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In all of the debates about the value of AI-assistance in software development there’s one depressing anecdote that I keep on seeing: the junior engineer, empowered by some class of LLM tool, who deposits giant, untested PRs on their coworkers—or open source maintainers—and expects the “code review” process to handle the rest.
This is rude, a waste of other people’s time, and is honestly a dereliction of duty as a software developer.
Your job is to deliver code you have proven to work.
As software engineers we don’t just crank out code—in fact these days you could argue that’s what the LLMs are for. We need to deliver code that works—and we need to include proof that it works as well. Not doing that directly shifts the burden of the actual work to whoever is expected to review our code.
There are two steps to proving a piece of code works. Neither is optional.
The first is manual testing. If you haven’t seen the code do the right thing yourself, that code doesn’t work. If it does turn out to work, that’s honestly just pure chance.
Manual testing skills are genuine skills that you need to develop. You need to be able to get the system into an initial state that demonstrates your change, then exercise the change, then check and demonstrate that it has the desired effect.
If possible I like to reduce these steps to a sequence of terminal commands which I can paste, along with their output, into a comment in the code review. Here’s a recent example.
Some changes are harder to demonstrate. It’s still your job to demonstrate them! Record a screen capture video and add that to the PR. Show your reviewers that the change you made actually works.
Once you’ve tested the happy path where everything works you can start trying the edge cases. Manual testing is a skill, and finding the things that break is the next level of that skill that helps define a senior engineer.
The second step in proving a change works is automated testing. This is so much easier now that we have LLM tooling, which means there’s no excuse at all for skipping this step.
Your contribution should bundle the change with an automated test that proves the change works. That test should fail if you revert the implementation.
The process for writing a test mirrors that of manual testing: get the system into an initial known state, exercise the change, assert that it worked correctly. Integrating a test harness to productively facilitate this is another key skill worth investing in.
Don’t be tempted to skip the manual test because you think the automated test has you covered already! Almost every time I’ve done this myself I’ve quickly regretted it.
The most important trend in LLMs in 2025 has been the explosive growth of coding agents—tools like Claude Code and Codex CLI that can actively execute the code they are working on to check that it works and further iterate on any problems.
To master these tools you need to learn how to get them to prove their changes work as well.
This looks exactly the same as the process I described above: they need to be able to manually test their changes as they work, and they need to be able to build automated tests that guarantee the change will continue to work in the future.
Since they’re robots, automated tests and manual tests are effectively the same thing.
They do feel a little different though. When I’m working on CLI tools I’ll usually teach Claude Code how to run them itself so it can do one-off tests, even though the eventual automated tests will use a system like Click’s CLIRunner.
When working on CSS changes I’ll often encourage my coding agent to take screenshots when it needs to check if the change it made had the desired effect.
The good news about automated tests is that coding agents need very little encouragement to write them. If your project has tests already most agents will extend that test suite without you even telling them to do so. They’ll also reuse patterns from existing tests, so keeping your test code well organized and populated with patterns you like is a great way to help your agent build testing code to your taste.
Developing good taste in testing code is another of those skills that differentiates a senior engineer.
A computer can never be held accountable. That’s your job as the human in the loop.
Almost anyone can prompt an LLM to generate a thousand-line patch and submit it for code review. That’s no longer valuable. What’s valuable is contributing code that is proven to work.
Next time you submit a PR, make sure you’ve included your evidence that it works as it should.
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Read the original on simonwillison.net »
Although Viktor Zhdanov’s name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do?Read more →It is often suggested that modern viewers dislike painted reconstructions of Greek and Roman statues because our taste differs from that of the ancients. This essay proposes an alternative explanation.
This is a Roman statue located in the British Museum.
It depicts the goddess Venus, perhaps originally holding a mirror. Something you will notice about it is that it looks great. Subscribe for $100 to receive six beautiful issues per year.
Below is a Greek sculpture from half a millennium earlier.
One of the treasures recovered from the first-century BC Antikythera shipwreck, this statue is composed of bronze with inlaid stone eyes. It has been variously interpreted as representing Paris, Perseus, or a youthful Heracles. Whatever interpretation is correct, it is a stunning work of art.
Here is a detail from a wall painting in Rome. This has undergone two thousand years of wear and tear, but it is still beautiful to us.
Detail from the Villa of Livia. First century BC.
There is a general pattern to these observations. Ancient Greek and Roman art tends to look really good today.
This is not a universal rule. The Greeks weren’t always the masters of naturalism that we know: early Archaic kouroi now seem rather stilted and uneasy. As in all societies, cruder work was produced at the lower end of the market. Art in the peripheral provinces of the Roman Empire was often clearly a clumsy imitation of work at the center. Even so, modern viewers tend to be struck by the excellence of Greek and Roman art. The examples I have given here are far from exceptions. Explore the Naples Archaeological Museum, the British Museum, the Louvre, or the Metropolitan Museum and you will see that they had tons of this stuff. Still more remarkable, in a way, is the abundance of good work discovered in Pompeii, a provincial town of perhaps 15,000 people.
Here is another Roman statue, this time depicting the Emperor Augustus. It is called the Augustus of the Prima Porta after the site where it was discovered. Something interesting about this statue is that traces of paint survive on its surface. This is because, like most though not all ancient statues, it was originally painted.
You were probably already aware of this. The coloring of ancient sculpture has become widely known in recent years as a result of several high profile projects purporting to reconstruct the original appearance of these works — most famously, Vinzenz Brinkmann’s travelling Gods in Color exhibition. This was not news to historians, who have been aware that ancient sculpture was colored (polychromatic) since the 1800s. But it took these striking reconstructions to galvanize public interest.
Here is Brinkmann’s well-known reconstruction of the Augustus of the Prima Porta.
Reconstruction of the Augustus of the Prima Porta, Vinzenz Brinkmann. First exhibited 2003
What do you notice about this reconstruction? That’s right, it looks awful. In the eyes of modern viewers, at least, the addition of this matte, heavily saturated color has turned a really good work of art into a really bad one.
Look at this archer, from the pediment of the late archaic temple of Aphaia on Aegina.
