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Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

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Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#31

Post by lightedman »

mikewarot wrote: post #5

So, today I'm one of the lucky 10,000[1] who finally understands what "black pilled" actually means. (Edit: The video explains what black pilled means) As a mapper[2], that knowledge now gets subconsciously checked for matches and usefulness against all the other chunks of knowledge I'm fairly certain of. The first thing that popped out (and there will be more over the next 24+ hours) is that y'all are black pilled a…

"y'all are black pilled about computers and security. You believe, incorrectly, that computers can't be safe AND secure AND easy to use all at the same time"

This is basic fact. Man can make it; man can break it. I've never come across anything in my 44 years of life where this wasn't true.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#32

Post by ianbutler »

spudlyo wrote: post #19

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such…

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers".

I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#33

Post by helloplanets »

In the same vein, Jonathan Blow's modestly named "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko

Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#34

Post by jlhawn »

leecommamichael wrote: post #28

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently. Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this…

I have so far only completed about 14 minutes of the talk, but I would imagine it to be some sort of relatable analogy which foreshadows what the thesis of the talk is about. The "Christian Parents" are the authority figure and following their rules, lessons, and expectations for dating is a lot like doing only the software engineering tasks that management prioritizes for you. You end up unsatisfied with your life to the point where you become jaded about software (software development is like "dating" in this analogy) instead of learning the skills necessary to wield influence over what you get to work on. I'll watch the rest to see if I'm right.

edit: it's wasn't just about developing software but also using software. You don't have to accept the bad situation you're in (or the bad software you've been given or told to use). Finally, I'll say that while the speaker's comment about conservative christian upbringing isn't a universal one, it is a widely shared one. If you take offense by it maybe take a moment to pause and consider that maybe the way you were exposed to it was probably more balanced than what many others experience, or in the worst case that maybe your negative reaction to it is a sort of defense mechanism that you've learned to shield yourself from confronting the reality that your own conservative christian upbringing was not so good after all?.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#35

Post by Lerc »

leecommamichael wrote: post #28

> “I almost fell into this trap (...) I was raised by conservative Christian parents and thereby had so, so much to learn, and unlearn, in order to date comfortable and confidently. Is this engagement bait? Is this a cultural critique? What is meant to be said here? At any rate, this is the kind of speech which will alienate a lot of people. Look, I'm more on the progressive end of things, I get it, but I think this…

This not a rare thing to express. There are a lot of people raised under conservative Christian environments who have spent a considerable amount of time recovering from this. It is not surprising that they feel the need to express something of the journey that has dominated much of their early life.

Taylor Tomlinson puts much of this into her comedy. She often asks the audience to call out if they were similarly screwed up by their religious upbringing. The is a loud audience response every time.

While I don't agree with Andrew Kelly's adversarial attitude, I do understand it a little more from the perspective of someone who had to fight his way out of an ideology that will not seek consensus with his values.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#36

Post by christophilus »

helloplanets wrote: post #33

In the same vein, Jonathan Blow's modestly named "Preventing the Collapse of Civilization" talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSRHeXYDLko Crazy how time flies, given that talk is seven years old at this point. But could've been given today, with the points being more relevant than ever.

One of my favorite talks.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#37

Post by nz »

jagadaga wrote: post #8

I watched 8 minutes and feel like my time was wasted. Thank you. Yeah, we always knew how to build reliable software, but it's expensive.

Unreliable software is also expensive. Rather, building reliable software is incompatible with a management policy that rewards and punishes people based on KPIs (basically leading indicators). The concept of KPIs is fine, but they should (a) be actual indicators of progress, and (b) be kept secret from employees (so that we can avoid or mitigate Goodhart's Law). Both of those things are difficult, because you need a rigorous statistical model of what correlates, and you need to keep that model a secret, while also changing the KPIs periodically, to prevent employees from intuitively overfitting. That whole process would be very expensive (and if it would not, why is nobody doing it).

Furthermore, software that is reliable, is also software that is done (in the sense that AVL Trees, and ZFS, and DTrace, and ZSTD, and slab allocators are done -- they are very close to perfect, and require minimal changes, related to compilers and kernels and computer architectures). A team that builds reliable software, is a team that cannot be "managed". What exactly is there to manage?

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#38

Post by bryanrasmussen »

ianbutler wrote: post #32
spudlyo wrote: post #19

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark. Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such…

I don't think this is really entirely true. Everyone who isn't a FAANG or Frontier Lab seem to be absolutely starving for good talent. It's far more often that I hear "we interviewed someone we thought looked good and they couldn't even write a for loop, where are all the good engineers". I think you have far more leverage than you think in most places still.

I don't think I have ever encountered anyone who could not write a for loop that got a job as a programmer.

I encounter plenty that used a for loop when something else would have been advisable.

Re: Don't Take the Black Pill [video]

#40

Post by DangitBobby »

I'm much more interested in a realistic bang for your buck discussion about software value for effort and diminishing returns rather than a conversation about whether it's possible to build great software.

Also notable that not up for discussion was any second order effects about user interaction with software; software always must serve its user in the immediate first order. Why? I suppose it's because if you attempt to examine nth order effects the proposition completely falls apart because the world is much more complicated than "software must serve the end user".

Finally, the purpose of software isn't determined by the end user, nor necessarily its author. A user can have their goals, the author(s) theirs, the funding body theirs, and so on. The "purpose" is diffused in this way until what's left is what it does. Saying it _must_ serve the user is a principled stance reflecting a world view, but it's just that. That are other coherent worldviews where software has more than one master. Or no master.

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