Tuesday, April 21, 2026

2005: Israel GAVE Gaza away. Not “ended an occupation.” GAVE. IT. AWAY. — Every soldier: gone. — Every settler: gone. 8,000 Israelis dragged out of their homes by their own army, some kicking and screaming. Entire communities destroyed. — Jewish graves: exhumed, because Israel knew they’d be desecrated otherwise. — Greenhouses: LEFT STANDING. American Jewish donors paid $14 million to buy them and leave them intact so Palestinians could farm and build an economy. Within days, Palestinians looted and destroyed most of them. — Infrastructure: synagogues, farms, factories left behind as a functioning starter economy. Israel handed Gaza the keys to a functioning proto-state. A gift. 2006: They elected Hamas a genocidal terror group whose founding charter calls for the murder of every Jew on earth. Read it. It’s not subtle. 2005–2023: The world gave Gaza tens of billions of dollars. US, EU, UN, Qatar, Gulf states reconstruction funds, UNRWA, humanitarian aid. Estimates run $40+ billion total. What did Hamas build with it? — 300 to 500 MILES of terror tunnels longer than the NYC subway system. Under hospitals. Under schools. Under UNRWA facilities. Built with concrete meant for civilian housing. — Rocket factories. — A weapons smuggling empire through Sinai tunnels. — Personal billions for Hamas leaders. Haniyeh. Mashaal. Meshaal. Living in Qatari luxury hotels while children in Gaza starved. Look up their net worth. Go ahead. What they did NOT build: — A single functioning hospital they didn’t weaponize — A single school they didn’t store rockets in — A single bomb shelter for civilians (they have shelters for fighters) — An economy — A future Since Israel withdrew in 2005, Hamas and other Gaza terror groups have fired OVER 20,000 rockets at Israeli civilians. — 2008: rocket barrages + cross-border raid → Cast Lead — 2012: rocket barrages → Pillar of Defense — 2014: kidnap and murder of three Israeli teens + rockets → Protective Edge — 2021: 4,400 rockets in 11 days → Guardian of the Walls — 2023: 5,000+ rockets on October 7 alone. 12,000 more in the following months. ISRAEL STARTED NONE OF THEM. Every single war, every single round, started with rockets from Gaza or attacks on Israeli civilians. October 7 was not “resistance.” — 1,200 murdered in a single day. — Babies burned alive. — Women gang-raped beside the corpses of their friends. — Entire families executed in their safe rooms. — 250+ hostages dragged into tunnels. — The worst single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust. “But the destruction in Gaza…” Yes. It’s devastating. And here’s what your genocide post leaves out: — Israel has nuclear weapons. Hasn’t used them. — Israel has the firepower to flatten Gaza in a day from the air. Hasn’t done it. — Instead, Israel has sent soldiers building by building, tunnel by tunnel, losing 900+ of its own young men and women, BECAUSE it’s trying to minimize civilian casualties against an enemy that hides behind them. — Israel issues evacuation warnings — leaflets, texts, phone calls tipping off Hamas in the process. — Hamas fires from hospitals, schools, mosques, UN facilities. They’ve admitted it. They’ve been filmed doing it. They’re proud of it. Gaza looks like this because the world continues to excuse barbaric terrorism instead of wiping it off the face of the map.

Monday, April 20, 2026

From leverage to weakness - Hormuz

From Leverage to Liability: The Hormuz Strait Is Now Iran’s Biggest Weakness | dlacalle.com

From Leverage to Liability: The Hormuz Strait Is Now Iran’s Biggest Weakness

19 April, 2026Sin categoríaDaniel Lacalle

For half a century, the Strait of Hormuz was Iran’s weapon. Today, it is its noose. The mathematics of energy have flipped, and with them the balance of coercive power in the Persian Gulf.

Iran’s implicit deterrent was geographic, spanning from the tanker wars of the 1980s to the sanctions standoffs of the 2010s. Almost 20% of global seaborne oil, and a similar share of liquefied natural gas, passes through the Strait. The formula was simple: any military confrontation that threatened the Tehran regime risked a closure that would halt trade supplies, spike crude prices, bleed Western consumers, and, above all, inflict pain on the United States, who was the world’s largest oil importer.

The strait served as Tehran’s insurance policy and its most powerful bargaining tool. The threat was predicated on the regime’s belief that it could block everyone except its exports. The Iranian regime revealed its biggest weakness by constantly threatening to damage the global economy through a shutdown of the Strait. In reality, a total shutdown has the most severe impact on Iran.

