Seems like it. That would explain the various suspicious entries and lack of rigor (missing thousands of smaller startups that have failed in the last decade)
This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable. And by working for them, you are enabling this.
It offers no constructive alternative and the author (yes, I know who he is) seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
I understand that sentiment, but it's very one-sided.
I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small. I enjoy being able to easily work from home.
None of the above was possible just 20 years ago. All of them are enabled by big tech and none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
Yes there are drawbacks. I also find them bad to a point of threatening society. But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
> None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
Most of those things were actually possible. In many cases they weren’t as convenient, but as a child of the 80s I can tell you that life wasn’t like the dark ages before we all got smart phones.
In any case, I don’t think anyone here is arguing against technological progress. What we’re saying is that big tech has been too powerful, and too unregulated, for far too long.
As a child of the 80s, who lived 20 miles away from a city, I can tell you that my life was pretty much dark ages before I understood that driving was not just something parents did; I could also do that. And that there were people with similar interests as me at the end of that drive! Took 18 years.
I grew up in a rural township 50 miles from a major city in the 1980s. We were never isolated and there were in fact a diverse set of peers my own age with interests and heritage all across the spectrum. Yes there were a few racists or religious zealots but 99% of the folks got along just fine.
My own lasting impression is that this is the “American experience” that is not dead nor impossible to recreate in 2026. We just all need to learn to be decent Americans again.
Probably a similar environment to me. Around the peak of stranger danger + inefficient means of public transportation. So the world can feel extremely small.
I agree that big tech is and has been too powerful and too unregulated. But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements. Which is why I called it out.
I also didn't say the 80s were dark ages. I was also around back then and life was fun. But none of what I wrote was easy or possible 20 years ago. You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
>But it's not "making everybody miserable". The world is not just black and white and HN is too much of an intellectually honest forum to just throw around such blanket statements.
It's not making everybody miserable "yet". But the current rate of change suggest that is the goal, and that's where the alarm comes from. We had the term "embrace, extend, extinguish" used to describe their business last decade and they clearly want to extend that philosphy to the consumers over time too. Some parts of tech are already arguably at the "extinguish" stage as we speak.
>You can try to nitpick but the point stands.
I feel inclined to nitpick a nitpicker who rejects a statement "there making everyone miserable" with "yes, but not everything is miserable".
Most of the texts that matter are. Yeah you’re not going to find some random flat earth blog in the library, but equally, that’s a good thing.
However, I wasn’t talking specifically about libraries. The web did still exist 20 years ago. Wikipedia is more than 20 years old. And newsgroups have been around much longer too.
The web was also mobile accessible for more than 20 years (WAP, for example, was introduced in 1999).
There were also phone numbers you could ring who could provide quick searches for information look up. People are most familiar with them in terms of telephone directory services (eg ring an operator to ask for the phone number of someone else) but there were other general knowledge services too. In fact I used one once when my bike chain broke, I walked to a local pay phone, and enquired how to put a chain back on.
Even know, there’s a plethora of information at local government information and audit offices, which isn’t available online. most of which is store on microfilm. A friend needed to visit one office recently to look at historic maps to trace the origins of a public right of way (which is a legal public footpath though farmland in the UK)
Like I said before, we weren’t living in the dark ages before smartphones came along.
And most of the texts you can access at the local library aren't even at that local library right now. Libraries are part of a humongous network. If you're willing to wait a few days, there's an avalanche of material that you definitely can't instantly find on the internet.
>I enjoy having the worlds knowledge at my fingertips. I enjoy being able to video-call my family from anywhere in the world at any time. I enjoy never being lost cause I always have a map showing where I am. I enjoy having group chats with all my different social groups, big and small.
>None of the above was possible just 20 years ago.
I also enjoy having those things, but we had all of them 15 years ago. Since then we got... algorithmic feeds?
You could do all those things 10 if not 15 years ago, with maybe the exception of the last one - mainly driven by the onset of the COVID pandemic forcing people to think differently about things for a brief time - in a much less hostile climate. And big tech isn't even required for let alone the best implementation of all those things, it's merely situated itself as the default.
None of the good things you described requires the existence of powerful private actors. The internet was created by public funded researchers, it is fundamentally decentralized. Wikipedia is a non-profit, video call could be p2p, etc.
> But we need to ack the positives, otherwise it's not an honest debate but only a mix of ranting and populist propaganda.
It's not ranting to not ack every positive if the negative clearly outweighs it. I would much rather live 20 years ago than live now without a job. Wouldn't you?
Alternatively suppose you get to keep your job. What percentage of the population being unemployed do you think would make it worse for you personally than going back 20 years. Because there is going to be more unemployment and it will affect your environment unless you have got a private island (some people do - some ai owners do)
2005 you could do these things. Heck by 2005 I had moved to the remote mountains and still had high speed internet. 30 years ago these things weren't coming from big tech, they were coming from small scrapy startups that were going to replace evil entrenched institutions with something better.
Today, these things are actually LESS accessible due to enshitification from entrenched big tech companies.
You enjoy individual benefits and completely disregard the fact that electronics addiction and loneliness get worse year by year. You've been able to Google anything and chat with anyone back in 2010, all we've achieved since is making the average person spend 4-5h mindlessly doomscrolling on their phone and watching YouTube instead of having meaningful social interaction.
Also, we've got an entire generation growing up on ads, algorithmic brainrot, and now ai slop.
You're also forgetting algorithmic price fixing, algorithmic pricing, the billions in R&D into making internet platforms and services more addicting and effective at siphoning out your money, etc.
That's not true. All of the examples you mentioned are possible without Big Tech. There are F/LOSS and community supported alternatives for all of them. Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Relying on Big Tech is a personal choice. None of these companies are essential to humanity.
> none of them is based on surveillance, ads or social media.
That's not true either. All Alphabet and Meta products are tied to and supported in some way by advertising. All of these companies were/are part of government surveillance programs.
So you're highly overestimating the value of Big Tech, and highly underestimating the negative effects they've had, have, and will continue to have on humanity.
>Big Tech might've contributed to parts of the technology that make these alternatives possible, but that could've been done by anyone else, and they are certainly not required to keep the technology functional today.
Not only that, but big tech proprietary products have depended and depend heavily on F/LOSS and community supported code.