Colored reconstructions of the archer from the Temple of Aphaia in Aegina, c. 500 BC. As with a number of the reconstructions, this differs somewhat from the original in form as well as in having been recolored, which may add to the odd effect.
I have not said anything novel here. Everybody knows these reconstructions look awful. The difficult and interesting question is why this is so.
The explanation usually given is that modern taste differs from that of the ancient Greeks and Romans. It follows that, if the reconstructions are accurate, their taste must be very alien to ours. The apparent hideousness of ancient colored sculpture strikes us partly because of what it seems to show about the profoundly changeable character of human taste.
It is usually added that we are the victims, here, of a historical accident. Paints deteriorate much more easily than marble. So, when we rediscovered classical sculpture in the Renaissance, we took the monochrome aesthetic to be intentional. As a result, we internalized a deep-seated attachment to an unblemished white image of Greek and Roman art. We became, to use David Bachelor’s term, chromophobes. It is this accidental association between Greek and Roman art and pristine white marble, we are told, that accounts for the displeasure we feel when we see the statues restored to color.
At least two things about this explanation should strike us as odd. First, there actually exist some contemporary images of statues, showing how they appeared in the ancient world. The resemblance between the statues in these pictures and the modern reconstructions is slight. The statues depicted in the ancient artworks appear to be very delicately painted, often with large portions of the surface left white. A well-known example is the depiction of a statue of Mars at the House of Venus in Pompeii.
House of Venus in the Shell, Pompeii. First century AD.
The statues depicted on the north wall of the frigidarium in the House of the Cryptoporticus have an even gentler finish:
In other cases the colors are richer. Here too, however, the effect is far from ugly. I have given an example of this below a famous mosaic depicting a statue of a boxer, from the Villa San Marco in Stabiae. Note the subtlety of color recorded by the mosaic, in which the boxer is reddened and sunburned on his shoulders and upper chest, but not his pale upper thighs. There is nothing here to suggest that the statues depicted would have struck a modern viewer as garish.
Is there any sculpture depicted in ancient Greek and Roman visual art that resembles the modern reconstructions? To the best of my knowledge, the closest example is the red, blue and yellow visage from the Villa Poppaea at Oplontis.
The tragic mask in the Villa Poppaea, Oplontis, 1st century AD.
In that case, the treatment really does resemble the approach favored in modern reconstructions. However, the face belongs not to a classical statue but to a theatrical mask, and is grotesque in form as well as in color. It is not strong evidence that a similar approach was taken with normal classical statuary.
Depictions of people in paintings and mosaics also use color very differently to the modern reconstructions of polychrome ancient sculpture. Here are two examples, each of which show a sensitive naturalism that is, if anything, surprisingly close to modern taste. Again, these are not one-offs: countless further examples could be given.
The Sappho fresco, National Archaeological Museum, Naples, 1st century AD, and Mona Lisa of Galilee, Amos Gal, 3rd-4th century AD
Classical art evolved over the centuries, and some of it looks quite different from these examples. But it is difficult or impossible to find an ancient picture from any period whose coloring resembles the Brinkmann reconstructions. Of course, we cannot be sure that the Romans colored their statues in the same way they colored their pictures. But it is surely suspicious that their use of color in pictures tends to be beautiful and intuitive to us.
Some indirect evidence is also provided by the uses of color in ancient interior design, as seen below. The intensity of red on the Farnesia walls is striking, but these cases rarely seem grotesque in the way that the sculptural reconstructions do, nor do they seem to manifest a radically foreign taste in color. In all these cases, ancient art is enjoyable despite having retained its original color.
Neither, it might be added, do we find it impossible to appreciate the painted statues of cultures beyond ancient Greece and Rome.2 It is true that polychrome sculpture often verges on an uncanny valley effect, but it seldom looks as bad to us as the classical reconstructions. This is true not only of the polychrome sculpture from post-classic Europe, like that of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Spanish and German Baroque, but of polychrome sculpture from pre-classical and non-Western cultures, like dynastic Egypt or medieval Nepal. Many of these sculptures have an eerie quality. It is perhaps no accident that they were often used in religious rituals, as were the sculptures of antiquity. But they seldom seem distractingly ugly.
Clockwise from top left: Virgen de Belen by Pietro Torrigiano; Cabeza de San Pedro de Alcántara; a 14th century BC bust of Nefertiti; and a 16th-century AD statue of the Nepalese Goddess of Dance.
Jl FilpoC via Wikimedia Commons;José Luis Filpo Cabana via Wikimedia Commons; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Azoor Photo via Alamy.
We are thus asked to believe not only that the colored sculpture of Greek and Roman antiquity was distinctive among its art forms in seeming consistently ugly to us, but also that it is distinctive among the colored sculptural traditions of the world in doing so. This seems unlikely to be true.
We should be doubtful, then, of the idea that modern reconstructions of colored ancient statues seem ugly to us because we do not share Graeco-Roman taste in color. Ancient depictions of statues, other ancient depictions of people, and other ancient uses of color, all suggest that their feeling for color was not so different to ours. It is also suspicious that other cultures have produced colored sculpture that we readily appreciate. Is there a better explanation of what is going on here?
There is a single explanation for the fact that the reconstructions do not resemble the statues depicted in ancient artworks, the fact that their use of color is unlike that in ancient mosaics and frescoes, and the fact that modern viewers find them ugly. It is that the reconstructions are painted very badly. There is no reason to posit that ancient Europeans had tastes radically unlike ours to explain our dislike of the reconstructions. The Greeks and Romans would have disliked them too, because the reconstructed polychromy is no good.
Two objections might be raised to my proposal. They are, however, easily answered.
First, it might be thought that my explanation cannot be right because the experts who produce the reconstructions know that this is what the statues originally looked like. After all, it might be reasoned that their work is based on a scientific analysis of the paint residues left over from the original finish.
This objection should not worry us. Nobody, to my knowledge, seriously claims that the methods used to produce the reconstructions guarantee a high degree of accuracy. And this should come as no surprise. The paints used in the reconstructions are chemically similar to the trace pigments found on parts of the surface of the originals. However, those pigments formed the underlayer of a finished work to which they bear a very conjectural relationship. Imagine a modern historian trying to reconstruct the Mona Lisa on the basis of a few residual pigments here and there on a largely featureless canvas.
