[HN Gopher] Tech companies are irrational pop cultures
___________________________________________________________________
Tech companies are irrational pop cultures
Author : pietroppeter
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-01-10 15:02 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (softwarecrisis.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (softwarecrisis.dev)
| genericacct wrote:
| "$bigcompany uses it so we must use it as well" is modern-day
| cargo cult programming and i've seen it in lots of places.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| It's also wishful thinking. Your problem isn't scaling to a
| hundred million users, your problem is finding simple
| product/market fit!
| hot_gril wrote:
| This article has a broad title but focuses on layoffs. I've seen
| the theory thrown around that it's a form of big tech collusion:
| They can't collude openly, but if one huge player makes a move
| like layoffs, it sends a signal to the others. Pandemic and work-
| from-home gave employees a lot more bargaining power, with the
| ability to get competing job offers without leaving their desks,
| so companies want to take that back.
|
| I don't see enough evidence to call it, but I wouldn't put it
| past them, given how several big players including AAPL and GOOG
| were caught and fined for making no-cold-call agreements several
| years ago. And it does seem like the tech scene has been less
| competitive lately on the consumer side.
| zackmorris wrote:
| A better way to state this is that the problems we're facing
| today are due to the whims of capital owners and management, not
| labor.
|
| We could have a system where companies don't do layoffs, and
| workers sit on 50% of board seats, and democracy in the workplace
| is standard.
|
| I wonder how many majority shareholders truly want the billions
| of dollars in stock that comes with that, knowing that their
| wealth deprives countless thousands/millions of people of their
| opportunity. Would they be ok with a different kind of corporate
| structure? Something like a cooperative where management and the
| CEO are elected by workers, and difference in pay doesn't exceed
| perhaps 10:1?
| drewcoo wrote:
| They're more like cults.
|
| "a system or group of people who practice excessive devotion to a
| figure, object, or belief system, typically following a
| charismatic leader"
|
| https://study.com/learn/lesson/cult-characteristics-types-be...
| marban wrote:
| Tech is a 24/7 popularity contest where everybody can have their
| 15 minutes of fame. Enjoy the ride.
| 4k3aa4 wrote:
| I think it's easy to mistake the concept of fads within
| technology with the application of arguably necessary
| abstractions. Most of what is new and faddish is just another
| abstraction around some (probably, relatively) archaic system.
| The abstraction is the new thing, not the technology or the
| language that it's written in.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The thing about churn (of developers/contributors) rings _so
| true_ to me from my career, and I think is really under-
| appreciated. In "the industry", or just among "people who make
| things in teams" (including open source).
|
| > Constant churn in a software development team, both among the
| programmers and designers, is absolutely devastating. It is the
| death knell for a software project. Makes deadlines meaningless.
| It turns software into a disposable, single-use product like a
| paper towel. Anything that increases team member churn threatens
| the very viability of the project and the software it's creating.
|
| From an essay that is worth reading in full, "Theory-building and
| why employee churn is lethal to software companies":
| https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2022/theory-building/
|
| I think it's exactly right about the importance of "mental
| models" and "theory building", and if we could keep that in mind
| we could build better more maintainable software. ("More
| maintainable" over the long-term I think is almost synonymous
| with "has easy to grasp mental models that are sufficient to
| guide your work with the system")
| thrwaway011023 wrote:
| Churn is worse now that we have split everything into
| microservices that often use their own libraries, frameworks
| and languages.
|
| That adds a lot of overhead when employees inherit a pet
| project
| ericmcer wrote:
| Really true, ownership is a huge part of microservices. I
| have been on teams that have adopted orphaned services, then
| been called into meetings to advise on use of a service I am
| barely aware of.
|
| It is a really easy way to make your employees overwhelmed,
| but you can always hire someone else to take ownership once
| they quit.
| z3t4 wrote:
| One idea of Micro services is that you can rewrite the entire
| service. There are more combinations of libraries, frameworks
| and languages then there are programmers. Most programmers
| however has a favourite stack that they are 10x more
| productive in.
| Pet_Ant wrote:
| I feel like microservices are specifically chosen because
| they work best with lots of churn. You can throw away the
| code. You only need to learn only the code in your service.
| It is an architecture (often) chose not for it's technical
| merits but rather how it works in high-churn environments.
| wmichelin wrote:
| The same exact results can be yielded by OOP interfaces and
| implementations, so I unfortunately don't feel this is a
| valid argument for microservices.
| blindhippo wrote:
| The point for "microservices" to me is to separate the
| components of an integrated system to achieve scaling
| factors independent of other related but not directly
| coupled parts of the system.
|
| Most systems in my experience don't really benefit from
| separation of the entire application domain into a set of
| independent systems. Most use cases don't benefit from
| decoupling a request/response in a series of asynchronous
| calls across 20 different APIs.
|
| So, most systems can and should be implemented as a
| simple abstracted interface inside a single application
| stack. But then, no one ever gets promoted/hired/funded
| to build the most optimal solution.
| KronisLV wrote:
| > The same exact results can be yielded by OOP interfaces
| and implementations, so I unfortunately don't feel this
| is a valid argument for microservices.
|
| I'm not sure about this, there's so much going on in most
| software, a lot of the ruin comes from the dependencies
| around your code, like libraries and frameworks. Let's
| take web development as an example.
|
| Suppose you need to query the database in some legacy
| project - well, it doesn't have a framework that supports
| proper logging of each query/parameter for debugging, it
| doesn't have any codegen capabilities, it has a wonky
| connection pool implementation. And yet, if you want to
| work within the same codebase, you have to use it. What
| could take a bit of codegen and an hour of work now can
| take close to a day, all because you're pigeonholed into
| using what's already there for "consistency".
|
| Suppose instead you now want to have a task queue. Well,
| instead of RabbitMQ or something of the like being used,
| instead you have to work with what's present - a bunch of
| pre-existing abstractions and a DB centric implementation
| (with arguably poor documentation) that the business
| requirements have largely outgrown, so now you'll need to
| hack around the existing code, hope that you break
| nothing there, all while attempting to create something
| passable (which may or may not be viable with this
| approach, depending on the use case).
|
| And doing logging? Well, maybe the team didn't do
| structured logging or log shipping, so you have to be
| very frugal with the logs, or spend time setting up
| Logrotate or an alternative for that monolithic app, just
| so you can turn on some additional logging and make sure
| that the eventual rollout actually works.
|
| Well, what about the actual database or maybe tests? Be
| prepared that the test framework will be somewhat out of
| date, some of the test utilities won't quite fit what
| you'll try to do and perhaps your current ORM and DB
| choices won't really work well with the idea of letting
| integration tests test actual DB statements and
| migrations against a DB instance that would be setup for
| the tests and torn down automatically afterwards (say, a
| PostgreSQL/MariaDB container somewhere, as opposed to MS
| SQL or Oracle), so you won't be able to test every schema
| migration that easily.