But seriously, this is a political problem, not a technological problem. The harms of technology are like the harms of the food industry or the gambling industry. Those of us who care, know these things can be bad for society, and we regulate them. Our society doesn’t care, we literally just legalized sports gambling, and the leagues have embraced it, forgetting the clear history of what happened last time.
Hating technology is like hating metal because you don’t like gun deaths. The problem is that our electorate has stopped caring about society.
They're not making my life miserable. I definitely wouldn't want to go back to the tech we had in the 90s. You don't have to use social media. Advertising is annoying but it's not really any worse than TV ads back in the day.
The west was enjoying the peace dividend while Russians were dealing with the collapse of the USSR so the answer to your question depends on who you ask.
In most countries living in the woods on your own isn't allowed. You're forced to be connected if you want a job, social life, not be seen as a crazy person. You pretend like we're all living on some island where everything is merely decided by what you as an individual do.
In my home country several old people had to close their shop as they were forced to move to a digital accounting system, they didn't have a choice. My bank only allows me to go to their office without an appointment 1 day a week (maybe not even). My grandpa who doesn't have a phone (he never even got a landline), doesn't have internet and barely even drives, he has to depend on others to call and make appointments. If you want to apply for a job, you need internet connection. Many won't even hire you without owning a car (even if you could perfectly commute with a bicycle or public transport).
If you think we're at the end of this 'evolution', we're just getting started. My grandpa could perfectly do everything on his own until 2010, by 2018 it was getting almost impossible, 2026 he feels like a burden for not being into technology.
I do choose big tech less, but over time it finds its way to creep back in. Over time it becomes increasingly more difficult to engage with a society increasingly more dependent on it. It's not just stop using facebook and degoogle your phone.
unfortunately it will not be enough to just choose not to "do big tech" while the rest of society around you degrades. i.e. try going outside into the woods next to an ai datacenter and see if it really doesnt kill you.
> This post seems to be haphazardly proposing that big tech will inevitably make everyone's lives miserable.
Except that’s already happening. Through social media being engineered to be additive, advertising and user data collection being used to manipulate voters, AI bosses proudly claiming they’re putting people out of work, and games companies paying on the weak with loot boxes and other massively overpriced in game transactions.
And why isn’t there any legislation against these predatory tactics? Because big tech also donate millions to the very people we elect and who are supposed to serve the citizens.
And that’s without discussing the indirect costs of big tech from data centres ruining the lives of local residents, to independent stores getting screwed by knockoffs from Amazon and cheap Chinese stores.
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
That’s a pretty weak counterpoint. In fact it’s basically what we call an “ad hominem attack”. What you’re doing is arguing about the individual rather than discussing their points directly.
It’s like saying “you can’t be worried about climate change because you own a car.”
> It's hard to take this too seriously (even if there is some legitimate worry here)
If you think there is legitimate worry the you should take their points seriously. It would be contradictory to do otherwise
Inevitably? Maybe not, but the situation isn't gonna get better by saying "oh I'm sure the tech industry will do a 180 and stop making everything worse"
> seems to have no issue with Google hosting their email.
There's this meme where person A says "we should improve society somewhat", and B replies "yet you participate in society! curious". Very similar argument.
I don't believe "true" agi/asi will happen, but I totally believe if a company theoretically invented they would immediately shut all API's and then go for software market dominance in every category.
While I've said in another comment on this thread that comparative advantage is flawed, I still think the opening moves, the very initial phase, would be as per comparative advantage, not everything all at once.
Until supply grows to saturate demand in whatever market, comparative advantage points to the fastest way to make more money, that money then gets used to construct more servers and data centres, which gets used to saturate supply for the next most profitable market, etc. until there's none left.
I wouldn't say "never" for AI that can economically substitute all human labour. I think that meaning of AGI/ASI is slightly easier than the "AI which learns from as few examples as humans do" meaning, which I also think is possible eventually but don't know how far away it is.
It's vogue on HN to sometimes criticize critically so I want to try and be as constructive as possible:
I work for one of these companies. I also have pay bills to pay. I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
Frontier labs such as Google DeepMind are not just going to shutter their doors because 10% of the peons dropped their jobs. I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society. I only get to live once: if I am to spend it for social change, I best maximize by expected return.
And quitting a job in a capitalist society probably has negative return overall.
I also argue it depends on which 10%. 20% of all key talent may stall the project for years, so it would be a similar form of collective bargaining. But those at the top tend to be more complicit.
As is it, nothing is "real". But I'll offer options
1. Unionize
2. Work to form a general strike. Even an industry wide strike would be highly effective
3. Work your civic duties to push for stronger labor rights in the United States. It can include anywhere from 4 day work weeks to raising minimum wage to preventing abuse of the H1b Visa. There's dozens of initiatives to push for.
4. Similarly work to properly regulate Ai before the genie is out the bottle.
5. In the abscense of the ability to do 1-4 for whatever reason, research efforts out there and use capitalism to support them financially. Anonymously if need be.
Quittog your job without. Collective bargaining is a drop of water on a clear sunny day. You need to make it rain, and we can only do that together. Or have enough money to lobby he government to do your bidding. Too bad people at that level only seem to resort to authoritarian efforts.
> I believe, at least, that we should be demanding political accountability and safeguards for society.
You can't help but swing between "AGI is going to save us, praise the tech lords" and "AGI is going to kill us, tech lords have mercy" if you believe there is no counterpower to the tech lords.
"You, alone, leaving your job" is not a great way to counteract the tech lords (although at least it makes a point and show other people there is a problem.)
But there is the option to use your counterpowers (you know, legislators and all that ?) The tech lords are actively trying to avoid that (see the hilarious Musk vs Breton feud.)
It would be better if your system did not give money to power to choose lawmakers.
Maybe AI will make USA realize the definition of corruption and proper election funding laws.
But, if you don't want to join the underclass, maybe, just maybe, consider not picking tech lords as kings next time.
> I'd like to understand what a real, good alternative is.
The "real, good" part all depends on your expectations of life.
There's a real shortage in trades people and I'd love to see ChatGPT fix a leaky pipe, build a house or make a chair. So switching to the trades/manual labor, while financially tough at the beginning might be a good long term choice. But this requires much more physical work than most of us on HN are used to.
