikes by Iranian proxies or a larger conflict that would require more US forces.

In a lengthy post on Truth Social, Trump described the reports as "fake news".

------------

[1]https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0zrwzr519o

I agree that many people inside and outside the US gov didn't want this war for various reasons, but of the people that wanted this war, they must have calculated these very obvious risks.

The article touches on this topic, but my guess is Iran isn't part of the USD/petrol trading. If the US can convince the new leadership in Iran to start trading in USD, then that would be very good for the USA (and bad for CN, RU, and IN).

If the POTUS starts a war against the advice of the The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, he should have a plan beyond "wag the dog" to distract from the Epstein files. I'm not convinced Trump actually has a plan unfortunately.

I think you give too much credit to the US and zionists. They probably convinced Trump that it would be another Venezuela, and because of their hubris they decided to go for it anyway. Remember how at the beginning it was supposed to only last for 2-3 days? Then 1 week, then 2 weeks, then 4 weeks, then until September. They clearly didn't see this far.

I'm very surprised anyone would think Iran would be a Venezuela.

Venezuela's leadership was barely legitimate (with voter fraud / dictactorship 3 years ago) whereas the supreme leader in Iran has had power for 36 years.

> There is no way the US/Israel didn't calculate that - the straight would be closed, a new leader may represent similar idiologies of the past leader.

A few things to remember here. First, Israel and US have divergent strategic goals. (Well, that presumes the US has strategic goals, which appears to be false given the struggle the administration has had over the past week to explain why the fuck we're at war with Iran.) Israel's apparent goal is the complete destruction of the Iranian state, and Netanyahu certainly seems to believe that Israel will suffer no consequences as a result.

The second is that Trump has never faced any consequences for his actions. If anything goes wrong, he just lies and says that it's all right, changes the topic and since no one talks about anymore, hey, it's been fixed. It also seems as if he believes that nobody else truly has agency, so the idea that the enemy gets a vote in war may truly be foreign to him.

Note also the quality of people that Trump has surrounded himself with in this term. The head of the military is someone who washed out of the military officer corps (and also essentially failed in every managerial career he's had since them). They openly denigrate the importance of things like logistics in military, in favor of big, manly things like the awesome power of their missile salvos. I believe Hegseth legitimately doesn't give a crap about the boring things like naval escort missions because that's not manly, and instead cares more about how much big kaboom has been delivered to Iran, and so far the evidence of how the operation has gone to doubt completely vindicates that belief.

Fourth, even almost two weeks into the strait being closed, the US military has done nothing to reopen it. The strait is not closed because of the existence of mines, or because Iran is targeting ships; it is closed because shippers are absolutely terrified to send their ships through it. Reopening it thus requires giving those people confidence to send their ships through it, and that confidence of course requires clear, public statements. That is not happening. Instead, we get Trump giving off a different explanation of how to reopen it everytime he's asked, followed up by the US Navy denying whatever Trump said (e.g., the US Navy is unwilling to provide any naval escort). There is insufficient materiel in the theater right now to reopen the strait, and nothing is being shipped to the strait that can reopen it. From all apparent evidence, the current plan for reopening the strait is praying that it reopens tomorrow, although I have doubts that there is enough self-awareness or religiosity to actually do any praying here.

The risk of Iran closing the Strait of Hormuz is so obvious, the catastrophe of such an action is so well-known, that you would have to be a colossal idiot to go into a situation where Iran might plausibly close the strait without a plan to reopen it swiftly. And yet all available evidence leans in that direction. So now many, many people are forced to countenance the sobering idea that the US government is led by an idiot who will destroy the economy without realizing that's what he's doing. It's time for us to wake up to the fact that there are no adults in the US government anymore and do something about that.

  Japan, an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, depends on it for a staggering 75% of its oil. Japan’s Prime Minister has warned plainly that if the Strait closes, the entire Japanese economy will collapse within eight to nine months. Not slow down. Not a contract. Collapse.

I am failing to an article about this, but that is absolutely incredible if true.

That's a lot of words for describing "attempting MAD doctrine with conventional weapons". Hell, we even got to see a "first strike decapitation countered by autonomous cells with pre-written second strike directives" scenario play out.

Normally what happens in these scenarios is that both sides declare victory and go home to lick their wounds.

The US and Israel can claim that they've caused the IRGC sufficient damage to set them back a decade or more.

Iran will declare that they've fought off a superpower with minimal real losses. They can also claim that -- despite intense foreign interference -- they got to choose and keep their preferred leader, alive. For now.

Normally yes, but without regime change the Iranian leadership will have even more resolve than ever to continue weapons programs (nuclear or not) and prepare retaliation for the inevitable next round of bombing…

There is no winning here for anyone.

I'm not claiming either side is actually winning, I'm merely predicting that they'll both claim to have won.

