The word "engineer" origin (from Oxford Dictionary):

Middle English (denoting a designer and constructor of fortifications and weapons; formerly also as ingineer ): in early use from Old French engigneor, from medieval Latin ingeniator, from ingeniare ‘contrive, devise’, from Latin ingenium (see engine); in later use from French ingénieur or Italian ingegnere, also based on Latin ingenium

Would be great if we had a less war-like derived word for our profession.

I know this is easy for me to say but I really want to encourage you and other hardware people to innovate on extremely cheap consumer facing commodity p2p/mesh communication devices. I've been teaching myself electronics and RF to try to be able to meaningfully contribute.

It's dumb that we have these super computers in our pockets with long range antennas and in order to talk to each other they have to go through central intermediaries and paid access.

I want ad-hoc geographically local connectivity without service providers.

One sometimes gets to a second take on that: you don't want to make machines that kill people, until invaders from another country ride into your country (or a country of your friends/neighbors) and start killing, raping and torturing. And suddenly, as you feel frustrated and powerless, you realize that even though you don't want to make machines that kill people, you pretty much have to, otherwise those people will come for you, your family and your friends.

I thought humanity would grow out of senseless aggression in 2024, but here we are. And yes, I am basing this on a specific real-world example of a country invading another country right next to mine, and my specific thoughts and beliefs.

Unfortunately most of today's software is also going down that route, if not necessarily killing people then most likely making their lives a lot more nightmare-ish. AI is a very good example of that.

You could instead work on a robot performing surgery ... Just one example.

You could work in autonomous driving!