Moving away from capitalist society into a cheap tiny off grid house in a rural area and leading a much more basic life is also an option. You don't need 100k to survive, but you do need it in populated areas. (Also, I'm European and therefore not dependent on employment for health care, so I'm ignoring that part.)
There are many choices we can make that remove our dependence on big tech. But big tech is hella convenient and so is having expendable income, so it's a tough choice to make.
I lived the original post and left working in tech a years ago for essentially the reasons in the post. I agree the article stops short of offering solutions, but you also acknowledge there's a legitimate problem but then don't engage or offer alternatives.
From my experience, the problem I saw, and why I really respect OPs post, is that many good and smart people were lying to themselves in those environments. They'd do exactly what you do and try find reasons to justify working in tech.
Go into your average modern tech engineering team at e.g. Amazon, and ask them how many of the engineers in there use and support the software they're creating. They tiny fraction of people who say they do use it and support it, go check their usage, and you'll see half of them were overinflating it. HN knows it better than anywhere: many of these tech companies are not producing great tech to improve people's lives.
To you point "no constructive alternative" - think about it this way, if you're spending your life writing something you won't even use for reason that boil down to "it's just not valuable for me, especially knowing how its made", then doing literally anything other than working there is a more valuable use of _your_ time for you.
Look at your household and figure out what you need and what would improve your lives. If it's "6 figures salary and a world owned by megacorps", then working in places like Amazon is the best thing you can do for your family.
If you're a small household without kids, like a lot of people in these engineering environments, then instead of spending 12 hours a day mon - fri addicted to trying to solve this really cool little engineering problem (which just so happens to help e.g Amazon), you'd be far better solving some really cool little engineering problem that just so happens to help your family, like building some cool home automation thing for them, or working on your own house to make it more efficient so you can use less energy so anyone else working in your house can retire earlier with smaller outgoings. Or even just being a housewife/husband will improve the lives of the people you care about in more valuable and appreciated ways than anything you could do working at Amazon.
Now, I appreciate I'm in a lucky place to be able to do this, but if you've been able to work as an engineer in top engineering environments and this post is relevant to you, then you are already more than lucky enough to be able to walk away from those environments do things that are consciously useful and appreciated by other humans whom you value.
This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful? I could be at AWS working on their metering/billing system. I’d never use a billing system of that scale in personal life but that doesn’t mean it’s not a useful thing to build. And I think AWS as a whole is a very useful product for the world.
Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard. If you have some cool idea which makes home energy usage lower like a revolutionary heat pump, you should build your own company and sell that to everyone and scale up. You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.
A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.
> This is such a weird take - why do you have to personally use something for that to be useful?
> Working to make your home more efficient is not going to suddenly make anyone retire early. That’s the stupidest take I have heard.
I don't feel like you're engaging with entirely positive intent here. I also don't understand how you can know the concept of FIRE and come to the conclusion that reducing your outgoings is the stupidest take on how to retire earlier. It may not be obvious, or the best, but if it's genuinely the stupidest you've heard, then I don't think you've heard much.
> You sound like a FatFIRE person that has quit professional life and is now trying to justify why sitting at home and helping your family members is a virtuous thing to do as opposed to working for some BigTech.
That is what I'm saying, for me, and it's probably an option for you and many people here if they consider it. Not really Fat or necessarily RE. But my generalisation is: doing things that more directly help your household or family members or local community is far more virtuous thing to do than what the majority of engineers at BigTech spend/spent their time doing - including us both probably. I feel like you're a bit perplexed by that.
The whole point of a job IMO is ideally to:
1. improve the world so you can
2. earn some money to
3. do what you want, ideally improve your life and those around you.
The longer I was in BigTech, the more I noticed me and a lot of people around me were overestimating 1 because of 2 and not doing the best job of 3.
> A lot of the danger with BigTech is just the fact they are very big and so have accrued a lot of power. A simple solution is to use the anti-trust laws to break them up into smaller entities. I don’t think the problem is the products/services they build.
I agree entirely, breaking them up is also a good contribution. I'm not sure I remember it being suggested that the only issue was the products/services they build though - there are lots of issues with BigTech, that's the big issue.
We are over a decade into Big Tech already making everyone's lives miserable (the malicious wielding of social media is something even the mainstream knows about now). His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
There is some nuance in what "not working for big tech" means though. The general gist is to not take work making tools that can foreseeably be used to hurt people and the social fabric at large. Reject "disruption." Don't take money to make your life worse. That sort of thing.
> His alternative of not working for big tech is literally the only way out of this.
This won't actually work though. The only reason we even have this discussion is because we're rich enough that pure survival isn't even really in our instinct anymore. Most of us haven't experienced actual hardship for years and we live in luxury.
There are plenty people in the world who are smart and poor and living tough lives, who are ready to replace people who quit because they have te luxury to quit. Just look at the huge amount of Indian people moving across the world to work in tech. These people aren't going to let the opportunity to significantly improve their lives go because they're going to work on software that might negatively impact society at some point. You could see this exact thing happen when Elon took over Twitter. Many people left because they disagreed with Elon, while many H-1B stuck around because they (and their families) actually had something to lose.
I don't think many of us on HN realize how incredibly spoiled we are with the lives we live.
If you're working in big tech and you truly believe you are spoiled, then why not quit that job and let the migrant improve their living situation, while you live in the luxury you already have?
I don’t work in big tech. Wish I was, would be a pretty big improvement in my salary. Still think I’m very spoiled compared to about 90% of the world, probably more than that.
being snarky about it doesn't change the fact that you, despite having a number of options, opted to give one of the most inhuman corporations in the world a lot of money for a luxury brand device assembled by quasi-slave laborers.
so yes, it is rather absurd to demand radical changes from the society when you are unwilling to endure even minor inconveniences yourself.
> If Iran has nukes, then a nuke race will start in the middle East
A fair concern, but it is interesting that although "estimates of Israel's stockpile range between 90 and 400 nuclear warheads" [1], we are not concerned about those warheads as much as we do about the ones Iran might have. Should US bomb Israeli nuclear plants? No. Should they have bombed the Iranian ones? Why?