On the topic of the weapons program: The Israeli approach is to regularly "mow the lawn" to keep their regional opponents perpetually behind. Iran's nuclear weapons and ICBM programmes have almost certainly been damaged, perhaps enough to delay them for half a decade or more. Then it'll be time to mow the lawn again, or hope that by then a more moderate leadership can sign an agreement with a new US president that's a bit more trustworthy than the current one.

Israel and the US completely control their airspace and Iran's entire navy got demolished. I think the US prefers not to got too far as they prefer to keep the negotiation talks open. According to reports they asked Israel not to target energy for example.

> Israel and the US completely control their airspace

Maybe the soldiers sending shaheds and missiles hitting other countries every day haven't gotten the memo? Did somebody forget to put a cover sheet on it?

This is written a bit like the US dollar depends solely on the price of oil, which isn't true.

It also seems like if we're to game theory this, we'd need to plot out the full escalation capacity of the USA, which the author is failing to do here. I don't like the idea of doing that because the thought is sickening, but it's necessary to consider the entire decision tree to make a remotely rational model.

In retrospect I guess game theory is used kind of rhetorically here. If you consider what's written through that lens, it's very poorly developed and doesn't make sense. Maybe this is a thing, though? Am I misunderstanding what the author means by game theory here?

I do think the asymmetry of war costs are a serious problem for the USA, and the less they're willing to escalate or otherwise mitigate this, the more serious that problem becomes. If I were to make a statement like the author did about the war, I'd frame it more like "this is going to be insanely fucking risky and expensive for the USA", but certainly not that they'll lose.

edit: Listening to the Professor Jiang analysis and I understand why game theory was referenced now. He seems much more thorough and analytical so far.

edit again: he claims Dubai will probably go bankrupt in one scenario. This seems exceedingly unlikely, but he doesn't explain why it could be true

The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order. The world needs policing and deterrence is the sad reality otherwise everything goes to hell.

Why did Russia attack Ukraine? Why is China threatening to attack Taiwan? Without the US (and the west more generally) Russia would retake half of Europe and China would have taken Taiwan. If you think there would be world peace you are so very much mistaken (speaking of propaganda). If you goal is to speak Russian and Chinese and live in those sorts of regimes then that's very much aligned with the US and the West just stepping back and not using force ever.

> The core of the problem is that the US stepped back under Obama from being the guarantor of global order.

That is not the core of the problem. We can go a bit further:

- Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush. As a 'guarantor of global order' the US created a lot of disorder with Iraq and Afganistan. That is actually more in line with what historically the US understands under 'the global order': the US does what it wants to do and calls it the global order.

- also the relative standing of the US since the end of the 90s is falling, because of the rise of other countries. That was widely expected and forecasted. What was also expected is that empires on their way out don't act rationally, because there is ample historical precendent to that. And so here we are.

You're not wrong but neither am I. Both of these factors are relevant as is the break up of the USSR. And maybe even climate change. And globalization?

I'm not sure I would use the term "empire" to refer to the USA. It was for some time the world's only "super power" and it is still by far the strongest and most able to project power conventional military.

Whether or not it's "on its way out" - history will tell. Maybe? If it is I would claim this is more about internal forces than geopolitical ones (or internal forces influenced by geopolitics). Maybe that's also typical.

I would still say that when there is no policing the world goes to hell and there's not going to magically be "peace" by the USA not intervening. And yes, Iraq and Afghanistan were not great examples of how interventions can be followed by political gains. But- those interventions may have acted as deterrence anyways. Iraq took Kuwait by force. With no intervention why wouldn't they take all the Gulf states? It's easy to critique what happened but we also don't know what alternatives existed.

Keeping the world a peaceful place seems to require at least the threat of violence. Definitely given the composition of the world today. A threat that's never acted upon loses credibility. Too many Putins in this world who would invade and murder others at the blink of an eye if they feel that can gain them something.

> I'm not sure I would use the term "empire" to refer to the USA.

the UN was created in New York mostly by the US, the dollar is the world's reserve and international trade currency, the main distinguishing point of other countries foreign politics is their relationship with the US, there are US army bases all over the world, english is the lingua franca (yes, partly carried over from the British empire, but still) etc.

> I would still say that when there is no policing the world goes to hell

and with the current policing it's going to hell too.

> there's not going to magically be "peace" by the USA not intervening

yes of course

> Iraq took Kuwait by force.

That was in 1991 and it was indeed the right reaction at the time but as the realists say it is quite doubtful we would see the same reaction in an oilless region.

> But- those interventions may have acted as deterrence anyways.

