I remember when computer magazines were aimed at programmers and had code listings in them.
Then there seemed to come a time when all they talked about was the IBM vs. Microsoft lawsuit. From then on they must have felt that they had discovered a formula, because all they ever yapped about after was insider baseball of computer companies.
I find this sort of corp. vs. corp. coverage boring, sort of like techie reality TV. Who will be voted out tonight, Debra, or Deborah...?
I dunno man, there are two "tech" industry worlds and the one you and I -- hacker types -- think of as "tech" is not what the rest of the world means. They mean the other one, which has almost nothing to do with the actual technology and instead everything to do with the absolutely apeshit amount of money, power, influence and intrigue that the technology enabled.
This was a very large apeshit $$ amount back in IBM vs Microsoft but the scale of it now in the era of e.g. OpenAI etc is beyond imagination.
There's a whole generation of people whose association with the engineering/technology side of things only happened because of their interest in the other side of things.
What gets me is back in the day when I said I was into tech I got shat on for being a nerd. Now I get shit on for destroying the world. And because I don't care about whose company is dating who (I'd rather be coding), people call me out of touch with "tech".
I feel myself going insane when I think about it too much.
Interesting. So, the actual concern now for the average person is ... which narcissist is steering the apocalypse? Yeah, that's slightly more engaging than RAM prices.
Back in the day when it came out, I gotta admit, Docker sort of got my my nerves as yet another thing coming to 'disrupt' how things are done.
(Half assed NOSQL 'databases' with poorly thought out storage models, everything having to be a microservice, turning every function call into a fallible RPC call etc...)
But I've come to appreciate it more, and i use it regularly now. I appreciate its relative simplicity.
But as in life, hell is other people's containers. My own I can at least try to keep them simple and minimal.
But I have seen many use the kitchen sink approach, giving me the feeling that even the developer don't seem to know how they arrived at their deployment anymore.
But this all seems quaint today. With LLMs, now we can look forward to a flood of code the developers haven't even looked at, but which is widely believed to work...
Having been on way too many middle-of-the-night Zoom calls watching my company's DevOps and development teams aimlessly troubleshoot issues with containers and similar cloud first technologies, I am convinced that nobody really understands what's happening.
> "hey, why do mathematicians keep changing rules on the fly, they just told me square of minus one doesn't exist
Mathematicians aren’t chasing numerical solutions, they’re chasing structure. ℂ isn’t just about solving cubics, it’s about eliminating holes in algebra so the theory behaves uniformly and is easier to build upon.
And as for "changing rules" they haven't changed, they have broadened the field (literally) over which the old rules applied in a clever way to remove a restriction.
Far too many people decide to occupy the us vs. them part of their brain with National politics as opposed to sports.
Both are basically useless as it relates to your personal quality of life but at least with the latter you can see nice geometric combinations between players on a pitch and some incredible athleticism in between
It also looks hopelessly Gen Z to want all communication to be asynchronous and ignorable. If you guys have your way, we’ll all be connecting via API like 1U machines in a rack somewhere.
Seriously—if you’re going to go overboard, so can I.
WTF is it with everything having to be mediated by a machine these days? People can’t get around without GPS, remember phone numbers, or now even do their work or homework
without 'AI.'
How do you explain how people managed to do all of these things before without assistance? And how do you square that with telling 'boomers'—who were able to do these things—that they’re stupid and that you’re somehow better?
Seriously, it’s like we used to have weightlifting competitions where humans physically lifted weights overhead, and then you guys decided, "Nah, that’s too old and boomerish. From now on, all weightlifting competitions will use forklifts. Anyone who wants to lift the weights themselves is boomerish and stupid."
And where's your solidarity? If you lose your job, you may find yourself wishing you could meet people in person, when all your 'ignoreable,' electronically submitted job applications somehow get thrown away.
I think that LinkedIn writing style is so infectious that people who do have something to say wind up getting sucked into it and wind up dodging tomatoes in the comment section as a result.
There’s the prolific curmudgeon with a tomato cannon backed by a whole tomato farm and then there’s what you get when people thought your blog post was written by A.I. Ignore the first.
>then flee at maximum speed because a well-fed 200+lb apex predator is passing by, it sure looks like work and effort.
