There are all sorts of levers US, China, Russia can pull to in order to put pressure on a country for such things. There's occupation, mutual benefits, long standing agreements post wars, soft power, sanctions, etc. Geopolitics is complicated.

Ironically Yemen (Houthis) are fighting not only with US but against other gulf sates like Saudi Arabia as well. It's not really an example that demonstrates unity in gulf.

> The Taliban beat the US.

Taliban, brought to you by US of A to combat Soviet Union's influence! Well, it seems they are done beating US and are now busy beating Afghan women.

> The US tends to lose a lot.

Do they really? After the war is over and US is beat, how does the life of an average American compare to someone's from your list. It is the people of Middle East who pay the biggest price. That's the real loss.

*edit: typo

Of course it isn't. In reality, being able to resist requires power. Power that's gained more or less independently such as Iran's. Gulf states should be in a position of power to able to resist US presence. The power they have right now is mostly gained through the help of USA and its allies. It's not the same as Iran. Not even close.

What do you mean? Can you give an example?

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that.”

Considering the results of this war so far and the one before, as well as Iran's military strategy, it doesn't seem plausible to think Iran sees (or ever saw) Israel as a threat to its borders' integrity. This may be the basis for Iran's strategy in the region in some version of the future, but to extend it to what they've done in the past would be hindsight bias.

IMO, the regime is not as much worried about Israel as it is about the US. Just compare the number of missiles and drones they shot at Gulf countries vs Israel.

But consider that Israel, rightfully or not, can make similar claims, which actually conform to the Iranian regime's long-stated goal of "destruction of Israel".

> Frankly, I'm struggling to see what aspect of their actions isn’t just common sense over the last decade.

That’s because it didn’t all start in the last decade. As you get closer to “present” in this timeline, it looks more like a one-sided affair. This is similar to the view which sees the whole Israel-Palestine issue only from October 7th onwards.

> Israel and their supporters have done a very bad job of offering an explanation of why the repeated hits were justified or helpful.

True, I’m also not sure if this is going to turn out as they wish it did. Although the jury's still out, but as the article points out, it seems unlikely.

edit: type

Sure, it’s not hard to find. These started long before Trump. You should look beyond the last few months’ news cycles. Iranian government’s issues with Israel are of ideological nature (according to the regime) and their open support (financially and militarily) of a part of Palestinian resistance and Hezbollah. Iran has been active at Israel’s borders for years. Their heavy involvement (including sending troops) in Syria’s civil war is another one to name. All of these are the ones that Iran openly admits to. You can’t explain these away with Israel’s expansionist tendencies because that’s not been a threat to Iran. No serious analyst believes that Israel wants/can to expand into even Iraq, let alone Iran!

The hostilities towards US and vice versa are a whole different topic.

Now to be clear I’m not siding with Israel on this and not saying that caring for Palestinians is not right, just answering your question and naming a few examples. Now, it’s all happened during many decades and not sure if it matters anymore who started it because it’s become a total shit show that is very hard to reconcile.

You might find it surprising that during Iran-Iraq war, Israel was the only country in the region who helped Iran against Iraq (which had the backing of the Arab countries including Palestinians).

edit: typo

IMO, that’s what we should do as software engineers. The idea of letting AI "do the thinking" for you is a bad idea. Sure, it can trivially write a sort function for you. Let it! But you still need to understand how that sort function works. If having the tool was a substitute for understanding the fundamentals, anyone with access to Catia, etc. could design a working airplane.

That’s a bit… handwavy…!

> Instead, different classes of instructions were implemented incrementally, and there were bugs that were fixed…

Not sure the author fully grasps how and why LLM agents work this way. There’s a leap of logic here: the agent runs in a loop where command outputs get fed back as context for further token generation, which is what produces the incremental human like process he’s observing. It’s still that “decompression” from the weights, still the LLM’s unique way of extracting and blending patterns from training data, that’s doing the actual work. The agentic scaffolding just lets it happen in many small steps against real feedback instead of all at once. So the novel output is real, but he’s crediting the wrong thing for it.

You see this type of template response copy pasted basically under any post/comment of this kind.

I think at the end of the day we’ll be able to look back and see what/who fared better, based on actual data.