Essay

From the 2026 Iran War to Iraq: Three Shapes of the Same U.S. Military Machine

Operation Epic Fury, launched February 2026, is the most consequential high-intensity U.S. campaign in two decades — 52 days, 1,700+ targets, all six services in the fight, a foreign head of state killed. This essay uses Epic Fury as the main case, dissecting command chain, acquisition, logistics, training-and-exercise pipeline, and strategic implications across five sections. Then it looks back at the 8-month-earlier Midnight Hammer precision strike. Finally the 22-year-older Iraq War as historical reference. Three cases, ordered newest to oldest, showing how the same organizational machine flexes across wildly different mission intensities.

A Private Recommendation System

Social media recommenders want me to stay as long as possible, and they'll do whatever it takes to poke at my emotions — which isn't pleasant. RSS readers don't push emotional buttons, but once the volume grows I get buried under things I don't care about. So I built a private recommender that balances quality and efficiency.

Book Notes: Freedom of Money

Finished CZ's autobiography Freedom of Money in two days. I don't follow crypto, but his story — going all-in on Bitcoin, becoming the richest Chinese person, and then serving time in a US prison — is genuinely fascinating.

Survival, Competition, and Freedom

People go through three stages when they work: survival is driven by instinct, competition is framed by the coordinate system your rivals set, and true freedom means standing in an open wilderness with no compass. Freedom without values is a painful cage; freedom with values is the most powerful engine.

Compressed Boundaries

Knowledge splits in two: Techne, which can be serialized, and Metis, the embodied know-how that grows from context, trial, and error. AI is brilliant at compressing the first and can't touch the second — that's where its capability ends. As standardized work gets automated away, the knowledge that can't be compressed becomes scarcer, not less valuable.

Reading Notes: The Republic of Technology

Palantir's CEO Alex Karp released a new book in 2025 titled "Tech Republic," which was also published in mainland China by the end of the year. I bought it immediately and read it. The book's viewpoints represent the right-wing ideology of Silicon Valley, and its influence is evident in current American politics.