We didn't want Israel to have nukes either, we tried to stop them and failed. We wouldn't bomb Israel's nukes because they -already- have them, and they have grown in a semi-reliable regional ally since then. We are trying to stop Iran from having them at all to prevent them from being essentially off-limits to retaliation (note Iran is the #1 state sponsor of terrorism / people's fears of supporting Ukraine given Russia keeps threatening nuclear action) and kicking off a regional nuclear arms race.
> it has something to do with Israel being an ally
There are many allies of the US, still they are not exempt from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). I'm not sure if it's a sane strategy to permit a single ally who has never signed the NPT [1] to build nuclear weapons, unlike your many other allies or non-allies:
> The roots of this preferential treatment go back to a secret 1969 understanding between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. The agreement essentially allowed Israel to keep its nuclear weapons as long as it remained silent about them and avoided nuclear tests. That bargain has held ever since, with successive U.S. administrations turning a blind eye to what would be a clear violation of international norms if committed by any other state.
Causing a power imbalance in the region doesn't seem the right way to keep peace.
"terrorism" is just war fighting that we don't like. Israel is by far the biggest aggressor in the middle east having bombed half a dozen countries in the last year.
> Death to Arabs is an anti-Arab slogan originating in Israel. It is often used during protests and civil disturbances across Israel, the West Bank, and to a lesser extent, the Gaza Strip. Depending on the person's temperament, it may specifically be an expression of anti-Palestinianism or otherwise a broader expression anti-Arab sentiment, which includes non-Palestinian Arabs.
Have you been to Israel? I have cousins there. When I was 14 and visited, my 19 year old cousin told me we need to kill all the Arabs because “if we exile them, they will just come back.” Do you really think (a large segment of) Israelis are less crazy than (a large segment of) Iranians?
No. People are crazy everywhere. That is not the same as the actual leaders of the country. The one that are calling the shots making the same claims for 46 years.
Now, I don't know if you noticed, your cousins while they are not kind to Arabs (which if you had Arab cousins you would have noticed that they are not very kind to Jews), have nothing whatsoever with Iran, no more than they have anything with Napal.
That’s a little simplistic. Iranians feel, somewhat justifiably, that they and the Arab world have been pushed around by the West for over 100 years. The Jihadism we bemoan today didn’t arise in a vacuum - it is at least partially a reaction to Western interference in Middle Eastern affairs (recall how the US deposed a democratically elected Iranian leader). Israel is one such example of this Western interference, and while I obviously have the utmost sympathy for Israelis - having family there - I do think not enough Westerners are willing to see this from the Arab/Iranian PoV. There’s a reason they dislike us, and it’s not just that they’re fanatics. Negotiation would be more fruitful if we didn’t typecast our enemies as unreasoning fundamentalists.
Israel has always threatened its neighbors. Remember, it was born as a group of European Jews that attacked Palestine to conquer their land, with arms provided to them by Europe. It will always exist under a state of war.
We have to let Israel die off and change our alliances. An alliance with Iran would be much more beneficial to America than an alliance with Israel.
I think this attack makes it more likely they’ll get nukes, not less. They moved all their enriched uranium already, and now they know that there’s no longer any point in diplomacy.
The next facilities they build will be a few times deeper, and I have no doubt we’ll soon be hearing that ground troops are the only way to stop them.
They had already crossed the line into nuclear tech that's specifically for weapons, i.e. with a 400kg stockpile of uranium enriched to 60%. Unless we accept explanations like "scientific curiosity", they were already somewhere in the process of building nuclear weapons, even if success wasn't immanent.
I don't know how long these operations will set them back, but if the Iranian regime won't willingly refrain from nuclear weapons work, isn't a delay better than nothing?
They “could have” had nuclear weapons for a long time if they’d wanted to, yes, but they didn’t get them. They signed the NPT, allowed inspections, and their ruler issued a fatwa against developing nuclear weapons. Why’d they do all that if their goal all along was to get a nuclear weapon? They could have just done it.
These attacks make it clear that they would have been better off if they had gotten them, so it seems reasonable to assume this will be their new policy. What other strategic choice have they been left with?
Just to clarify, is your position that Iran was never working toward nuclear weapons, or just not until recently? I think enriching uranium to 60% is pretty clear evidence of their intent, even though it's just one component of an eventual weapon.
Being an NPT signatory could be evidence of Iran not working toward nuclear weapons, if they were compliant. But they have violated their NPT obligations on some occasions, with major violations recently.
I think they wanted to be seen as credibly close as a deterrent and bargaining chip in negotiations, but they had no intention of going all the way unless attacked.
Now they likely do intend to get them asap if they’re able to.
There isn't really such a thing as (forcefully) enforcing the NPT. Israel's casus belli (if we consider this a new war and not a continuation of one) would be based on self-defense.
60% enrichment is not weapons grade. Weapons grade is 80%. High enrichment is used in certain reactor designs, such as naval reactors.
There are a lot of reasons to be enriching uranium besides building nuclear weapons. Considering the US reneged on its deal to drop sanctions in exchange for Iran to not enrich uranium, it is pretty obviously useful as a bargaining chip, in the negotiations.
The US intelligence community assessed that Iran has not been working on a bomb since the program was shut down in 2003. They didn't want a nuke, they wanted an end to sanctions. They further wanted to avoid provoking exactly this sort of conflict. This did not delay them getting nuclear weapons, it will make them get nuclear weapons.
To quote an ISIS report, "Iran has no civilian use or justification for its production of 60 percent enriched uranium, particularly at the level of hundreds of kilograms". In theory it could be for naval propulsion, but experts (including IAEA inspectors) seem unconvinced.
Those can be bombed right at the beginning. Israel will probably try to establish a similar status que as in Lebanon right now - "if you make a move we immediately take it out".
And the development of a nuclear sites leaves a significant intelligence trail, not sure it can be hidden.
(Of course they can always be gifted a bomb, but that's a very different story)
Yeah I’m sure it will be a huge success with no unforeseen consequences whatsoever. Since that’s how these things have been going over the last thirty years.
And that's something we will have to accept, that Islamic populations will always have nukes.
How do you plan to handle a world with Islamic populations having nukes? Because that's something you will have to plan for. You have no choice. They will not let you not let them have nukes. They will make sure they will have nukes. That's just given.