|
| You might even run into a situation where you need to run
| a relatively recent runtime (say JDK 11) but the project
| is stuck on an older release (JDK 8), whereas migrating
| everything isn't going to be done for now. So you can't
| do what you need now, because the libraries don't support
| your runtime. Worse yet if the monolithic project has
| dozens of business use cases, whereas the bit of code
| that's preventing the migration is needed for just one or
| two of them.
|
| I won't even get into instrumentation and scaling parts
| of the total solution up or down, or things like
| configuration, since that'd make this needlessly long.
|
| I think that microservices indeed are a good choice for
| mitigating some of these issues, by untying your hands -
| the impact of issues is lessened, to a per-service basis.
| An individual service might therefore rot and this rot
| could be addressed separately, without slowing everything
| else down. Even to the point where the old implementation
| can be thrown out and rewritten, if that's ever needed.
|
| However, microservices come at a possibly huge
| operational and complexity cost otherwise, to the point
| where they might either make the project late, hard to
| work with, or unfeasible altogether. And it's hard to
| know which approach will be the best for any given
| situation. Starting out with monoliths makes sense,
| because most smaller projects will never need to be split
| up, but when you need to do that, you will _really_ need
| to. Modular monoliths (e.g. feature flags for enabled
| /disabled bits of functionality) can be an intermediate
| step.
|
| In an ideal world, programming language module systems
| would be enough. We don't live in a perfect world.
| Spivak wrote:
| What you're describing is just microservices but with
| different message passing.
|
| So I think this is overall very pro-microservices.
| namaria wrote:
| All of this is just structured programming with extra
| steps
| autokad wrote:
| is this on the wrong article... if so please delete
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| The quote I quoted is quoted at the end of the very short OP,
| I took it from there.
| dustbitying wrote:
| on the other hand, there's a strong incentive for group-
| organizations, specially profit-driven and "the show MUST go
| on" kinds of organizations to never depend on a single (or a
| small sub-group) of people to keep things going; lest somebody
| important gets hit by the proverbial bus.
|
| IMO, this is also part of the challenges that come with dealing
| in software (understood as some sort of novel "substance"); in
| great part we (as a culture/civilization) haven't figured out
| how to deal with software (and in general, with digital
| artifacts) in the best way.
| jffhn wrote:
| Preventing people from being productive by fear of the bus
| factor, is like throwing them yourself under the bus.
| bitwize wrote:
| Well, it's how business works. Maximal productivity of
| individual developers is not necessarily as valuable to the
| business as consistent forward progress that's resilient to
| risks, especially human risks like cranky developers
| quitting.
|
| As much as _Office Space_ is supposed to be a pastiche of
| corporate toxicity, Initech was perhaps more honest than
| most real-world companies. They had banners everywhere
| reading "Is it good for the COMPANY?" In the real world
| the same principle applies but you have to keep it in mind
| yourself. Any time corporate makes a decision which you
| think of as foolish because it hampers or disadvantages the
| line workers, ask yourself... Is it good for the COMPANY?
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| A large part of the value is not the software, but the
| knowledge built around the software, and that knowledge must be
| known and understood by someone (the developers). This includes
| everything from domain knowledge, the history of why things are
| the way they are, what failed and what succeeded, the technical
| idiosyncrasies, etc. The software is in a sense secondary,
| certainly secondary to business goals as its entire purpose is
| to serve business goals. Software is a means and an instrument,
| not an end.
|
| But perverse incentives make churn attractive. Switching jobs
| is often the best way to raise your income, for example.
| TremendousJudge wrote:
| That's a great essay, thank you. I have been thinking this
| exact same thing for over a year now, it's nice to see it
| written out so clearly.
| simongray wrote:
| He paraphrases a classic paper by Peter Naur which is worth
| reading in its entirety.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Unpredictable churn from layoffs is probably bad, but I view
| churn in general as an almost necessary thing for software dev.
| Every great thing I've done on a SWE team has been something
| the previous person in my position wouldn't do, and every bad
| thing I've done was redone by someone after me. The truly well-
| designed and maintainable systems survive multiple owners, so
| there's a trend towards better. And it's a bad sign for a
| system to rely on someone.
| madsbuch wrote:
| It's a shame that this has negative connotations. There is a case
| that this is essential.
|
| It seems like we are overcoming an AI winter, using the same
| technologies that was deemed infeasible 20 years ago.
|
| When I did competitive programming 20 years ago. I would somewhat
| jokingly say that I would want to write and AI to solve all the
| problems. Our mentor laughed it of clearly not considering it
| even feasible - today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool
| competitive programming competition.
|
| We probably needed to look away from that generations
| presumptions in order to leap frog on some of these technologies.
| ibizaman wrote:
| A contrary anectdotal exemple. We use MongoDB where I work and
| the only justification is it was the new fad at the time. Now
| it bites us because we use it as a relational DB. PostgreSQL
| would've been much more suitable in our case but it wasn't in
| vogue.
| pmarreck wrote:
| This could also be a case of developers not pressing hard
| enough back on technically-less-competent manager-driven
| architectural decisions
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Is there any regret in technology selection more widespread
| and common than having picked MongoDB during its bizarre new
| hotness phase? That phase where SQL database administrators
| where crying, thinking they'd lose their jobs tomorrow and
| many people claimed SQL was now absolutely deprecated.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| In the last 20 or so years I can't think of one. I've
| migrated 4 different companies off of Mongo to Postgres and
| it's a huge project each time.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Probably nearly a full code rewrite, right? My job the
| past 4 years has essentially been to clean up from bad DB
| decisions.
| edgyquant wrote:
| In my experience the sql guys were laughing because they
| knew mongo was a fad and not an actual replacement.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| I think using language-provided async calls everywhere will
| be the next mistake. Instead of callback hell, you get
| callback hell along with weird async race conditions and a
| contagion of async functions.
| hot_gril wrote:
| I find async calls totally sensible in a lot of web
| frontends and backends. The alternative is explicit
| threading models, which are overly pedantic in a wide
| variety of use cases.
| hot_gril wrote:
| This was probably the worst. Fads in business logic code or
| even APIs don't have anywhere near the lasting impact of a
| fad in screwing up the least easily replaceable part of
| your system, the DB.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| The fact that MongoDB hype could reach the level it did is
| an indictment of tech culture.
|
| Why was people's excitement allowed to trump data
| integrity? Are there not enough adults in the room to stop
| this from happening again?
| hot_gril wrote:
| NoSQL fad was the most destructive I can think of. Those had
| their place as niche tools, but they somehow became the
| default for a while. Once you pick the wrong DBMS, you're
| building on quicksand.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| But, MongoDB is web-scale:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2F-DItXtZs
| hot_gril wrote:
| I heard Snapchat uses it to support their web-scale
| disappearing photos, cause it erases your data randomly
| madsbuch wrote:
| This seems to be a failure outside of fads. This is
| application of an unviable technology.
|
| Filesystems has been available for much longer than MongoDB.
| Using that as a database and having requirements changed to a
| relational database would be the same without anything about
| the filesystem being a fad.