How confident could we be that the result accurately reproduces the original?
This point is not actually disputed by supporters of the reconstructions. For example, Cecilie Brøns, who leads a project on ancient polychromy at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, praises the reconstructions but notes that ‘reconstructions can be difficult to explain to the public — that these are not exact copies, that we can never know exactly how they looked’.
Second, it might be urged that it makes no difference whether the reconstructions are accurate because there is simply no way to paint the statues, consistent with the pigments that have been left behind, that modern viewers will find beautiful.
But this just isn’t true. It is manifestly possible to paint a classical statue in a manner consistent with the evidence that will look incomparably more beautiful to the modern viewer than the typical reconstructions do. The triumphant examples above from Egypt and Nepal above prove this incontrovertibly.
Why, then, are the reconstructions so ugly? One factor may be that the specialists who execute them lack the skill of classical artists, who had many years of training in a great tradition.
Another may be that they are hampered by conservation doctrines that forbid including any feature in a reconstruction for which there is no direct archaeological evidence. Since underlayers are generally the only element of which traces survive, such doctrines lead to all-underlayer reconstructions, with the overlayers that were obviously originally present excluded for lack of evidence.
If that is the explanation, though, reconstruction specialists have been notably unsuccessful in alerting the public to the fact that colored classical sculpture bore no more resemblance to these reconstructions than the Mona Lisa would to a reconstruction that included only its underlayers. Much of the educated public believes that ancient sculpture looked something like these reconstructions, not that these reconstructions are a highly artificial exercise in reconstructing elements of ancient polychromy for which we have direct archaeological evidence.
One wonders if something else is going on here. The enormous public interest generated by garish reconstructions is surely because of and not in spite of their ugliness. It is hard to believe that this is entirely accidental. One possibility is that the reconstructors are engaged in a kind of trolling. In this interpretation, they know perfectly well that ancient sculptures did not look like the reconstructions, and probably included the subtle variation of color tones that ancient paintings did. But they fail to correct the belief that people naturally form given what is placed before them: that the proffered reconstruction of ancient sculpture is roughly what ancient sculpture actually looked like.
A painted Doric entablature, as reconstructed by a German illustrator in the 1880s. How come the color looks really good here?
It is a further question whether such trolling would be deeply objectionable. Brinkmann has produced a massively successful exhibition, which has more than accomplished its aim of making the fact that ancient statues were painted more widely known. The reconstructions are often very funny and are not all as bad as the best-known examples.3 There is genuine intellectual value in the project and what could be seen as mean-spirited iconoclasm could equally be embraced as harmless fun.
On the other hand, at a time when trust in the honest intentions of experts is at a low, it may be unwise for experts to troll the public.
Note how easily the statue of a pagan god in the fresco at the House of the Surgeon in Pompeii, mentioned above, might serve in place of a medieval devotional statue like this St Anthony — something Brinkmann’s reconstructions could never do. The reconstructed Venus Lovatelli is rather lovely. It is no coincidence that this is based on an original whose color scheme has survived unusually well, minimizing the opportunity for mischief.Why do some neighborhoods get garden squares and graceful streets, while others don’t? The answer isn’t zoning or taste, it’s who owns the land, and how unified that ownership is.
Read more →Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace.
Read more →Many women face a choice between career advancement or motherhood. But emerging fertility technologies could allow women to have it all.
Read more →
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Read the original on worksinprogress.co »
Demonstration that natural bacteria isolated from amphibian and reptile intestines achieve complete tumor elimination with single administration
Combines direct bacterial killing of cancer cells with immune system activation for comprehensive tumor destruction
Outperforms existing chemotherapy and immunotherapy with no adverse effects on normal tissues
Expected applications across diverse solid tumor types, opening new avenues for cancer treatment
A research team of Prof. Eijiro Miyako at the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) has discovered that the bacterium Ewingella americana, isolated from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs (Dryophytes japonicus), possesses remarkably potent anticancer activity. This groundbreaking research has been published in the international journal Gut Microbes.
While the relationship between gut microbiota and cancer has attracted considerable attention in recent years, most approaches have focused on indirect methods such as microbiome modulation or fecal microbiota transplantation. In contrast, this study takes a completely different approach: isolating, culturing, and directly administering individual bacterial strains intravenously to attack tumors–- representing an innovative therapeutic strategy.
The research team isolated a total of 45 bacterial strains from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs, Japanese fire belly newts (Cynops pyrrhogaster), and Japanese grass lizards (Takydromus tachydromoides). Through systematic screening, nine strains demonstrated antitumor effects, with E. americana exhibiting the most exceptional therapeutic efficacy.
Remarkable Therapeutic Efficacy
In a mouse colorectal cancer model, a single intravenous administration of E. americana achieved complete tumor elimination with a 100% complete response (CR) rate. This dramatically surpasses the therapeutic efficacy of current standard treatments, including immune checkpoint inhibitors (anti-PD-L1 antibody) and liposomal doxorubicin (chemotherapy agent) (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Anticancer efficacy: Ewingella americana versus conventional therapies. Tumor response: single i.v. dose of E. americana (200 µL, 5 × 10⁹ CFU/mL); four doses of doxorubicin or anti-PD-L1 (200 µL, 2.5 mg/kg per dose); PBS as control. Data: mean ± SEM (n = 5). ****, p < 0.0001 (Student’s two-sided t-test).
Direct Cytotoxic Effect: As a facultative anaerobic bacterium, E. americana selectively accumulates in the hypoxic tumor microenvironment and directly destroys cancer cells. Bacterial counts within tumors increase approximately 3,000-fold within 24 hours post-administration, efficiently attacking tumor tissue.
Immune Activation Effect: The bacterial presence powerfully stimulates the immune system, recruiting T cells, B cells, and neutrophils to the tumor site. Pro-inflammatory cytokines (TNF-α, IFN-γ) produced by these immune cells further amplify immune responses and induce cancer cell apoptosis.
