4 ms·

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along

by tern 7mo ago

I am solidly in this "curious" camp. I've read HN for the past 15(?) years. I dropped out of CS and got an art agree instead. My career is elsewhere, but along the way, understanding systems was a hobby. I always kind of wanted to stop everything else and learn "real engineering," but I didn't. Instead, I just read hundreds (thousands?) of arcane articles about enterprise software architecture, programming language design, compiler optimization, and open source politics in my free time. There are many bits of tacit knowledge I don't have. I know I don't have them, because I have that knowledge in other domains. I know that I don't know what I don't know about being a "real engineer." But I also know what taste is. I know what questions to ask. I know the magic words, and where to look for answers. For people like me, this feels like an insane golden age. I have no shortage of ideas, and now the only thing I have is a shortage of hands, eyes, and on a good week, tokens.

wartywhoa23 7mo ago
[flagged]
- sd9 7mo ago
  Calling somebody a wannabe systems engineer is unneccessarily antagonistic.
- tern 7mo ago
  I know it's not anyone's fault exactly, but the current state of systems in general is an absolute shit show. If you care about what you do, I'd expect you to be cheering that we just might have an opportunity for a renaissance. Moreover, this kind of thinking is incredibly backward. If you were better than me then, you can easily become much better than I'll ever be in the future.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
salawat 7mo ago
You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some variant of system to make money for someone else somehow, or system that burns money, but ensures necessary work gets done somehow. That's it. That's the extent of the optimization function as defined by capitalism. Taste, falls by the wayside, compared to whether or not you are in the context of the optimizers who matter, because they're at the center of the capital centralization machine making the primary decisions as to where it gets allocated, is all that matters these days. So you make what they want or you don't get paid. As an Arts person, you should understand that no matter how sublime the piece to the artist, a rumbling belly is all that currently awaits you if your taste does not align with the holders of the fattest purses to lighten. I'm not speaking from a place of contempt here; I have a Philosophy background, and reaching out as one individual of the Humanities to another. We've lost sight of the "why we do things" and let ourselves become enslaved by the balance sheets. The economy was supposed to serve the people, it's now the other way around. All we do is feed more bodies to the wood chipper. Until we wake up from that, not even the desperate hope in the matter of taste will save us. We'll just keep following the capital gradient until we end up selling the world from under ourselves because it's the only thing we have left, and there is only the usual suspects as buyers.
- arcanemachiner 7mo ago
  Paragraphs, man. Paragraphs.
  - sdf2df 7mo ago
    Sure but his post is very valid. Nice post fella.
- tern 7mo ago
  You seem to be saying two things. For me, the answer is: I've been somewhere in the middle—working on real projects, sure. I've been employed as a software developer in the past, and I've worked with startups and corporations. I've also worked in academia. Have I spent years, personally grinding directly in the belly of the beast? No. I managed a small dev team in small startup once. Yeah, it's not the same thing. I know I don't know everything. Yes, I'm familiar with the critiques of capitalism. I went to art school. Art school is like studying philosophy, but only the social critique parts (for better or worse). Yes, I'm aware that I'm being ingested by machinery that serves capital. I've read Nick Land. We're all doing our best to navigate this, but don't forget that poets, mathematicians, artists, and musicians really exist. They contact the cold realities of real life too, and many of them still succeed, still live beautiful lives. And no matter how bad things are, they still write history in the long-run.
wk320189 7mo ago
Standard AI promotion talking points. Show us the frigging code or presumably your failed slow website that looks like a Bootcamp website from 2014.
krona 7mo ago
I don't mean to be rude, but you write like a chatbot. This makes sense, to be honest.
- tern 7mo ago
  Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just thinking yesterday ... that because the majority of reading I do now is output from chatbots, I'm starting to think and write like a chatbot. A little terrifying. Probably the solution is to read 19th century literature before bed.
sdf2df 7mo ago
Ok fella. But show me something then. This is all talk. Personally I have been able to produce a very good output with Grok in relation to a video. However, it was insanely painful and very annoying to produce. In retrospect I would've much preferred to have hired humans. Not to mention I used about 50 free-trial Grok accounts, so who knows what the costs involved were? Tens of thousands no doubt.
godelski 7mo ago
But that knowledge was never hidden or out of reach. Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Everyone has tons of ideas. But every good engineer (and scientist) also knows that most of our ideas fall apart when either thinking deeper or trying to implement it (same thing, just mental or not). Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again. The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it.
- tern 7mo ago
  I hear you, but I have subtle disagreements: > Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Sure, but it's just way faster now. I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand, rather than having to spend minutes or hours tracking down the right information, then scanning around the text to filter out all the irrelevant stuff. There's also a motivational effect: the activation energy of bothering to do this was such that in many domains, it didn't seem worth it. > Everyone has tons of ideas Most people have profoundly bad ideas > Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again. Agree, however that's the challenge of this time. Things are becoming less visible. On the other hand, you can implement and get that feedback ten times faster, or point ten minds at stress-testing a concept in 3 minutes. For many of my projects, that's the difference between getting anything done vs idly fantasizing. For others, it could easily be irrelevant. > The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it. I don't think this is a coherent statement. How could you possibly surmount complexity with anything other than better ideas and more hands?
  - godelski 7mo ago
overgard 7mo ago
So from my perspective as a professional programmer, my feeling is good on you, like, you're empowered to make things and you're making them. It reminds me of people making PHP sites when the web was young and it was easier to do things. I think where I get really irritated with the discourse is when people find something that works for them, kinda, and they're like "WELL THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE HAS TO DO NOW!" I wouldn't care if I felt like "oh, just a rando on the internet has a bad opinion", the reason this subject bothers me is words do matter and when enough people are thoughtlessly on the hype train it starts creating a culture shift that creates a lot of harm. And eventually cooler heads prevail, but it can create a lot of problems in the meantime. (Look at the damage crypto did!)