| the_only_law wrote:
| Yet for some reason I never hear about people complaining
| that some idiot chose a file system to be the database for
| their application . I do hear quite often, disdain for the
| choice of MongoDB.
| madsbuch wrote:
| That's on you, it happens quite often :)
| dragontamer wrote:
| I think most people know that filesystems make for poor
| databases.
|
| However, most people don't seem to realize that Excel
| spreadsheets are rather poor databases... they're the
| _real_ issue.
| dsr_ wrote:
| There are lots of situations where filesystems are good
| databases. The problem is that relational databases are
| flexible in ways that filesystems are not, so when your
| requirements change, a relational database is likely to
| be able to support the change whereas the filesystem may
| not.
|
| Excel spreadsheets are terrible as databases and are also
| terrible as a file format for sending database records.
| dragontamer wrote:
| Filesystems already fail at step#1 of a database, which
| is concurrent read / concurrent writes.
|
| Its pretty obscure and arcane for the rules of read/write
| ordering on Linux/Windows systems and filesystems. You've
| got FILE* fwrites interacting with mmap regions, and
| locks don't exactly do what you think in Linux.
|
| In both Linux / Windows, you end up needing to create a
| Filesystem mutex of some kind (Linux flock, Windows
| Mutex). Then, and only then, is it really safe to read or
| write to a file.
| whatshisface wrote:
| That complexity only exists if you create it. The regular
| read and write calls are serialized by the operating
| system.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I'm sure you're familiar with the ATM example?
|
| Lets say Bob's money in an ATM is being held in your
| "database" (be it a file, or SQL database, or whatever).
|
| Thread#1: Depositing money --------------
| int bob_balance = readfile(); bob_balance += 100;
| // Add 100 to Bob's account.
| writefile(bob_balance);
|
| Thread#2: Withdrawing money -------------
| int bob_balance = readfile(); bob_balance -= 100;
| // Add 100 to Bob's account.
| writefile(bob_balance);
|
| ------------
|
| Lets say Bob started with X-dollars. What is Bob's value
| of his account after Thread#1 and Thread#2 run
| concurrently?
|
| More than likely, Bob's account is either X, X-100, or
| X+100. But under the worst case scenario, a full
| corruption of Bob's account value could happen. If Bob's
| account straddles across a filesystem boundary, like
| across 4096 hard drive cluster or something, then the
| "writefile" itself could be corrupted and interleaved
| between the two threads.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Most of Linux's userspace uses files as databases. There
| are a lot of cases where you won't ever have two of the
| same process running at once. One example is those that
| bind a specific port.
| dragontamer wrote:
| People are talking about MongoDB, PostgreSQL, MySQL and
| the like in this thread of discussion. And suddenly
| you're talking about local userspace programs on Linux?
|
| There's a web-bias in the discussion. Database here is
| innately concurrent, such as when you and I submit a
| comment to this webpage (Hacker News), the ordering of
| our submissions are ill specified and effectively random.
|
| A proper database organizes the data (ex: PostgreSQL) so
| that its in a form that's well defined.
|
| This is true for even the smallest of web servers.
| Concurrency and concurrent access is fundamental to web
| applications today. I know PHP has access to raw files if
| you ever wanted them, but its definitely a dangerous
| proposition to be doing raw file access on web apps.
| There's just too much risk of data corruption.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Well the irony of this example is that Postgres and MySQL
| struggle with it too because they use row-level locking
| by default, not serializable (full ACID). You'd be ok if
| you repeatedly updated a balance row as a way to lock
| things, but if you relied on summing withdrawal/deposit
| rows to determine balances as you would in a fully
| normalized schema, you'd get a race condition allowing
| Bob to overdraw. You can put the transaction in
| serializable mode, but it becomes very slow and non-
| scalable. So you have to work around this with a little
| denormalization or separate pending/active balances.
|
| But yes it'd be awful doing this with files.
| dcow wrote:
| What in the world are you doing where you need everything
| you described? Writing a custom cache for a FS?
| dragontamer wrote:
| Just a webserver. If two threads write to a file at the
| same time, you start getting wonky issues.
|
| You know, like if you and I make a comment at the same
| time here on Hacker News, the server's hard drive has to
| serialize the data so that all the other readers can
| handle it.
| dcow wrote:
| I was thinking more about what mmap has to do with
| anything. Anyway it depends on the API you use. libc
| read/write are thread safe for instance. Obviously you
| still have to synchronize the higher level concept of
| writes if you are not writing an object all at once, but
| this is rather trivial to do.
| CoolGuySteve wrote:
| GP's core argument is that a passing fad led to a poor
| technology decision.
|
| I see it all the time as well, the MongoDB example is far
| from the only case. This industry fetishes anything that's
| new and if it turns out to be a bad idea you can always get
| another job with a shiny new technology on your resume.
| nisegami wrote:
| That's just plain old using the wrong tool for the wrong job.
| Although, I suppose that part of the rise of any new tool
| will be trying to figure out which for which jobs it is the
| right tool, and sometimes the failure cases might live longer
| than expected.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The fad was "MongoDB is a tool that everyone has a job for"
| and it doesn't matter that I always knew that was a stupid
| take because I don't sign the purchase orders and if a
| manager listens to someone who makes way less than they do
| they feel less important.
| ad404b8a372f2b9 wrote:
| The entirety of AI innovation is driven by hardware
| improvements. Almost all AI research is done at the edge of our
| compute capabilities, and most of the models which produce
| results today existed in some form 20 years ago.
|
| We didn't leap-frog our predecessors presumptions, we built
| exactly what many envisioned but were unable to put to fruition
| with the computers of their time.
| madsbuch wrote:
| The point is that we retried something that was previously
| deemed infeasible. Had you been too much aware of the
| history, you might not have done that.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It was deemed infeasible because it was infeasible.
|
| It took 2 generations time for computers to improve enough that
| it became feasible. And also a huge unexpected discovery about
| 20 years ago, that you can pre-train a neural network and cost
| your costs by an order of magnitude.
| dgreensp wrote:
| An essay about academia (versus software engineering in
| industry) would probably make slightly different points.
| Academics definitely know their history.
|
| Also, when an _actual_ disruptive new technology is first
| invented, jumping on it and trying to do something with it is
| both trendy and arguably rational, but this is a relatively
| rare occurrence.
| rpdillon wrote:
| I don't think the notion is that we should be relying entirely
| on cached results from prior generations. Rather, we need to
| understand what was tried and what worked and what didn't, and
| why. With this knowledge, we can see when innovation has
| invalidated prior assumptions, and we can try again.
| madsbuch wrote:
| Yep, as nobody argues we should completely forget previous
| generations. The question is where to set the needle. The
| author definitely thinks we do not dwell enough on the past
| and should spend more time studying it.
| k__ wrote:
| I know it's a hype right now, but I didn't get good results
| with any AI, be it text or image generation.
|
| It all looked impressive the first few days, but the novelty
| wore off quite quickly.
| poszlem wrote:
| You are looking at a Nokia 3210 generation of AI.The most
| primitive version of what is to come. So the fact that the
| novelty has worn off is not really a good indicator of how
| much this will transform our everyday lives. Wait for the
| iPhone generation of AI, always in your pocket, interacting
| with you multiple times a day, changing how you consume news,
| how you communicate with the outside world, your friends and
| family.
| Existenceblinks wrote:
| Here we go again "it's early day", "it's like how the
| internet was born"
| poszlem wrote:
| Here we go again. "640K ought to be enough for anybody".
| "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a
| novelty--a fad."
