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Time is the only real currency we have

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Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#181

Post by kubanczyk »

cryptica wrote: post #34

Unfortunately, in essentially all big corporations, the incentives encourage developers to waste as much time as possible - Mostly by focusing their attention on creating elaborate and ever-changing development processes and constantly adding unnecessary software complexity at the same time. This doesn't work well at all when you also allow individuals to detach themselves from any responsibility over the code that t…

Organizations (I mean the power structures made of people called managers) are machines that sit between (a) people selling their time and (b) people who buy stuff/service.

If you are either kind of people and the big organization sucks for you, use a smaller one maybe? Or find another big one that works acceptably? Talk about one differs slightly from another?

You can rant about the deficiencies of big organizations or you can observe a well known fact that it is a very hard civilization-wide problem. Fortunes are made even from minuscule optimizations in this area and there is no shortage of execs experimenting with these. And here enter you with "the reality is that [employee's] work probably doesn't matter".

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#182

Post by bittercynic »

amakine wrote: post #146
fersho311 wrote: post #80

I have a hard time empathizing with people’s desire for saving time or being efficient. I feel like all I have is time and I don’t mind helping others out when they need help, filling out useless forms, or waiting in line. Everything sort of have its own beauty. I’m not sure how I got here, but to me time just feels infinite.

I really would love to believe that this mindset is possible, but I run into the following problem: If time really seems infinite to you, and you see the beauty in every "overly time-consuming" procedure, you must draw the line somewhere. If you wait in line, and every minute, the next in line is served, and you are standing in 5th place, you might think "ok, we've got to wait..give or take 5mins" Now imagine that ev…

Not the one you asked, but I have a similar attitude, and some sense of trust and fairness is necessary to maintain this attitude.

If I'm in urgent care for a relatively non-serious problem, and people who much more urgently need care keep getting served ahead of me, that just seems like the right way to do things, and I'll be happy to wait my turn, or eventually give up and go home.

On the other hand, in line to pay for purchases I would not like for someone to cut in front of me. It's rude, and there is an established norm that they would be selfishly breaking.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#183

Post by choeger »

> Figure how/where your application code runs.

Most important advise to become a useful software engineer. I did not want to believe how many developers just did not give a damn about what exactly makes their code execute and when that happens.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#184

Post by clairity »

didericis wrote: post #161
clairity wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that’s kind of (not as eloquently) how i came to land on the labor theory of value needing to be more prominent in economic policy. our application of energy (both physical and mental) transforms matter and collects/redirects ambient energy to productive use. that’s what generates value—gold in the ground is essentially worthless until we use labor to extract it. that it’s rare and has other interesting properties th…

Time is easily wasted, though. The labor theory of value ignores this, and ignores the value of cleverness as a result. If I need to grind wheat for bread every day, I could spend hours a day working hard to grind it by hand, or I could spend a month or so to build a very basic water wheel/grindstone and free up all that time. The resultant bread is still bread either way. If someone chooses to spend all their time d…

you're presuming the value and price are static in that example.

once the capital investment has been made, the price of the bread will go down because less labor will be used to make it, as the marginal cost of the bread goes down. the labor in the capital investment will be amortized over time in the price. the capital investment itself should only capture the riskiness portion of the project, not the majority of the resultant productivity gains.

and in many cases, people do pay more for a product made using more labor--i pay more for my manually-roasted beans than i would for mass-roasted ones. the higher price reflects the added labor in the value chain.

that's what i mean by the labor theory of value being more prominent, not to the exclusion of other theories of value.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#185

Post by lisper »

bbbobbb wrote: post #178
lisper wrote: post #133

I agree with the sentiment of this article, but strongly disagree with the title, and the advice to learn to type fast. The title is abuse (or misunderstanding) of the word "currency". Currency is an accounting mechanism. Time is, well, something else. It's an incredibly valuable commodity, a necessary (but not sufficient) ingredient for any activity and hence any kind of progress, and one which you cannot make more…

> There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C) That's quite an extraordinary claim. Would you mind sharing some examples of that?

It's very hard to give short examples because for any short example you can find another language that does the same thing with similar effort. For example, this:

https://edicl.github.io/cl-who/

is basically PHP embedded in Common Lisp. So any example I give you to show how cool CL-WHO is you could render it in PHP and conclude that PHP is similarly cool.

The Big Win only happens if you want to combine a feature that is best served by language X with some other feature that is best served by language Y. In the non-Lisp world, you now have to start gluing together code from entirely different ecosystems, whereas in Common Lisp everything lives together in the CL ecosystem (including nowadays the ability to call C code). So I can combine CL-WHO seamlessly with other programs written in CL (and C). That turns out to be a huge win in the long run.