No. By the US ignoring the rules they helped to establish (2nd Iraq war) they helped to codify 'might makes right' as the only real rule and as a consequence both Israel and Russia knew they won't be stopped by the international rule based order. So we got Russia bombing and annexing parts of Georgia in 2008 (no reaction), annexing parts of Ukraine in 2014 (no reaction) and starting an all-out war in 2022 (finally some reaction but too little too late and now the US is more a friend of Russia anyway), and Israel genociding and expanding their lebensraum without any consequences whatsoever.

Israel is very much a different story. Hamas initiated the last war like Russia initiated their war on Ukraine.

Israel, as a country, ignoring the fringe right, has had no desire to either have war or expand its borders. Israel simply wants to live in peace. Something the Palestinians and the Arab countries have been unwilling to accept.

You're also conveniently forgetting that pretty much the entire western world joined in post 9/11, that there was a large coalition against Iraq, and against ISIS in Syria. All those countries that were fine with using force against something that ranges from low threat to little threat to their citizenry are quick to lynch Israel when it does the same.

Attacks on Israel are also ignoring those supposed rule based world (from 1948 and onwards) and are universally recognized as war crimes (e.g. Hamas and Hezbollah firing rockets into Israeli population centers).

Maybe in your circles (obviously) there's a different story. But it's false. It's at the very least a simplistic narrative that ignores facts that don't fit in it. That's not to say Israel has necessarily always been 100% right but to equate it with Russia being 100% the aggressor is completely wrong.

> Something the Palestinians and the Arab countries have been unwilling to accept.

Seems to be a common trait amongst Palestinians: fighting losing wars and blowing up shit in the process because they are unable to accept reality.

The entire Middle East should just be glassed. Encase the holy lands in concrete and sink them into the Mediterranean.

> Israel, as a country, ignoring the fringe right, has had no desire to either have war or expand its borders.

Oh please, this is a straight lie. I'm pretty sure you are familiar with Area C, for example.

> Hamas initiated the last war like Russia initiated their war on Ukraine.

It was Israeli Army that bombed unknown tens of thousands of civilian to death and destroyed the vital infrastructure for millions. It's for a reason we call it a genocide (while of course you called it war, because Palestinians lives don't matter). But anyway that's a nice example of how the rules don't apply to you if you don't like them and about the very selective enforcement by the international community, especially the US.

>Obama was a reaction to overstepping under Bush

A great example of this was Obama asking Congress permission to bomb Syria after Assad used chemical weapons. A permission they delayed voting on until Russia ended up resolving the issue.

Quite the difference to how Trump's foreign adventures occur.

Things don't change... until they do.

Not really. The U.S. can send in the ground force to restore the trade around the Gulf. The BUT is obvious in this case tho.

That's not a reasonable option, it's a bear-trap. Once troops are on the ground it will be another decades-long slog, and one that ends like Afghanistan at best. At worst, this looks like America's version of Ukraine.

I can argue both sides but under the assumption (which I think is true) that 80%-90% of Iranians want to remove the regime there's some possibility of success. That said there's also the possibility of screwing things up completely and getting the entire population to fight you as an invader.

One thing for sure, it's not going to look like Russia invading Ukraine. The Iranians don't have the resolve or the support or the capabilities that Ukraine had and has. It will look more like Iraq in terms of the ability of the military to put up any resistance.

The problem with "boots on the ground" isn't that it can't succeed. The problem is it has zero support from the American public. People feel about this a lot more strongly than the other topics dividing the public.

Iranian polls show that 20-25% Iranians living in Iran support the IRGC, but due to how the questions were formulated, you can't know who would support a regime change.

Polls after the 12 day bombing campaign in 2025 showed that 60% disapproved the bombing. That means you probably have at least a 40% base of support for active overthroing, growing, to change the regime, which is larger than the current supporters. Maybe you could have done something with it. Wait until the previous Komenei died of his cancer instead of martyring him, and wait for the new nomination and the protests that would follow to strike (decapitation of the morality police, species to open the prisons, etc).

The way it was done just feels like the US wanted chaos and death, not meaningful change.

Trump, the neo-cons, and much of the Republican party might as well hang up their hats if they put boots on the ground (beyond special forces which is often ignored for some reason).

The US will be bogged down for years at a minimum if we entered Iran on the ground, or we would lose quickly and tuck tail.

This isn't a fight to be won in a conventional war, the administration put every chip they had on a gamble that regime change was possible with air superiority alone. I don't know of any historical example of that working, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Everyone says there's no historical examples but there is no exact parallel either. I wouldn't argue based on historical precedence here.

The challenge is that regime is large and armed and they can hide and weather the storm. They'll hide in hospitals, and mosques, and schools and amongst civilians.

Getting them and disrupting their organization to a point where a popular revolt can take over seems ... lessay hard.

What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides. The probability of that is very hard to gauge. There are stories of some defecting but hard to know if it's true or not.