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Have you tried midjourney for image generation? Especially
| for photography style images, I've gotten some really cool
| results that I go back to occasionally
| yrgulation wrote:
| " today ChatGPT would like outperform a highschool competitive
| programming competition."
|
| Google did it first. You input a search string, find results on
| first or second attempt and then copy and paste the code.
| ben_w wrote:
| Not even a close comparison.
|
| At best, Googling StackOverflow gets me one function, but
| only if I know the right keywords and it is short. ChatGPT, I
| can (and have!) given it example data and said "make a python
| script to parse this", and it not only gives me code, not
| only does it work, but when I ask it to extend this to do
| more or differently, the changes also work coherently with
| the previous results. For example:
| https://github.com/BenWheatley/Studies-of-
| AI/blob/main/codin...
| qu4z-2 wrote:
| Your highschool must have had pretty terrible programmers...
| blitzar wrote:
| > The symptoms of pop culture: A "disdain for history". Pop
| cultures believe history doesn't have anything to teach them.
|
| This almost completely falls to pieces in the framing ... how
| does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia that is
| prevalent in a lot of media? An 80's casio watch is, in some
| circles, the pinacle of timepiece fashion. Of course there are
| times where pop culture is a rejection of the prior art, but also
| there are times when current pop culture icons show deference to
| the past and their influences.
| gspencley wrote:
| I'm old enough to have seen this as a fashion trend unto
| itself.
|
| If you go back and watch TV shows from the 80s, you'll see a
| lot of 50s nostalgia.
|
| In the 90s, it was the 60s that was being fetishized. They even
| brought back Woodstock, twice. I was in high school in the 90s
| and "hippie fashion" was very popular. Tie dyed shirts came
| back etc.
|
| In the 2000s the 70s were in. We had TV shows like That 70s
| Show etc.
|
| Then it was the 80s, and now 90s nostalgia is starting to come
| in.
|
| It's the cycle of aging. All the kids and teenagers from those
| decades are now middle aged and they want to consume nostalgia.
| If they had kids in their 20s, then those kids are now
| teenagers and young adults and are becoming curious about their
| parents lived experiences and all the things that they just
| missed out on (during the 00s I was very interested in the 70s
| since that decade happened right before I was born).
|
| But this is a specific exception, not the rule. Middle aged
| consumers are not the trend-setting hipsters who create new
| fashion trends (the stuff that they will fetishize when they
| are middle age).
|
| What's really ironic, though, is that in tech there really
| isn't much that is new. Even AI/ML was being researched as far
| back as the 1940s, we had working proof of concepts in the 80s.
| We knew how to do this stuff ages ago, and had practical
| applications. We just needed the hardware and data
| accessibility to catch up so that we have the storage and
| computing to actually train these things. Every advancement
| over the last 20 years has been small incremental refinements.
| The big stuff is not new.
|
| But the industry still fetishizes it like it's new.
|
| "Cloud" is just resource sharing. We're back to mainframes,
| complete with the vendor lock-in caused by proprietary APIs.
| And yet it is branded, marketed and fetishized as if it's
| "new."
|
| OOP is soooo passe. We tried that in the 90s and 00s and there
| were ... _gasp_... problems! People wrote buggy and difficult
| to maintain code. Enter Functional Programming and now this is
| the way that we do things. It 's impossible to write bad code
| in this paradigm ... right?!
|
| Relational databases are slow and complicated and require DBAs
| to maintain. In comes NoSQL and key/value doc-stores ... now
| THIS is the way we do things. You can't develop a bad product
| using a doc store database ... right?!
|
| Restful APIs require strong collaboration between backend and
| frontend developers and simple, single-purpose contracts aren't
| very flexible. In comes GraphQL now ALL web apps need to use it
| because you can't develop a difficult to maintain application
| using GraphQL .. .right!?
|
| This is the point of the article and after 25 years in the
| industry I have a hard time finding the lie.
| jasmer wrote:
| Casio watches are not 'cool' because they are useful and cheap
| as they always were - they are fetishized as a 'fashion'.
|
| If we were all just 'wearing them because they made sense' then
| yes, but they are specifically objectified as thing of
| adornment. It's mostly not about the past.
|
| That guy who is still wearing the Casio because he always 'just
| did' - that's not pop culture.
|
| There's nothing wrong with pop culture and it has many positive
| attributes, change is needed. It'd be boring without change.
| That said it can obviously be carried away.
|
| Pruning is also healthy for the org in many ways, especially if
| it allows for adaptation and change. It obviously has some
| negative externalizations for individuals which is not nice.
| pif wrote:
| Calling 40 years ago "history" is actually "disdain for
| history".
|
| History is not what you can find at an older cousin's place.
| History is what someone had to make an effort to save for you,
| and you cannot experience it any more.
| blitzar wrote:
| Here is a perfectly preserved sony walkman from 1987 -
| maximum effort and all.
|
| https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O315300/walkman-
| personal-...
| edgyquant wrote:
| When I was in 8th grade in 2007 our history book ended with a
| chapter on 9/11. History is the past and even history forums
| tend to say anything more than a generation ago is history.
| namaria wrote:
| The whole 'history repeats itself' really rang true to me
| when I was reading on the birth of the roman empire, about
| when the republic fell (not the last decade, the full
| history) and I realized much of what we see happening in
| American politics is not new. The big outrageous
| personalities, the moral pleas, the manipulation of public
| opinion, the principled vs the pragmatic. All of that
| resonates across the centuries.
|
| But, alas, as they say... those who don't know history are
| condemned to repeat, while those who know are condemned to
| watch other repeating it.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Some writing on why the US and Rome are completely
| different:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/19mi71/how_
| v...
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1ir3jm/in_w
| h...
| namaria wrote:
| The fact that they are completely different contexts, yet
| we can see patterns in behavior repeating themselves, is
| what makes this interesting.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not really. As said in those posts, just because there
| are superficial _ostensible_ patterns does not mean that
| they are useful, or even real.
| namaria wrote:
| These posts are disabusing people of the notion that The
| American Empire shall follow because omens were foreseen.
| I am obviously not saying that. I took care to single out
| the personality traits and behaviors I was comparing.
| It's an aesthetic exercise and not at all similar to
| prognosticating modern politics bases on ancient history.
|
| What are you trying to accomplish?
| 3-cheese-sundae wrote:
| There is a lot that occurred 40 years ago that can no longer
| be experienced, or even known by anyone today. Wouldn't
| refusing to call it history be disdain for history?
