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I'm with you, and been on a bit of a rampage about it lately. Honestly, just too much broken shit, though I'm not sure what the last straw was. A big thing I r

I'm with you, and been on a bit of a rampage about it lately. Honestly, just too much broken shit, though I'm not sure what the last straw was. A big thing I rail against is the meaning of an engineer and that our job is about making the best product, not making the most profitable product (most times I bring this up someone will act like there's no difference between these. That itself is concerning). The contention between us engineers and the business people is what creates balance, but I'm afraid we've turned into yesmen instead. Woz needs Jobs, but Jobs also needs Woz (probably more than the other way around). The "magic" happens at the intersection of different expertise. There's just a lot of weird but subtle ways these things express themselves. Like how a question like "but what about x problem" is interpreted as "no" instead of "yes, but". Or like how people quote Knuth and use it as a thought terminating cliche. In ML we see it with "scale is all you need." In effect, by choosing to do things the easy way we are choosing to do things the hard way. Which this really confuses me, because for so long in CS the internalization was to "be lazy." Not in the way that you put off doing the dishes now but in the way that you recognize that doing the dishes now is easier than doing them tomorrow when you 1) have more dishes 2) the dishes you left out are harder to clean as the food hardens on the plate. What happened to that "efficient lazy" mindset and how did we turn into "typical lazy"?[0] [0] (I'm pretty sure I need to add this) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

hinkley 1y ago
One of the aphorisms I operate by is that when the order of magnitude of a problem changes, the appropriate solution to that problem may also need to change. Here we are sitting at four to seven orders of magnitude separated from Knuth, depending on whether you mean number of devs or number of machines or size of problems tackled.
- kragen 1y ago
  Size of machines is pretty amazing. The PDP-10s and 360/67s Knuth was talking about in 01974 were about 1 MIPS (with 32-bit or 36-bit operations) and could scale as high as 16 mebibytes of RAM. Today you can put 6 tebibytes in a 384-core two-socket AMD server that can do in excess of 10 trillion 32-bit operations per second: 6 orders of magnitude more RAM, 7 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. But that's really understating the case, because those were large shared mainframes. Today's equivalent would be not a 2-socket rackmount server, or even a whole rack, but quite plausibly a whole data center, three more orders of magnitude. 9 orders of magnitude more RAM, 10 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. Probably also worth mentioning that the absolute number of computers has also increased a lot; every USB-C power brick contains a multi-MIPS computer. I agree that the number of devs has increased by only about four or five orders of magnitude. In 01974 I'd guess there might have been 50,000 programmers; my grandparents took programming classes around that time involving batch submission of punched cards, and that was a reasonably common thing at US universities. Today, Roblox has 380 million monthly active users; what percentage of them write their own games in it? And the popular programming environments Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have over a billion users each.

hinkley 1y ago

One of the aphorisms I operate by is that when the order of magnitude of a problem changes, the appropriate solution to that problem may also need to change. Here we are sitting at four to seven orders of magnitude separated from Knuth, depending on whether you mean number of devs or number of machines or size of problems tackled.

kragen 1y ago
Size of machines is pretty amazing. The PDP-10s and 360/67s Knuth was talking about in 01974 were about 1 MIPS (with 32-bit or 36-bit operations) and could scale as high as 16 mebibytes of RAM. Today you can put 6 tebibytes in a 384-core two-socket AMD server that can do in excess of 10 trillion 32-bit operations per second: 6 orders of magnitude more RAM, 7 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. But that's really understating the case, because those were large shared mainframes. Today's equivalent would be not a 2-socket rackmount server, or even a whole rack, but quite plausibly a whole data center, three more orders of magnitude. 9 orders of magnitude more RAM, 10 orders of magnitude more arithmetic. Probably also worth mentioning that the absolute number of computers has also increased a lot; every USB-C power brick contains a multi-MIPS computer. I agree that the number of devs has increased by only about four or five orders of magnitude. In 01974 I'd guess there might have been 50,000 programmers; my grandparents took programming classes around that time involving batch submission of punched cards, and that was a reasonably common thing at US universities. Today, Roblox has 380 million monthly active users; what percentage of them write their own games in it? And the popular programming environments Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets have over a billion users each.