5 ms·

"(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can comman

by fao_ 2y ago

"(layperson looking at the Intel opcodes listing) The harder they make it to join their club, the more exclusive their service becomes. And thus they can command a higher salary" I know this might be difficult for those of us who have specialized in computer science and have found a lot of things very easy, but sometimes, other professions are difficult and complicated too! Not everything is gatekeeping, and needing to consult an expert otherwise you'll footgun yourself, isn't a personal blow to you, as a person!

gosub100 2y ago
Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?
- goatlover 2y ago
  Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?
  - gosub100 2y ago
    No, thats yet another cartel.
    - fao_ 2y ago
      Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology. Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train. Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation, no? Computing became cheaper because it has layer upon layer of economies of scale. Law doesn’t because every case is unique and is literally decided upon minutiae and exceptional details. Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.
  - robocat 2y ago
    > Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation And smart software engineers never over-complicate their code, right?
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      Sure there’s definitely some of that. That doesn’t “explain why” (OP) code is complex nor does it prove there’s a “cartel” (GP) trying to gatekeep software engineering.
  - gosub100 2y ago
    "wild" is not defined as as "anyone who doesn't share your perspective".
    - llamaimperative 2y ago
      That’s why I didn’t use it that way. I used it to describe your belief that law and medicine are arcane primarily for the purpose of gatekeeping. “Wild” is the most generous word I could come up with, sorry! Is software engineering arcane for similar gatekeepy reasons or is that for more legitimate reasons?
  - fao_ 2y ago
    > Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world. My personal suspicion is that software is one of the easiest fields in the world to learn, and it has the sneaky benefit that you don't have to brush up against many constraints of the real world, but then — this doesn't explain the apparent god complex many programmers have.
- abduhl 2y ago
  The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in. And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.
zo1 2y ago
Except we go out of our way in programming to make everything as easy as possible. If you think about it, half the non-video and non-social media internet is just programming related, with guides, tutorials, and various tools to make it as easy as possible to get somebody doing something. And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply complicated and we need to use complicated tools, specifications, processes and other such things in order to describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next. This is why they are so against automation and simplification of their field. They know that if they automate the processes, that their field becomes very focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just realize that most of what they know can be codified in some sort of unambiguous specification format.
- fao_ 2y ago
  > nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next. A machine cannot be held accountable, and therefore should not be in charge of making decisions.
Zak 2y ago
The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. It is an injustice if most people can't figure out whether things they want to do are legal or not without employing a lawyer.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. In theory, yes. In practice, not “everyone”, and very much not equally true of everyone to whom the law practically applies at all, even in the places which tout “equal protection of the laws” as a bedrock principle.
- SideQuark 2y ago
  I suspect most people never employ a lawyer, and most people don’t go around doing illegal things. You can learn a lot by watching or asking others. Your fear seems unfounded.
- fao_ 2y ago
  > The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. In medicine if you get things very wrong, you die, your patient dies, or everyone in the room dies. In programming if you get things wrong, you give someone radiation poisoning and they die, a plane crashes, or someone loses days of work. Surely, those are bigger injustices.

by fao_ 2y ago

gosub100 2y ago

Computing has become substantially cheaper and more accessible in the past couple decades. Can the legal industry make any such claims? Is it faster and more efficient to use the judicial system than it was in the 90s, 2000s? Why is the NY bar one of the hardest in the nation? Couldn't have anything to do with all the biglaw and money to be made in the city, no?

