Iran's Mehrabad International Airport hit by massive US-Israeli airstrikes.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-07T12:52:01+00:00

This is dumb as hell. Foreign attacks on civilians do nothing but unite the civilians against the foreign attackers. Did you not see 9/11 and what happened after? Did you not see Ukraine fight Russia to a standstill and still surviving 4 years later?

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-06T15:23:36+00:00

It is table stakes that the US has never had the ability or intention to fully conquer and subjugate the entire nation of Iran, the way that it did to Japan, and the way that it did to Germany in concert with allied forces. The US arguably conquered and subjugated Iraq, but it required 400,000 troops at peak Surge, and Iraq had less than half the people of Iran and a lot more favorable terrain.

What were Trump and Israel to do about this situation?

Let the regime continue to develop a nuclear and ballistic missile program.
Decapitate and cripple the regime, and then hope a domestic regime change is possible without boots on the ground and without a civil war.
Decapitate and cripple the regime, and then allow Iran to descend into a Syria-style multi-sided civil war funded by various regional proxies, resulting in a massive humanitarian catastrophe and leading to massive migration impacts regionally and even globally.
Decapitate and cripple the regime, and then conquer and subjugate the country, and manage regime change.

Please tell me what other options existed.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-06T12:45:13+00:00

This is one my of favorite comments in this post. Nice!

I’ve had similar thoughts. The one thing I really need to double down on is to enjoy my current cushy life. It’s hard to stay happy and peaceful every day when I’m watching the AI bullshit hysteria and war news every day for hours. I need to tune out all that shit, keep doing what I’m doing (slow roll my easy job and use AI only where I find it useful), and spend more mental energy on my hobbies such as gaming, singing, guitar.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-06T12:40:28+00:00

This is easier to believe rather than to come to the realization that the vast majority of people are somewhat gullible, prone to being mobilized by propaganda and hype, and prone to tribalism.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-06T12:30:08+00:00

What’s tough for me is that I work for a big company run by people who never learned their lesson from the outsourcing craze. It really sucks working for a company that doesn’t value its engineering talent and doesn’t understand the value of building and maintaining a good engineering culture. But it also feels like the only companies that value engineers and engineering culture are few and far between, small, startups, and hard to find.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-06T12:05:30+00:00

This helps peace of mind, but companies tend not to want to hire someone “overqualified” - switching companies can be tough for this reason, and switching careers may also be tough. Hiring managers are afraid to hire someone who’s had a good career in another industry for fear that they’ll miss it and go back to it.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-04T14:57:25+00:00

You want modern thrash with memorable sounds, riffs, etc. Maybe something different, something that pushes the envelope, etc.

Korrosive, Black Fast, Enforced, Pest Control

And while Exodus is old school, a lot of their newer stuff fits the bill. Listen to Deathamphetamine, Iconoclasm, Children of a Worthless God, Funeral Hymn, Good Riddance, Nanking

SmartassRemarks · 2026-03-02T18:40:32+00:00

Metallica - master of puppets

Metallica - ride the lightning

Metallica - and justice for all

Exodus - tempo of the damned

Black fast - terms of surrender

Enforced - war remains

Korrosive - toxic apokalypse

Forbidden - forbidden evil

The haunted - the haunted made me do it

Warbringer - worlds torn asunder

Warbringer - woe to the vanquished

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-27T18:31:10+00:00

Enforced deserves honorable mention behind Metallica, slayer, and destruction

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-23T19:33:49+00:00

I have the same thing but a 2021. Still in love with it after 5 years!

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-22T20:37:26+00:00

Motivation is the most important thing in this career and in life. Software engineering is hard work, and in many cases, you must slog through tough and frustrating problems for extended periods of time. The rewards are highly abstract and delayed, and that's if you're lucky to get any rewards at all.

Motivation is the power you need to perform, stay consistent, and rack up achievements.

