Yeah that was pretty much my thought throughout the piece.
It felt like the author was punching down, too. This Cluely founder seems largely unsuccessful and, as the boat guy says at the end, just a kid. A chud of a kid, but a kid nonetheless.
Agreed, but not because it agrees with the logic of Roko's Basilisk. If it actually did agree with it, it would be too stupid to be a super-intelligence.
Interesting comment. I haven't heard this problem phrased this way nor have I heard of these schools, do you have a recommendation for learning more about this?
> At the turn of the 20th century, a crucial debate emerged between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey over the viability of democracy in an increasingly complex world. Lippmann critiqued democracy’s reliance on public opinion, arguing that citizens construct simplified “pseudo-environments” shaped by media and stereotypes, rendering them ill-equipped to make informed decisions on vast global issues. He warned that modern democracies are driven more by emotionally charged reactions than by accurate understanding, and that media, language, and time constraints further distort reality. Dewey responded not by dismissing Lippmann’s concerns, but by reframing democracy as more than a political system—it was, to him, an ethical ideal and a form of social cooperation. Viewing society as an interconnected organism, Dewey believed individuals flourish only through participation and education. He saw democracy as a continuous process of mutual growth, where every person contributes uniquely, and where the antidote to authoritarianism lies in cultivating thoughtful, empowered citizens—not in retreating from democratic ideals, but in deepening them.
She puts it all together relatively succinctly if dense. You can just read Dewey too if you want to be closer to the source. He's a bit more interesting because it is more of the road not taken out of the progressive era.
Code review is rarely done live. It's usually asynchronous, giving the reviewer plenty of time to read, digest, and give considered feedback on the changes.
Perhaps a spicy patch would involve some kind of meeting. Or maybe in a mentor/mentee situation where you'd want high-bandwidth communication.
Yeah when we first started, "code review" was a weekly meeting of pretty much the entire dev team (maybe 10 people). Not all commits were reviewed, it was random and the developer would be notified a couple of days in advance that his code was chosen for review so that he could prepare to demo and defend it.
Wow, that's a very arbitrary practice: do you remember roughly when was that?
I was in a team in 2006 where we did the regular, 2-approve-code-reviews-per-change-proposal (along with fully integrated CI/CD, some of it through signed email but not full diffs like Linux patchsets, but only "commands" what branch to merge where).
Around that time frame. We had CI and if you broke the build or tests failed it was your job to drop anything else you were doing and fix it. Nothing reached the review stage unless it could build and pass unit tests.
This was still practice at $BIG_FINANCE in the couple of years just before covid, although by that point such team reviews were reducing in importance and prominence.
Am old enough that this was status quo for part of my career, and have also been in some groups that did this as a rejection of modern code review techniques.
There are pros & cons to both sides. As you point out it's quite expensive in terms of time to do the in person style. Getting several people together is a big hassle. I've found that the code reviews themselves, and what people get out of them, are wildly different though. In person code reviews have been much more holistic in my experience, sometimes bordering on bigger picture planning. And much better as a learning tool for other people involved. Whereas the diff style online code review tends to be more focused on the immediate concerns.
There's not a right or wrong answer between those tradeoffs, but people need to realize they're not the same thing.
I would guess that 3 part code review would actually be most effective. Likely even save on costs. First part is walkthrough on call, next independent review and comments. Then per need an other call over fixes or discussion.
Probably spend more time on it, but would share the understanding and alignment.
And yet... is it? Realtime means real discussion, and opportunity to align ever so slightly on a common standard (which we should write down!), and an opportunity to share tacit knowledge.
It also increases the coverage area of code that each developer is at least somewhat familiar with.
On a side note, I would love if the default was for these code reviews to be recorded. That way 2 years later when I am asked to modify some module that no one has touched in that span, I could at least watch the code review and gleem something about how/why this was architect-ed the way it was.
My kid got a copy of your first book as a gift a couple years ago. It's really fun to have on the shelf. The buttons are so satisfyingly clicky. Thanks!
Is this still a problem? Your example video is from nearly twenty years ago, RAM is over a decade old. I think the advent of streaming (and perhaps lessons learned) have made this less of a problem. I can't remember hearing any recent examples (but I also don't listen to a lot of music that might be victim to the practice); the Wikipedia article lacks any examples from the last decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Thankfully there have been some remasters that have undone the damage. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and Absolution come to mind.
Certified Audio Engineer here. The Loudness Wars more or less ended over the last decade or so due to music streaming services using loudness normalization (they effectively measure what each recording's true average volume is and adjust them all up or down on an invisible volume knob to have the same average)
Because of this it generally makes more sense these days to just make your music have an appropriate dynamic range for the content/intended usage. Some stuff still gets slammed with compression/limiters, but it's mostly club music from what I can tell.
This goes along with what I saw growing up. You had the retail mastering (with RIAA curve for LP, etc.) and then the separate radio edit which had the compression that the stations wanted - so they sounded louder and wouldn't have too much bass/treble. And also wouldn't distort on the leased line to the transmitter site.
And of course it would have all the dirty words removed or changed. Like Steve Miller Band's "funky kicks going down in the city" in Jet Airliner
I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics, or because of the studios wanting to save money and only pay for the radio edit. Possibly both - reduced production costs and not having to pay big-name engineers. "My sister's cousin has this plug-in for his laptop and all you do is click a button"...
> I still don't know if the compression in the Loudness War was because of esthetics,
Upping the gain increases the relative "oomph" of the bass at the cost of some treble, right?
As a 90s kid with a bumping system in my Honda, I can confidently say we were all about that bass long before Megan Trainor came around. Everyone had the CD they used to demo their system.
Because of that, I think the loudness wars were driven by consumer tastes more than people will admit (because then we'd have to admit we all had poor taste). Young people really loved music with way too much bass. I remember my mom (a talented musician) complaining that my taste in music was all bass.
Of course, hip hop and rap in the 90s were really bass heavy, but so was a lot of rock music. RHCP, Korn, Limp Bizkit, and Slipknot come to my mind as 90s rock bands that had tons of bass in their music.
Freak on a Leash in particular is a song that I feel like doesn't "translate" well to modern sound system setups. Listening to it on a setup with a massive subwoofer just hits different.
The bass player tuned the strings down a full step to be quite loose, and turned the treble up which gave it this really clicky tone that sounded like a bunch of tictacs being thrown down an empty concrete stairwell.
He wanted it to be percussive to cut through the monster lows of the guitar.
I have an Audio Developer Conference talk about this topic if you care to follow the history of it. I have softened my stance a bit on the criticism of the 90’s (yeah, people were using lookahead limiting over exuberantly because of its newness) but the meat of the talk may be of interest anyway.
You can see some 2025 releases are good but many are still loudness war victims. Even though streaming services normalize loudness, dynamic range compression will make music sound better on phone speakers, so there's still reason to do it.
IMO, music production peaked in the 80s, when essentially every mainstream release sounded good.
Poor societies are perfectly capable of criticizing hedonism. I don't see what's luxurious about criticizing the many examples of absurd resource waste through luxury good consumption.
It felt like the author was punching down, too. This Cluely founder seems largely unsuccessful and, as the boat guy says at the end, just a kid. A chud of a kid, but a kid nonetheless.
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