goatlover 2y ago
Is it substantially easier and cheaper to become a medical doctor? Are there lots of technical jaron to learn in medicine?
- gosub100 2y ago
  No, thats yet another cartel.
  - fao_ 2y ago
    Go pick up "The Molecular Biology of the Cell" and come back to me after a month of reading it, and then you will have learned perhaps 10% of the knowledge required to specialize in endocrinology. Some things are just complex! Programming as a field is "complex" but compared to any actual scientific field it probably the simplest to learn, pick up and understand. There's a reason why Doctors and Lawyers are highly paid and take forever to train. Techbros have already tried to reinvent the wheel in other fields — crypto payments and metamed come to mind. Metamed learned that "actually, medicine is really absurdly difficult and you can't just instantly automate the job of a doctor with Technology" the hard way, and crypto payments are learning "why financial infrastructure and regulation exists in the first place", the hard way (through losing billions of dollars over and over again through exploits and ponzi schemes). I suspect that soon techbros like you will try to invent the legal system from scratch and learn why laws and the legal system are that way, hopefully it won't be the hard way! (Through a revolution)
llamaimperative 2y ago
Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation, no? Computing became cheaper because it has layer upon layer of economies of scale. Law doesn’t because every case is unique and is literally decided upon minutiae and exceptional details. Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world.
- robocat 2y ago
  > Couldn’t have anything to do with it being one of the most complex regulatory environments in the nation And smart software engineers never over-complicate their code, right?
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    Sure there’s definitely some of that. That doesn’t “explain why” (OP) code is complex nor does it prove there’s a “cartel” (GP) trying to gatekeep software engineering.
- gosub100 2y ago
  "wild" is not defined as as "anyone who doesn't share your perspective".
  - llamaimperative 2y ago
    That’s why I didn’t use it that way. I used it to describe your belief that law and medicine are arcane primarily for the purpose of gatekeeping. “Wild” is the most generous word I could come up with, sorry! Is software engineering arcane for similar gatekeepy reasons or is that for more legitimate reasons?
- fao_ 2y ago
  > Working in software breeds some truly wild perspectives on the world. My personal suspicion is that software is one of the easiest fields in the world to learn, and it has the sneaky benefit that you don't have to brush up against many constraints of the real world, but then — this doesn't explain the apparent god complex many programmers have.
abduhl 2y ago
The NY bar exam utilizes the same exam as the majority of other jurisdictions (with the notable exception of California) - the Universal Bar Exam. It is not one of the hardest in the nation, it is about the same as the majority of the nation. In fact, New York requires a lower score on the UBE than most other states, so it’s actually one of the easier states to get licensed in. And the answer to your question about the legal system being faster or more efficient is that it has gotten much slower but this is due to the massively increased caseload across the system (that has not been matched by an increase in court resources) which is, ironically, likely due to an increasing ease of access to the courts caused by everyday lawsuits becoming cheaper and easier to file.

zo1 2y ago

Except we go out of our way in programming to make everything as easy as possible. If you think about it, half the non-video and non-social media internet is just programming related, with guides, tutorials, and various tools to make it as easy as possible to get somebody doing something. And yes to be fair, yes some stuff in a field is simply complicated and we need to use complicated tools, specifications, processes and other such things in order to describe it accurately. But lets face it - most lawyer stuff is not complicated, the field is just swamped with complexity, "technical debt" and they are relying on processes and fluid human-driven interpretations in order to make it all chug along. What makes the whole thing complicated are the unspoken, verbally and experience-driven pieces of arcane knowledge. Nothing is documented in simple flows, nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next. This is why they are so against automation and simplification of their field. They know that if they automate the processes, that their field becomes very focused on knowledge, and at that point we'll all just realize that most of what they know can be codified in some sort of unambiguous specification format.

fao_ 2y ago
> nothing can be automated according to them, and they require actual human actors to drive the process forward from one step to the next. A machine cannot be held accountable, and therefore should not be in charge of making decisions.

Zak 2y ago

The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. It is an injustice if most people can't figure out whether things they want to do are legal or not without employing a lawyer.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. In theory, yes. In practice, not “everyone”, and very much not equally true of everyone to whom the law practically applies at all, even in the places which tout “equal protection of the laws” as a bedrock principle.
SideQuark 2y ago
I suspect most people never employ a lawyer, and most people don’t go around doing illegal things. You can learn a lot by watching or asking others. Your fear seems unfounded.
fao_ 2y ago
> The law is special because everyone has to obey it or face punishment. In medicine if you get things very wrong, you die, your patient dies, or everyone in the room dies. In programming if you get things wrong, you give someone radiation poisoning and they die, a plane crashes, or someone loses days of work. Surely, those are bigger injustices.