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| History is simply what we chose to remember and how we
| remember it. There's no minimum length it needs to be in the
| past. A "historical moment" can happen in the present.
| rjknight wrote:
| Superficial imitation is not the same thing as deep
| understanding. Nostalgia for the past isn't the same as respect
| for the lessons that it can teach us. A _real_ understanding of
| history is one that can teach you something important about the
| present.
| p0pcult wrote:
| >how does one explain the pop culture of 80s nostalgia
|
| The fact that people who were teens in this era are a desirable
| market segment with a lot of purchasing power, and nostalgia
| works. If it were anything about the actual historical value,
| then the 80s references would last. But they won't.
|
| Before the 80s nostalgia it was "That 70s Show."
|
| Prior to that, it was "The Wonder Years" (set in the late
| 1960s/early 70s)
|
| And before that, it was "Happy Days" (50s/early 60s).
|
| It's all a cash grab, plucking on the heart strings of the
| people who were at the apex of their earning power.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Usually, pop culture means for young people. 80s nostalgia is
| for people born in the 70s.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not necessarily. There are movements for 90s nostalgia from
| people who did not exist in the 90s. It's a sort of fake or
| retrograde nostalgia, possibly from seeing their parents.
| totemandtoken wrote:
| Respecting the aesthetics of history is not the same thing as
| having respect for history
| googlryas wrote:
| The persistent retro mimicry across decades is just an exercise
| in stereotyping, not born out of any appreciation for history.
| A Casio in the 80s was cutting edge consumer tech in a sense. A
| Casio watch today has a totally different vibe.
| agumonkey wrote:
| Beside the mimicry there's also a lack of "cultural tension"
| (as in physical force). A simple thing in the 80s was a
| magical item from a lot of new ideas and new efforts. Today
| there's such a gluttony of capabilities that you're drowning
| and can't feel anything. It's like x-ray.. new improvements
| happen so fast, they go through you.. with either extremely
| high emotional response (iphone waiting lines) or very mild
| one (renew your flagship from 2 years ago). Same goes for
| music IMO.. people are looking at the past because today's
| culture is lacking. Some of it is from my generation
| nostalgia, but a lot of it isn't, I was very surprised to see
| new filters to imitate VHS tapes or CRT screens being used in
| new youtube videos, even though everything sold is about 4K,
| 120fps and whatever.
|
| There's also an anthropological aspect about this.. watching
| 70s videos, with lots of glare, or halos, probably
| limitations of optics/film .. but giving some pretty
| aesthetics. Having more physically correct capture of an
| event doesn't improve that aspect. People are romantics.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| It's like Synthwave, which was never a thing in the 80s.
|
| It's a modern reinvention of how people assume the 80s felt,
| filtered through a gauzy haze of nostalgia for an imaginary
| pop culture that never existed in that form.
|
| Which is similar to computing and other tech nostalgia. An
| Amiga was out there on the edge in the 80s, now it's a source
| of fond reminiscence. Likewise 1980s music equipment,
| especially synthesizers.
|
| The modern anti-pop-culture equivalent would be asking what's
| out on the edge today. And there isn't much, because the vibe
| of computing - actually the vibe of everything - has changed
| from excited exploration and boundary breaking with constant
| invention and surprises, to backward-looking and derivative
| commoditised corporate consumption and collectorism, and the
| generation of content and items for same.
|
| The most innovative thing at the moment - AI - is an evolving
| set of automated systems for summarising what has already
| been generated, rather than for generating something
| completely new from out of left field.
| ben7799 wrote:
| The Amiga is such a perfect example. I grew up in the 80s
| in a software engineering household and all my parents
| friends were likewise engineers in the computer industry.
| So I grew up and ended up in the industry too.
|
| I was around lots and lots of different computers that were
| not common in the 80s due to being a "tailgate" kid into
| facilities. And yet I've still never seen an Amiga in
| person I think, and I have never had a "IRL" friend who
| ever had one either.
|
| And yet you'd think from nostalgia that we all had them in
| the 80s.
| oscillonoscope wrote:
| I think it's better to treat the author's definition as
| separate from the traditional understanding of pop culture. It
| seems like they really want to talk about an idea they have and
| are assigning a new definition to an old term.
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Copy the image of versus incorporate the essence of.
|
| We wear a Casio because it looks retro, but we check our phones
| for the time. We have a cassette player in our house, but we
| use a Bluetooth cassette to play MP3s on it. We put a
| 3D-printed Sony Walkman phone case around our iPhones instead
| of digging out the real thing and enjoying the original media
| with all its perks and problems.
|
| I would use tea as an example. We can drink a modern aluminum
| can of iced tea that contains 50 ingredients, none of which is
| tea, or we can take it slow and do a complete traditional tea
| ritual. One is loosely inspired by the past, the other is
| immersing yourself in tradition.
|
| The floppy disk save icon comes to mind.
| ghostpepper wrote:
| Curious what icon you would replace it with
| Karawebnetwork wrote:
| Nostalgia is not always negative, and I didn't mean to
| imply that it needs to be replaced. Everyone knows that the
| icon stands for "Save" even if they don't know where it
| came from.
|
| In a recent tweet from Japan, younger people wonder why the
| "Save" button in Excel is a vending machine with a drink in
| the tray. Another popular tweet shows a child wondering why
| their parents 3D printed a save button. In both cases, they
| understood the icon stood for save without knowing what it
| was.
|
| As for your question, I would either use a circle with an
| arrow in it or an open box with an arrow in it. Perhaps a
| cloud with an arrow if it's saving to the cloud. Another
| alternative is a bookmark style icon (but then you need to
| ask: will the future generations experience physical books
| at all?)
|
| However, I'm not a UI/UX expert, and this might clash with
| the Download button, so you'd have to ask whether or not
| the distinction is important in your own application.
| Keeping the convention of a mysterious floppy disk might
| still be the right choice.
| croes wrote:
| That's retro fashion.
|
| I doubt that most wearers think the Casio is the superior watch
| compared to nowadays smartwatches
| blitzar wrote:
| It has a better battery, the little solar panel thing means I
| dont need to put it on a magnet every night. It keeps the
| time just as well. The metal band is the same one that a
| premium smart watch comes with, and it also comes with an
| smart advanced "notifications off" setting - such that it is
| litterally impossible to get an errant notificaion in the
| middle of an important meeting.
| poszlem wrote:
| <<A "disdain for history">>
|
| A common problem in contemporary culture is a disregard for
| history, which can be seen not only in startup companies and the
| technology industry, but throughout society as a whole. During
| times of significant change, it is common for people to believe
| that they are much more intelligent and advanced than previous
| generations, who they may view as ignorant or backward. As the
| consequences of the revolution inevitably become clear, when the
| revolution turns on its children, people often begin to
| appreciate the positive aspects of the past and recognize that
| revolutions are usually not the solution you want (for the exact
| same reason why you usually don't want to rewrite a huge software
| project).
|
| Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming to an
| end.
| pif wrote:
| > Let us hope that the current period of revolution is coming
| to an end.