Almost 90 per cent of Iran’s crude exports, and about 80 per cent of its total exports, depend on the transit through Hormuz. Around 25 per cent of Iranian GDP and 60 per cent of government revenues depend completely on having the Strait open.

Before the war, Iran was exporting roughly 1.7 million barrels per day, receiving around $160 million in daily revenue from exports via the Strait. Thus, Trump’s full closure of the Strait costs Tehran hundreds of millions of dollars a day in losses, not accounting for the additional fiscal and currency consequences in a country already facing an economic disaster with 40–50% inflation. The complete dependence on the Strait of Hormuz also adds to another weakness: 95% of Iranian crude at sea is sold to a single buyer, China. Tehran is not selling into a diversified and open market. Its exports are sold to a monopsony that demands large discounts, between 10 and 11 dollars per barrel.

These weaknesses were visible long before the war. Capital flight reached $15 billion in the first half of 2025 alone; the rial collapsed against the dollar, and the government’s budget, which allocates 51 per cent of oil revenues to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, became even more dependent on a single export route it could not afford to close. When the war began, Iranian crude shipments collapsed by 94%. Then, the United States’ decision to block all Iran export vessels showed that Iran’s chokepoint had become self-choking.

In the past 30 days, 80% of the essential volumes that moved through the Strait have been rerouted or offset by other oil producers, including US record exports.

The world is very different from what the Iran regime thought. In 2025, U.S. crude oil production hit a new annual record of 13.6 million barrels per day, making the United States the world’s largest producer but also the biggest exporter. The United States shipped 5.2 million barrels per day of crude and 7.2 million barrels per day of petroleum products in March 2026, both global records. For the first time, America exported more petroleum than it imported, by a net margin of almost 2.8 million barrels per day, according to the EIA. Total US liquids production now exceeds that of Saudi Arabia and Russia combined. On the natural gas side, U.S. LNG exports reached well over 15 billion cubic feet per day, surpassing Qatar and Australia to make the United States the world’s largest liquefied natural gas exporter, while U.S. dry gas production exceeds the combined output of Russia, Iran, and China. Furthermore, the United States is also the world’s largest producer of nuclear electricity, at roughly 30 per cent of global generation, and a global leader in renewable energy.

When President Trump could say in April 2026 that the United States was “clearing the Strait as a favour to countries around the world, including China, Japan, Korea, and Germany,” the framing was an accurate description of who needs Hormuz open and who does not. Only 4% of the traffic through the Strait goes to the United States, according to SP Global.

According to the International Energy Agency, throughput at Hormuz collapsed from its long-run average of about 20 million barrels per day to 3.8 million since the beginning of the war through the second week of April. Daily ship transits fell roughly 95 per cent. The Tehran regime, in a gesture more theatrical than realistic, attempted to levy a $2 million toll on each vessel crossing the strait, without understanding that the move showed desperation instead of leverage.

The US response has been the most important measure deployed against Iran in two decades of standoffs. Operation Economic Fury established a full naval blockade of Iranian ports. Iranian naval losses in the first 38 days of combat exceeded 150 vessels. The ceasefire framework under negotiation requires Iran to reopen Hormuz, but the US maintains control. Thus, negotiations revolve around Iranian dismantlement, not American concessions.

The lesson is not just that Iran miscalculated but that it massively underestimated its obvious weaknesses. The United States is not a hostage of the Gulf; it is the guarantee of its safe sea lanes. Europe is tied to U.S. LNG while keeping a substantial Russian dependence, which complicates its energy security and makes it vulnerable to fluctuations in supply and price from both sources. Asia’s largest economies, particularly China, are suffering the marginal cost of a Hormuz disruption, which has led to increased energy prices and supply chain uncertainties that further exacerbate their economic challenges. Iran’s economic nightmare has only started.

Three important factors must be considered. First, the traditional Hormuz risk premium in Brent, which refers to the additional cost added to oil prices due to geopolitical tensions in the Strait of Hormuz, is structurally smaller than in the 2010s because U.S. supply can absorb shocks that previously had no substitute. The Brent price is lower in real and nominal terms than in the 2008, 2018, or 2022 peaks. Second, the strength of American energy, including economics, export infrastructure, and LNG capacity, has become a key global geopolitical variable, influencing global energy prices and the strategic decisions of other nations. Third, Iran’s economy has not only suffered damage; it has also been demolished, and its extremely weak fiscal position indicates that it cannot sustain the threat posture in Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz remains the world’s most important chokepoint. However, a chokepoint hurts whoever depends on it most, and Iran relies on it completely. The United States does not. The geopolitical advantage that Tehran once held has now become its greatest weakness, likely leading to the disappearance of the regime’s effective bargaining power.

