Same. That line about "your legacy is your family and friends" hit hard.
I've been coding professionally for >30 years. I don't think any of my code has survived 5 years in production.
I don't think code quality affected that at all - I know the really, really, shitty code I wrote when learning OOP in the 90's survived for a looong time, while the amazing code I wrote for a startup 2018-2021 died with it.
One of the projects I'm most proud of is still running ten years later, and has processed over a billion AUD through it in that time, with very minimal maintenance. I recently consulted on it, and sure enough it's still ticking along nicely! The code is honestly quite good too, even if it is PHP (though in a very nice microframework we wrote on top of Silex: removed all magic that a lot of these systems relied on. No annotations!)
I haven't doing this forever (only 10+ years) but surprisingly I think a majority of what I've written is still running. Probably a fair bit will continue to run for a while yet too I think (again, surprising for CRUD web apps).
Not only because of cost. Mythos has only been released to some of the big tech players because it's "too dangerous" [0] for us little people.
It's easy to see this becoming a permanent position; the latest models and smarts are reserved for establishment members only, the riff-raff get the cast-offs. So the establishment is preserved and the status quo protected.
[0] I'm putting scare/irony quotes around this, but if the reporting is accurate, there is something to this; we built the internet on string and duct tape, it's not hard to see how a very smart AI could cut it to ribbons.
I'm Australian. We drop the C-bomb regularly. Other folks flinch at it. Presumably the vast corpus of training data harvested from the internet includes this flinch, doesn't it?
If the model dropped the C-bomb as regularly as an Australian then we'd conclude that there was some bias in the training data, right?
Bombing civilian infrastructure never works like this. As we saw in The Blitz (and in Vietnam, and in Ukraine), it just draws the bombed together, unifying them and hardening their resolve.
Can you use an example that doesn't prove the exact opposite?
Bombing absolutely worked in Vietnam so much that the south didn't actually lose the war until 2 years after the USA left. The war becoming a political nightmare is why the USA left not because the horrendously effective bombing stopped working.
Ukraine is really weird to put in here because Russia has fail to establish any effective air superiority so I can't make heads or tails why you put it in here.
As for the Blitz is was absolutely effective vs the British but USA factories and supply shipments were largely out of reach of the Axis.
Add in the fact that the people of Iran are largely opposed to being governed by a Muslim theocracy (most of the population is not Muslim) I'm frankly struggling to see how you get any of your viewpoints.
That is a unique view of what happened in Vietnam.
But let's look at a more modern example that makes your case: Syria. The US starved that country, seizing the food and oil, funding/arming terror groups - not just the kurds but also Al Nusra and other islamic terror groups, invading portions of the country and placing military bases there to give air support to terror operations and maintain control of the oil wells, blowing up pipelines, for over a decade. Finally after years of starvation and hyperinflation, the government collapsed as the generals were bribed by Qatar (or the Qataris were just intermediaries, we don't know) to lay down their arms and let the Jolani regime take over. When you are convinced your nation doesn't have a future, suitcases of cash and exit visas to mansions in London do wonders.
So yeah, you can punish a nation so much that it is easy to take over.
But, can the world survive 10 years of the straight of Hormuz being closed? I doubt it. Syria was a small country and it held out for a decade. Sure, it had help from Russia and China, but so does Iran now. When the US was strangling Syria, we already controlled the oil and food producing regions of the country. But there is no such arrangement in Iran, and Syria was not able to close off a major shipping lane like Iran can.
So I am skeptical that the US can outlast Iran and inflict enough misery on them to overthrow the region before this Iran adventure is brought to a close by world oil prices and US domestic political unrest.
You're suggesting that bombing civilian infrastructure will cause the Iranians to surrender (or to concede negotiating points in order to stop the bombing).
My point is that this doesn't work - the British under The Blitz famously had "Blitz Spirit" that was all about enduring the bombing and showing the Germans that they couldn't be beaten like this. The Vietnamese did not try to stop the bombing by surrendering or negotiating, and neither have the Ukrainians; again, if anything, they are more unified and more resolute because of the Russians attacks on their infrastructure.
Can you give me a single example where prolonged bombing of civilian infrastructure has brought a country to the negotiating table? Or made them surrender?
Even if it doesn't cause them to "surrender" - I still don't know what the point of this whole "limited operation" is - it would effectively set back Iran's ability to operate a nuclear materials enrichment program, among other things.
I'd also like to point out that German raids on Britain, American raids on Vietnam, and Russian raids on Ukraine are not exactly comparable to the sort of bombing raids carried out by the Allies (particularly the US and UK) in Germany and Japan in scale.
If anything, the Iranians are trying the same strategy the Nazis did with the V1 and V2 with their drones and missiles: use them as a weapon of stochastic terror against the population of the region and on the occasional industrial target.
Again, as I replied above, Japan was nuked. There were 2 bombs. That is not "sustained bombing". Also, they were losing the conventional war and US troops had set foot on Japanese soil.
The Germans surrendered because millions of Russian troops invaded their capital city. The bombing had nothing to do with it (and I would argue, even hardened their resolve against surrendering).
Your definition of "complete dominance" is different from most people's.
If you completely dominate your enemy, you prevent them from being able to affect the situation. Iran is maintaining a blockade over a major shipping lane that the USA does not want them to. The USA's inability to prevent this shows that they are not "completely dominating" Iran.
No, "air dominance" is a well recognized term, it means you can fly your planes basically anywhere you want, to take out whatever target you want, without risk from AA. They are using it exactly how anyone familiar with warfare terminology would understand it.
"Air supremacy" would be dominance of the air such that enemy cannot effectively interfere. "Air superiority" is the lesser level (enemy interference is not prohibitive).
Air supremacy (using your useful NATO definition) is not stopping Iran from flying drones and missiles. I don't know if that therefore contradicts the US/Israeli forces having Air Supremacy, or if Air Supremacy itself is an outdated term because it doesn't allow for the kind of drone bombardment we see now.
Either way, it's not "complete dominance" which is where we started from ;)
And don't forget open source games. Before going for the indies, I'd suggest downloading and winning all the available major open source roguelikes. And after that, start creating mods/patches for those. Once you're done with that - and not too old of age - maybe think about spending some money on games again.
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