211–220 of 284 posts
For a longer and more biting critique of SF one should read
Private Citizens (2016) by Tony Tulathimutte
“ Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire.”
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An example of this I've personally seen is a friend who works on COBOL mainframes at a bank. He writes COBOL and maintains a banking system that keeps the world running. Literally like a billion people die if the system he maintains fails. I maintain a VC funded webpage that only works half the time. I make more than him, a lot more.
You should ask your friend what they do with all of the half cents that are floating around in the banking system.
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Why conflate critical thinking with individualistic values? It seems you are unnecessarily muddying the water.
In my opinion there is a correlation there. I think individualistic societies are better at thinking of new paradigm shifting ideas.
It makes sense to me that a culture that values collectivistic cohesion would shy away from paradigm shifting ideas (disruption). I also see the correlation between disruptive ideas driven by principled critical thinking over conventional thinking.
I guess on some level my assumption is that they are adjacent. Those embedded in a collectivistic culture can think critically but can run into walls within a sandbox of convention. This is how they can be great at iterative improvement and engineering but struggle with paradigm shifting ideas.
I think you have a point, but there's definitely some nuance here I'm still untangling.
The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…
I'm glad you appreciate the contributions of compiler engineers, but seeing as my current job is writing compilers for AI chips... I am proud everytime I see someone use AI, in their business, in their life, etc,, because it's my small contribution to the ever-growing American economy and the forward march of human progress.
I'm also so tired of people making fun of techbros. I'm glad techbros exist. They actually make the world a novel place to live in. People who want to go back to living in the dark ages should go move in with the Amish. The sudden turnaround of tech workers (supposedly paragons of human progress) into unquestioning Luddites is disappointing
The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…
You think the power grid fell out of the head of some master craftsman thinking in decades? They dont teach the history of science for various reasons, but its basically a ledger of how over rated 3 inch chimp brain intelligence is. The power grid is thing of beauty. Today. But the path to that Beauty is one train wreck after another. Boiler explosions that kill hundreds. Wiring that burns down towns. Transformers th…
It's not even limited to modern technology. If you go talk to certain grievance-driven individuals from tribal backgrounds (for lack of a better term) who have produced nothing for the last 10000 years, they will levy similar accusations against the very institutions that are providing them with healthcare their ancestors could only have dreamed of. In some areas, even agriculture is seen as suspect. It's ridiculous.
It's scary to me how both sides of the American political aisle have suddenly turned anti-tech and are buying into the same arguments. Gross.
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> You can’t survive a steady erosion of mastery. That sounds like an onset of a certain type of dark age. Eventually the shiny bits will too fall off when the underlying foundation crumbles. It would be massively ironic if the age of the "electronic brains" brought about the demise of technological advancement.
Just look at current software. Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year. Linux is still written by a couple of people. Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush. All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire…
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You should go outside of the "web" world. Automotive, medical or heavy industries. You will see that their are plenty of low level developers/engineers our there. Yes even ones born after 2000.
And they get paid squat compared to their brainrotted silly-valley webshit-slinger counterparts. Can we pay these fine folks, as well as people in professions like teaching, more?
I know this forum is highly skewed towards Saas/JS/web stuff, but there's an entire industry of deep tech software and the payouts are excellent.
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Just look at current software. Windows is maintained by morons, and gets shitter every year. Linux is still written by a couple of people. Once people like that die, nobody will know how to write operating systems. I certainly couldn’t remake Linux. There’s no way anyone born after 2000 could, their brains are mush. All software is just shit piled on top of shit. Backends in JavaScript, interfaces which use an entire…
I was once one of the mush brained morons hired to work at Microsoft. I think I did ok. Would I compare myself to the greats? No. But plenty of my coworkers stacked up to the best who'd ever worked at the company. Do I think MS has given up on pure technical excellence? Yes, they used to be one of the hardest tech companies to get a job at, with one of the most grueling interview gauntlets and an incredibly high reje…
I was there in the DOS days. I was there when Windows 3.1 came out (others too but I didn't use them). I was there when Windows 95 came out.
Microsoft has never been about "pure technical excellence". We had wonderful machines (Unx ones and then stuff like the Atari ST / Commodore Amiga / Archimedes) and amazing OSes (including Unx on workstations) and Microsoft nearly destroyed everything with the endless turds it produced that ran on cheap beige PCs. Not excellence. Mediocrity. Cheap, but mediocre.
At some point 95% of all machines sold with an OS had Windows and the times were incredibly dark. Thankfully things changed and now Windows is only present on something like 11% of all devices sold yearly that have an OS.
We dodged a big one and many of us shall never ever forget how slow, insecure, horrible and mediocre the products of that company were.
The folks who keep the power grid running, write compilers, secure the internet, and design dependable systems don’t get viral fame, but their contributions are far more critical. That imbalance is no small thing; it shapes who gets funded, who feels validated, and who decides to pursue a challenge that doesn’t promise a quick TikTok moment or a crypto-style valuation bump. A complex technological civilization depend…
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Huh, I think I read a book about that once. I forget who wrote it. Carl something, I think?