"The full model weights will be released by July 27, 2026."

This is exactly what Trump tried. The US was boarding Iranian ships thousands of kilometers away. In the end the US still backed down and agreed to an Iranian toll in the MoU.

Iranian ships have been getting boarded for extremely flimsy reasons for over ten years now. That forced them to adapt to it in such a way that they are now far more resilient to it than the rest of the world is.

And the drones/missile have much more range than 300km. The Shahed-136 drone have a 2000+km range, which is significantly more than the combat radius of carrierborne fighters, even if you add reasonable amounts of refuelling.

The problem in the end isn't that it was impossible to strike every possible hiding site without causing massive casualities. It just wasn't possible. The US failed to durably damage Iranian installations. The backup plan was to exploit air supremacy to interdict whatever was coming in and out of those installations - that also failed. This was an operational failure of US military doctrine, that is unrelated to the tolerance of casualties. It is simply that US military planners overestimated their abilities and made assumptions they couldn't cash. It wasn't a case of casualty avoidance or whatever.

It's also questionable whether a ground invasion of Iran would be feasible to begin with. The Operational Art of War has a great series on the logistics of such an operation, it would be extremely difficult and would most likely require the US to send the troops... through the Strait of Hormuz to begin with.

The American doctrine might be to kill the enemy before you are in their view. But the enemy gets a vote. This is no longer something the US can rely on, even against clever enough middle powers.

It's just true that the assumptions that underpinned the current American force composition and strategy are breaking down. That's why the war went much worse than most mainstream analysts expected.

Basically every large advertiser requires this so it's pretty trivial to turn on.

It's ultimately not very complicated - it's a laser rangefinder that you spin on a motor. It's such a simple - and old! - technology which would obviously get significantly cheaper with time, it was definitely the right horse to bet on. I never understood iRobot's vision strategy.

It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis.

Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful to begin with, for entirely different reasons. If they had managed to get to iRobot's level of ubiquity and distribution they would have had a much better shot of still being around nowadays.