|
| Let us hope that the current _need_ of revolution is coming to
| an end. FTFY
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> older is inherently inferior._
|
| As an "older," I've encountered this exact attitude.
|
| Really uplifting.
|
| As a positive, it pissed me off enough, to "drop out," and lean
| into early retirement.
|
| I spent the majority of my career at the antithesis of "pop
| culture," which was a 100-year-old Japanese company.
|
| I am grateful for the lessons and habits I got, there.
|
| Plenty of stuff that they did wrong, but they also did a lot of
| stuff right.
| robomartin wrote:
| > As an "older," I've encountered this exact attitude.
|
| Same here. I was frustrating to watch young engineers insist on
| ignoring well-established knowledge only to go out and make
| mistakes that cost the company 6 to 8 months and hundreds of
| thousands of dollars, maybe more. And they were warned about
| the very things that happened during design reviews.
|
| Two examples (without getting into identifiable details):
|
| A complex mechanical assembly intended for challenging thermal
| and dynamic (vibration) environment. After studying the design
| I told the 20-something mechanical engineer the approach she
| took to the distribution of loads would fail instantly. This
| was done professionally, one-on-one and without any "attitude",
| to use the term. Her response: "I have a Masters degree in
| Mechanical Engineering from MIT, I think I know what I am
| doing.".
|
| Six months later the assembly, quite literally, exploded during
| the vibration test. Even after that she still refused to listen
| to my recommendations. This joke easily cost the company a
| million dollars and six months of wasted effort. If you
| consider this in the context of the larger project, the cost
| and delays could have been an order of magnitude greater.
|
| Second example. A EE designing a board to drive a bunch of
| LEDs. Again, 20-something. If I remember correctly, the board
| had 15 independent channels. He executed this as what I call
| "datasheet design". He picked a switched-mode LED driver, used
| the circuit from the datasheet with little modification and
| stuffed the board with 15 of these circuit blocks.
|
| The board ends-up having hundreds of components, it bigger than
| what we wanted and complexity/reliability/RFI were of concern.
| After studying this I had a meeting with him and explained that
| we could use an analog circuit with somewhere around four
| components per channel to drive the LEDs with excellent
| efficiency. The board would shrink to 1/4 the size, use 80%
| less components, have a less intense RF signature, etc.
|
| In this particular case, he actually laughed at me and said
| something like "Are you crazy? Everyone knows linear drive of
| LEDs is the most inefficient thing you can do". Of course, this
| is precisely the kind of thing a book-smart engineer who just
| copies circuits from datasheets would say. Not only is this not
| true, it is ridiculously easy math to show how you can build
| efficient LED drivers in the analog domain with just a few
| components (hint: control the power supply voltage with an
| efficient switched-mode regulator set to a precise voltage
| based on the LED string Vf range).
|
| Once again, this design was implemented. It caused untold
| problems in the context of the greater project, all of which
| required mitigation in some form.
|
| I don't know what it is. When I was a 20-something engineer I
| was eager to listen to and work with the older engineers. I
| learned more this way than I can possibly describe. Not just
| about engineering, about life.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I am sorry to hear about that.
|
| At my company, in Tokyo, there were job titles you couldn't
| get, until you reached a certain chronological age. Would not
| be possible, here in the US.
|
| Sometimes, I look at some of these Jurassic-scale meltdowns,
| and ask myself "Were there _any_ adults in the room, when
| this idea was discussed? Even a minimally-experienced geek
| could have foreseen most of these problems. "
|
| Of course, it's a trick question. The answer is, inevitably,
| "No."
| kerblang wrote:
| Well I think the author got one thing right:
|
| > The "Pop" in "Pop Culture" stands for "popularity". If it's
| popular then it must be right.
|
| And that's social media simplified. The internet is filled with
| pop-seeking garbage because pop was the best metric anyone could
| fathom. Even now the AI's are struggling to reach for a better
| version of "right".
|
| But more to the author's point, yes, modern tech startups and
| their funders are absolutely obsessed with being trendy, even
| moreso than an 80's teenager (a lot of the big players _were_ 80
| 's teenagers, btw).
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| Kind of a nitpick, but AIs mostly don't get to choose what's
| "right". I mean they're trained with a particular goal in mind
| already, so either their training data or whatever metric their
| self-training is set to optimize defines "right" for them in
| advance.
|
| It's not AIs that are struggling to find a better version of
| "right", it's people building AIs.
| dcow wrote:
| It's true. People believe you can raise money on having a
| trendy feeling product idea with very little merit... and sadly
| they are right. It baffles me.
| fullshark wrote:
| I agree with some of what he is saying, but don't really get the
| "pop culture" framing. Isn't pop culture just popular cultural
| artifacts? I'm under the impression they are mostly looked down
| upon for class reasons more so than any of the intrinsic problems
| stated.
| britch wrote:
| I agree -- I found the author's definition distracting to the
| points being made.
|
| > The "Pop" in "Pop Culture" stands for "popularity". If it's
| popular then it must be right.
|
| No -- popular culture is simply what is currently popular.
|
| The popular culture could value novelty and uniqueness --
| inherently "unpopular" things. That's not the case today, but
| it fits the definition of pop culture.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| "Pop culture" is a post-WW2 US phenomenon that creates a shared
| societal reality through movies, TV shows, household items and
| brands, etc. As of late, it has infected the whole world
| through social media "virality". Something new appears, then
| thousands of outlets, youtubers and "tech" journalists are
| repeating it and most of society starts talking about it
| without any historic or technical background whatsoever. It's
| an overly-expressive culture based on hype and reactivity.
| fullshark wrote:
| Not sure you are the author but I don't really think that's
| what pop culture is considered colloquially. And you're
| basically just describing any cultural ideas that can be
| considered "viral." I guess a sufficiently large number of
| people accepting that viral idea makes it popular but pop
| culture to me is just music/movies/books etc that are
| popular.
|
| Basically this piece is just saying "the dominant (read:
| popular) culture in tech companies is bad" and they all have
| basically slight variations on this bad culture.
| shapefrog wrote:
| Its even more micro, the current on trend tiktok dance from
| the last 15 minutes that everyone is doing is what everyone
| is doing.
|
| Lemmings as a construct perhaps. Naive social media
| obsessed teens perhaps.
| bluetomcat wrote:
| I am describing the transmission mechanisms of pop culture
| and what it's rooted in. It's inherently linked to
| consumerism, advertising, mass media and fashion. The
| currently popular music/movies/books are just a
| manifestation of that. Important scientific, political or
| philosophical ideas can also go "viral" among intellectual
| circles, but you wouldn't hear about them in an
| entertainment TV show or in an advertisement.
| fullshark wrote:
| Idk, I think what you're really talking about is just
| ideas going hyperviral in tech companies very quickly
| without adequete time to judge their merits based on
| historical comparison, or any meaningful debate. Then
| afterward any attempt to challenge the idea, the fact
| that the idea is so popular is used to defend it. "How
| can you think that when X on twitter said they agree!
| That company X is doing it so we're gonna do it."
|
| Kind of ironic for the innovation industry to just be a
| bunch of followers chasing whatever's popular huh.