Most of Islamic republics are fiefdoms, kingdoms and dictatorships. Most of the populations are radicalized, and have very limited freedom of speech and right to protest.
I will not seek to engage with you on this matter. You have developed a cynical and propagandistic approach to demonize and vilify. Just understand that all of your information is wrong.
> I have not lived in the US, and I know a lot about the US national character
That is not a good comparison. The US is well reported enough in news and media and movie to have a good awareness of the culture within. You also understand their language.
However, the Arab world is not reported well enough apart from biased sources that seek to defame and discredit them. And neither would you understand their language. So no your awareness of their culture and country and leadership is so far fallen yet you think it is sufficient that it becomes dangerous.
There is no such thing as Islamic population unless you are an Islamophobe who have sought to “other” this part of the world
The US is the leader of the liberal empire which depends on the middle east allowing trade. Iran is standing in the way of this and wants to push back the empire's control away from the middle east... but they have their own plans to establish another empire of their own.
I know "empire" is maybe an outdated term but I'm just illustrating there are bigger incentives than at the national level. Ironically it is conservative nationalists (who are hated by the Left) that want the empire to shrink and for the US to pull back from this leadership position. The risk here is it could also destabilize the entire world, but that's a different matter.
In short, this move is an attempt to strengthen the status quo that began after WW2.If the status quo is maintained it directly benefits the US.
This is the opposite of how I see it. This move is a complete repudiation of the post-ww2 order that emphasized the system of international laws and treaties developed by the UN. For the US to blindly follow Israel into a war with a sovereign country without even taking it to the UN or Congress is preposterous and signals the end of the post-ww2 and American domestic order. Both the UN Charter and the US Constitution are trashed and we won't recover from it in our life times. There's a reason Bush W sent Colin Powell to the UN, we still paid lip service to the rule of law 20 years ago. We don't even pretend anymore. We are trashing our laws and institution all at the behest of some a tiny racist religious extremist country.
I don’t envy the position of American diplomats the next time they are asked to negotiate an off-ramp from hostilities while military options are simultaneously being considered. Intentional or not, the diplomatic posture leading up to this point reads like diversion.
This is also how I see it. This child-man has just blown 80 years of careful control and credibility. Who allowed this to happen? A bunch of feckless children, who should never have been allowed to rule. Way to go, people. It all goes downhill from here.
"the system of international laws and treaties" are only effective to the extent that someone is going to enforce it, and that someone is the US and its allies. So ultimately it's military power that matters.
The status quo is only maintained because the US has military bases all over the world. If we retreat from the world and let Iran do whatever it wants (which is more influence and an Islamic empire), the the world order crumbles and that has an even more increased chance of WW3, as multiple nations will fight over the void left behind by the US.
Part of the reason things are unfolding this way is because the US rose to world power with the invention of the nuclear bomb.... which automatically means that toppling the US might mean nuclear war, which spells doom for the entire world. Not sure I would call that luck, but that is why the world cannot change to a new world order easily without existential risk. And as the "world police" the US doesn't want non-allies to get the bomb for this reason (something that Trump has been saying for years, which proves he is just maintaining status quo).
You realize we (us) are a large, religious, racist country? Generally speaking, anti muslim, anti Iran sentiment is EXTREMELY high in the parts of the US that voted for Trump, at least based on my personal network.
People who were born into, grew up in, and live the current western bubble take it for granted and genuinely believe it is something natural rather than carefully built and expensively maintained - for extraordinary benefit.
I don't take it for granted, but Israel and these trillion-dollar Mid East wars don't seem to help it. China and Russia must be very pleased with the US being so distracted for the past 50 years while they established economic control even in the Mid East.
I'm seeing a lot of death and the payoff is... Cheap gas prices? I can't imagine what. But the replies to this laying out all the benefits of blood soaked American hegemony I'm sure will be great for a laugh.
The petrodollar, which largely depends on the US having significant influence over global oil supply, is arguably the main reason why the USD is the global reserve currency and an enormous reason why the US is as wealthy as it is.
The petrodollar is severely overrated by people who claim it's the cause for every foreign policy decision they disagree with. USD is attractive because the US government is stable and US companies are attractive investments, due to a historical track record of competence and rule of law adherence - unlike, say, Saudi currency, or Russian currency, or Chinese currency. The US government doesn't do a lot of currency manipulation relative to those other countries either.
Of course, that historical record is being shat upon currently, and the importance of petroleum is on a downward trajectory from here on.
We aren't even really getting cheap gas prices out of this. Iran is one of the largest oil producers, and we won't allow trade with them, so instead we've built a relationship with other dictatorships like Saudi Arabia, who know we have no other choice. But our actions are also straining that.
Keeping the Arab world from building their own nuclear weapons has long been contingent on Iran not having a nuclear weapons program. It only benefits the US to the extent it prevents the situation where half the countries in the Middle East having nuclear weapons.
Good lord, it benefits far more than just America if the broader middle east doesn't enter into a rapid nuclear weapons proliferation stage. Iran is considered to be a very serious enemy throughout much of the middle east. A nuclear armed Iran is a very bad idea.
the dude needs a PR win of some kind. I guess he gave up on the Nobel prize and decided to try something else. Aside from that, could really be a chance to end the nukes there and try to topple the regime, who knows what's going to happen, but time-wise now is the best opportunity.
Why do you highlight that the theocracy "believes in jihad" and not that the theocracy has issued a religious decree opposing weapons of mass destruction?
If this was about the benefit to the United States, then we would have had months of public buildup and debate like we did with the war in Iraq. It is hardly an example of a good decision, but history shows that it was at least a popular one; the majority of poll respondents and of legislators were both in favor of the initial invasion of Iraq. I was only eleven at the time, but I remember most moderate Democrats and independents who I knew (including, particularly, my seventh-grade history teacher, who was no fan of Bush) were in favor of the war.
Contrast that to the situation today, when polls show Americans are overwhelmingly opposed to involvement [1] and even some prominent Republican legislators (Gaetz, IIRC) were against the war. This is the Trump show: it's motivated by his ego and hopium. He's more erratic than ever. Historically, American presidents almost never started a major war without popular support (Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq were all popular when they started, and I think Libya and Kosovo were too). I can't even think of a case where the country was dragged into a war that was opposed 60% to 16% in favor. I would be very interested to hear if there ever was one.
