One can cheat on this for airline systems by taking the position that "the system" is the aggregation of all the different systems, not any one of them.

[...]

>> One 9-character string, sitting in a PNR field, threading across four organisations' financial systems.

(emphasis added)

It's not that identifiers identify. It's that an identifier identifies the same thing across multiple, independent, entirely distinct systems.

There are other examples: credit card numbers, government issued ID numbers.

But in general, identifiers have little currency outside the system that generated them, hence the "impressed" element to this.

I have no particular interest or knowledge of military tactics, and no desire to expand it. I do, however, recall what is written in an article that I've just read, particularly when it already answers, all by itself, questions that people are asking about it.

I have no opinion on this, but TFA makes it pretty clear: visibility and susceptibility to attack.

TFA also makes it clear that cutting and covering is weak sauce compared with actual tunnels "30-40 feet below the surface".

significant parts of the current world order evolved when the US was very much a contested superpower, c/o the USSR. While many things have changed since the dissolution of the USSR, many things have remained the same.

Further, you can guarantee that if Russia had announced in the days of war rumors re: Iran that they would militarily (not just intelligence & logistics, if stories are to be believed) support Iran, the US would likely not have attacked in anything like this way. That they did not doesn't mean that the US is "uncontested", merely that Russia wasn't interested in that sort of positioning of its own (nuclear) military threat over US action in Iran.

but since then, so many people have gotten used to the basic model that git offers (even if they still have issues with details of the syntax).

to gain a foothold in this environment is a monumental task, and anything that wasn't unambiguously libre and probably gratis too has little hope.

$400 is about 10-11 movies for 2 people. So one a month is pretty much even-stevens with that.

If you live (or watch) alone, the math changes a bit, perhaps.

This is completely different than what you're describing (even if the end results are sometimes the same).

The Netflix adaptation of "100 Years of Solitude" (part two due out this august) was one of the most astounding bits of visual story telling I've seen in a long time. Entirely the opposite of "disposable background TV".

... I still think there is an interesting question to be investigated about whether, by building immensely complex models of language, one of our primary ways that we interact with, reason about and discuss the world, we may not have accidentally built something with properties quite different than might be guessed from the (otherwise excellent) description of how they work in TFA.

I agree with pretty much everything in TFA, so this is supplemental to the points made there, not contesting them or trying to replace them.