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Most tech content is bullshit

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Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#351

Post by jacobobryant »

jacobobryant wrote: post #348
bartread wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. I'd thought about some sort of meta-search service running over Google, Bing, etc., and aggregating results, that was tied in with some way of rating recommending URLs. I've never got around to doing it and one of the reasons (excuses) is that I haven't yet figured out a way to stop bad actors exploiting it by, e.g., mass downvoting URLs of competitors. I did think about some sort of moving average, or b…

I've thought about that a fair amount also. I think the key is personalization. If bad actors downvoted a bunch of items, it would only affect people who already shared a lot of similar votes with those actors. That is still exploitable: if I know you like A, B, and C, (perhaps those are popular items), I could also upvote those items and then downvote another item D. I have an idea for countering this: keep track of…

To generalize that a bit, I guess I'm talking about a reputation network. You could visualize it with a directed graph that has edges weighted from -1 to 1 (0 default). Recommendation + rating history is used in some way to assign those weights, and then future recommendations are taken primarily from other users who have high weights from your perspective.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#352

Post by Yetanfou »

goatinaboat wrote: post #262
tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. I’ve never been so productive as I was in those days. Good quality documentation and no distractions. A golden age that we didn’t even know we were in. The modern development paradigm is a dumpster fire in comparison. Thanks for the good work you did back then producing those materials.

Part of the reason for the higher productivity probably was the lower amount of churn in the development tools, frameworks, paradigms-du-jour, deployment strategies, microservices, picoservices and more. It doesn't make sense to produce and print books about technologies with a half-life time of a year nor does it seem to make sense to invest time and effort into learning them - but you'll have to anyway.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#353

Post by dredmorbius »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58
tuyguntn wrote: post #4

I believe part of problem is Google SEO. Tech content maybe bullshit, but marketing content is even more bullshit. I remember times when we had slow internet and/or only subset of blogs we read from time to time. Most of development was done by reading books, specification of devices for writing drivers and so on. Now, literally everyone is trying to do SEO and use lots of words in articles, kind of creating content,…

Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…

Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject. What an inestimable boon it would be, if in every branch of literature there were only a few books, but those excellent! This can never happen, as long as money is to be made by writing. It seems as though the money lay under a curse; for every author degenerates as soon as he begins to put pen to paper in any way for the sake of gain. The best works of the greatest men all come from the time when they had to write for nothing or for very little.

...

There is no greater mistake than to suppose that the last work is always the more correct; that what is written later on is in every case an improvement on what was written before; and that change always means progress....

If the reader wishes to study any subject, let him beware of rushing to the newest books upon it, and confining his attention to them alone, under the notion that science is always advancing, and that the old books have been drawn upon in the writing of the new. They have been drawn upon, it is true; but how? The writer of the new book often does not understand the old books thoroughly, and yet he is unwilling to take their exact words; so he bungles them, and says in his own bad way that which has been said very much better and more clearly by the old writers, who wrote from their own lively knowledge of the subject....

It often happens that an old and excellent book is ousted by new and bad ones, which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension and much puffing on the part of friends. In science a man tries to make his mark by bringing out something fresh. This often means nothing more than that he attacks some received theory which is quite correct, in order to make room for his own false notions. Sometimes the effort is successful for a time; and then a return is made to the old and true theory. These innovators are serious about nothing but their own precious self: it is this that they want to put forward, and the quick way of doing so, as they think, is to start a paradox. ... Hence it frequently happens that the course of science is retrogressive.

-- Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Authorship"

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10714/10714-h/10714-h.htm#li...

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#354

Post by Wowfunhappy »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #127

Good is hard. When I left O'Reilly Media in 2005 we were just ending a period where many programmers worked with a set of physical O'Reilly books on their shelf. And everyone at O'Reilly could see that their business was being eaten away by free. Stack Overflow didn't exist yet but we could feel it coming. At the time, we hoped that UGC would have some sort of wisdom of the crowd thing that would lead to high quality…

Perhaps part of the problem is that books are hard to search?

It may well be a bad habit, but I frequently don't learn new technologies through a concerted effort. Instead, there's just something I want to do, and I google it, and after doing that a bunch I eventually learn a lot.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#355

Post by DrFell »

tasssko wrote: post #315

My two cents many people can't think individually any more. Tech has become complex some people can only justify a decision based on what other people did. Honestly the solution is a combination of the scientific method, hacker mindset and being prepared to RTFM. No tech content is worth its character count it is just one persons perspective, their biases and mistakes. However reading code is another story, that tell…

I think at least part of the reason tech has become complex is because so many tech stacks today are a briar patch of 3rd party libraries and components that no one person can understand. The 'Don't reinvent the wheel' rule of thumb has practically become a mantra, and enables this. Newer developers who grow up in the online community are so afraid to think for themselves, lest they get mortified to death for doing something dumb. So it's sort of a self-perpetuating complexity problem.

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#356

Post by tpmx »

Swizec wrote: post #108
PragmaticPulp wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal brand building is another major contributor to search engine content dilution. Whenever I Google for something in hot new languages or frameworks, I have to sift through 10s of Medium articles from beginner developers who are trying to establish themselves as industry experts. I don't want to read some junior developer's Medium post full of animated GIFs and a pseudo-tutorial that is really just entire sourc…

As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations. And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.…

> Edit: you downvote and yet I often get comments appreaciating how the gifs make my 2000 word emails feel like a quick short read.

I sampled your work. It's exactly what we're talking about.

I'm sure this works for you, financially and SEO-wise.. but.. maybe use 500 words and no gifs instead?

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#357

Post by [deleted] »

azeirah wrote: post #183
Swizec wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a programmer with some 20 years of experience who likes to write tutorials on original research and techniques — you can pry my animated gifs out of my cold dead fingers! All my life I waited for broadband to be widespread enough to write articles with rich embedded animations. And yes, sometimes they only serve the purpose of entertainment or emotional tone setting. Other times they’re actual part of the content.…

Go you! I love high quality written content with a lighter tone. I find it incredibly difficult to focus on dry tests because of my ADHD.

[deleted]

Re: Most tech content is bullshit

#360

Post by cryptica »

whack wrote: post #279

Call me a cynic, but the whole "think critically and figure it out for yourself" solution is inefficient at best, harmful at worst. Global warming skepticism is exactly the kind of thing that often occurs when people trust their own judgement more than that of subject matter experts. There are very effective ways to get high quality recommendations, with minimal effort on your part. Want to get good medical advice? F…

There are too many bullshitters in the software industry. Years of experience helps but it's not sufficient to be a good developer. There are many terrible developers with 20+ years of experience and there are some great developers with only 10 years of experience.

The number one characteristic that makes a developer great is their critical thinking ability. These developers don't blindly adopt tools and business processes based on popularity. They are always able to justify their decisions with strong arguments which convincingly explain why their chosen option is better than all the other possible options. This applies to every decision they make.

Writing software is more like chess than checkers - You need to consider every reasonable option many steps ahead.

IMO software development is a complex area - Following common industry patterns and best practices without thinking about whether or not they actually apply to your particular use case is almost always the wrong approach. There are nuances in essentially every single software project which would warrant deviating from industry norms in at least some ways.

To always follow best practices blindly without questioning them or adapting them to your use case is in itself a terrible practice.

Also, the problem with trusting experts in complex domains is that the line between an expert and snake oil salesman is incredibly blurry. Sometimes even moderately skilled insiders with domain expertise don't know how to tell apart an expert from a conman.

The software industry has grown extremely fast and now the situation is that there are a huge number of highly vocal novices who pose as experts and who are silencing the real experts.

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