E. americana selectively accumulates in tumor tissues with zero colonization in normal organs. This remarkable tumor specificity arises from multiple synergistic mechanisms:
Zero bacterial colonization in normal organs including liver, spleen, lung, kidney, and heart
This research has established proof-of-concept for a novel cancer therapy using natural bacteria. Future research and development will focus on:
Expansion to Other Cancer Types: Efficacy validation in breast cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, and other malignancies
Optimization of Administration Methods: Development of safer and more effective delivery approaches including dose fractionation and intratumoral injection
Combination Therapy Development: Investigation of synergistic effects with existing immunotherapy and chemotherapy
This research demonstrates that unexplored biodiversity represents a treasure trove for novel medical technology development and holds promise for providing new therapeutic options for patients with refractory cancers.
Facultative Anaerobic Bacteria: Bacteria capable of growing in both oxygen-rich and oxygen-depleted environments, enabling selective proliferation in hypoxic tumor regions.
Complete Response (CR): Complete tumor elimination confirmed by diagnostic examination following treatment.
Immune Checkpoint Inhibitor: Drugs that release cancer cell-mediated immune suppression, enabling T cells to attack cancer cells.
CD47: A cell surface protein that emits “don’t eat me” signals; cancer cells overexpress this to evade immune attack.
Discovery and characterization of antitumor gut microbiota from amphibians and reptiles: Ewingella americana as a novel therapeutic agent with dual cytotoxic and immunomodulatory properties
This research was supported by:
Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A) (Grant No. 23H00551)
Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) Program for Co-creating Startup Ecosystem (Grant No. JPMJSF2318)
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Read the original on www.jaist.ac.jp »
You will recall the Apple Account fiasco of Paris Buttfield-Addison, whose entire iCloud account and library of iTunes and App Store media purchases were lost when his Apple Account was locked, seemingly after he attempted to redeem a tampered $500 Apple Gift Card that he purchased from a major retailer. I wrote about it, as did Michael Tsai, Nick Heer, Malcom Owen at AppleInsider, and Brandon Vigliarolo at The Register. Buttfield-Addison has updated his post a few times, including a note that Executive Relations — Apple’s top-tier support SWAT team — was looking into the matter. To no avail, at least yet, alas.
There is one way the Apple community could exert some leverage over Apple. Since innocently redeeming a compromised Apple Gift Card can have serious negative consequences, we should all avoid buying Apple Gift Cards and spread the word as widely as possible that they could essentially be malware. Sure, most Apple Gift Cards are probably safe, but do you really want to be the person who gives a close friend or beloved grandchild a compromised card that locks their Apple Account? And if someone gives you one, would you risk redeeming it? It’s digital Russian roulette.
I suspect that one part of Buttfield-Addison’s fiasco is the fact that his seemingly problematic gift card was for $500, not a typical amount like $25, but that’s just a suspicion on my part. We don’t know — because key to the Kafka-esque nature of the whole nightmare is that his account cancellation was a black box. Not only has Apple not yet restored his deactivated Apple Account, at no point in the process have they explained why it was deactivated in the first place. We’re left to guess that it was related to the tampered gift card and that the relatively high value of the card in question was related. $500 is a higher value than average for an Apple gift card, but that amount is less than the average price for a single iPhone. Apple itself sets a limit of $2,000 on gift cards in the US, so $500 shouldn’t be considered an inherently suspicious amount.
The whole thing does make me nervous about redeeming, or giving, Apple gift cards. Scams in general seem to be getting more sophisticated. Buttfield-Addison says he bought the card directly from “a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)”. Until we get some clarity on this I feel like I’d only redeem Apple gift cards at an Apple retail store, for purchases not tied to my Apple Accounts. (I’ve still got two — one for iCloud, one for media purchases.)
In addition to the uncertainty this leaves us with regarding the redemption of Apple gift cards, I have to wonder what the hell happens to these Apple Accounts that are deactivated for suspected fraud. You would think that once escalated high enough in Apple’s customer support system, someone at Apple could just flip a switch and re-activate the account. The fact that Buttfield-Addison’s account has not yet been restored, despite the publicity and apparent escalation to Executive Relations, makes me think it can’t be restored. I don’t know how that can be, but it sure seems like that’s the case. Darth Vader’s “And no disintegrations” admonition ought to be in effect for something like this. I have the sinking feeling that the best Apple is able to do is something seemingly ridiculous, like refund Buttfield-Addison for every purchase he ever made on the account and tell him to start over with a new one.
My other question: Were any humans involved in the decision to deactivate (disintegrate?) his account, or was it determined purely by some sort of fraud detection algorithm?
Update: Very shortly after I posted the above, Buttfield-Addison posted an update that his account was successfully restored by the ninja on Apple’s Executive Relations team assigned to his case. That’s great. But that still leaves the question of how safe Apple gift cards are to redeem on one’s Apple Account. It also leaves the question of how this happened in the first place, and why it took the better part of a week to resolve.
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Read the original on daringfireball.net »
* Encrypted messaging developers may be considered hostile actors in the UK
* An independent review of national security law warns of overreach
Developers of apps that use end-to-end encryption to protect private communications could be considered hostile actors in the UK.
That is the stark warning from Jonathan Hall KC, the government’s Independent Reviewer of State Threats Legislation and Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, in a new report on national security laws.
In his independent review of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Act and the newly implemented National Security Act, Hall KC highlights the incredibly broad scope of powers granted to authorities.
He warns that developers of apps like Signal and WhatsApp could technically fall within the legal definition of “hostile activity” simply because their technology “make[s] it more difficult for UK security and intelligence agencies to monitor communications.”
He writes: “It is a reasonable assumption that this would be in the interests of a foreign state even if though the foreign state has never contemplated this potential advantage.”
The report also notes that journalists “carrying confidential information” or material “personally embarrassing to the Prime Minister on the eve of important treaty negotiations” could face similar scrutiny.
While it remains to be seen how this report will influence future amendments, it comes at a time of increasing pressure from lawmakers against encryption.
While the report’s strong wording may come as a shock, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Encrypted apps are increasingly in the crosshairs of UK lawmakers, with several pieces of legislation targeting the technology.
Most notably, Apple was served with a technical capability notice under the Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) demanding it weaken the encryption protecting iCloud data. That legal standoff led the tech giant to disable its Advanced Data Protection instead of creating a backdoor.
