7 ms·

Hard times create traumatized people with learned helplessness. Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola T

by api 3y ago

Hard times create traumatized people with learned helplessness. Issac Newton, Albert Einstein, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Nikola Tesla, ... keep thinking of names of profoundly accomplished people in areas like science, business, sports, art, etc. Then tally up how many of them had traumatic hardscrabble origins. Not many. Most grew up middle class or better and had the benefit of good education, solid family life, and a stable society. This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much. The points brought up in this talk are valid though, but I don't think the answer is "good times." I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." (Fixing it later usually involves enshittification.) There are other types of good times that favor more balanced sustainable business models, and those tend to encourage software with a bit more of a focus on quality. I think there's some survivorship bias at work here too though. There was a lot of total crap software in the 80s and 90s that we don't remember. There were lots of DOS and Windows apps with horrible UI/UX that would crash your entire machine because operating systems were much less solid than they are today. Security almost didn't exist unless you were on a Unix-type OS or VMS, and even there it was pretty basic and coarse grained. Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: it is much more bloated today. Some of that bloat is explainable by things like high-DPI displays and larger data sets, but much of it is a result of bad architecture and perverse incentives.

pelagicAustral 3y ago
> Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: The Javascript ecosystem.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Its bloated because hardware isnt the bottleneck. IE good times.
- api 3y ago
  Yes it is, especially at scale. This is most obvious in the cloud where zero interest rate era companies blow ludicrous amounts of money running comically inefficient code. The cloud bills at some of these companies are hilarious. Even on the desktop hardware is a constraint if you are trying to do anything that pushes the boundaries of the medium, which is why endpoint-first AI is only possible thanks to hyper-optimized code like llama.cpp.
  - dartos 3y ago
    Even then llama.cpp requires special hardware (a gpu) to run at an acceptable product level of speed.
  - jongjong 3y ago
    I hate hearing this but I know it's true because I've tried to build my career as a software engineer around minimalism, simplicity, maintainability and efficiency at scale but it has constantly felt like a struggle; that there is no market for that. You're totally right in pointing out that a lot of valuable software is comically inefficient. Sometimes it almost seems like only bad, ridiculously inefficient software is allowed to succeed financially in this system. Freaky. I've literally seen projects with horrible code be worth billions and witnessed their market cap drop over time as the code quality improved. I don't know WTF is going on in this industry but it's weird.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    You’re conflating constraint with bottleneck. Of course its a constraint.
robertlagrant 3y ago
> I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." I need to re-read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to double check you haven't just grabbed an example from the last five minutes.
- api 3y ago
  You know I never thought of Rome this way: grow at all costs, consolidate, enshittify. I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium. This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak. https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalous-private-life-of-tiberius-caesar/ https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalo... Also there's a whole bad history meme about how Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The bulk of destruction was done by imperial Rome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_by_Julius_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_... Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake. ... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.
  - lr4444lr 3y ago
    Yep. It's a limited analogy. Other than Pharaonic Egypt and Confucian China (maybe also Mayans/Aztecs), empires back then didn't have a clear understanding like we do today about planning for sustainability. And even those two aforementioned ones couldn't do so without technological ossification and internal social repression, which led to their demise. Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.
33a 3y ago
Maybe that's true, but the examples you picked are pretty bad. * Isaac Newton lost his dad before he was born and his parents gave him up to live with relatives. He had a very rough childhood. * Andre Carnegie's family went broke when he was a child, they had no money and had to restart their lives moving to the United States with basically nothing. * Steve Jobs was adopted, though maybe not exactly poverty it still doesn't sound like a great way to grow up. That's about 3/7 having rough childhoods and 4/7 having good or average.
- manxman 3y ago
  The real issue is authentic versus simulated rough childhoods. Freemasons fucking up their kids to see how they behave and try to correct/program their behaviour based on the responses is more fucked than authentically fucked experience and the simulated experience doesn’t build true character. It’s only as good as the simulation and its parameters and behavioural engineering has a long way to go. Non-consensual behavioural engineering is worse than rape.
myspy 3y ago
I've read an article about why there are less geniuses around and what "creates" geniuses. Usually it was high quality mentorship which helped the kids to get into deep knowledge faster. And from there they were able to build upon it.
- azzentys 3y ago
  and boredom, so the kids would venture into the field of interest on their own vs forced to do.
  - banannaise 3y ago
    You could also approach this from the other direction: our focus on productivity, efficiency, monetization, etc. prevent people from pursuing things they are interested in and developing skills that don't directly translate into profit.
  - germinalphrase 3y ago
    I had a lot of niche interests as a kid that apparently make me interesting as an adult. All of them are because I grew up in a small Wisconsin river town with parents who worked in the arts. Lots of time, minimal media exposure, and plenty of freedom to just… putter, learn and make. As my dad would say back then, ‘only boring people get bored, go find something to do’.
wazoox 3y ago
Usually the line is pretended to be a digest of Ibn Khldun thought, unfortunately this is quite inaccurate, as Ibn Khaldun's theories are wider and more sophisticated than that. Now that I think of it Ibn Khaldun is precisely this example of an accomplished thinker that went through the hardest times possible in the Old World : he went through the Black Death in the 1340, his whole family died while travelling to reunite with him after many years of forced separation, he was imprisoned, deported, exiled many times...
seydor 3y ago
most historic scientists lived far more brutal lives than all humans live since WW2 or so. Schwarzchild figured his radius while figthing WW1. Instead of "middle class" i think their common trait was that they were educated , which if we go back centuries just means "literate". To be honest i think the adage itself is not true, just popular BS.
Izkata 3y ago
> This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much. The meme is at least a few months older than the book, and most likely actually comes from a simplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...