This is my honest assessment of the calculus of the move. Please don't interpret any of this as me personally supporting or approving of these motives. I'm just trying to have a genuine intellectual discussion about the potential thought processes of our collective leaders.
* Quick, victorious wars can be incredibly popular domestically, regardless of whether surveys say that only 16% of the US population supports the war. Trump needs an approval ratings boost. The global tariff shock was a PR disaster. A quick, victorious war is a tried-and-true approval rating booster over the last 200-300 years. The key, of course, is actually keeping the war truly short and victorious. If it drags on, or if people start asking "have we truly won?", then that's a whole different matter.
* We have moved out of a unipolar geopolitical world and into a multipolar one. The USA is checking the ambitions of the rival powers. Want to invade Ukraine? Sure, go ahead and try, but it will be a multi-year slog. Want to go for years maybe developing nuclear weapons, maybe not, and making US antagonism a central part of your political platform? Watch us systematically attack your nuclear program and and air power and do highly targeted assassinations of your political elites over the course of two weeks. Want to invade Taiwan? Look at what happened in Ukraine and Iran and maybe reset your expectations about how that will pan out.
* There has been a lot of questioning lately around whether the US will actually help their allies when they're in a pinch. This is sending a pretty strong message of reassurance to allies.
* Trump may actually want things to escalate to a point where he can reasonably declare martial law within the US. How do you stay in power when you've already hit your two-term constitutional limit?
Your question was "how does it benefit the US?" but I don't think that's answerable because everyone has a different take on what's best for the US. It's much more feasible to discuss "how does it benefit Trump?" or "how does it maintain US's position as a world power?"
I understand Iran is a headache to Israel, but did it have to be an enemy of USA? Isn't Iran's ambition, and its proxies, are all regional in nature? Have they ever attempted to harm an american living in America?
Israel has led an amazingly succesful campaign in presenting their problems (often arising out of their territorial ambitions) as a problem for the entire west.
I agree which is why we need to get all these evangelical nuts actively trying to destroy the world so that Jesus come back out of power. No more death cults!.
The Netherlands and Germany both produce highly enriched uranium despite not having nuclear weapons programs. 60% enrichment is insufficient for use in nuclear weapons. Iran's enriched uranium is its main bargaining chip in the diplomatic negotiations that the US walked away from. Iran was assessed by the US intelligence community to not be developing nuclear weapons.
Iran is the largest state sponsor of terrorist groups. The key word being “state”. There are many well known terrorist groups that are not sponsored by Iran.
Iran was willing to "come to a diplomatic negotiation" before Israel pre-emptively and unilaterally attacked. In fact, Iran and the US had found a diplomatic solution before Trump tore it up and promised to get a better deal (and then repeatedly failed to do so).
Iran did come to a diplomatic solution: the JCPOA [0]. Unfortunately, it was Obama who did it, so Trump tore it up in his first term. Why would Iran believe that any diplomatic outcome is meaningful?
Why must we stop Iran's terrorism? Their terrorism is directed at Israel, not America.
We can in fact just as easily support Iran's attacks against Israel. No reason to pick either side.
Right now the American people are coming to the consensus that Israel are the bad guys. Everybody under 50 already recognizes that, purely based on the thousands of Palestinian toddlers they see on Instagram that Israel kills and injures (the popular post today on Instagram is of a toddler with his legs severed). And the people over 50 will eventually die off, causing Israel's base of support to disappear.
There is no hope of Israel's permanent existence. We should remove our support for Israel immediately and prepare for the long term.
If they wanted to disrupt China's oil wouldn't they have hit the main export terminal on Kharg Island? More generally, you don't think its likely that, regardless of what you think of Israel, their main motivation is they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?
> If they wanted to disrupt China's oil wouldn't they have hit the main export terminal on Kharg Island?
They aren't ready to directly start that war. They are trying to cut off the alliances first. Iran is a much smaller country (90M vs over a billion) with a lot of oil. Conveniently, Iran is already so dehumanized many Americans don't even recognize their rights to sovereignty.
> their main motivation is they don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?
No. They have been trying to attack Iran since the revolution. It's similar to how Cuba embarrassed America and was never forgiven. If Iran wanted a weapon they'd have one. However, these attacks may force Iran to get one because countries with nuclear weapons appear to actually have sovereignty. Iran of course retains the possibility of making one, hoping that will have the same effect, but it appears that doesn't do it.
We don't need a second North Korea. Nor do we want to normalize every country starting a nuclear program.
Air strikes do not constitute boots on the ground, and the rules based norms around "you break it, you own it" ended with the last flight from Kabul. Most likely, we will conduct bombing raids, but take no part in nation building.
Ironically, South Korea wanted to do this to North Korea in 2003 (edit: 1993-94), but the Bush (edit: Clinton) administration pushed back because they were concentrating on Iraq and Afghanistan (edit: Yugoslavia).
Edit 1:
Nuclear weapons ALONE do not act as a deterrent anymore. Most nuclear countries have second/third strike capabilities and nuclear triad capabilities.
This is something that Iran has been working on for decades with a fairly robust ballistics and cruise missile program, and attempts at building a domestic nuclear submarine program.
More critically, just about every regional power in the Middle East has been investing in similar capabilities in case an Iran breakout happens. Going from 1 additonal country with nuclear weapons to 3-4 leads to a cascading domino effect (a nuclear Iran means a nuclear Saudi means a nuclear Turkiye means a nuclear Egypt...)
Edit 2:
For the downvoters - a country who's leadership explicitly chants "مرگ بر آمریکا" (Death to America) will unsurprisingly be viewed as a threat. Even our large rivals China or Russia do not normalize that kind of rhetoric.
> Ironically, South Korea wanted to do this to North Korea in 2003
Where did you get that info? Makes no sense. South Korea has been consistently against starting another war with NK for at least 30 years or so, and besides, in 2003 South Korea was ruled by Kim Dae-Jung, famous for he's staunch support of improving relations with North Korea (he got a Nobel prize for that), and then Roh Moo-Hyun, from the same party and largely following Kim's foreign policy.
Thanks to them we had no wars, and of course now we have some young whippersnappers complaining about their "pro-NK" policies, saying we could have totally bombed NK, starting a war, and burning the peninsula to the ground, but at least North Korea won't have nukes today!