The Online Safety Act is already well known for its controversial age verification requirements. However, its most contentious provisions have yet to be fully implemented, and experts fear these could undermine encryption even further.
On Monday, Parliament debated the Act following a petition calling for its repeal. Instead of rolling back the law, however, MPs pushed for stricter enforcement. During the discussion, lawmakers specifically called for a review of other encrypted tools, like the best VPNs.
The potential risks of the Act’s tougher stance on encryption were only briefly mentioned during the discussion, suggesting a stark disconnect between MPs and security experts.
Olivier Crépin-Leblond, of the Internet Society, told TechRadar he was disappointed by the outcome of the debate. “When it came to Client Side Scanning (CSS), most felt this could be one of the ‘easy technological fixes’ that could help law enforcement greatly, especially when they showed their frustration at Facebook rolling end-to-end encryption,” he said.
“It’s clearly not understood that any such software could fall prey to hackers.”
It is clear that for many lawmakers, encryption is viewed primarily as an obstacle to law enforcement. This stands in sharp contrast to the view of digital rights experts, who stress that the technology is vital for protecting privacy and security in an online landscape where cyberattacks are rising.
“The government signposts end-to-end encryption as a threat, but what they fail to consider is that breaking it would be a threat to our national security too,” Jemimah Steinfeld, CEO of Index on Censorship, told TechRadar.
She also added that this ignores encryption’s vital role for dissidents, journalists, and domestic abuse victims, “not to mention the general population who should be afforded basic privacy.”
With the battle lines drawn, we can expect a challenging year ahead for services like Signal and WhatsApp. Both companies have previously pledged to leave the UK market rather than compromise their users’ privacy and security.
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A measured-yet-opinionated plea from someone who’s tired of watching you suffer
Look. I’m not going to call you a fucking moron every other sentence. That’s been done. It’s a whole genre now. And honestly? HTMX doesn’t need me to scream at you to make its point.
The sweary web manifesto thing is fun—I’ve enjoyed reading them—but let’s be real: yelling “JUST USE HTML” or “JUST FUCKING USE REACT” hasn’t actually changed anyone’s stack. People nod, chuckle, and then go right back to fighting their raw JS or their webpack config.1
So I’m going to try something different. I’ll still swear (I’m not a fucking saint), but I’m also going to show you something, in the course of imploring you, for your own sanity and happiness, to at least please just try htmx.
Right now, the shouters are offering you two options:
Option A: “Just use HTML!” And they’re not wrong. HTML is shockingly capable. Forms work. Links work. The element exists now. The web was built on this stuff and it’s been chugging along since Tim Berners-Lee had hair. And a little tasteful CSS can go a long motherfucking way.
But sometimes—and here’s where it gets uncomfortable—you actually do need a button that updates part of a page without reloading the whole damn thing. You do need a search box that shows results as you type. You do need interactivity.
So you turn to:
Option B: React (or Vue, or Svelte, or Angular if you’re being punished for something).
* A build step that takes 45 seconds (if the CI gods are merciful)
* Junior devs losing their minds over why useEffect runs twice
For what? A to-do list? A contact form? A dashboard that displays some numbers from a database?
This is the false choice: raw HTML’s limitations or JavaScript framework purgatory.
There’s a third option. I’m begging you, please just try it.
What if I told you:
* Any HTML element can make an HTTP request
* The server just returns HTML (not JSON, actual HTML)
* That HTML gets swapped into the page wherever you want
* The whole library is ~14kb gzipped
That’s HTMX. That’s literally the whole thing.
Here’s a button that makes a POST request and replaces itself with the response:
When you click it, HTMX POSTs to /clicked, and whatever HTML the server returns replaces the button. No fetch(). No setState(). No npm install. No fucking webpack config.
The server just returns HTML. Like it’s 2004, except your users have fast internet and your server can actually handle it. It’s the hypermedia architecture the entire freaking web was designed for, but with modern conveniences.
This page uses HTMX. These demos actually work.
This button makes a POST request and swaps in the response:
This button fetches additional content and appends it below:
Type something—results update as you type (debounced, of course):
That’s HTMX. I didn’t write JavaScript to make those work. I wrote HTML attributes. The “server” (mocked client-side for this demo, but the htmx code is real) returns HTML fragments, and HTMX swaps them in. The behavior is right there in the markup—you don’t have to hunt through component files and state management code to understand what a button does. HTMX folks call this “Locality of Behavior” and once you have it, you’ll miss it everywhere else.
Anecdotes are nice. Data is better.
A company called Contexte rebuilt their production SaaS app from React to Django templates with HTMX. Here’s what happened:
They deleted two-thirds of their codebase and the app got better. Every developer became “full-stack” because there wasn’t a separate frontend to specialize in anymore.
Now, they note this was a content-focused app and not every project will see these exact numbers. Fair. But even if you got half these improvements, wouldn’t that be worth a weekend of experimentation?
“But what about complex client-side state management?”
You probably don’t have complex client-side state. You have forms. You have lists. You have things that show up when you click other things. HTMX handles all of that.
If you’re building Google Docs, sure, you need complex state management. But you’re not building Google Docs. You’re building a CRUD app that’s convinced it’s Google Docs.
The ecosystem is why your node_modules folder is 2GB. The ecosystem is why there are 14 ways to style a component and they all have tradeoffs. The ecosystem is why “which state management library” is somehow still a debate.
HTMX’s ecosystem is: your server-side language of choice. That’s it. That’s the ecosystem.
After the user downloads 2MB of JavaScript, waits for it to parse, waits for it to execute, waits for it to hydrate, waits for it to fetch data, waits for it to render… yes, then subsequent navigations feel snappy. Congratulations.
HTMX pages load fast the first time because you’re not bootstrapping an application runtime. And subsequent requests are fast because you’re only swapping the parts that changed.
Maybe you do. I’m not saying React is never the answer. I’m saying it’s the answer to about 10% of the problems it’s used for, and the costs of reaching for it reflexively are staggering.
Most teams don’t fail because they picked the wrong framework. They fail because they picked too much framework. HTMX is a bet on simplicity, and simplicity tends to win over time.