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| >It's inherently linked to consumerism, advertising, mass
| media and fashion.
|
| Strongly disagree with this statement. It's _currently_
| linked to those things, but popular culture from even 300
| years ago was not inherently linked to consumerism at
| all. It was more rooted in songs and stories that were
| performed and shared in relatively public spaces like
| taverns, schools and churches. What changed has mostly
| stemmed from the advent of the printing press and the
| subsequent creation of copyright laws.
|
| _Nowadays_ popular culture is linked to consumerism, but
| that 's because new cultural content is treated strictly
| as a product first and a common point of reference
| second. We have created these perverse economic
| incentives that have wreaked absolute havoc on the
| creative commons, which for the vast majority of human
| history included essentially all of "popular culture".
| lucaw wrote:
| Yes, tech companies are building an image of pop cultures, but
| they are not. For example, layoffs are never "mimicking" what
| other companies are doing. Pop culture people may think it is,
| but business people -- who tech CEOs really are -- always tries
| to make the right decisions.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Layoffs are in very large part about mimicking what other
| companies are doing. I have no doubt that most CEOs are
| honestly trying to make the right decision, but (just like in
| pop culture!) the mere fact of what everyone else is doing has
| a substantial impact on the right business decision for you. If
| layoffs are a big trend this year, that substantially reduces
| both the reputational cost of doing your own layoff and the
| number of high performers you can expect to jump ship
| afterwards.
| mempko wrote:
| Then explain the over hiring during easy money after pandemic
| stimulus. Poor decision making, even if consistent, isn't
| 'right decision' making.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| There was no straightforward way to tell in the post-pandemic
| environment which changes in the economy would be transient
| and which ones would be long-term. It's easy to tell a just-
| so story about how these companies' pandemic boom was
| _obviously_ because of easy money and they should have known
| it wouldn 't last. But back in 2020, I remember I used to go
| around telling a similar but wrong story about how remote
| work won't last.
| Zigurd wrote:
| Whoa whoa whoa. Regarding "layoffs are never 'mimicking' what
| other companies are doing" layoffs are getting hyped like other
| trends in tech. Tech management is very trend-driven. Over-
| hiring to lock down talent, swinging to lean to the point of
| dysfunction, is characteristic of the tech industry.
| Entrepreneurs managing on the basis of pop management books and
| gurus is rife in tech.
| rcarmo wrote:
| Having a lot of exposure to early stage startups, I get that
| most founders have essentially zero management experience,
| but the Darwinian process of VCs and go-to-market doesn't
| seem to favor them actually going out and acquiring some.
| Zigurd wrote:
| A lot of those VCs aren't really experienced trained
| managers themselves. The most visible ones tweet in ways
| that confirm this.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| If tech companies are pop cultures, then HN is Teen Beat.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| I'm looking at https://tigerbeat.com now and wishing I had the
| 'shop skills to do a HN front page. Buzz are stories, Crush is
| "Tell HN", and Polls are "Ask HN"; the mapping practically
| writes itself...
|
| [Edit: and Beauty are the automatic YC front page spots?]
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Tiger Beat buzz | music | beauty | style | crush 1. ^
| Everything we know about 'Outer Banks' Season 2 2. ^
| Ask TB: Which New Song Off 'Sour' is Your Favorite? 3.
| ^ Pick a Yearbook Superlative and We'll Tell You...
|
| (Style transfer in the other direction was a bit easier)
| msarrel wrote:
| Startups are pop culture cults.
| sanitycheck wrote:
| I think there's some rationality.
|
| Let's say as a company you need money. Money comes from investors
| and/or customers. Customers or (especially) investors may want
| you to make "modern" software using "modern" technology.
| Developers (especially the young talented ones you can afford)
| are also attracted to modern tech for rational ($PSEUR) reasons.
|
| So you can ignore that, and miss out on money and talent and thus
| maybe success. Or you can take the easier route and do what
| everyone else is doing.
| mempko wrote:
| I mean, it's turtles all the way down isn't it. I would just
| call that second hand irrationality. Why? Because investors
| chasing shiny new things because they are new is also
| irrational.
| q845712 wrote:
| I expected the example at the end to be kubernetes, but instead
| it's layoffs. I think the article works almost equally as well if
| you swap in k8s, blockchain, or a few other buzzy buzzwords,
| which is kind of a testament to the truthiness of the argument.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Everyone I've ever met with experience deploying to
| heterogeneous environments wholeheartedly endorses Kubernetes.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| If you use a managed version of k8s like AKS/EKS - it's a
| literal no-brainer for running containerized workloads.
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _There are two kinds of fools. One says, "This is old,
| therefore it is good"; the other says, "This is new, therefore it
| is better"_
|
| The former is a little Lindy. The latter is ready for paradigm
| shifts. Ideal is if you don't choose based on age.
|
| But I'll say something contrary: neither of these things matter
| in technology. The layoffs are good for the firms that 2xed in
| the pandemic. The kubernetes is survivable or beneficial.
| mjw1007 wrote:
| I think some programmers need to hear the advice "don't assume
| that newer is necessarily better", and others need to hear "don't
| dismiss new things as being created by a cascade of attention-
| deficit teenagers".
|
| Maybe the author of this article is meeting more of the first
| kind, but it's dangerous to issue advice that amounts to
| "wherever you are on this balance, move further East".
| vehemenz wrote:
| I regularly wonder how much of the "tooling" in modern
| development stems from not knowing or making an attempt to
| understand what GNU applications from 30+ years ago offer out of
| the box.
| gerbilly wrote:
| This article echoes a few of my most unpopular opinions.
|
| * The current generation could not invent the internet. They
| don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
|
| * People who spurn well thought out technologies like SQL or
| relational databases, are doomed to re-invent them, badly.
| igammarays wrote:
| Absolutely agree. And let me add:
|
| * 99.99% of modern software startups could be built,
| maintained, and scaled in production by a single dedicated
| programmer and served on a single machine. Yes, even with tens
| of millions of users.
|
| * Most tech companies hire for the prestige and to not feel
| lonely, not because they need to hire. (And to have pretty
| young interns walking around the office).
|
| * YCombinator has deviated far from the original vision of Paul
| Graham and his essays. Nowadays all of the startups coming out
| of YC batches are just trash, and the YC panel has suffered
| "death by committee", i.e. bland risk-averse pop conformism
| riding the trends with no deep understanding of anything.
| frodowtf wrote:
| > They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
|
| Meanwhile $GENERATION is inventing general AI. Your so-called
| unpopular opinion is basically "old man yells at younger
| people", but with even less foundation.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Yeah sure. ChatGPT confabulates constantly and has no
| understanding of what it's saying. I think it fails the 'I'
| part of 'AI.'
|
| I've had it confidently invent URLs when challenged to show
| the sources for an obviously false claim. It _invented a URL_
| which has never existed.
