I have nowhere near the experience managing such complex systems, but I can empathize with this. In a high-pressure situations the most obvious things get missed. If someone is convinced System X is at fault, your mind can make leaps to justify every other degraded system is a downstream effect of that. Cause and effect can get switched.
Sometimes you have smart people in the room who dig deeper and fish it out, but you cannot always rely on that.
I don't even know what the selling point of AI is for regular people. In the 60s it was possible for a man to work an ordinary job, buy a house, settle down with a wife and support two or three children. That's completely out of the realm of reality for many young people now and the plummeting birth rates show it.
The middle class have financially benefited very little from the past 20+ years of productivity gains.
Social media is driving society apart, making people selfish, jealous, and angry.
Do people really think more technology is going to be the path to a better society? Because to me it looks like the opposite. It will just be used to stomp on ordinary people and create even more inequality.
I'm reminded of how time pieces such as sundials changed societies, and how some ancients almost lost their minds due to this new development.
“The Gods confound the man who first found out
How to distinguish the hours---confound him, too Who in this place set up a sundial
To cut and hack my days so wretchedly
Into small pieces
! . . . I can't (even sit down to eat) unless the sun gives leave. The town's so full of these confounded dials . . .”
― Plautus
The only decisions that matter for languages that get adopted are the decisions that cause adoption.
JS went without static types, Go went without generics, PHP was just a tool for reducing html boilerplate. New languages love to stick null right in there. Rust isn't what Graydon Hoare wanted it to be. Chris Lattner called Swift a failure.
I have found a fairly interesting correlation between people who are good at learning programming and people who are good at English spelling bees. Something about holding a lot of anecdotes and esoteric rule exceptions when performing an otherwise algorithmic process.
You can't do Tokyo in 24 hours, you are going to miss many of the "do-not-miss" anyways. So you will have to make choices.
First thing to realize is that Tokyo is not really a single city but a prefecture, it is like a bunch of smaller cities (wards) stuck together, and there are 23 of them. They all more or less independent and they have their own center, and they also have some kind of theme. All that to say that there is no "downtown Tokyo", and choosing what to do in Tokyo is essentially about the districts you will choose to visit.
Which one depends on your interests. Shinjuku which is a major business center at day and a shady (but still safe!) place at night, Shibuya for fashion and youth, Roppongi for foreigners and its nightlife, Asakusa for its temple, Yoyogi's park, Akihabara "Otaku" mekka, Odaiba's futuristic vibe, Ikebukuro's shopping centers and arcades, Ginza's luxury, etc... Tokyo-Edo museum is indeed awesome if you are interesting in the history of the city, and it certainly a "do-not-miss", but on a 24-hours stay, you have to make choices.
If I had to pick one to add to any list, maybe Shibuya crossing. It is one of the most famous sights of Tokyo and a symbol of the busy city it is. It is also right out of the station on the Yamanote line, so close to other notable places. Just north is Harajuku, Yoyogi, and Shinjuku, all worthwhile.
I don't know how to articulate it, but wherever I hear the financial analysts talking about how much work AI is going to do for us, I just have this spidey-sense that they're severely underestimating the social aspect of why anyone tries to achieve a good outcome
they think they can just spend 100,000$ on GPUs and get 10x the output of someone buying a house and raising kids getting paid a 6 figure salary
I find this absolutely nothing like delegating to an intern personally. Interns usually do their best because they will be held accountable if they don't.
When I look into the future, and I know that I really can't, one thing I really believe in is that there will be a shift in how quality will be perceived.
With all things around me there is a sense that technology is to be a saviour for many very important things - ev's, medicine, it, finance etc.
At the same time it is more and more clear to me that technology is used primarily to grow a market, government, country etc. But it does that by layering on top of already leaking abstractions. It's like solving a problem by only trying to solvent be its symptoms.
Quality has a sense of slowness to it which I believe will be a necessary feat, both due to the fact that curing symptoms will fall short and because I believe that the human species simply cannot cope with the challenges by constantly applying more abstractions.
The notion about going faster is wrong to me, mostly because I as a human being do not believe that quality is done by not understanding the fundamentals of a challenge, and by trying to solve it for superficial gains is simply unintelligent.
LLMs is a disaster to our field because it caters to the average human fallacy of wanting to reach a goal but without putting in the real work to do so.