I’m not a zealot. HTMX isn’t for everything.
* Offline-first applications (though you can combine approaches)
* Genuinely complex UI state (not “my form has validation” complex—actually complex)
But be honest with yourself: is that what you’re building?
Or are you building another dashboard, another admin panel, another e-commerce site, another blog, another SaaS app that’s fundamentally just forms and tables and lists? Be honest. I won’t tell anyone. We all have to pay the bills.
For that stuff, HTMX is embarrassingly good. Like, “why did we make it so complicated” good. Like, “oh god, we wasted so much time” good.
You’ve tried React. You’ve tried Vue. You’ve tried Angular and regretted it. You’ve tried whatever meta-framework is trending on Hacker News this week.
Just try HTMX. One weekend. Pick a side project. Pick that internal tool nobody cares about. Pick the thing you’ve been meaning to rebuild anyway.
Add one tag. Write one hx-get attribute. Watch what happens.
If you hate it, you’ve lost a weekend. But you won’t hate it. You’ll wonder why you ever thought web development had to be so fucking complicated.
Learn more:
htmx.org — The official site and docs
hypermedia.systems — The free book on hypermedia-driven apps
...
Read the original on pleasejusttryhtmx.com »
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Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U. S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.” It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are falling on deaf ears.After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10 million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion.While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, hydrologists say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
To meet growing water shortages in the country’s burgeoning cities, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late 20th century, says Penelope Mitchell, a geographer at the University of Alabama’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too small to sustain them. Rather than fixing shortages, the reservoirs have increased the loss of water due to evaporation from their large surface areas, she says, while lowering river flows downstream and drying up wetlands and underground water reserves. Today, many of the reservoirs behind those dams are all but empty. Iran’s president made his call to relocate the capital after water levels in Tehran’s five reservoirs plunged to 12 percent of capacity last month.
Iran’s neighbors are exacerbating the crisis. In Afghanistan, the source of two rivers important to Iran’s water supplies (the Helmand and Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-building spree that is reducing cross-border flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into operation in August, “means Afghanistan can control up to 80 percent of the average stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threatening water supplies to much of eastern Iran, including Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad. While surface waters suffer, the situation underground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a million wells fitted with powerful pumps. The aim has been to irrigate arid farmland to meet the country’s goal of food self-sufficiency in a hostile world of trade sanctions. But the result has been rampant overpumping of aquifers that once held copious amounts of water. The majority of Iran’s precious underground water reserves have been pumped dry, says Madani. He estimates a loss of more than 210 cubic kilometers [50 cubic miles] of stored water in the first two decades of this century. Iran is far from alone in overpumping its precious national water stores. But a recent international study of 1,700 underground water reserves in 40 countries found that a staggering 32 of the world’s 50 most overpumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar aquifers,” says coauthor Richard Taylor, geographer at University College London. In each, water tables are falling by up to 10 feet a year.
Agriculture is the prime culprit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture. But as ever more pumped wells are sunk, their returns are diminishing. Analyzing the most recently publicly available figures, Roohollah Noori, a freshwater ecologist until recently at the University of Tehran, found that the number of wells and other abstraction points had almost doubled since 2000. But the amount of water successfully brought to the surface fell by 18 percent. In many places, formerly irrigated fields lie barren and abandoned.As reservoirs empty and wells fail, the country’s hydrologists say Iran is on the verge of “water bankruptcy.” They forecast food shortages, a repetition of water protests that spread across the country in the summer of 2021, and even a water war with Afghanistan over its dam-building. And a long-discussed plan to move the capital from Tehran to the wetter south of the country is now “no longer optional” but a necessity, because of water shortages, says Iran’s president. No detailed plans have yet been drawn up, but the Makran region on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely location for the project.
This is a tragic turnaround for an arid country with a proud tradition of sophisticated management of its meager water resources. Iran is the origin and cultural and engineering heartland of ancient water-collecting systems known as qanats. Qanats are gently sloping tunnels dug into hillsides in riverless regions to tap underground water, allowing it to flow out into valleys using gravity alone. They have long sustained the country’s farmers, as well as being until recently the main source of water for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan. But today only one in seven fields are irrigated by the tunnels. Iran has an estimated 70,000 of these structures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. Their aggregate length has been put at more than 250,000 miles. The Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance. Unlike pumped wells, qanats are an inherently sustainable source of water. They can only take as much water as is replenished by the rain. Yet such has been their durability that they were often called “everlasting springs.”
But in their homeland, there is no such action. Iranian hydrologists estimate that in the past half century, around half of Iran’s qanats have been rendered waterless through poor maintenance or as pumped wells have lowered water tables within hillsides. Noori found that groundwater depletion began in the early 1950s and “coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats… with deep wells”.“History will never forgive us for what [deep wells] have done to our qanats,” says Mohammad Barshan, director of the Qanats Center in Kerman. Besides overpumping, a second reason why Iran’s underground water reserves are slipping away is that less water is seeping down from surface water bodies and soils to replenish them. Noori found a 35 percent decline in aquifer recharge since 2002.
One reason is climate change. Droughts have combined with warmer temperatures that reduce winter snow cover, which is a major means of groundwater replenishment in the mountains. But Noori identifies “human intervention” as the main cause — especially dams and abstractions for irrigation that dry up rivers, natural lakes, and wetlands, whose seepage is another major source of recharge. Lake Urmia in northwest Iran was once the Middle East’s largest lake, covering more than 2,300 square miles. But NASA satellite images taken in 2023 showed it had almost completely dried up. Similarly, the Hamoun wetland, straddling the Iran-Afghan border on the Helmand River, once covered some 1,500 square miles and was home to abundant wildlife, including a population of leopards. Now it is mostly lifeless salt flats. The loss of such ecological jewels makes a mockery of Iran’s status as the host of the 1971 treaty to protect internationally important wetlands, named after Ramsar, the Iranian city where it was signed.
