4 ms·

I went to a "progressive" school where we had one strange class called "Design For Living". Today we'd probably call it "lifehacking". Among the fascinating and

I went to a "progressive" school where we had one strange class called "Design For Living". Today we'd probably call it "lifehacking". Among the fascinating and odd topics was a lesson on managing free time. The premise was a (socialist?) vision that everything would be done by robots by 2000, and we would have to find good hobbies and interests, keep fit and volunteer doing good things for our communities. I think digital technology did the opposite in many ways. It turned us into robots. Another thing I noted while reading the article is it mentions trades as the best sort of work. If you're a plumber, bricklayer, or electrician then every job has an end. A wall is finished when you lay the last brick. By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to. Like that page that said "You have reached the end of the Internet", I sometimes wonder if Microsoft might one day release "Windows Final Edition" , the operating system that is finished. Go home developers. Your work is complete. Well done!

samhuk 4y ago
Nicely written, but I don't fully understand your logic here. The bricklayer's wall in your comparison is precisely analogous to an "update" a developer has to do. The work is not complete for a bricklayer nor a software developer. Just as there is "one more revision or update" as you put it, there is always one more house to build walls for. What I think you may be feeling though, is that working on software sometimes feels "endless", but that's really what happens when a project is poorly managed and no "strategic milestones" are reached. This is particularly severe in web dev, less so in the game dev scene where there are more of those "definite walls" to reach.
- bombcar 4y ago
  There's a satisfaction you get when you finish a house - there is something you can point to and say "that is done". There's even a satisfaction with mopping a floor, it is clean now even though it will dirty again. Most programming doesn't have the first and only sometimes do you get the second. It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever. Programming is like being a contractor building the Winchester mansion.
  - drdec 4y ago
    > It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever So it would be like owning a house?
  - samhuk 4y ago
    As sibling comment implies, constructing things physically can often have the "forever needing to be built upon" aspect just like software. The difference that you are probably feeling here, at least from what i can see, is that once a house is built by a construction company, it is "handed over" pretty much completely, whereas with software there is almost never such a handover, but instead a "support period". This I suppose can lead to fatigue as you end up never reaching a "final final" product per se like the house. Personally, i have always found it helpful to plan by milestones/major versions, such that it, in a "hack the human brain" kind of way, provides a synthetic almost-copy of that " ah, all done, time to move on" that the human brain gets when a house is built, or a mountain is climbed. Interesting philosophies hidden within all this, particularly for team leads and such of dev teams.
  - pas 4y ago
    waterfall, well definied requirements, release every few months, have regression tests. have a few days to celebrate the release. sure, business needs and software/IT complexity explosion means that only a small fraction of the problem-design space gets properly covered pushed the majority of the industry toward more agility
paulryanrogers 4y ago
All the tradesmen I've talked with say get up or out as soon as you can. Many aspire to be inspectors or managers. A few do it when retired, out of boredom, though they don't seem to do as good a job and work at their own pace.
carapace 4y ago
Bucky Fuller calculated that we should all be able to retire after a career of about two years having paid for the rest of our lives, by sometime in the 1970's if we apply our resources and technology efficiently. It was part of his "Design Science Revolution". The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up. At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet! - - - - Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?) Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Very interesting, Thanks for sharing.
kirse 4y ago
By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to. You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic]. Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work. I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Those are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. Sorry for the late reply which I hope you see. > Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work. You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all without telos, other than as ends in themselves. However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life. Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away from. > I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag you. > if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really. You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness of so much activity. I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle. I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.
hackerfromthefu 4y ago
So you are saying you think the grass is greener over there? I've worked lots in both, and it really is not. There's something satisfying about the physical movements, and being in different locations, about the house building work, but that is very different to the issue of completion of work you mentioned and I guess you just never did more than one physical building job?

samhuk 4y ago

Nicely written, but I don't fully understand your logic here. The bricklayer's wall in your comparison is precisely analogous to an "update" a developer has to do. The work is not complete for a bricklayer nor a software developer. Just as there is "one more revision or update" as you put it, there is always one more house to build walls for. What I think you may be feeling though, is that working on software sometimes feels "endless", but that's really what happens when a project is poorly managed and no "strategic milestones" are reached. This is particularly severe in web dev, less so in the game dev scene where there are more of those "definite walls" to reach.

