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This quote stuck out to me: > More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians. It makes me realize how fundamentally different t

• munchbunny 6y ago
  I don't think it's that software engineers don't value it. I think we all understand, to some degree, that building resilient, simple software that solves the problem thoroughly requires incredible investment into carefully thinking through the problem and constant upkeep. It's just that we don't want to believe it because getting from 80% to 100% requires boring grind that we'd rather spend building something new and exciting, or because getting from 80% to 100% requires time we could spend building 80% of something else we want to sell.
  • bentcorner 6y ago
    Personally I don't like facing the work to take something from 80-100% - I envision the potential work and I can see it laid before me, extending beyond the horizon. And sometimes that work doesn't even lead to a certain success. I realize that more often than not it would likely lead to improvements and a better state of the world. But it can feel overwhelming at times. Whereas working on a shinier smaller thing brings feelings of gratification that much easier and faster.
  • 0xFACEFEED 6y ago
    For me it's that 1) most people won't even care and 2) someone is going to ruin it anyway, eventually. I've observed a cognitive dissonance that I can't quite put my finger on. You'll work with (and for) people who have an extreme admiration for Apple products because of the attention to detail and quality. And yet they are perfectly fine churning out terrible technology products in order to make a buck. Often times just little attention to detail can make a huge difference; you don't need to be a zealot about it. Loosely related: I've found that I've made the most money while working with bad teams on terrible technology products. And I've made the least money working with great teams on great products. I really hate that.
    • themacguffinman 6y ago
      I suspect a lot of the noticeable difference between Apple products and the normal stuff that most other companies churn out is the zealotry. Steve Jobs was notorious for being zealous about the small details. Tim Cook was notorious for his very high standards for operations, expecting even minor operations problems to be fixed very quickly and very thoroughly. Other companies do pay a little attention to detail, if you're observant you can see small details everywhere [1]. Apple is known for zealously taking it to the next level. My point is that I think you do need to be kind of a zealot about it to be comparable to Apple. Most companies and employees aren't prepared to be zealots about it, which isn't that surprising to me because it's a lot of pressure and effort. One might admire how efficient Amazon is at retail compared to everyone else without admiring the sweatshop-style labor evidently needed to achieve it. [1] aside: there's a fun Twitter feed for this kind of stuff https://twitter.com/littlebigdetail?lang=en https://twitter.com/littlebigdetail?lang=en
  • chrisco255 6y ago
    By the time you grind to get that 100% perfect solution, the number of requirements the business has put on you in your backlog has extended well beyond what you can keep up with. It's not like software engineers are the only actors in a software system. They are reactive to the needs of product development who are reactive to the needs of customers. You have to balance your limited development resources against a constantly changing set of requirements. So you make trade-offs.
    • ReactiveJelly 6y ago
      I was gonna say that! curl and ffmpeg are definitely commendable "100%" FOSS projects, but they aren't chasing new features. HTTP3 is big, but it's not like curl had to break HTTP 1.1 compatibility to add it. AV1 is big, but it's not like MPEG1 will ever change. Both projects deal in protocols, which means most of their requirements are literally set in stone, or silicon. Whereas youtube-dl is constantly breaking _only_ because YouTube is constantly breaking, probably on purpose to thwart youtube-dl. Why spend the other 80% of my time adding armor plating and documentation to a feature that will either be gone or half rewritten next week?
      • chrisco255 6y ago
        Yeah agreed. There's a big difference between the base layer utilities and the application layer interfaces.
      • majewsky 6y ago
        > YouTube is constantly breaking, probably on purpose to thwart youtube-dl. I don't think they're trying to thwart youtube-dl, because there's so many low-hanging-fruit countermeasures that they don't employ. youtube-dl can download a playlist with hundreds of videos at 1000x playback speed. You can't tell me that's not distinguishable from regular users going through the website. What's more likely IMO is that the constant changes that ytdl is catching up with are caused by good old CADT (Cascade of Attention-Deficit Teenagers) inside Google, driven by their infamous "build over maintain" culture.
• mathgladiator 6y ago
  The key word is marginal. Sadly, software tends to align against art as pushing boundaries is marginal for the return of investment. I can provide an example. I'm writing a programming language, database, and platform to power board games. http://www.adama-lang.org/ http://www.adama-lang.org/ Most of my personal investments are marginal to most businesses (or deeply incompatible). If was going to run this as an enterprise, then this would be a death sentence. However, my hope is that when I get this thing moving, then I can ship games quickly with exceptional and redefining reliability. The only reason I can pursue this as an art is that I'm close to retirement.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  The movie thing is a good example. I remind my kids that some of these movies cost $1,000,000/minute to make. That might be what they make in their lifetime, so it is about that many hours of work per minute (a life’s work).
  • mwcampbell 6y ago
    When you put it that way, that's obscenely expensive. Maybe we should be steering kids toward entertainment that we can create as well as consume because it's not absurdly expensive.
    • spdionis 6y ago
      It does get kind of ironic if you realize that streaming is getting more and more popular. I guess that's a much more cost effective form of entertainment?
    • Gravityloss 6y ago
      TV became digital and the amount of channels exploded. Yet the amount of eyeballs watching advertisement didn't. So the money spent per TV program minute went down. Enter reality TV.
    • tonyedgecombe 6y ago
      But stuff like Netflix or Disney+ is quite cheap compared to other forms of entertainment because it is spread over so many viewers. I remember Madonna getting a lot of grief over a statement about climate change because her crew was shifting so much kit around by air. But the reality is someone paying $100 for a concert ticket isn't going to cause much in the way of carbon emissions, certainly nothing like buying a car or a trans-Atlantic flight.
  • cma 6y ago
    Top billed actors may inflate that, unless you consider that they then spend the money on gardeners and stuff and consider them part of the crew.