Another factor in the reduced recharge, says Noori, is the introduction of more modern irrigation methods aimed at getting more crops from less water. Farmers are being encouraged to line canals and irrigate crops more efficiently. But this greater “efficiency” has a perverse consequence: It results in less water seeping below ground to top up aquifers. Hydrologists warn that much of the damage to aquifers is permanent. As they dry out, their water-holding pores collapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in. At the surface, this is causing an epidemic of subsidence. According to Iranian remote sensing expert Mahmud Haghshenas Haghighi, now at Leibniz University in Germany, subsidence affects more than 3.5 percent of the country. Ancient cities once reliant on qanats, such as Isfahan and Yazd, are seeing buildings and infrastructure damaged on a huge scale. Geologists call it a “silent earthquake.” But, while surface structures can be repaired, the geological wreckage underground cannot. “Once significant subsidence and compression occurs, much of the… water storage capacity is permanently lost and cannot be restored, even if water levels later rise,” says Mitchell.
Critics such as Kowsar’s son Nik, a water analyst now working in the U. S., say officials are closely aligned with politically well-connected engineers bent on constructing ever more big projects such as dams. Their latest is a complex and expensive scheme to desalinate seawater from the Persian Gulf and pump it through some 2,300 miles of pipelines to parched provinces. A link to Isfahan opened this month. But, while the water is valuable for heavy industries such as steel, the high cost of desalination, pipes, and pumping makes it far too expensive for agriculture.Something has to give. More dams make no sense when the rivers are already running dry. More pumped wells make no sense when there is no water left to tap. They just hasten water bankruptcy.
Politically, the country’s ambition for food security through self-reliance needs to be rethought, hydrologists say. There is simply not enough water to achieve it in the long run. Madani and others call for farmers to switch from growing thirsty staple crops such as rice to higher-value, less water-intensive crops that can be sold internationally in exchange for staples. But that requires Iran to lose its current political status as an international pariah and rejoin the global trading community. Correction, December 18, 2025: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Penelope Mitchell is affiliated with the University of Arizona. She is at the University of Alabama.
...
Read the original on e360.yale.edu »
Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
Iran is looking to relocate the nation’s capital because of severe water shortages that make Tehran unsustainable. Experts say the crisis was caused by years of ill-conceived dam projects and overpumping that destroyed a centuries-old system for tapping underground reserves.
More than international sanctions, more than its stifling theocracy, more than recent bombardment by Israel and the U. S. — Iran’s greatest current existential crisis is what hydrologists are calling its rapidly approaching “water bankruptcy.” It is a crisis that has a sad origin, they say: the destruction and abandonment of tens of thousands of ancient tunnels for sustainably tapping underground water, known as qanats, that were once the envy of the arid world. But calls for the Iranian government to restore qanats and recharge the underground water reserves that once sustained them are falling on deaf ears.After a fifth year of extreme drought, Iran’s long-running water crisis reached unprecedented levels in November. The country’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, warned that Iran had “no choice” but to move its capital away from arid Tehran, which now has a population of about 10 million, to wetter coastal regions — a project that would take decades and has a price estimated by analysts at potentially $100 billion.While failed rains may be the immediate cause of the crisis, hydrologists say, the root cause is more than half a century of often foolhardy modern water engineering — extending back to before the country’s Islamic revolution of 1979, but accelerated by the Ayatollahs’ policies since.
To meet growing water shortages in the country’s burgeoning cities, “Iran was one of the top three dam-builders in the world” in the late 20th century, says Penelope Mitchell, a geographer at the University of Arizona’s Global Water Security Center. Dozens were built on rivers too small to sustain them. Rather than fixing shortages, the reservoirs have increased the loss of water due to evaporation from their large surface areas, she says, while lowering river flows downstream and drying up wetlands and underground water reserves. Today, many of the reservoirs behind those dams are all but empty. Iran’s president made his call to relocate the capital after water levels in Tehran’s five reservoirs plunged to 12 percent of capacity last month.
Iran’s neighbors are exacerbating the crisis. In Afghanistan, the source of two rivers important to Iran’s water supplies (the Helmand and Harirud), the Taliban are on their own dam-building spree that is reducing cross-border flows. The Pashdan Dam, which went into operation in August, “means Afghanistan can control up to 80 percent of the average stream flow of the Harirud,” says Mitchell, threatening water supplies to much of eastern Iran, including Iran’s second largest city, Mashhad. While surface waters suffer, the situation underground is even worse. In the past 40 years, Iranians have sunk more than a million wells fitted with powerful pumps. The aim has been to irrigate arid farmland to meet the country’s goal of food self-sufficiency in a hostile world of trade sanctions. But the result has been rampant overpumping of aquifers that once held copious amounts of water. The majority of Iran’s precious underground water reserves have been pumped dry, says Madani. He estimates a loss of more than 210 cubic kilometers [50 cubic miles] of stored water in the first two decades of this century. Iran is far from alone in overpumping its precious national water stores. But a recent international study of 1,700 underground water reserves in 40 countries found that a staggering 32 of the world’s 50 most overpumped aquifers are in Iran. “The biggest alarm bells are in Iran’s West Qazvin Plain, Arsanjan Basin, Baladeh Basin, and Rashtkhar aquifers,” says coauthor Richard Taylor, geographer at University College London. In each, water tables are falling by up to 10 feet a year.
Agriculture is the prime culprit, says Mitchell. In Iran, some 90 percent of the water abstracted from rivers and underground aquifers is taken for agriculture. But as ever more pumped wells are sunk, their returns are diminishing. Analyzing the most recently publicly available figures, Roohollah Noori, a freshwater ecologist until recently at the University of Tehran, found that the number of wells and other abstraction points had almost doubled since 2000. But the amount of water successfully brought to the surface fell by 18 percent. In many places, formerly irrigated fields lie barren and abandoned.As reservoirs empty and wells fail, the country’s hydrologists say Iran is on the verge of “water bankruptcy.” They forecast food shortages, a repetition of water protests that spread across the country in the summer of 2021, and even a water war with Afghanistan over its dam-building. And a long-discussed plan to move the capital from Tehran to the wetter south of the country is now “no longer optional” but a necessity, because of water shortages, says Iran’s president. No detailed plans have yet been drawn up, but the Makran region on the shores of the Gulf of Oman is seen as the most likely location for the project.