bombcar 4y ago
There's a satisfaction you get when you finish a house - there is something you can point to and say "that is done". There's even a satisfaction with mopping a floor, it is clean now even though it will dirty again. Most programming doesn't have the first and only sometimes do you get the second. It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever. Programming is like being a contractor building the Winchester mansion.
- drdec 4y ago
  > It'd be like building a house and finishing and immediately changing something on it, or fixing something that broke, forever So it would be like owning a house?
- samhuk 4y ago
  As sibling comment implies, constructing things physically can often have the "forever needing to be built upon" aspect just like software. The difference that you are probably feeling here, at least from what i can see, is that once a house is built by a construction company, it is "handed over" pretty much completely, whereas with software there is almost never such a handover, but instead a "support period". This I suppose can lead to fatigue as you end up never reaching a "final final" product per se like the house. Personally, i have always found it helpful to plan by milestones/major versions, such that it, in a "hack the human brain" kind of way, provides a synthetic almost-copy of that " ah, all done, time to move on" that the human brain gets when a house is built, or a mountain is climbed. Interesting philosophies hidden within all this, particularly for team leads and such of dev teams.
- pas 4y ago
  waterfall, well definied requirements, release every few months, have regression tests. have a few days to celebrate the release. sure, business needs and software/IT complexity explosion means that only a small fraction of the problem-design space gets properly covered pushed the majority of the industry toward more agility

paulryanrogers 4y ago

All the tradesmen I've talked with say get up or out as soon as you can. Many aspire to be inspectors or managers. A few do it when retired, out of boredom, though they don't seem to do as good a job and work at their own pace.

carapace 4y ago

Bucky Fuller calculated that we should all be able to retire after a career of about two years having paid for the rest of our lives, by sometime in the 1970's if we apply our resources and technology efficiently. It was part of his "Design Science Revolution". The technology has arrived on schedule but the logistics are still messed up. At least part of the problem is the elites siphoning off capital to Panama or wherever, but the real issue is just getting the basic idea across: you no longer have to "earn" a living. Science and capitalism have delivered technology and wealth. We have effectively already won the game of "Life on Earth" but we collectively haven't noticed it yet! - - - - Ideally programmers are working to replace themselves, and the set of problems you can solve with a computer expands (to some theoretical limit? E.g. will an AI one day tell you who to marry? Which schools to attend, what career path to pursue?) Anyway, have you heard of the Futumura Projections? ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_evaluation ) I think one path forward would be to use a notation for programming that is amenable to partial evaluation.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Very interesting, Thanks for sharing.

kirse 4y ago

By contrast, digital work is almost never finished. Everything keeps changing, everything breaks and needs fixing, there's always one more revision or update... we have truly created a diabolical machine to enslave ourselves to. You're talking about telic (finite) vs atelic (infinite) activities. Life needs a balance in the matrix of [painful/pleasurable + telic/atelic]. Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work. I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favorite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Plus if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really.

nonrandomstring 4y ago
Those are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing. Sorry for the late reply which I hope you see. > Ultimately the atelic stuff that we naturally find pleasurable is where we want to spend a lot of our time, but life doesn't work that way. And it sounds like you're heavily skewed to the painful side of atelic work. You're right. There's a lot of pleasurable activities for me, making music, playing games, sea swimming and long distance yomping, all without telos, other than as ends in themselves. However I really resent technological makework. I consider it a failure of intelligence. So much stuff people do nowdays is a clear misuse of computers. Maybe I feel that way because as a computer scientist I see how wrong is the path we've taken and how foolish the work is. Nobody ever got fit or happy sitting at a desk doing a job that doesn't need doing. It's a tragic waste of human life. Seeing people enslaved in tedium by the very tools that promised to set them free is a travesty and injustice I cannot easily turn away from. > I personally enjoy that I can come back to my favourite SW projects and never run out of new ways to play with + improve them. Absolutely. I totally get that too. But I think an unbounded creative drive is something different from the misery I am describing, which is not even a Protestant ethic, a duty, or even a Sisyphean feat. One needs full ownership of a project. And it takes considerable discipline not to be a dog who grows a tail so big it starts to wag you. > if you limit your time vs binge until overfilled/ overworked, it creates a sense of looking forward to the activity later that is motivating. It's a matter of perspective really. You and I probably share a similar sense of self-management. But what I get reading these pages is that "tech culture" today is filled with workers who feel disempowered at the pace, pressure and pointlessness of so much activity. I don't think this is explainable simply as a necessary side-effect of technological society. Neil Postman made an interesting distinction between a technocracy (in which technology becomes the framework of a normally functioning society) and a technopoly in which technology for its own sake becomes the dominant organising principle. I think that's where we are. And worse I think that "change for its own sake" is not what it seems. It's what I call paradoxical progress in Digital Vegan - where change as perpetual disruption is used as a disorientating force that inhibits real innovation and progress.

hackerfromthefu 4y ago

So you are saying you think the grass is greener over there? I've worked lots in both, and it really is not. There's something satisfying about the physical movements, and being in different locations, about the house building work, but that is very different to the issue of completion of work you mentioned and I guess you just never did more than one physical building job?