Sunday, April 19, 2026

Vibe coding

Ihtesham Ali

@ihtesham2005

The former director of AI at Tesla stood up at Y Combinator's AI Startup School in June 2025 and said something that made half the room of young developers realize they had been preparing for the wrong future. His name is Andrej Karpathy, and he is one of the only people alive who has been in the room for all three of the paradigm shifts that built modern AI. He was a founding member of OpenAI. He led the Autopilot team at Tesla. He designed and taught the first deep learning class at Stanford, which grew from 150 students in 2015 to 750 by 2017 and then escaped onto the internet where millions of people have watched it since. When he said something had fundamentally changed, the people in that room had every reason to listen. Here is the framework he walked through, and why it is the clearest map anyone has drawn of what just happened to software. He said there have now been three distinct eras of programming, and they are not replacements of each other. They are layers on top of each other, each one eating into the work that used to require the one below it. Software 1.0 is what almost everyone still means when they say code. A human being sits down, writes explicit step-by-step instructions in Python or C or JavaScript, and the computer does exactly what those instructions say. For seventy years, this was the only kind of software there was. Software 2.0 is the shift Karpathy himself named in a 2017 essay. He watched it happen in real time at Tesla. The team stopped writing explicit rules for how the car should recognize a stop sign and started showing a neural network millions of examples until it figured the pattern out on its own. The code was no longer the instructions. The code was the dataset and the network architecture, and the actual logic lived in the weights that came out of training. He wrote at the time that Software 2.0 was eating Software 1.0 one function at a time, and inside Tesla, he was watching hand-coded computer vision logic get deleted and replaced by learned weights week after week. Software 3.0 is the one that just arrived, and it is the one almost nobody has the right framework for yet. He said the line carefully. "The hottest new programming language is English." Not a metaphor. A literal statement about how software is now being built. You no longer need to write Python to produce behavior. You write a prompt in plain language, and a large language model executes the intent. The prompt is the program. The English is the source code. And the thing that makes this more than a productivity improvement is what he said next. Software 3.0 is eating Software 1.0 and Software 2.0 at the same time. Every traditional rule-based function that used to require a team of engineers can now be replaced by a prompt and a model call. Every narrow machine learning model that used to require millions of labeled examples can be replaced by a large model that was already trained on a significant fraction of the internet. The entire stack is being compressed upward into natural language. The implication he drew from this is the one that matters most for anyone trying to figure out what to build next. He said we are living through the single biggest expansion of accessibility in the history of computing. For seventy years, programming required learning a formal language that fewer than one percent of humans could ever become fluent in. In the span of about three years, the barrier has collapsed. The only language you need to program a computer now is the one you already speak. He used a phrase for this that sounded almost silly until you realize what it actually means. Vibe coding. The act of describing the program you want in loose natural language and letting the model handle the syntax, the structure, the boilerplate, and the integration. You do not need to know Swift to describe the iOS app you want to build. You describe the vibe, and the LLM handles the rest. But he was careful not to oversell it. He said LLMs are what he calls people spirits. Stochastic simulations of human reasoning with an emergent psychology and a set of very specific weaknesses that every builder now has to design around. They have jagged intelligence, meaning they can do astonishingly hard things and then fail at something a child could handle. They have anterograde amnesia, meaning they cannot form new long-term memory the way a human coworker would. They hallucinate. They get confused. They need supervision. Which means the job of a developer is not disappearing. It is changing shape. The best developers in the Software 3.0 era are not the ones who write the most code. They are the ones who can think in systems, design the right prompts, build the validation layers that catch the model when it drifts, and orchestrate an entire pipeline of specialized AI agents the way a conductor handles an orchestra. The specific line he kept coming back to is the one I keep thinking about. We are no longer just writing code. We are managing behavior. The people who will build the important things in the next decade are not the ones with the cleanest syntax. They are the ones who figured out, earlier than everyone else, that when English becomes a programming language, the bottleneck is no longer how well you can speak to the compiler. The bottleneck is how clearly you can think about what you actually want the machine to do. And that has always been the real skill. It is just that for seventy years, we had the luxury of hiding it behind the syntax.

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