Isn't it great when people take things out of context? In this case the context that wishing death is quite common in Iranian expressions of frustrations?
I understand that the phrase is intended to call for the end of the US government, not the end of the US people.
That even better supports my point though. Diplomacy is between two governments, not one government and the population of another government. Iran has practiced diplomacy at times, but calling for the end of the US government wouldn't exactly fit well in the implied reality of Iran having done everything they could diplomatically.
While I understand not wanting countries like North Korea and Iran having nukes, it does protect them from invasion. We've seen what happened after Ukraine gave up their nukes. Less we forget, the Neocons of the Bush era wanted to remake the entire Middle East, not just Iraq and Afghanistan.
The actions of the US and Israel are only proving an unfortunate trend of reality: The only deterrence against invasion from other countries is nuclear deterrence. We had a comprehensive deal with Iran to limit their nuclear program which Trump tore up in 2017 and which Israel is taking advantage of today.
Oil for starters. Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east. By proxy they are participating in every conflict.
A nuclear iran would be completely intolerable, never mind that their regime might just be lunatic enough to use them.
Add that war is bad for the whole world.
So the us benefits that it protects her economic (and strategic) interests in the ME, which are real and extremely important, at the low cost of a limited air campaign.
There are further moral arguments, but i'm answering your question in the most direct way.
That is true in much the same way that the UK caused ww2 by refusing to make peace with the Germans in 1940. Or the soviets for selfishly resisting their invasion attempt.
Israel doesn't start any wars, it just finishes them. Hamas, hezbolla, syria, yemen and iran started up with Israel for no good reason. So they end up with a bloody nose. That's on them.
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza as we speak and is expanding settlements more and more in the West Bank. The end game of the Israelis is very clearly complete ethnic cleansing. Israel is no victim here, it's a settler colonialist state that happens to be successful in being a settler colonialist state.
> Hamas, hezbolla, syria, yemen and iran started up with Israel for no good reason
If the UN decided to put a country for the Roma in the middle of India, how do you think that turn out? Very well or very badly? Is it surprising that everything turned out so badly in the ME with regards Israel? Seems obvious to me that putting a new country in the middle of a colony just as said colony is gaining independence seems like a shit idea?
Simply put, the very creation of Israel was fundamentally destabilising. We basically torpedoed our relations with the entire Islamic world (and especially the Arab world) just for the sake of some mostly (at that time) European colonists in Israel (who later became Israelis). That was retarded as shit. Say what you like about how good it was for the Israelis, but for us that was shit geopolitics, shit realpolitik, and a shit deal. Israel has now, rather predictably, become an ethnofascist state run by a (war)criminal. And we enabled them the whole way. And for what??? How exactly has anyone in the West actually benefited from this? It was clearly good for Israel and for Israelis, but how have we benefited from this???
i actually hate it when people pull the victim card and i can't stand apologists either but happily i have a very pragmatic answer;
the West benefits from israel that at least one country in the region isn't an authoritarian hellhole and actually contributes to the global economy beyond just providing petrol.
That's my point though, that's not pragmatic in the slightest. It would be ruthlessly pragmatic to favour the 400M Arabs and 2B Muslims over the 10M Israelis. The Israeli economy is 0.5% of global GDP.
> region isn't an authoritarian hellhole
It's colonising the West Bank, committing genocide in Gaza, is led by a (war)criminal... Israel is arguably worse than many of its neighbours. I honestly don't care how good gay people have it in Tel Aviv when they're simultaneously committing genocide in Gaza or settling the West Bank like it's 1899. And yeah Israel is a democracy but they use their democratic choice to vote for a war criminal who's in bed with the settlers and other theocratic extremists. So Israel is really no better than many of its neighbours and arguably worse than many of them. And it's only getting worse, the Israelis are only becoming crazier and more extreme. And now they've got the US into a war with Iran. Sorry, 0.5% of GDP: not fucking worth it.
You are exaggerating. Israel is not that bad and they and the Arab states have basically worked things out by now. And America are not in a war with Iran. They are simply engaging in bigger arms diplomacy.
I am not exaggerating at all. Israel is that bad, indeed it's worse than many of its neighbours.
> And America are not in a war with Iran
Bombing a country's nuclear infrastructure is surely an act of war.
We're going to see a big turn from Israel in the West. Boomers are absolutely obsessed with the place but the younger generations aren't. Netanyahu throwing his lot in with Trump means that Israel will become a partisan issue. Europeans already have mostly turned against Israel: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/03/public-support...
It's seeming more and more like Israel, which propped up Hamas for example, is the principal destabilizing element in the region, and therefore really it's America, which spearheaded the original overthrow of Iranian democracy, alongside all its other middle eastern meddling for the last fifty years.
> Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east
Says Israel, the nation who tore up every single international laws, directly led campaign against UN and ICC, and whose right-wing (ones in power now) have been dreaming about a Greater Israel that threatens territorial integrity of like 10 different ME countries.
If we want their oil, we can buy it like reasonable people do. What you're referring to is armed robbery.
>Iran is the principle destabilising element in the middle east
Is this a joke? The country that has not started any wars in its 300 year existence is not the "destabilizing element". That would be the country that has attacked Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Iran this year alone.
This is a strange comparison. Iran funds the Houthis, for example, who commit plenty of acts of war. And if you’re talking about starting wars, it’s worth noting that the present war in Gaza was started by Hamas. (I’m making no statement about whether the actions of either side or justified — I’m just pointing out that, in the present shooting war, the first shots were fired by Hamas, not Israel.)
You ignore decades of aggression and occupation in Gaza, along with the 4 other countries Israel has decided to launch wars against this year. "But Hamas" is not a convincing argument.
I’m not ignoring anything. The situation in Gaza and elsewhere has been horrible for decades. Israel has imposed various forms of nastiness on Gaza, and I imagine that Israel’s government and many of its people saw some of that nastiness (heavy handed restrictions on imports to Gaza for example) as necessary, since Hamas quite regularly converted whatever materials they could into weapons to fire across the border into Israel. Meanwhile, I imagine that Hamas, and many of the people of Gaza, saw that as necessary because Israel treated them poorly. It was a catch-22. Meanwhile, Iran most definitely interfered heavily from the sidelines, and I imagine that Iran’s government had reasons that seemed valid to them.
