This is spot on. It would be great (and very easy for them) to have a setting where you can force compaction at a much lower value, eg 300k tokens.

What kind of systems are you thinking about? Jet airplanes for sure are completely safe from small drones.

With Ukraine, if Russia had been able to establish total air dominance early on, they wouldn't have been stopped in their tracks the way they were. The fact that they weren't able to do that has nothing to do with cheap drones, which became a decisive factor only much later.

In Iran, US and Israel were able to establish total air dominance, but they didn't have any plan to follow on with boots on the ground, which is still necessary to actually defeat an enemy. And most successful hits so far were achieved through ballistic missiles, not cheap drones.

I wouldn't be surprised if creating a truly great AI DJ was also hindered by this kind of legal shackles.

Was it lobbies, or costs which aren't competitive with China?

Isn't this the actual definition of vibe coding?

* Life on Earth will survive any human-made change, even a full nuclear war. It's our society which won't survive if changes are too quick.

* Publicly ran healthcare systems in Europe and elsewhere are MUCH more cost efficient than the US private system, it's very easy to compare cost/performance, so the "government operated systems invariably balloon costs" is just false in this case. This isn't to say that private enterprises aren't more efficient in most cases, and the issue with private healthcare isn't that they're not efficient in terms of resources used - it’s just that maximizing profits and shareholder value when people’s lives are on the line means that you, as a health care customer, will be gouged for every penny they can get.