This is a tragic turnaround for an arid country with a proud tradition of sophisticated management of its meager water resources. Iran is the origin and cultural and engineering heartland of ancient water-collecting systems known as qanats. Qanats are gently sloping tunnels dug into hillsides in riverless regions to tap underground water, allowing it to flow out into valleys using gravity alone. They have long sustained the country’s farmers, as well as being until recently the main source of water for cities such as Tehran, Yazd, and Isfahan. But today only one in seven fields are irrigated by the tunnels. Iran has an estimated 70,000 of these structures, most of which are more than 2,500 years old. Their aggregate length has been put at more than 250,000 miles. The Gonabad qanat network, reputedly the world’s largest, extends for more than 20 miles beneath the Barakuh Mountains of northeast Iran. The tunnels are more than 3 feet high, reach a depth of a thousand feet, and are supplied by more than 400 vertical wells for maintenance. Unlike pumped wells, qanats are an inherently sustainable source of water. They can only take as much water as is replenished by the rain. Yet such has been their durability that they were often called “everlasting springs.”
But in their homeland, there is no such action. Iranian hydrologists estimate that in the past half century, around half of Iran’s qanats have been rendered waterless through poor maintenance or as pumped wells have lowered water tables within hillsides. Noori found that groundwater depletion began in the early 1950s and “coincided with the gradual replacement of Persian qanats… with deep wells”.“History will never forgive us for what [deep wells] have done to our qanats,” says Mohammad Barshan, director of the Qanats Center in Kerman. Besides overpumping, a second reason why Iran’s underground water reserves are slipping away is that less water is seeping down from surface water bodies and soils to replenish them. Noori found a 35 percent decline in aquifer recharge since 2002.
One reason is climate change. Droughts have combined with warmer temperatures that reduce winter snow cover, which is a major means of groundwater replenishment in the mountains. But Noori identifies “human intervention” as the main cause — especially dams and abstractions for irrigation that dry up rivers, natural lakes, and wetlands, whose seepage is another major source of recharge. Lake Urmia in northwest Iran was once the Middle East’s largest lake, covering more than 2,300 square miles. But NASA satellite images taken in 2023 showed it had almost completely dried up. Similarly, the Hamoun wetland, straddling the Iran-Afghan border on the Helmand River, once covered some 1,500 square miles and was home to abundant wildlife, including a population of leopards. Now it is mostly lifeless salt flats. The loss of such ecological jewels makes a mockery of Iran’s status as the host of the 1971 treaty to protect internationally important wetlands, named after Ramsar, the Iranian city where it was signed.
Another factor in the reduced recharge, says Noori, is the introduction of more modern irrigation methods aimed at getting more crops from less water. Farmers are being encouraged to line canals and irrigate crops more efficiently. But this greater “efficiency” has a perverse consequence: It results in less water seeping below ground to top up aquifers. Hydrologists warn that much of the damage to aquifers is permanent. As they dry out, their water-holding pores collapse. As qanats dry up, they too cave in. At the surface, this is causing an epidemic of subsidence. According to Iranian remote sensing expert Mahmud Haghshenas Haghighi, now at Leibniz University in Germany, subsidence affects more than 3.5 percent of the country. Ancient cities once reliant on qanats, such as Isfahan and Yazd, are seeing buildings and infrastructure damaged on a huge scale. Geologists call it a “silent earthquake.” But, while surface structures can be repaired, the geological wreckage underground cannot. “Once significant subsidence and compression occurs, much of the… water storage capacity is permanently lost and cannot be restored, even if water levels later rise,” says Mitchell.
Critics such as Kowsar’s son Nik, a water analyst now working in the U. S., say officials are closely aligned with politically well-connected engineers bent on constructing ever more big projects such as dams. Their latest is a complex and expensive scheme to desalinate seawater from the Persian Gulf and pump it through some 2,300 miles of pipelines to parched provinces. A link to Isfahan opened this month. But, while the water is valuable for heavy industries such as steel, the high cost of desalination, pipes, and pumping makes it far too expensive for agriculture.Something has to give. More dams make no sense when the rivers are already running dry. More pumped wells make no sense when there is no water left to tap. They just hasten water bankruptcy.
Politically, the country’s ambition for food security through self-reliance needs to be rethought, hydrologists say. There is simply not enough water to achieve it in the long run. Madani and others call for farmers to switch from growing thirsty staple crops such as rice to higher-value, less water-intensive crops that can be sold internationally in exchange for staples. But that requires Iran to lose its current political status as an international pariah and rejoin the global trading community.
...
Read the original on e360.yale.edu »
Back in 2016, after six-and-a-half years spent working on puzzle-adventure opus The Witness, Jonathan Blow says he needed a break. He tells Ars that the project he started in The Witness’ wake was meant to serve as a quick proof of concept for a new engine and programming language he was working on. “It was supposed to be a short game,” that could be finished in “like a year and a half or two years,” he said.
Now, after nine years of development—and his fair share of outspoken, controversial statements—Blow is finally approaching the finish line on that “short game.” He said Order of the Sinking Star—which was announced Thursday via a Game Awards trailer ahead of a planned 2026 release—now encompasses around 1,400 individual puzzles that could take completionists 400 to 500 hours to fully conquer.
“I don’t know why I convinced myself it was going to be a small game,” Blow told me while demonstrating a preview build to Ars last week. “But once we start things, I just want to do the good version of the thing, right? I always make it as good as it can be.”
Just as The Witness was based around multiple variations of the outwardly simple concept of line-tracing puzzles, Order of the Sinking Star is built around the kind of 2D, grid-based navigation puzzles that date back to video game proto-history. From a centralized starting point in the middle of a sprawling map, players can choose to wander in four cardinal directions to explore four distinct variations on that basic concept.
In one direction, “the hearty heroes of hauling” use D&D-esque abilities to compulsively push and pull carefully arranged blocks in specific patterns. In another direction, the “Mirror Isles” let players position looking glasses to teleport and/or clone themselves across the screen at different angles. Then there’s a whole set of puzzles focused on skipping stepping-stones across water to build paths, and another built around an exoskeleton that gains new abilities in the path of a moveable energy beam.
...
Read the original on arstechnica.com »
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