I think the 'effort' being described in the article—despite using analogies of overgripping and physical strain—is mental effort.
When the rabbit has escaped, he returns quickly to a relaxed state. A typical human reaction would be to continue to worry about the predator, to form plans to rid the whole _world_ of all predators, to build a fortress with grass to eat on the inside...
This whole saying that "Nature is red in tooth and claw" is overstated. Most animals have normal, humdrum days like we do.
However, I think it was the Buddhist teacher, Ajan Cha who said: "We live in a world where we must eat to survive, and some of us are uncomfortable about being eaten."
But this does not mean that every animal lives a life of unremitting terror all the time.
I’m wary of your use of 'romantic' as a descriptor here. It's a rhetorical shortcut which makes it easy to pre-emptively dismiss a position as naïve without further examination.
Only a touch of judgment? I must have been too subtle, then.
I’m not convinced that most animals have humdrum days. It’s hard to judge the “natural” state of an animal when I’m a terrifying predator, but even when I’m pretty sure they aren’t aware of my presence, their lives seem pretty stressful. The prey animals seem to be constantly worried about attacks, and the predators are always hungry.
Come on you can't come up with a single five minute period when observing animals where they seem to be calm?
That does not fit the evidence.
And besides you can read thousands of articles on HN about anxiety in humans, a mostly useless anxiety focused on societal 'threats' which we suffer from just as much.
At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.
Also if you compare animals lives to human ones, with our propensity for war and torture and persecution, I think the animals _do_ objectively live calmer lives.
You don't see them systematically tearing each other to pieces over made up goods like money.
I think this trope that "nature is a constant struggle" is a projection of human values (or lack of) onto nature.
I regard the experience of most animals as being something like living in a slasher movie their entire lives, and Lovecraft’s work as coming closest to describing life writ large, stripped of pleasant lies.
… but I still think it’s a notable feature of humanity that we can escape much of that for long periods, yet always seem to invent problems for ourselves, can find trouble and discontent even when they don’t seek us out. A rabbit may contend with predators, with hunger, but it doesn’t seem they’ll drive themselves crazy with worry and want when sated and resting in their den. They deal with what’s in front of them, in rabbit-ways, and that’s that. What will they do today? Rabbit stuff. If they’re left to do rabbit stuff without external resistance, will they be content? Yeah. Tomorrow, will they be upset because they’re still going rabbit stuff? No.
I still don’t buy the “slasher movie” framing of nature at all, and the only function 'pleasant lies' serves here is just low effort dismissal. :shrug:
Alas, I'm ceding ground by even arguing within your chosen framing. It's all very self defeating.
Frequent risk of sudden violent murder. And, like, credible relatively-high risk, not the “well a person might be murdered at any time, too”. Like fictional humans in a slasher-movie universe.
The “pleasant lies” mostly involve pretending about meaning, and avoiding thinking about huge scales. That’s the lovecraftian bit. Large-scale reality dwarfs and overwhelms us. We eke out sanity by ignoring it, by even being able to forget about or never thoughtfully engage with it.
My point is just that I largely agree with the other poster on the “nature of nature” as it were, but still find insight in the quoted passages. I don’t think they demand we regard nature as particularly safe or easy, for them to work.
Don’t forget terrible diseases, constant problems from parasites, etc.
There’s an ancient debate over whether wild animals age in the way humans do, or indeed at all. Of course they do, but this isn’t at all obvious since few wild animals live long enough to die of age, or even long enough for aging effects to become obvious.
> At least a deer is on the lookout for something real.
That is pretty much my point. Humans have the luxury of being anxious about stuff that’s not really a threat. Animals mostly don’t.
The ones who do are the ones who have come closest to achieving human luxury. My cats are often calm. They also get upset when they want to go outside but it’s cold.
Maybe I’m just projecting and my perception of animals as constantly worried about eating or being eaten is not real. Or maybe you’re projecting and your perception of calm is not real. Judging the mental state of animals is very difficult.
I worked in the US for a bit when I started out. I paid more income tax in CT than in Toronto on the same salary.
I just wanted to come back home. Even in small town CT, there were areas we were told to stay away from after dark.
reply