|
| I mean it's impressive, but it has a _long_ way to go to
| become intelligent.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You're using ChatGPT as a strawman.
|
| You claimed the younger generation doesn't have the
| attention span to invent the internet. Someone else
| mentioned the clear and ongoing progress in machine
| learning, which involves many things not named ChatGPT, and
| has become one of the biggest economic engines of the
| world.
|
| You're just making an inane generalization. You will
| rightly be criticized for this.
|
| And you're completely missing out on the inevitable fact
| that those zoomers could teach you a lot of things you
| don't know too.
| rebolek wrote:
| AI is Artificial Ignorance.
| bakugo wrote:
| > Meanwhile $GENERATION is inventing general AI
|
| They're not inventing anything, they're just taking the
| concept of machine learning that has been around for ages and
| throwing more data and hardware at it. Underneath it all,
| it's still just an algorithm that finds and repeats patterns
| and nothing more, the patterns are just getting more complex.
| It's not in any way comparable to the invention of the
| internet in terms of innovation.
| hagbarth wrote:
| People saying AGI is right around the corner are just as
| wrong as people saying full self driving was right around the
| corner 5 years ago.
|
| Not saying current generative ai will not have a huge impact.
| It will.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| Not sure about that, there are always smart people abound. The
| guy who made SerenityOS, the CommaAI founder, etc.
|
| This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of old-
| man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time
| immemorial.
| gerbilly wrote:
| > This simply reads to me like a "kids these days" type of
| old-man argument, which has, as we know, existed since time
| immemorial.
|
| And this counterargument has existed since time immemorial +
| 1. It proves nothing.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| It also disproves nothing, ie your argument bears no weight
| either. At least I have shown some examples where smart
| people of this generation are building complex things that,
| were they born 50 years ago, would likely have been able to
| build the Internet too.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Ok, I never said there weren't smart people still around.
|
| But I stand behind what I claim. A large collaborative,
| and disinterested project like DARPANET could not get off
| the ground today.
|
| Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used
| pocket protectors and HP calculators didn't have an
| advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown
| to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a
| cat might be doing something interesting?
|
| But really the argument behind your argument seems to be
| that there is a monotone increasing function to
| 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes
| we regress.
|
| We can't even agree on what is real anymore, isn't that a
| serious disadvantage?
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _But really the argument behind your argument seems to
| be that there is a monotone increasing function to
| 'progress'. I'm arguing that it's not and that sometimes
| we regress._
|
| Where did I ever say that? Your claim was about the
| Internet, not "progress" in general.
|
| > _Are you seriously arguing that the generation who used
| pocket protectors and HP calculators didn 't have an
| advantage in concentration over the one who's been shown
| to distractedly check their phones every 15sec in case a
| cat might be doing something interesting?_
|
| Yes, because again you're generalizing to an entire
| population based on a stereotype. Do you think everyone
| back 50 years ago was similarly concentrating? No,
| because certain people can simply concentrate more than
| others, and those are the people building the Internet
| back then, and those are the same kinds of people who can
| build an Internet today. 99% of people were not doing so,
| we are talking about the differences of 0.0...1% of the
| population who built the Internet, so let's compare the
| same amount of people today too.
| gerbilly wrote:
| Think of all the coworkers you've ever had and see if you
| can imagine them writing RFCs and debating back and forth
| and revising them?
|
| I have worked at a _lot_ of companies and I find the kind
| of people who can or are willing and able to do that is
| decreasing. It 's nearly zero today.
|
| If the Internet was invented today, it would work only
| for the happy path and fail with a million different
| error modes, each handled differently depending on the
| specific implementation.
|
| And you know what? People would accept it's unreliability
| probably, the way we accepted the 'all computers crash'
| from the DOS era till about NT 40. Everybody knew that
| computers just crash like that. :shrug:
|
| Today ChatGPT makes up facts and gets things wrong. But
| it's OK cos it's newer than Google, or printed books.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I sometimes participate in the Rust RFCs, so yes, I can
| imagine them writing RFCs and debating back and forth,
| which they do daily.
|
| Again you're focusing on coworkers and teams here and
| there at various companies, not in the best of the best
| who are the ones who built the internet and who would
| build it today. They are not average developers like one
| might normally work with, as I said, they are 0.0...1%.
| Hercuros wrote:
| I think times are also just different now. Now a lot of
| the talent just gets vacuumed up by the Big Tech
| companies where they can be a cog in some wheel.
|
| You seem to be ascribing some moral failure to the
| younger generations whereas there are also factors at
| play that go beyond individuals. It might be more
| sensible to say that the internet could not be invented
| in the current economic/social climate.
| kortilla wrote:
| > The current generation could not invent the internet. They
| don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
|
| You vastly underestimate how much thought went into the
| internet. Look at:
|
| - TCP delayed acks + Nagle's algorithm
|
| - IPv4 address size (Vincent said 32-bits was roughly as likely
| as 24 or 48).
|
| - the 7 layer OSI
|
| - class-based (A, B, C, ...) routing
|
| - most of the options in IPv4 headers
|
| The Internet was as much hacks and a playground as other layers
| of the stack are today. The good stuff is still in use but
| there is a vast graveyard of bad ideas that didn't pan out
| because they were security nightmares, couldn't scale, etc.
|
| The same applies to core protocols like BGP. BGP hijacking is
| _still_ possible today.
| betaby wrote:
| > BGP hijacking is still possible today.
|
| .. in the same sense as http hijacking is possible today,
| i.e. without httpS. For BGP we have RPKI ROA for a quite a
| while, and ASPA is coming.
| LarryMullins wrote:
| > > _Old thing was hard, too hard for this generation_
|
| > _You 're vastly underestimating how hard the old thing was_
|
| Sounds like you're agreeing with him, if anything. Where is
| gerbilly's 'underestimation'?
| [deleted]
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| To be fair: current generation does not exist in a time where
| inventing the Internet is necessary. And there probably are
| some big ideas out there incubating in obscurity that will only
| show themselves to be important much later.
|
| Do we lack the vision for such big projects? Absolutely. Is it
| only the current generation's fault? Absolutely not. This is
| very widespread.
|
| > They don't have the attention span or the culture for it.
|
| I'd argue there is almost _no_ technical culture whatsoever. It
| is basically "trending on HN" and comment section discourse.
| This is a massive problem and contributes to the shoddy state
| of a lot of software nowadays.
| jklinger410 wrote:
| Please don't forget that every accusation lobbied at the next
| generation is an implicit admission that the previous
| generation created an unsuitable environment for raising
| children. Or that those people were failures as parents
| individually.
|
| Or you could just not make broad generalizations about
| different generations. Which is preferable.
| carapace wrote:
| I think you're making a good point in general, but in this
| case I think we arguably did create an unsuitable environment
| for raising children, first with television and then the
| Internet itself.
|
| I don't blame anyone, every step down this path has seemed
| like a good idea at the time, eh?
| hot_gril wrote:
| I've seen the second thing happen department-wide where I work,
| three times now, with databases in particular.
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