The real work is of course to understand what it is that you are really trying to solve with applying assumptions about correctness.
Luckily not all of us is trying to move faster but instead we are sharpening our minds and tools while we keep re-learing the fundamentals and applying thoughtful decisions in hope to make quality that will stand the test of time.
Don't know about Rob Pike in particular but Ken Thompson, who probably had the same reasons for "hating" Stroustrup, had this to say about him (from Coders at Work):
Seibel: You were at AT&T with Bjarne Stroustrup. Were you involved at all in the development of C++?
Thompson: I'm gonna get in trouble.
Seibel: That's fine.
Thompson: I would try out the language as it was being developed and make comments on it. It was part of the work atmosphere there. And you'd write something and then the next day it wouldn't work because the language changed. It was very unstable for a very long period of time. At some point I said, no, no more.
In an interview I said exactly that, that I didn't use it just because it wouldn't stay still for two days in a row. When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on. Since then I kind of avoid that kind of stuff.
Seibel: Can you say now whether you think it's a good or bad language?
Thompson: It certainly has its good points. But by and large I think it's a bad language. It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive. Everybody I know, whether it's personal or corporate, selects a subset and these subsets are different. So it's not a good language to transport an algorithm—to say, “I wrote it; here, take it.” It's way too big, way too complex. And it's obviously built by a committee.
Stroustrup campaigned for years and years and years, way beyond any sort of technical contributions he made to the language, to get it adopted and used. And he sort of ran all the standards committees with a whip and a chair. And he said “no” to no one. He put every feature in that language that ever existed. It wasn't cleanly designed—it was just the union of everything that came along. And I think it suffered drastically from that.
Seibel: Do you think that was just because he likes all ideas or was it a way to get the language adopted, by giving everyone what they wanted?
Thompson: I think it's more the latter than the former.
I lived in NYC for 10 years (the majority of my 20s).
Yes, people talk about their rent and their apartments (amongst many other things!), but it's because it's one of the things they all have in common— they rent. And because we loved to collectively complain about things.
And not once in the 10 years did I have bed bugs. I think I knew one other person with them (barring I'm sure a few who never shared).
All that being said, there is absolutely a housing shortage AND things in NYC are tougher than anywhere else. But I liken NYC to the doughnut added to the baseball bat when batters warm up— once you take it off (and live anywhere else) everything feels easier.
I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this— that rich men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck.
He falls more towards the idiot savant side for me. Not because he was necessarily dumb, but he channeled his intelligence in such useless ways. All raw intellect, and no cohesion, theme or application.
I read his story as a cautionary tale, along with Euler, someone to be pitied.
Plato, Da Vinci, Einstein tried to make sense of the bigger picture. They grounded their intellect in the real world.
Thats cuz you think of it as a tech/content company, instead of Wall St financializing content.
In the same way they did mortgages. The people who built the houses that were sold to people who couldnt afford them, were also standing around scratching their head.
Its a joke because there is an upper limit to what the world can offer for content. Only the finance robots who run these companies believe it doesnt matter.
After all this time, Netflix hasnt been able to get more than 200-250 million subscribers, even though Startups and CEOs love to bray about how the internet is full of billions of people, just waiting to hand over their cash. The truth is vast ocean of people dont have cash.
And now the market capture phase is complete. The people who can pay, have already been corralled into pens and are milked everyday. The finance class then turns their attention to milking the "subprime" crowd. Give them credit cards. Get the advertisers involved. Reduce the VFX, content creation, animation budgets, layoff those self important expensive engineers.
Such a system doesn't generate software quality beyond a point, cuz it doesn't need it. In a few years Netflix will look like Yahoo.
Tech and Content do not run the world. Finance does. Sooner or later into the ground. Cause the goal of milking cows hits an upper limit.
Let's get this straight. The person blessed with what is basically a panhandling superpower -- an attractive female body -- somehow says her marks, the ones paying $80, have an entitled attitude toward sexual attention. Pause and think about that. Do you think these guys had a Plan B to buy them an English degree?
These places conduct zero-sum economic activity. One person loses money, one person gains money, and nothing of value is created. Draw a control volume around an economic activity to understand it. China: Opium in, silver out. Congo: Guns in, rubber out. This place: Money in, nothing out.
A hallmark of exploiters is that they have contempt for their marks. Well, I sense more than a little contempt here. Don't trust this person around children or small animals.