• david422 6y ago
  One of my favorite magicians: Derren Brown He does a coin flip trick where he flips a fair coin 10 times in a row and gets heads every time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzYLHOX50Bc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzYLHOX50Bc The amount of time and effort he puts into this and other illusions is very large.
  • phpnode 6y ago
    I used to be a big fan of Derren Brown when I was younger, and I do still like a lot of his work, but he readily admits to deceiving the audience, and the deception includes the explanations he gives for his techniques. The video you linked to was part of a longer show (The System) which gives an explanation for how this trick was done - he says they kept filming take after take, for 9hrs, until they finally got ten heads in a row. I think that kind of brute force approach would have been excessively boring to him, and it's much more likely that he switched to a gimmicked coin to get the ten heads in a row, then filmed a few shots of throwing tails for the "explanation".
    • piyh 6y ago
      He wrote Tricks of the Mind and that was a great book. One piece that has stuck with me for ~15 years now is the 20 word series that I can recite forward or backward after spending 5 minutes visualizing them in a "linked list". For example, telephone - sausage - monkey. Vividly imagine dialing a payphone with a sausage. Next up, sausage monkey. Vividly, using all your senses imagine a monkey flinging sausages to the point of absurdity where he's swimming through sausages. You just created a mental linked list that you can traverse from either direction, and that you'll remember for as long as you want to. Push it to the extremes, build up your method of loci to arbitrary lengths, build your memory palaces and become Hannibal Lecter.
      • thr0w__4w4y 6y ago
        I've done the exact same trick in my mind to remember a sequence -- the "linked list" linking A to B, B to C, etc. It just seemed natural to me, I didn't read it anywhere. If you have the "head pointer", you're probably golden. When I told a colleague about this years ago, he said that my approach seemed so much more complicated and/or difficult than his approach (IIRC it's called the Memory Palace?) of building a castle/cathedral / museum in your mind, and as you walk through it, you see a banana on the left, and then a monkey a little further down the hall, then a trombone on the right, etc. For me, that technique simply doesn't work, as much as I try.
• akiselev 6y ago
  > Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be spending time on animations -- the result is a cool flourish, but it lasts 0.15 seconds and it took 3 days to get it just right, and it's impossible to quantify how worthwhile it was beyond a gut feeling. Even still, that's not even in the same ballpark in terms of time or effort. The difference is that movies are all or nothing productions in an industry set up for a waterfall process with directors who exert creative control. Everything from dealflow to billing to the unions are set up to support the industry's unique requirements. They do the same kind of budget triage as software companies do, but they emphasize the creative aspect far more relative to tech since they're competing over form not function. The nearest creative equivalent would probably be Jobs-era Apple but I think the best analog would be NASA, whose missions are dictated by scientific and exploratory goals outside of their control. Except instead of an artistic direction, they have to contend with physics that dictates they spend extreme resources on seemingly trivial details like what tape or writing implement works best in zero-g.
  • olivertaylor 6y ago
    > they emphasize the creative aspect far more relative to tech since they're competing over form not function Yes and no. There are a lot of "make it fit in the box" requirements when making a movie. The unions mandate a certain make up of the crew, and a certain size, the stage rental costs are a certain amount, there are various laws and corporate budgets to take into account; all that adds up to a certain number of shots you can do in a day, which adds up to a dollar amount, and ALL THOSE THINGS cascade down to enabling only certain creative things. The difference between a brilliant director and a ok one is not the beauty of their art, it's their ability to pull-off something incredible in the middle of all that machinery. In a way, it's WORKING that machinery in your favor. So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a creative endeavor, that industry runs on a template that makes certain things possible and certain things very difficult. But brilliant producers and directors find ways around it.
    • akiselev 6y ago
      >* So while, yes, the industry is set up to support a creative endeavor, that industry runs on a template that makes certain things possible and certain things very difficult. But brilliant producers and directors find ways around it.* Totally agree, and IME that's par for the course for any creative endeavor that becomes profitable but unpredictable, whether its cinema, music, or software engineering. I meant more that the final product is judged on aesthetic qualities more so than in software, so the industry naturally allows for more creative expression at the highest levels of decision making.
• rcurry 6y ago
  I wanted to be a professional magician when I was younger, and there’s a single-handed cut that I learned from Daryl Easton (at a seminar he gave at some Holiday Inn). It took me a month or two of solid practice to get it down, but over thirty years later I can just pick up a deck of cards and flip that cut out like it was nothing. I was saddened to learn that he had committed suicide a while back. Every time I do that flourish playing cards with people or whatever I just remember that time when one of the world’s best magicians hung out with me for a few minutes after his seminar just to make sure I had it down.
• IncRnd 6y ago
  > It makes me realize how fundamentally different the values are between some fields. The amount of time magicians put into the craft is mind-boggling. Larry Wall was quoted in the article, regarding laziness. Bill Gates has a famous quote, "I choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it." Neither of those people can be accused of laziness, yet they both embrace it. Laziness in the context of productivity is often misunderstood as not doing things, but it is more aptly the stopping of doing in order to observe, think, and let the answer come to you. Work diligently, but think and simplify first. It seems to me that is also what the magicians do.
  • grayclhn 6y ago
    They both use the word “lazy” to make their quotes memorable. But that’s it. They’re not actually describing real life laziness.
• caseysoftware 6y ago
  > Maybe a similar sort of thing with software would be spending time on animations A few years ago, I was running a meetup in Austin and a local game studio offered a couple of their people as speakers. Intrigued, I asked about their projects, specializations, etc and learned about fabric animation. That's when I learned that the Sony studio for DC Universe Online had a "fabric guy" who animated Superman and Batman's capes.