[flagged]
I hereby pardon all junior engineers
21–30 of 57 posts
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure if it isn't a losing material information in that process. It is easy to compress anything to true/false if you're willing to live with information loss. I think material information was lost in the aforementioned "Country X can't build anything" hot-take.
So people compress to the point where the speed vs information loss tradeoff makes instinctive sense to them. You can dramatically increase your computing power if you're not constantly deriving everything from the fundamental physics and instead rely on some stereotypes. This ranges from "objects that look like that are chairs" to "I can sit on chairs" to "Americans can/can't do X"
It's amusing that this text chain is about derivations when in reality we can reference a direct quote. We're not deriving any meaning here.
I'll leave it as an exercise to you to find that direct quote, as it'll be sure you actually read the comment :)
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#23I connected with this, I've had many of the same thoughts lately. It's a thoughtful essay and I have no idea why it's been flagged?
> When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) and APL (1966) and sketchpad (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React.
It feels like this has worsened even just in the last 15 years. When I started in the industry (2008ish) it felt like there was a lot of experimentation and new ideas compared to today. Memes like "language wars" and "javascript framework of the week" come from the recent past when there was not the same monoculture of like 3 big JS frameworks, 5 big languages, etc
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you can't generalize then you can't think If you blindly follow others' generalizations without question, you can't think.
Compression is a form of intelligence
Sure, but blindly following something without question, isn't compression, even though both happen to involve reduction.
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#25> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…
It has been my experience that there are good and bad engineers from all origins; Americans do not have a monopoly on it in either direction, nor does anyone else.
Good and bad in the sense that they can achieve management's directives? Yes, anyone from any culture so long as they have a practical grasp of the language they're working in can adapt to the circumstance.
But the culture starts at the top. Everything within the U.S. spiritual ecosystem is geared towards a superficial approach to all things. One example in the vein of engineering is Ford vs. Toyota. Anyone who has owned both of these can attest to the difference. There is a craftsmanship culture within Japan that I'm sure we're all acquainted with, but there are also much more subtle values at play (f.e. duty, sacrifice, etc.) that color everything an individual, and the society he makes up, touches. The individuals of America do not have strong values or sensibilities. I want to say this is because of its quality of being a "cultural melting pot." But this aspect of it doesn't turn it into a stone soup, where all the different and varied ingredients work together to make something unique, with surprisingly complimentary flavors. Instead, I think it turns into an actual crucible, where people of all different mettle are melted down; and all of the extraneous spiritual slag is scooped off the top, before being poured out as a completely uniform metal, without a noticeable difference batch-to-batch.
Instead of refining and building upon a culture, as 99% of other nations do, America specializes in annihilating it, and integrating the stray quality here and there that it finds useful towards its ends. And its ends is something I cannot even begin to know.
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#26Taylor was one of my favorite people at strange loop this year. His outfits were fantastic. I love his blog even more. And he's a courageous and deep thinker.
Aww what kind words! Come stay at our place if you're ever in the Southern California area :) If you want to copy my outfits, I find all of my strange clothes at Anime Expo every July! I just purchased an egg sweater from a vendor I found there: https://shop.kinwamonster.com/products/cardigan-egg
That would be great! I hope to do that someday.
I'm trying to take my daughters to Japan in March. Let me know if you need anything direct from the source!
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#27I connected with this, I've had many of the same thoughts lately. It's a thoughtful essay and I have no idea why it's been flagged? > When fewer than 5,000 programmers existed, they built Lisp (1960) and APL (1966) and sketchpad (1963). With over 5 million programmers today, the best we can do is Rust and React. It feels like this has worsened even just in the last 15 years. When I started in the industry (2008ish) i…
It has a distinctively LinkedIn style of writing, e.g. many one-sentence paragraphs. Could be why.
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#28> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…
I'd love to try the software products from these countries, but I can't deny that some of the very things spoken of in the article came from the origins of which you speak. Samsung made Tizen, and many of the 'TVs with eyes and ears' out there. BMW was apparently the flagship for heated seats as a service. To be fair, Nintendo is pretty good at innovation in both hardware and software, but not so much at cutting edge…
China's Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope (FAST) is a nifty bit of now proven novel engineering with active shaping and nimble receiver positioning.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#29> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…
I'd love to try the software products from these countries, but I can't deny that some of the very things spoken of in the article came from the origins of which you speak. Samsung made Tizen, and many of the 'TVs with eyes and ears' out there. BMW was apparently the flagship for heated seats as a service. To be fair, Nintendo is pretty good at innovation in both hardware and software, but not so much at cutting edge…
Ableton comes from Germany for instance - not my cup of tea personally but by all accounts great software.
Samsung meanwhile has a significant software development presence in California.
Re: I hereby pardon all junior engineers
#30> It seems like nobody knows how to build things anymore. The Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Germans, etc might disagree. There's a lot of people out there who seem to be able to build very high quality things fairly quickly. It seems like it's the Americans that are struggling. We have for a long time, actually. I would argue we just have a shitty building culture. We chase trends, cheap out on materials and salaries,…
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