Notices by 22 (22@octodon.social)

Since joining the corporate workforce, I've become truly terrified of smart people who are so smart that they recreate an entire separate field of endeavor. Poorly.

*Normal* people just ask software engineers to write fast math code, or web designers to create a nice customer-facing website.

*Smart* people say, "oh high-perf computing? Modern JavaScript? How hard can THAT be?" and spend a few several human-months and millions of dollars to make some utter piece of shit that barely works.

O m f g!

Drop everything and read this overview by Cass Sunstein about what I’d like to call #MusicLab 2.0

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-09-16/what-caused-donald-trump

They did MusicLab but instead of songs, they asked *lightly* political questions (“should companies be taxed where they’re headquartered”, “should bitcoin be banned” etc.). In the worlds where participants could see previous votes, Repubs vs Democrats flip flopped!

WOW 👏!! Via #DuncanWatts himself.

Eight page PDF, Macy et al.: https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/advances/5/8/eaax0754.full.pdf

And proud-of-self-flaggelation coworker is a fresh alumnus and totally incapable of considering how much more effective a dev they'd be if they'd skipped the high-brow classes foolishly required by their last-century CS program and just shipped code.

I've worked with many mathematicians/RF engineers who knew nothing about coding but who we taught and in few short months were helping ship juicy code we sold for 💰💰💰. I maintain CS degree is laughably irrelevant for paying the bills with code.

‘Twitter, Facebook, Instagram—we can all agree that these are serious timewasters. But what about The Economist or War and Peace? How much can you really remember from all of those New York Times op-eds you’ve read? Could you summarize the major themes of Grapes of Wrath? Most knowledge worth having comes from practice. It comes from doing. It comes from creating.‘

https://tjcx.me/posts/consumption-distraction/

👏 More in the vein of “Sure X is shit but then Y & Z too”. Humorous too. And not over-edited. 1000% agree.

“There are many Hong Kongers and other smart people writing online who can explain the political context of the protests, the likelihood of intervention, and what this means in a deeper way. I am just a visitor who perhaps thinks too much about fish cakes when being tear gassed.”

https://idlewords.com/2019/08/a_walk_in_hong_kong.htm

Of course Maciej Cegłowski went to #HongKong protests and wrote a brilliant piece, with references to how the ’80s Soviet–American culture shock is as great as the 2010s America–HK one.

I don’t particularly care for your unique characters in unique circumstances.

I want to taste your society’s fabric.

How frequently your garbage is collected. How you far you go to get food. Who tells you what to do. How much do you pay in taxes. How often is the tax man replaced. How do you raise capital for an uncertain venture.

It's clear that success in software is all about getting people to notice it, use it, and help improve it.

And I think it's important to get the arrow of causality correct: it's not that technically-good software becomes popular, rather it's that popular software's traits come to be seen as good & worthy of imitation—and only sometimes those are good technically.

And I see a lot of anger about this reality—“if only it weren't so!”, etc. Well, go on a Buddhist mediation retreat if you need to!