What people don’t seem to understand is the word “targeted”.
They see some obviously civilian target in ruins with screaming parents outside and they have an instant visceral emotional reaction: “What kind of monster would do something like this on purpose!?”
Practically nobody targets civilian building with expensive precision munitions! They’re expensive! There’s limited supply! Targets are chosen to maximise the military effect.
The problem is that the victims and journalists have “boots on the ground”. They’re right there and can clearly see the civilian nature of the target with their own eyes.
The person doing the targeting from som bunker thousands of miles away can see only blurry rectangles on an outdated map, has sparse intelligence reports, and targets coordinates. They’re not walking up to the missile like it’s some sort of intelligent war animal and whispering “kill civilians!” in its ear.
Similarly, they’re not on the ground standing outside the civilian target waving the missile in with light sticks like some airport tarmac staff.
I repeat: they’re thousands of miles away and have to target hundreds of buildings that all look the same-ish from space and aren’t magically labelled by God as “no longer valid under the Geneva conventions” or whatever.
I’m not saying that this makes war good or in any way ethical, but you can see how a mistake is made that doesn’t require cartoonish evil people to explain.
>Practically nobody targets civilian building with expensive precision munitions! They’re expensive! There’s limited supply! Targets are chosen to maximise the military effect.
We're not dealing with a rational or competent military chain of command. We're dealing with people who believe they're bringing about the Biblical Second Coming and that rules of engagement are "woke." These are literally cartoonishly evil people. They probably chose targets by asking Grok.
I'm going to confidently state that nobody in the US military chain of command gave the order to "mix some schools into the target list" for any reason, religious or not.
That's absurd on its face, and if you honestly believe that, then your mental model of how the world (and people in general) function is fundamentally broken.
>That's absurd on its face, and if you honestly believe that, then your mental model of how the world (and people in general) function is fundamentally broken.
I'm not talking about the world or people in general, I'm talking about about the Commander in Chief Donald Trump and "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth, the people who set the tone and make the decisions. And if you listen to either one of them, especially Hegseth, you'll realize it isn't absurd on its face at all.
Even if no one gave a specific order to "mix some schools into the target list" this administration clearly and explicitly - as in, has literally stated on the record - does not care about morality, ethics, rules of engagement or anything of the sort. It's not out of the question that they would intentionally target civilian infrastructure just as a show of force and aggression, or simply not care because their goal is and I'm quoting here "killing people and breaking things."
Oh sure, and the US did it against both Japan and Germany in WW2, but those were not even remotely the same scenario as precision strikes against the IRGC and Iranian leadership in general.
This was clearly a horrific mistake, especially obvious since the girls school used to be a military building.
They target civilian infrastructure like power plants and the like, but again, that's "not the same" as purposefully targeting a school or an apartment block. The latter they do fairly clearly by accident, because I've seen at least four video clips of Ukranians interviewed outside of a bombed civilian building saying something to the effect of "Oh yeah, back in 1990 there was a military training facility here but it was demolished in `91."
Note that 1991 was the year Ukraine and Russia split and Russia stopped getting a "direct feed" of things like urban planning information from Kiev.
Yes, well... the Russians seem especially unconcerned with checking targets for validity before mashing the fire button.
The logic they're presenting is largely the same as Israel's excuse for bombing hospitals in Gaza.
When there's a war in a civilian area, injured soldiers from the front line will be mostly treated at the nearest available hospital, which then overflows into regional hospitals further back, etc... A country under siege at the scales seen in Ukraine and Gaza don't get to pick and choose specific hospitals, they're all overflowing, so they use every available medical facility, including children's hospitals.
Worse, the convoys taking the wounded to these hospitals are more than likely military trucks and are driven by and/or escorted by military personnel in uniform.
On a blurry satellite picture or drone video the enemy will see a building frequently visited by the military.