The situation was and remains unstable, and the factors that made it unstable were did not come from just one place. And you don’t have to look hard to find acts of war initiated by multiple different parties in the area.
I think that claiming that any one country “decided to launch wars” against multiple other parties ignores a whole lot of complexity.
You misunderstood me. I was talking about oil from the other gulf states. About 25 percent of the global oil supply goes through the straight of Hormuz. If iran were to disrupt that it would be disastrous for obvious reasons.
It's logical for the West to work to prevent that from being a possibility.
Iran/persia is far older then 300 years old. But again you somehow missed the point. I was talking about the current 40 year old regime, which while not having directly started any wars, have since the beginning declared their intentions to do so against America and Israel.
On Windows, Process Monitor does the same thing --- with the additional feature that, since configuration is often stored in the registry there, it will also show which registry keys it touches.
I use quick and dirty greps all the time, even when there is a "better" option available. It just works and is very intuitive in interactive contexts. Probably GP works in a similar way.
In lieu of strace, IDK how fast `ls -al /proc/${pid}/fd/*` can be polled and logged in search of which config file it is; almost like `lsof -n`:
pid=$$ # this $SHELL's pid
help set; # help help
(set -B; cat /proc/"${pid}"/{cmdline,environ}) \
| tr '\0' $'\n'
(while 1; do echo \#$pid; ls -al /proc/${pid}/fd/*; done) | tee "file_handle_to_file_path.${pid}.log"
# Ctrl-C
It's good Configuration Management practice to wrap managed config with a preamble/postamble indicating at least that some code somewhere wrote that and may overwrite whatever a user might manually change it to (prior to the configuration management system copying over or re-templating the config file content, thus overwriting any manual modifications)
## < managed by config_mgmt_system_xyz (in path.to.module.callable) >
## </ managed>
It still works if you turn off SIP. This is the same on Apple Silicon and Intel. However, for these purpose of tracking file accesses, I recommend using `eslogger` instead, as it doesn’t require disabling SIP and is faster, among other advantages.
It’ll show all file events. No need to disable SIP. SIP is doing a lot of good work for users and unless you’re doing kernel work or low level coding I’d keep it enabled. Obv. There are other cases but for the general public keep it on.
It’s personal preference. If the security people had their way we’d all be developing on iPads. If SIP interferes with your work: turn it off. Linux doesn’t have SIP and it’s just fine to develop on Linux as well.
100% agree. We would put everyone on chromebooks if we had our way. I don’t think it’s good for productivity and generating new ideas for a company so I never advocate for it.
There was a man who never existed named Thomas Covenant, created by Stephen R Donaldson. Decades ago this character said something that has stayed and will stay with me my entire life:
"The best way to hurt somebody who's lost everything is to give him back something that is broken."
For us, this thing is MacOS. I miss dtrace every damn day.
DTrace allowed you to ask the damn os what it was doing, since the man pages are random and do not match the command line help, new daemons constantly appear with docs like this:
NAME
rapportd – Rapport Daemon.
SYNOPSIS
Daemon that enables Phone Call Handoff and other communication features between Apple devices.
Use '/usr/libexec/rapportd -V' to get the version.
I do this much more frequently than I would like. But occasionally you have issues where the program lists a directory then only acts on specific names. So the strace output won't tell you what the expected name is.
Users should be aware that `sudo apt install sysdig` may require reconfiguration of UEFI Secure Boot, and that there is no apparent clean abort from this possible. The raw-mode terminal screen contains the text:
┌────────────────────────┤ Configuring Secure Boot ├────────────────────────┐
│ │
│ Your system has UEFI Secure Boot enabled. │
│ │
│ UEFI Secure Boot requires additional configuration to work with │
│ third-party drivers. │
│ │
│ The system will assist you in configuring UEFI Secure Boot. To permit │
│ the use of third-party drivers, a new Machine-Owner Key (MOK) has been │
│ generated. This key now needs to be enrolled in your system's firmware. │
│ │
│ To ensure that this change is being made by you as an authorized user, │
│ and not by an attacker, you must choose a password now and then confirm │
│ the change after reboot using the same password, in both the "Enroll │
│ MOK" and "Change Secure Boot state" menus that will be presented to you │
│ when this system reboots. │
│ │
│ If you proceed but do not confirm the password upon reboot, Ubuntu will │
│ still be able to boot on your system but any hardware that requires │
│ third-party drivers to work correctly may not be usable. │
│ │
│ <Ok> │
│ │
└───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
This leads to a second screen asking for a new password. There is a <Cancel> option, but selecting it merely loops back to the first screen.
Hitting C-c (Control-c) has no effect.
There are validity rules for the password, but they are presented only after you've entered an invalid password, twice, the second time to confirm.
After this installation proceeds, then terminates with a warning:
DKMS: install completed.
Processing triggers for man-db (2.9.1-1) ...
Processing triggers for libc-bin (2.31-0ubuntu9.9) ...
W: Operation was interrupted before it could finish
I suspect that's just because you're trying to install an old version (as I wrote sysdig used to have a kernel extension but now should use eBPF functionality provided in stock kernels). I can't easily verify (no ubuntu at hand), but presumably if you install the vendor supplied, up-to-date version (first google hit I found: https://www.linuxcapable.com/how-to-install-sysdig-on-ubuntu...) it will work without UEFI changes.
Don't they offer older DRM schemes for older devices? Surely you do not have to update your kindle (especially if it is older) to read newly published books?
Yes, and you can for now still get AZW3 files (that can be unDRMed) through Download for USB transfer if you have a registered Kindle even if it's new enough to handle their new KFX format.
What is broken is that you can't use Kindle for PC/Mac to get AZW3 copies of books published on or after Jan. 3rd 2023 as it only lets you download with the latest version. As someone without a Kindle (and I'm certainly not buying one now) any new Kindle books would be locked down.
You can still break the DRM on books with Adobe DRM (like that used by Google Play books) or Kobo (they have their own DRM but also offer Adobe versions).
How's that "not possible to unDRM" thing works? The reader able to decipher the content to show it on screen means that everything it needs to decipher content is inside the reader, and can be extracted.
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