VPs and PMs focused on updating things that are “concrete” to them like buttons, and logos soak up engineering agency.
Aggregate engineering and customer experience are cost centers.
Our management culture is irreparably broken. Somehow the Linux kernel runs the world without them. Very few CRUD apps out there need a literal people pipeline to copy-paste React deps into git.
We’re missionaries for nation state currency, sharing the wealth we create with our neighbors through make-work tasks. We’re not engineers engaged in craft.
The path to success now is still the Walmart model but you have to take longer to get there subtlety. The other Walmarts are out there monitoring for threats and will litigate!
So you have to appear novel to early adopters, and grow into being a landfills cash cow in a politically correct way.
We need less DSL, IMO, more constrained code generation from data models.
There is so much bloat due to everyone making a DSL to learn distributed systems with, or every little bit of UNIX coming with its own text config format.
I’d like to get away from generating yaml for Docker and k8s and import balancing forks of microservice logic v8 style; read kernel telemetry from eBPF in the app to determine how many forks the code can add or needs to subtract, and terraform because it’s still just a Linux box under there.
But the cottage industry that profits from these ideas is threatened by these ideas and sticks with showing off a new arbitrary string parser that ALSO sends the strings to an API for you!
The software industry has turned into a jobs program and has little to do with novel engineering.
That’s an overly reductive, thought ending, semantic position that sticks to status quo; I have been getting that a lot from the work bee office crowd. I freelance so maybe I am capable of a different perspective? It’s relative.
It would also eliminate who knows how many lines of code in the form of parsers/lexers for dozens of random static formats, and embedded HTTP clients that reach out to APIs being copy-pasted all over to handle ops.
It would bin a whole lot of cognitive gibberish that comes with Docker and k8s, and move SRE/ops thinking to leveraging the same language ecosystems as app developers, normalizing jargon.
But yeah let’s stick with your simple reduction. Apathy and lethargy are the zeitgeist of the day. The “disrupt!” industry has become a “wait not me though!” jobs program.
Effectively a government jobs program as the rate hikes forcing layoffs show. As soon as the Fed shut off the money printer, big techs house of cards started wobbling. Truly innovative measure like layoffs, a form of politically correct economic insecurity[1], not novel new ideas, was big techs reaction to government policy shift.
Financial math is just arithmetic with a footnote about remembering to add a dozen zeroes.
Same as we were taught in school; keep the numbers you work with day to day by using a simple noticing.
Add 1 to 3.654 x 10^11, another billionaire appears!
Their wealth is mathematical inference. None of them have Scrooge McDuck Vaults full of real money.
Tangentially, Paul G Tweeted a few weeks ago about America being “fake”; American cheese was one thing he called out specifically. No one Tweeted back “billionaire wealth.” I had del’d my Twitter years ago, did not seem worth making a new one.
Keep numbers you work with day to day simple by using a simpler notation, is what I meant to type. Thumb band aid is messing with autocorrect by creating the wrong string to begin with
Exactly. There’s no law forcing me me to chip into healthcare. Tacit admission in the US I don’t have to care any other meat bag exists; why should I care what they have to say?
Glad to see the political parties goals of pinning all of reality on one person in order for us to believe we’re “ruled by a god king” thus we cannot change it.
Congress is a thing and could force change, but it’s preferred the people don’t think that way and keep it gridlocked.
The public is a thing but they’re happy as punch to sit and complain than engage in alternative agency.
It’s always just the figureheads fault!
The intentional effort to instigate apathy and create a feckless people is working.
How do we know material abundance (I’m assuming that’s what you mean) “is the way”? Perhaps that’s not what you mean but it’s not an unreasonable way of describing contemporary zeitgeist.
A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up.
IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics.
It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines.
But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.
If you think there are very long term existential threats we can’t protect against without massive technological advances, or if there might be existential threats we don’t know about yet, you probably don’t want a relatively static society regardless of how internally stable and comfortable it seems to be. We probably need to up our game a lot to even be safe from existential threats we know about, like asteroid/comet impacts. And what about supernovae? And what about stuff that might be even less frequent that we don’t even know about?
I guess what I’m saying is that optimizing for stability and comfort almost certainly is at odds with optimizing for longevity. Unless we eventually have some good reason to think that we’ve discovered all the long-term existential threats and are protected against them.
Human civilization is only 6,000 years old. Worrying about supernovae and comets is really jumping the gun. Our biggest danger -- by many orders of magnitude -- is ourselves.
I won't stand in your way if you want to live in a commune in the woods foraging for roots and berries. It's your life so do what you want with it. I prefer living in a heated house with modern amenities like smokeless lighting and clean drinking water.
Train citizens to drive robot non-lethal surveillance drones, do paperwork, cut funding for rage prone meat bag policing.
Maintain minimum required force of trigger happies for all the shooting scenarios.
Our secular society isn’t anymore sacrosanct than religious based choices. It should be readily reorganize-able as logistics demand.
Optimizing for 24/7 status quo politics, profit margin optimizing and rent extraction “or else the world ends” is not so different from forcing unfalsifiable magic down our throats.
What I am trying to describe is a very different kind of organization of policing agency and your response is to repeat old semantics, and conclude then it’s not that new?
You posted five sentences. Three of them are mostly just vague conglomerations of charged symbology. Did you expect an entire treatise in response...?
Anyways, the point remains: the difference between a police officer and a civilian is a small amount of training and a whole lot of in-group politics. Not sure how hiring different people solves either problem.
Aggregate engineering and customer experience are cost centers.
Our management culture is irreparably broken. Somehow the Linux kernel runs the world without them. Very few CRUD apps out there need a literal people pipeline to copy-paste React deps into git.
We’re missionaries for nation state currency, sharing the wealth we create with our neighbors through make-work tasks. We’re not engineers engaged in craft.