That's a lot of contortions to go through to avoid the clear Occam's Razor conclusion that these people are simply evil scumbags doing evil scumbag things. Bombing hospitals because they thought they contained wounded troops isn't a defense, that's a whole war crime of its own!
They have an extremely long track record of committing atrocities. You don't need to go out of your way to give them the benefit of the doubt, unless you're literally in Russia where they'll imprison you for telling the truth about what they're doing.
> but I did not feel that I knew the codebase enough to be able to actually assess the correctness of the change.
The good engineering approach is to verify that the change is correct. More prompts for the AI does nothing, instead play with the code, try to break it, write more tests yourself.
I exhausted my ability to do this (without AI). It was a codebase I don't know, in a language I don't know, solving a problem that I have a very limited viewpoint of.
These are all reasons why pre-AI I'd never have bothered to even try this, it wouldn't be worth my time.
If you think this is therefore "bad engineering", maybe that's true! As I said, I ended up discarding the change because I wasn't happy with it.
> I exhausted my ability to do this (without AI). It was a codebase I don't know, in a language I don't know, solving a problem that I have a very limited viewpoint of.
And that's the critical point! I think it's fine to send the diff in; and clearly mark it as AI / vibe-coded. (Along with your prompts.)
I'm sure DOGE and all of its fans have a lot to say about this. After all, we all know fighting waste and corruption in the government is exactly why it was formed.
No, they're pointing out the "right" way is also corrupt and the problem is deeper-rooted. It being done plainly is obviously worse, but the corruption runs deeper than just this.
Supposedly DOGE was to fight corruption. We were all going to get checks back!
Not only did they find zero cases of corruption that were referred to prosecution, they ended up costing us MORE money even than they hypothetically “saved”.
That’s before we even add in “stupid wars of choice” to the “savings” mix.
The idea that “well everything is corrupt so it doesn’t matter” really needs to be confronted, especially when it’s so easily dismantled as an argument.
(I agree though that this administration has massive corruption, and see how you were explaining the above, so I’m talking generally.)
whether Israel cares or not the US people definitely care and half the nation literally wants Trump hanging from a tree. The US midterm elections in November are going to make things 1,000% harder for the Trump admin and widespread Iranian civilian deaths will up that by an order of magnitude.
Back to speaking tactically, JDAMs are cost effective enough that I bet they are the only gravity bomb used. I could see using unguided bombs for things like airbase runways but i bet they stick with JDAMs for logistical simplicity.
Remember https://wpde.com/news/nation-world/non-binary-ex-biden-nucle... or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine That is why democrats are losing. This isn't normal and 80% of the country outright rejects this. Democrats refuse to make even the smallest compromises to just go back to what was 'normal' only a few years ago. How willing to win are they really? Doesn't seem like they care to win if they won't give up the policies that are holding them back. Voter registrations tell you the story--democrats down 5M since 2020 and republicans up by about the same. Democrats have to change course and quit digging the hole deeper.
No, it's incompetent mentally ill weirdos being put in charge of things that they should because of DEI and woke virtue signaling that I disagree with. And again, if that's the hill that democrats want to die on when they think the entire country is under siege... then it shows just how unserious they really are. Those are elitist and luxury beliefs.
Why the personal attacks on someone who's trying to explain to you why the Democrats lost, and why they will continue to lose, now when it's more important than ever? Since when did he say he prefers the lunatics in power now? The election showed the result of attitudes like yours, where you say "vote for us or you're a despicable person" to undecided voters just makes you lose. Ordinary people hear that and they think: fuck you, if you're going to try to tell me what to do, then I'm voting against YOU.
The left in the United States is a group of extreme orthodoxy and excommunication of everyone who doesn't toe the line on absolutely everything, and what you just said is a great example of this. He doesn't agree with you on everything, so he supports pedophiles! Right now, the right is fracturing and millions of people who voted for Trump realize that he's a madman. Right now is the time for the left to move to the center and accept these people into the fold, and accept that they won't agree on every single thing, because there's something far more important at stake.
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