I think the point is that its believed they were foreigners who were part of iranian proxy forces (e.g. iranian backed militias in iraq), so weren't doing it for money but out of some sort of loyalty to the iranian regime or ideology.
Usually mercenaries mean people doing it for money not ideology who get paid significantly more than your average soldier.
My mom retired as an independent translator 5 years ago.
She worked freelance 40 years from age 25 to age 65.
In the 15 years that preceded her retirement, she would get less and less work.
Partly she's an introvert who relies on her network to provide work, and her network gradually retired.
But machine translation was the big killer.
Before LLMs, the early versions of Google Translate killed paid translation.
As the market adapted to machine translation, and as the internet became a globalised platform for knowledge work, it also opened up to lower grade translation, and there were suddenly many more translators willing to work at a lower wage.
Prior to Google Translate there were semi-automated systems that would fuzzy match from large databases.
But it'd still rely on a human-in-the-loop for adapting the sentences.
With Google Translate you'd get a super sketchy translation out, very crude and not at all correct or idiomatic in the target language. Any distance between the source and target language (e.g. English -> Chinese) and it'd be one big joke. With plain Google Translate it still is. But the market spoke: Probably you don't need a very good translation most of the time. Especially not if the shitty one is free.
In her later years she moved to transcription of board meetings. She'd type up everything that was said.
I work for a company now that automates transcription via the whisper model and generates summaries that can be adapted by the customer. You pay per minute of transcription, and you can regenerate summaries as much as you want after that until your prompts give the right results.
All of this manual labor that provided for my childhood is gone now.
I couldn't imagine being a professional translator today and not use AI extensively.
But unless I have a legal reason to consult with a professional translator, I probably don't even need one, since LLM-based translation is as good as it gets with just plain LLM usage, and near perfect with automated translation tools that will help you pick both the mood, formality and alternative formulations for your translation.
High-grade translation is massively parallelisable, and a human-in-the-loop is entirely for final proof-reading.
I love how terraform can describe what I’ve got. Sort of. Assuming I or my colleagues or my noob customers don’t modify resources on the same account.
I don’t love how unreliable providers are, even for creating resources. Clouds like DigitalOcean will 429 throttle me for making too many plans in a row with only 100+ resources. Sometimes the plan goes through, but the apply fails. Sometimes halfway through.
I’d rather use a cloud-specific API, unless I’m certain of the quality of the specific terraform provider.
I look at the 1990s picture of Brewster Kahle and think: He surely didn't get paid as much as me, but what did I do? Play insignificant roles in various software subscription services, many of which are gone now. And what did he do? Held on to an idea for decades.
The combined value of The Internet Archive -- whether we think just the infrastructure, just the value of the data, or the actual utility value to mankind -- vastly outperforms an individual contributor's at almost every well-paying internet startup. At the simple cost of not getting to pocket that value.
If you think that's fucked up, do you know how little we pay teachers? Especially preschool-K? Clearly money is just a metric for how much moneying the money had been able to money. Goodhart out it another way: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
I was a CS teacher for the past two years, so yes. I did it for quality of life reasons while my son learned to walk. But I almost doubled my salary going back to being a software dev.
Though President Ebrahim Raisi’s sudden death in May 2024 prompted a new electoral cycle with six vetted candidates, all were affiliated with the regime and loyal to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, ensuring little real policy divergence. The Guardian Council filtered out all but hardline male clerics and a nominal reformist, creating the illusion of choice while reinforcing conservative dominance. Moreover, the presidency in Iran holds limited authority — ultimate power resides with Khamenei, who, since 1989, has steadily centralized control in his hands, rendering both elected institutions and their leaders largely symbolic. In short, the article contends that no matter who wins, Iran’s domestic and foreign agendas — especially its nuclear program and regional interventions — will remain unchanged, as they are guided by the Supreme Leader's ideology.
There are many reasons why you can have violence in the streets, especially in a climate of enormous foreign manipulation. An enemy state was setting off car bombs just a year ago...
> Some software, such as Visual Studio Code and derivatives, has very lax policies on extensions. Even if you install it from a trusted source, but then install an untrusted extension, the extension will run with full access to your files!
Installing VSCodium on NixOS, you need to specify the extensions as part of your system configuration. This means extensions get pinned. But beyond that, they still have full user access.
That's a valid perspective, but claudebox isn't my own take. It's Linux user namespaces using bubblewrap to achieve VM-grade sandboxing and near native-level DX with the ability to express your environment using Nix.
Most of those dime-a-dozen solutions employ Docker, so if you like to work inside a container, that's great.
that's still largely a "container" or "sandbox", using the same kernel features, and some package / provisioning manager
I use Dagger, which is BuildKit based underneath, and aligns closely with Dockerfiles, but is far more flexible and is accessible from many programming languages
so in this sense "it's not my own take", but both of these are our own "take" on assembling several pieces of technology to realize a certain application feature. It's the feature that is the "dime-a-dozen" and most people largely don't care what technologies you choose to deliver that feature
> Claude Code makes it very fast and trivial to personalize, adapt, automate
I used Claude to define some CS exam computers using NixOS; it was just GNOME, but with a few tweaks made via dconf. For example, add a maximize icon next to the X (close) in the menubar, make the dashbar behave like a dock with smart autohiding. On a Tailscale VPN so I can service them. And with a few programs preinstalled, preconfigured and pinned to the dock. System users for every student. And with mirroring the screen at a certain resolution by default.
Anything I hadn’t tried before, I just asked it to make. The dconf tweaking in particular was so much easier than when I tried to do this manually.
(I've rephrased the sentence by removing "just" -- the novel thought here is that the agent's use of a skill can automatically trigger another skill, which is somewhat emergent.)
Also, read the article. :)
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