> What needs to happen is that some parts of the military, who are a bit less fanatic, switches sides.

Then they need to drive the rest out of the country, and then keep them out forever, regardless of whatever chaos, instability, and misery arise within the country.

Not really. Most people will just switch sides. There aren't that many people for whom fighting to the death with other Iranians is a goal. If the 10% can control the 90% today then the 90% will have no problem controlling the 10%.

I know you said to ignore historical precedent but I don't think what you're describing has happened anywhere, ever.

You can't build a stable, prosperous country with remnants of a former regime periodically showing up at people's doors holding guns and telling them that they're now part of a resistance movement.

Do you know many people that live in Iran today? You're making bold claims about their loyalty and aspirations, though if that's first or second hand I'd be very interested to hear more.

Historical precedent is important with regards to predictability. We have no idea if simply bombing them to hell will be enough for regime change, while we do know that there is some lower bound of military involvement on the ground that would have likely success with that goal.

Personally I don't see how an air campaign alone can lead to any regime change we'd actually want to see. We are all being told the Iranian public is a cohesive unit with a strong majority wanting to go back to 1978, I don't buy it.

The only likely outcomes I see, if the regime is changed at all, is a military coup with even worse people coming in, a very bloody civil war, or a faction in the country we never hear about taking over quickly by promising the world to the public. For the last one, I'd expect that to be a group more akin to the Nazis than some group that actually means well for Iranians.

The UK population was _very_ weary of Churchill and his decision to involve the UK in WW2. You had the UK nazi party that was lobbying the industrialists, and the moscow-aligned communist party that was putting pressure on the laborers. Churchill would have lasted at most half a year after Dunkerque, and and much more pro-nazi PM could have been named. But the German airstrike campaign radicalised the UK population. Because the fucking Nazis couldn't bear to have decisions like 'who to bomb' taken by non-nazi, they replaced all the capable men with idiots yesmen.

So 90% of British wanted were being brutally oppressed on the eve of WW2 and called on the Nazis to bomb the UK so they can overthrow the government? Not only that but weeks before the Nazi attacks the UK government mowed down protestors with machine guns on the streets?

Got it.

I'm not seeing any parallels.

There can be some "rally to the flag" effect but the Iranian population by large is not going to suddenly like their government.

But to turn the story around a little. Do you see Americans rallying around Trump if the Iranians attack some high profile US targets?

No. 80% of the British wanted to avoid war with Germany, for different reasons, and 15% even voted for someone whose main campaign idea was an alliance with them. The bombing campaign radicalised the vast majority of British voters, even those in less affected areas.

(Btw, the only recent documented instance of machine gun mowing down people is Saudi police mowing down Somali workers).

60% of the Iranian population polled were against the bombing during the 12 day war, bombing that, unlike this one, didn't break too much civilian infrastructure (targeting desalination plants is something I thought even Russia wouldn't do, but well, I shouldn't hold US army and Tsahal to the same standards). And that's with most observers saying that only 20-25% of the population support the regime in 'normal' time.

You had thousands dead, 50k people in prison waiting for the death penalty, a leader on his deathbed, and rather than waiting for the internal tensions between army branches to break the regime, the US chose to martyr the almost dead, suffering leader, consolidating his successor power, and eliminating and opposition in the more laical army. Nice fucking job. Now the army and the clerical police are aligned.

Even when you organize and plan correctly a regime change, a few unlucky breaks and you create a Lybia. Going there gung-ho was truly a spectacular choice, and managed to put Komenei son in place without any power struggles that could have been instrumentalized.

Consumer? Apple or Google Photos or 'drive' functionality of either. The only real risk then is losing your account and Apple Photos has an option to keep them all locally on disk.

To be pedantic, the post you responded to asked about "storage medium", not storage services, which leads to the question of what storage medium they use and how long the services will be around.

The thing people miss is isn't not that there aren't downsides (power, memory, disk size, dependency ecosystem size etc etc) it's that they're still completely outweighed by the upsides of write-once-ship-all for authors.

I suspect what'll kill these is the same thing that kill google glass - social ostracisation. It's so, so wildly adversarial to effectively shove a recording device in the face of everyone you're interacting with you might as well wear a emergency orange t-shirt with 'verified asshole' written on it.

They look like any other pair of sunglasses. No piece of glass over one eye reminding everyone you meet that you’re wearing a camera. They’re incredibly stealthy

Have you seen them in the wild? They're notably chunky and have an obvious hole where the lens is. You might not notice it in passing but if someone's talking to you it's hard not to notice. I wonder how many of their owners realise how much they're affecting every interaction they have with another human.

Unlike google glass they don't look weird. Unless you know what to look for you will probably just think they are ray bans.

Maybe in a few generations. Right now they do in fact look weird.