41–46 of 46 posts
I'd say it is saturation fatigue. 20 years ago, people who were online were kinda power users. Nowadays, internet is full of normies. Nothing wrong with that but it also means competition for everything has increased ten fold. Social networks used to be filled with smart people, now they are filled with average people and smart people are now just static noise in the background. Jobs in IT are the same. Instead of 5…
I like to read about the Industrial Revolution a lot, and I think a thing that’s lost in the the way we talk about luddites was the change from guild/skilled labor to factory labor. Software engineering is a lot like that old guild labor, you understand the whole of your craft (at the time called “mysteries”) and work to build things understanding that entirety. When things changed to factory / assembly lines, sure,…
Do you have any books to recommend to understand more about the luddites and industrial revolution? I want to learn more about historical analogues for our current moment and my current understanding is at the level of high school history class and popular knowledge.
I think it’s all about balance. In my free time I do “slow” programming: I read the timeless books of our craft (e.g., TAOCP), I spend lots of time writing code by hand, debugging, using pen and paper to think, etc. I love it. All the crap we have now (AI everywhere , technofeudalism, etc.) doesn’t get to bother me. Now, at work, I use AI , I get things done and call it a day. I can do that because I have fun outside…
Airbnb, Uber and Amazon were already making everything worse. We're past the "bleak threshold" for over 10 years now. Airbnb is inflating the real-estate bubble everywhere. Apartment building now are mass produced, tiny, and expensive, targeting investors who are only interested in Airbnb. Uber/ifood and other transport/delivery apps are just working around labor laws, undoing centuries of progress towards worker rig…
As far as Uber, was it better when there was both a medallion system monopoly in cities like New York and less access to cabs? Where people had to rent overpriced medallions and couldn’t make any money Or sometimes depending on what you looked like, where you were going or where you were coming from, you couldn’t get a cab at all. https://abcnews.go.com/GMA/race-cab-hailing-ride-black-white... I have used Uber all ov…
I was talking about the civilized world.