Good evening amigos and amigas,
Today’s letter is a bit of a smorgasbord (which I didn’t realise meant sandwich-table, but it makes me love the word even more) of things.
I wanted to start with ChatGPT and finish with a small Iranian SITREP.
I’m also working on a piece about the Bradford Race Riots and GB News prompted by this article (https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/bradford-race-riots-ethnicity-muslim) that I was originally going to include here. But there’s a possibility that one gets a lot of scrutiny, so I want to take the time to make sure it’s watertight. I’ve also pitched it to the Guardian, but they might not want it, in which case you’ll get it first!
CHATGPT
So as regular readers will remember, I paid for the upgraded version of ChatGPT a few months ago, to get access to the latest, cutting-edge models, and I thought it would be interesting to share my thoughts and reflections here.
The first point is just how much deeper I find this one to be, with a near night and day difference - now a lot of that is that as you use each new model, it’s exponentially better than the last so the jumps between each new model feel like they just get bigger and bigger.
My usage has stayed at a pretty similar frequency to before, but what I have found is that when I get into a rabbit hole and want to keep going, I don’t run out of credits which means I can carry the thought all the way through to completion. This is super useful when researching things and trying to get a basic understanding of things to direct my learning on various topics.
You can also upload files to this version, which is also very useful - one example is when I uploaded my rental contract and asked it to find a clause that I knew was in there but just couldn’t find after looking through two or three times. It did it in seconds, which was such a game changer.
I also keep a spreadsheet to track my finances, and have built up a few years of data there. I shared that too, and asked it talk me through a few things, and we had a really informative, engaging conversation that I then used to reorganise my banking set up. Not financial advice, but a really helpful way to reimagine something stale that I hadn’t really updated since setting up for the first time.
Now all of these are cool, but probably not worth the £20/month. But the Codex app that comes with it singlehandedly makes up the difference. It took a bit of getting used to, but I’ve now got it linked in with Github and Visual Studio Code (which between them are the backbone of the website) and it is an absolute game changer.
I used it to build a tool that can now take these letters, format them into a PDF, watermark them and send them out to a mailing list automatically. The whole process took about an hour, most of which was me deciding how I wanted them to look, and now it just works.
I’ve also got a tool that I built before this subscription, that takes each of these letters from my outbox, extracts the text, transforms it into a HTML webpage and pushes it out onto the website at the push of a button. Now that broke a few weeks ago, and I tasked Codex with working out what was going on and fixing it this afternoon. It did so within 10 minutes and now it works as expected again. Troubleshooting that before this would’ve taken me an entire weekend and so the £20/month is absolutely worth that time saving, even if it’s not every single day.
IRAN SITREP 006
Markets have woken up to the idea that this war isn’t going away now. Trump continues to be publicly irrational, and I have seen little evidence that makes me think there’s any form of serious strategy behind what we’re seeing.
Allegedly there’s now peace talks. I say allegedly because Trump says they’re happening and Iran says they’re not. It’s a bit confusing.
Pakistan has emerged as a potential power-broker, but don’t forget their vested interests here - they’ve got a defence pact with the Saudis that I’m sure they’re really hoping doesn’t have to be used and are also almost entirely dependent on the Gulf states for energy. They continue to walk a political tightrope with the US administration, which the Pakistani government has become increasingly close to despite its unpopularity amongst Pakistani people because of its support for Israel and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
Instead of focussing on rhetoric, I’m finding it useful to look at military preparation and troop movements, which have served Iran-watchers well so far in this war. Hark back to just over a month ago, when there were talks happening in Geneva whilst the US assembled the largest military buildup in the Middle East since the Iraq war.
They clearly didn’t have a plan then. I don’t think they have a plan to completion now either. But I think they’re starting to formulate a ground invasion plan for the next steps, and that Doublespeak is in effect i.e., any peace talks are a ploy.
50,000 US troops are currently in the Middle East, roughly 10,000 more than usual. Most of these are sailors, but there are 2,500 Marines which have been repositioned from Japan (much to the dismay of China hawks). There’s also an additional 2,000 soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division (paratroopers) en-route.
That’s not enough to launch a wholescale ground invasion of Iran. Iran’s huge. For context, it took 250,000 to invade Iraq. There are Kurds in the region that could be used (and have been in the past), who would love a US-backed opportunity to topple the Iranian regime. The CIA has already been arming them with small arms. But then the US went very quiet on the Kurdish front earlier this month and I haven’t quite been able to work out why.
Regardless though, US troops alone might be enough to take something smaller. Maybe something like Kharg Island. But then you have to hold it, and that puts you on the back foot in a not very pleasant way. The Iranian military is a much fiercer foe than both the Iraq and Afghan forces fought in the 2000s, and even those are widely seen as failures. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it is certainly unwise.
But then I don’t know what other options they still have. Aerial bombardment clearly hasn’t toppled the regime and there’s no reason I’ve seen for why that might change as time goes on. The Strait of Hormuz is blocked and there’s no clear way of changing that (although Pakistan has managed to get a few tankers through, which suggests that some talking is happening somewhere).
Do you put 50,000 troops next to a war zone, or do you put them into the war zone? I’m not looking forward to finding out.
The other notable event is that the USS Gerald Ford is, by all accounts, well and truly in a state of SNAFU (for the uninitiated: Situation Normal, All Fucked Up). It’s been out for nearly ten months now, which is on the upper end of deployments - don’t forget this is also the one that was in Venezuela at the start of the year. It’s since left the Middle East and moored in Croatia over the weekend for repairs after a fire that took 30 hours to put out.
The Pentagon claims the fire started in the laundry room, and a Greek newspaper apparently got a source saying that there was an investigation underway to explore the possibility that US crewmembers had started the fire to terminate their extended mission. I’ve also seen a video of President Trump saying it was attacked from 17 directions by Iran, leaving the crew “running for their lives,” but that’s actually from the Venezuela operation with misleading headlines overlaid. The information war is another dimension to this that we’ve not seen lots of yet. Keep an eye out.
To end on a slightly lighter note, you might find it funny that the reason this $13 billion, state-of-the-art aircraft carrier was delayed on its way to the Middle East was because the toilet system they installed is far too small and keeps breaking, and so it keeps flooding with shit. If ever there was a sign of the war effort…
Short week ahead, I hope you find time for a moment of joy despite the chaos.
RH