Everything else you mentioned also matters. I can't tell you the amount of times that the state of Georgia, suddenly out of the blue, invalidated a lot of registered voters. And if people don't check, like my friend in a minority town outside of Atlanta, they won't realize until election day. Red states are more likely to play this trick. Your conclusion is something I disagree with, though. Voters have lost so much over the last decade, and they don't fight back until it really starts to affect them personally. I think the surge that we might see this election is only due to economics. If the economics were good, it's not out of the question that Trump would be doing fairly decent this election cycle. This is why Iran is playing things very well to try to enact maximum economic pain in the days before the election. But it's all about economics, and that shows you that people truly don't really care.

[1]:https://chatjimmy.ai/

I remember from an old CCC conference they talked about looking for vulns in specific portions of the OS that have had UX changes like this as it may indicate a lower skilled developer having to show that they are getting tickets done. Code that was solid ends up introducing bugs. Areas of the OS untouched have less likelihood of easy to find bugs. I don't know how valid that theory really is but your example makes me think I have to start wasting time monitoring the beta program to see what changed and if my most used app features are touched I wait until at least the .1 release or now probably .2 release. Problem is with the advent of AI assisted hacks, it feels like I should update the nanosecond something new comes out.

I heard the US produced knockoffs of the Iranian ~$10-50k drone and produces it for ~$35K and its a modular and an upgradable platform (ie. not just a dumb copy). If you ask me, that ability to not only produce castles but also 'cheap cannons' as per your analogy when needed for cheaper and then improve on top of it is a pretty darn good skill.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-cost_Uncrewed_Combat_Attac...

The fact that they are still trying last minute fuel price manipulation in the hopes of converting some people into Trumps good graces proves that you are wrong. The country is very large. In 300+ million people you will find a large distribution of people in terms of skills and ability to discern fact from fiction. The bottom 10% of the distribution is still ~30 million people. Some % of these people vote. Lets not even consider the bottom 50% percentile.

>Jan. 6th wasn't enough to disqualify him from a second term. The Epstein files weren't enough to get him removed from power. ICE wasn't enough to get him removed from power. Blatant disregard for the courts, threatening allies, arbitrary and insane tariff policies weren't enough to get him removed from power.

You are conflating two different things. This is a failure of the system. This takes time to reform. There are attempts going back years. When you have so many layers of people who benefit from the existing status quo the only way you speed up the fix this without decades of sludging through roadblocks is if a national calamity happens that finally forces change(economic or other challenge). Otherwise too many people are insulated from the downsides of the system until they aren't anymore and then something changes.

>but Americans are the reason Trump was in that position to begin with, and he is there because Americans want him there.

Objectively this is a stated fact (unless you believe the election was rigged). But it glosses over so much nuance and context.

>Besides, what's happening in Iran is minuscule compared to what happened during the 'War on Terror'. Play imperial games, win imperial prizes.

Disagree, Those wars were confined to an adversary that was already a few rungs down on the ladder and couldn't crash the world economy. Iran is larger than Iraq + Afghanistan combined, has very large mountainous terrain which has a lot of easy hiding spots for drones/launchers, has the fourth largest collection of trained staff in the field of nuclear science (more than France) and even became space launch capable in 2009.

Thats is like night and day difference between Iraq/Afghanistan.

Lets zoom out: The whole world is about to enter a massive economic calamity, all because Americans got tricked into to electing the current knucklehead in the White House who took a ~$300 million bribe from an Israeli supporter to start this war.

None of those other conflicts will affect the entire world as what Israel has done.

Is the market for GPU developers so specialized that engineers get trapped in a company or set of companies? If those employees were uneasy was part of that driven by lack of opportunities for their skill set? I'd imagine this is a niche where everyone knows each other no?

I wonder if this legacy would allow easier decomps of Xbox 360 software to run on Adreno GPUs? I ask because, my attempts to port software like PS2 demoscene to a very different platform like Mac has led me down very painful path and I now understand that graphics is so custom tailored and built for a specific use case that anything that can lower the bar of difficulty (such as the target having the same GPU design) can only increase the chances of successful ports/decomps.

It is an excellent talk into why the security of the Xbox is so good by the platform security architect himself(at least the software stack). I highly recommend a watch.