by api 3y ago

pelagicAustral 3y ago

> Software has objectively gotten worse in one way though: The Javascript ecosystem.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Its bloated because hardware isnt the bottleneck. IE good times.

api 3y ago
Yes it is, especially at scale. This is most obvious in the cloud where zero interest rate era companies blow ludicrous amounts of money running comically inefficient code. The cloud bills at some of these companies are hilarious. Even on the desktop hardware is a constraint if you are trying to do anything that pushes the boundaries of the medium, which is why endpoint-first AI is only possible thanks to hyper-optimized code like llama.cpp.
- dartos 3y ago
  Even then llama.cpp requires special hardware (a gpu) to run at an acceptable product level of speed.
- jongjong 3y ago
  I hate hearing this but I know it's true because I've tried to build my career as a software engineer around minimalism, simplicity, maintainability and efficiency at scale but it has constantly felt like a struggle; that there is no market for that. You're totally right in pointing out that a lot of valuable software is comically inefficient. Sometimes it almost seems like only bad, ridiculously inefficient software is allowed to succeed financially in this system. Freaky. I've literally seen projects with horrible code be worth billions and witnessed their market cap drop over time as the code quality improved. I don't know WTF is going on in this industry but it's weird.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  You’re conflating constraint with bottleneck. Of course its a constraint.

robertlagrant 3y ago

> I think the answer is a very specific type of good times, namely zero interest rates which favored a business strategy of "expand at all costs and then we'll fix it later." I need to re-read the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire to double check you haven't just grabbed an example from the last five minutes.

api 3y ago
You know I never thought of Rome this way: grow at all costs, consolidate, enshittify. I have a contrarian view on Rome: it was good that it collapsed, though it would have been better if more effort were made to save works of knowledge and maintain expertise. Even with the consequences though, the collapse of Rome made way for the eventual rise of enlightenment thinking and modern republican democracy. I doubt that would have happened under the Roman imperium. This is what Rome's leadership looked like by the imperial period. It was pretty bleak. https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalous-private-life-of-tiberius-caesar/ https://www.walksinsiderome.com/blog/about-rome/the-scandalo... Also there's a whole bad history meme about how Christians destroyed the Library of Alexandria. The bulk of destruction was done by imperial Rome: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_by_Julius_Caesar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria#Burning_... Roman statue avatar Xitter accounts can suck it. We have more freedom and prosperity today by many orders of magnitude, and we build greater marvels too: space stations, reusable rockets, 3nm integrated circuits. We've taught the sand to think for f's sake. ... which leads me to yet another view I sometimes feel is contrarian: Western civilization is not in a state of collapse.
- lr4444lr 3y ago
  Yep. It's a limited analogy. Other than Pharaonic Egypt and Confucian China (maybe also Mayans/Aztecs), empires back then didn't have a clear understanding like we do today about planning for sustainability. And even those two aforementioned ones couldn't do so without technological ossification and internal social repression, which led to their demise. Today we know more about economic cycles, natural disaster preparedness, population planning, pollution, etc., even if our leaders don't always do it.

33a 3y ago

Maybe that's true, but the examples you picked are pretty bad. * Isaac Newton lost his dad before he was born and his parents gave him up to live with relatives. He had a very rough childhood. * Andre Carnegie's family went broke when he was a child, they had no money and had to restart their lives moving to the United States with basically nothing. * Steve Jobs was adopted, though maybe not exactly poverty it still doesn't sound like a great way to grow up. That's about 3/7 having rough childhoods and 4/7 having good or average.

manxman 3y ago
The real issue is authentic versus simulated rough childhoods. Freemasons fucking up their kids to see how they behave and try to correct/program their behaviour based on the responses is more fucked than authentically fucked experience and the simulated experience doesn’t build true character. It’s only as good as the simulation and its parameters and behavioural engineering has a long way to go. Non-consensual behavioural engineering is worse than rape.

myspy 3y ago

I've read an article about why there are less geniuses around and what "creates" geniuses. Usually it was high quality mentorship which helped the kids to get into deep knowledge faster. And from there they were able to build upon it.

azzentys 3y ago
and boredom, so the kids would venture into the field of interest on their own vs forced to do.
- banannaise 3y ago
  You could also approach this from the other direction: our focus on productivity, efficiency, monetization, etc. prevent people from pursuing things they are interested in and developing skills that don't directly translate into profit.
- germinalphrase 3y ago
  I had a lot of niche interests as a kid that apparently make me interesting as an adult. All of them are because I grew up in a small Wisconsin river town with parents who worked in the arts. Lots of time, minimal media exposure, and plenty of freedom to just… putter, learn and make. As my dad would say back then, ‘only boring people get bored, go find something to do’.

wazoox 3y ago

Usually the line is pretended to be a digest of Ibn Khldun thought, unfortunately this is quite inaccurate, as Ibn Khaldun's theories are wider and more sophisticated than that. Now that I think of it Ibn Khaldun is precisely this example of an accomplished thinker that went through the hardest times possible in the Old World : he went through the Black Death in the 1340, his whole family died while travelling to reunite with him after many years of forced separation, he was imprisoned, deported, exiled many times...

seydor 3y ago

most historic scientists lived far more brutal lives than all humans live since WW2 or so. Schwarzchild figured his radius while figthing WW1. Instead of "middle class" i think their common trait was that they were educated , which if we go back centuries just means "literate". To be honest i think the adage itself is not true, just popular BS.

Izkata 3y ago

> This whole meme is bullshit, and comes from a post-apocalyptic novel where it's used as a justification to murder a prisoner of war (in context). Most people don't know its origin though. They just repeat it because it sounds "truthy" if you don't think about it very much. The meme is at least a few months older than the book, and most likely actually comes from a simplification of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generational_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...