It pretty much comes down to Greenspun's tenth rule [1]. Macros and the ability to embed DSLs are a huge win in certain domains. Two which I have personally worked in are autonomous spacecraft control and chip design. You can do things in Lisp that you could not even conceive of doing in C short of, as Greenspun's tenth observes, basically re-inventing Lisp.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#186

Post by acituan »

I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market.

I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But humans are not machines. Sure, we shepherd the machines, and sure sometimes we are in rivalrous dynamics that increasing efficiency has a payoff, but it is never the goal in itself.

The real "currency" we have, if we are using the term in the sense of denoting essentialness, is our humanness, our mortality, our psyches, our connection with other people and seemingly mundane but meaningful parts of our lives. I mean, look how many of us started baking their breads and enjoying it. It is not a wise use of the "currency of time", but it is part of life very well spent, as our internal reward mechanisms have been telling us.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#187

Post by kazinator »

lisper wrote: post #185
bbbobbb wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are domains in which I can get 100x or 1000x improvements (i.e. 1 line of Lisp code is the equivalent of 1000 lines of Java or C) That's quite an extraordinary claim. Would you mind sharing some examples of that?

It's very hard to give short examples because for any short example you can find another language that does the same thing with similar effort. For example, this: https://edicl.github.io/cl-who/ is basically PHP embedded in Common Lisp. So any example I give you to show how cool CL-WHO is you could render it in PHP and conclude that PHP is similarly cool. The Big Win only happens if you want to combine a feature that…

No, it's actually very hard to give large examples. You're not going to replace a million lines of C with a 1000 lines of Lisp, unless something crazy is going on, like most of that million lines is completely the wrong code for the requirements at hand. Or it solves a huge problem X, which includes small subproblem Y; and in the Lisp program we only care about Y.

Small examples are easy: for instance, some one-liner in Lisp based on hashing, compared to a five-liner in C, plus 1000 lines of infrastructure: hash implementation, dynamic strings, ...

Big C programs that have the Greenspunned architecture don't need a lot of additional lines to add new functionality.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#188

Post by Barrin92 »

acituan wrote: post #186

I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But h…

Yep. This attitude of being your own little manager of your own life and treating it like an incremental game is horrible.

In James P. Carse's Finite and Infinite Games there one chapter on how the use of machines works both ways. It doesn't only shape the machine but it makes the person more 'machine-like'. In an attempt to operate a machine the person has itself to act mechanical and to comply with the interface of the machine rather than the other way around.

It's I think very evident in the way we communicate today or how everything becomes 'gamified' or even how dating works. Success today has to be defined in formal or quantifiable terms not because anyone actually consciously chose to do it, but because it's the only way you can put it in a computer, which actually was supposed to exist to empower people. It's pretty sad honestly.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#189

Post by chronogram »

acituan wrote: post #186

I hate this framing. It is pressuring, dehumanizing as it contextualizes human endeavor in transactional terms, usually in a market. I know this goes against the ethos of high-tech, but humans don't have an imperative to be as productive as possible. They don't have to make the most use of their time. They don't have to get as efficient as they could. These are metrics that work fine for our machines, our code. But h…

Slow down. Life is to be savoured.

Re: Time is the only real currency we have

#190

Post by didericis »

clairity wrote: post #184
didericis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time is easily wasted, though. The labor theory of value ignores this, and ignores the value of cleverness as a result. If I need to grind wheat for bread every day, I could spend hours a day working hard to grind it by hand, or I could spend a month or so to build a very basic water wheel/grindstone and free up all that time. The resultant bread is still bread either way. If someone chooses to spend all their time d…

you're presuming the value and price are static in that example. once the capital investment has been made, the price of the bread will go down because less labor will be used to make it, as the marginal cost of the bread goes down. the labor in the capital investment will be amortized over time in the price. the capital investment itself should only capture the riskiness portion of the project, not the majority of t…

I’m not making any statements about current practices or what value is typically assigned to labor vs initial capital investments, just to be clear.

And I know prices go down due to less labor being needed, meaning more supply results from less investment, but my point is that it’s wrong to assume labor is the underlying source of value. Labor has no intrinsic value. It’s only valuable in relation to output.

For some people, the “image” of a product and the amount of time and care put into it is an important part of that output. So they value products that have high labor costs even when comparable but less labor intensive products exist.

But to take an extreme example, if I banged two rocks together from 9-5 every day for the rest of my life, I wouldn’t expect a paycheck because there isn’t any useful output there, despite the labor.

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