Of course she justifies herself eloquently; did you not just see what she spent the money on? An English degree.
Moreover, she admits that she understands what she was doing:
> my livelihood somehow still depended on men employing bad judgement.
So don't get distracted. Draw a control volume. And stay away from these places, and these people.
Most people here commenting, even those praising this writing, who will surely rush to defend her, must at some level clearly understand this. Like -- do you frequent prostitutes? ... Didn't think so. So you know I'm right.
- during long game, chess grand masters have physiology comparable to marathon runner, while he runs. Deep thinking for several hours, takes huge load on body. All the logic and critical thinking, is not going to save you, if you are not fit, and your brain does not work correctly.
- real life is not about solving puzzles. Real life is a rigged game where rules are not enforced. Instead of finding problems to solve, you need to find oportunities (and loopholes) and exploit them!
- game is rigged, and oportunities close fast. What worked a couple of years ago, probably does not work anymore.
Thanks for the wall of text, I don’t doubt basic research is valuable and never wrote anything like that, so you could have saved that typing.
> The 9th Dedekind number is unlikely to be useful, but its pursuit may be valuable in ways we can't imagine.
The fact that you can’t imagine it doesn’t mean somebody else can’t imagine it. If you can’t imagine it, save the typing and let somebody that can imagine it reply, next time.
This guide is interesting but extremely out of date. I recommend Ruby Under a Microscope[1] though it is also out of date as well (but less out of date than the Ruby Hacking Guide)
This about sums up most Monty Python and Rick & Morty references as well.
A lot of nerd/hacker culture falls into this kind of recognition of unique humor and wit, then squeezing every little drop of joy out of it until it's as empty as a Garfield cartoon.
Anyone who disagrees with Kaczynski's ideas because they came from a convicted terrorist should read the works of Jacques Ellul instead, of which Kaczynski's was largely a popular reduction. The Technological Society is the clearest influence on Kaczynski's manifesto, but Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes is possibly more pertinent in this day and age.
Ellul was a professor, a pacifist, and a Christian anarchist. Attacks the ideas, not the man.
> Anyone writing these things today in C or C++ already understands object lifetimes and Rust just adds a static checker for them.
I've certainly seen seasoned C++ programmers saying this. Of course, a few of them of say they understand object lifetimes so well, they they don't need the static checker!
> Why on earth would you try to rewrite python CRUD apps in Rust?
This is one of the great mysteries of our times. I do think the enthusiasm for using Rust for web apps and such (a) is misplaced and (b) has been a drag on Rust developing into a better C++ replacement.
How ironic that Rust should have the most problems arising as a result of shared ownership.
Perhaps they should consider a model where the entity has a single logical owner and requests to change its state are made by passing messages to that owner…
> handing things over to other people to carry on.
"other people" means: corporate stooges
______
not the first time in history that voices appear to demand that a leader of some project, someone with a proven track record of principles over status/power/wealth, be replaced. typically what they're really asking for is a leader that's easier to pressure, more amenable to their interests. this is even more the case if they're demanding that the replacement be selected on the basis of immutable characteristics unrelated to the project.
At some point, I became disenchanted with tech and working as a software engineer when I realized that tech doesn't ethically fit into our primitive economic organization right now. It's made me feel bad about myself and the career path I've chosen.
Basically, with tech, you can build a product with a very limited amount of people and resources with a potentially infinite customer base. And this means that this product can suck up money from the whole world and redirect it into the hands of very few. At its essence, this is the case. With tech, this phenomena is exacerbated to the extreme compared to other industries where more physical resources and labor are required to scale production and distribution of the product, which means more wealth getting spread.
At its core, tech has the potential to exacerbate wealth inequality in mind-boggling proportions.
If you tell your bathroom remodelers that you want green tiles after they have already done half of it with red and by the way you want the bathtub in a different place and you also aren’t sure yet if if you need a toilet bowl then their estimates will get out of hand pretty quickly. And your bathroom should be able to handle a 200 person family just in case although right now there are only two people in the house. And to save money you hire people from the street who don’t speak your language and have no experience but we all know one worker is one worker. They are all the same so when you hire cheap workers your cost is less without loss of productivity.
Sometimes you have smart people in the room who dig deeper and fish it out, but you cannot always rely on that.