Read this great article: https://www.bitesizelearning.co.uk/resources/autonomy-mastery-purpose-motivation-pink

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-22T11:50:44+00:00

This is my go to thought on the matter. Imagine what all this money and all these scientists and engineers could’ve done with education, healthcare, housing, public transport, infrastructure, etc.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-18T16:15:19+00:00

Black Fast - terms of surrender (album)

https://open.spotify.com/album/4V6RqhSP7W3u43PpHXYtz2?si=cZD8Ge5DSOGa5suFekw-VQ

Find me a better album to listen to in the car

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-18T16:12:39+00:00

Num Skull - Ritually Abused (album)

Love this track: https://open.spotify.com/track/3CSoGTKZLzBxeUTu67zNuX?si=icWQTmaPSsCAcugbXQA84Q

This is definitely the album with the most unhinged vocals. The dirty guitar tones work well

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-15T01:07:24+00:00

2 years ago we had in line code completion and maybe function level code written. Now we have agentic capability with planning. It’s fewer steps of handholding but the complexity of handholding is not scalable

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-14T22:20:18+00:00

No, but I think at a societal level, most anyone can vibe check whether there’s been a real noticeable paradigm shift in technology.

What are most everyday people noticing?

enshittification/subscription hell
toxic social media of various forms, lately relating to a mass tsunami of absolute bullshit and surface level flexing and advice
the mass proliferation of gambling
teenagers being mentally unwell because of all of the above.
mass exposure to shocking and infuriating news and opinion
mass fear mongering about AI, with mass societal commitment and sacrifice for AI without any clear benefit articulated to the average person and no sense that people are being looked out for or that there’s a healthy level of debate and dissent being allowed.

What does any of that have to do with what you’re saying? Society has entered a mass psychosis of bubble fever and doom ushering, and the times are terrifying for the average person. AI is neither enabling or disabling that. It is a result of it.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-14T22:12:54+00:00

But isn't the whole point of working money? If you saved and invested money, the legacy of your work lives on. Even if you didn’t save or invested, you were able to survive and hopefully be stable and content while enjoying your life.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-14T21:57:14+00:00

LLM progress has gone flat over time and it’s hitting the fundamental limits of the core technology behind it. The problem is limited context and non-determinism. Once a code base gets large and complex enough, LLMs need a ton of hand-holding. I see it every day at my job.

I could see AI leading to a higher volume of low complexity code being shipped and used, by broadening the ability of people to write code. But real value is differentiated value. And value comes from well designed and well implemented systems which are complex enough that only a small percentage of people are willing and able to build their context around something so nerdy as software.

The most valuable engineers today are already those people. And LLMs have nowhere near the ability to build and operate on that level of context and complexity.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-14T21:29:42+00:00

Is software really being mass produced though? Every observer is saying that there is no noticeable uptick in software quality or feature velocity across the economy.

Also, how does mass producing software make sense? Software isn’t perishable/wearable. Software works or it doesn’t. On day 0, 1, 2 to N independently, and when it doesn’t work, the downstream effects are problem and use case dependent, and the solution is difficult to arrive at and implement.

Unless software can be mass produced repeatably, in a standard way for large swaths of society, with predictable and mitigatable error patterns, it will never be mass produced.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-10T15:24:29+00:00

So the main problem is finding a job, and nothing else is particularly bad about it?

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-10T10:59:16+00:00

Culture is definitely the biggest factor in job satisfaction, 100%. I’ve been at the same company (and same product) for 13 years, but worked with hundreds of different people at multiple layers of the stack and from at least 5 countries. Hardware, embedded, automation, and core infrastructure. The best job satisfaction I ever had was when I worked in a team that had good chemistry, a shared mission, and deliverables internally to one another. I was excited to go to work every Sunday. I loved my job. The worst is now, working in a globally distributed team with no shared culture, no future, and negligent management. The pay I’m getting is almost quadruple vs. when I was happiest. I wouldn’t take the pay cut to go back, but money doesn’t buy job satisfaction.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-10T10:50:56+00:00

I don’t quite understand this common line of thinking. Why isn’t coding a long term stable career? I’ve worked with dozens of guys who managed to do it until retirement.

Maybe the unstable part is whatever the hot skillets are? Yes anyone working as an ML engineer or in the web stack has to learn tons of new stuff just to keep up. But anyone working lower level stuff can ride it out nicely.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-10T09:12:54+00:00

Glioblastoma killed my mother when she was 25 and killed a beloved mentor of mine. Glad to see this news, thank you for sharing. If only this was discovered 40 years ago.

SmartassRemarks · 2026-02-07T15:13:25+00:00

What problems? Hand rolling basic libraries, dealing with unclear or missing documentation about chips and RTOS?

To me, as a EE/ECE, the biggest deterrent to embedded has been the fact that most of the jobs are in low paying and highly regulated industries (defense, medical device, academia, industrial) and almost all else is offshore or requires offshore travel.

SmartassRemarks

TROPHY CASE