by tern 7mo ago

wartywhoa23 7mo ago

[flagged]

sd9 7mo ago
Calling somebody a wannabe systems engineer is unneccessarily antagonistic.
tern 7mo ago
I know it's not anyone's fault exactly, but the current state of systems in general is an absolute shit show. If you care about what you do, I'd expect you to be cheering that we just might have an opportunity for a renaissance. Moreover, this kind of thinking is incredibly backward. If you were better than me then, you can easily become much better than I'll ever be in the future.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]

salawat 7mo ago

You think you know what taste is. Have you been cranking on real systems all these years, or have you been on the sidelines armchairing the theoretics? I'm not trying to come across as rude, but it may be unavoidable to some degree when indirect criticism becomes involved. A laboring engineer has precious little choice in the type of systems available on which to work on. Fundamentally, it's all going to be some variant of system to make money for someone else somehow, or system that burns money, but ensures necessary work gets done somehow. That's it. That's the extent of the optimization function as defined by capitalism. Taste, falls by the wayside, compared to whether or not you are in the context of the optimizers who matter, because they're at the center of the capital centralization machine making the primary decisions as to where it gets allocated, is all that matters these days. So you make what they want or you don't get paid. As an Arts person, you should understand that no matter how sublime the piece to the artist, a rumbling belly is all that currently awaits you if your taste does not align with the holders of the fattest purses to lighten. I'm not speaking from a place of contempt here; I have a Philosophy background, and reaching out as one individual of the Humanities to another. We've lost sight of the "why we do things" and let ourselves become enslaved by the balance sheets. The economy was supposed to serve the people, it's now the other way around. All we do is feed more bodies to the wood chipper. Until we wake up from that, not even the desperate hope in the matter of taste will save us. We'll just keep following the capital gradient until we end up selling the world from under ourselves because it's the only thing we have left, and there is only the usual suspects as buyers.

arcanemachiner 7mo ago
Paragraphs, man. Paragraphs.
- sdf2df 7mo ago
  Sure but his post is very valid. Nice post fella.
tern 7mo ago
You seem to be saying two things. For me, the answer is: I've been somewhere in the middle—working on real projects, sure. I've been employed as a software developer in the past, and I've worked with startups and corporations. I've also worked in academia. Have I spent years, personally grinding directly in the belly of the beast? No. I managed a small dev team in small startup once. Yeah, it's not the same thing. I know I don't know everything. Yes, I'm familiar with the critiques of capitalism. I went to art school. Art school is like studying philosophy, but only the social critique parts (for better or worse). Yes, I'm aware that I'm being ingested by machinery that serves capital. I've read Nick Land. We're all doing our best to navigate this, but don't forget that poets, mathematicians, artists, and musicians really exist. They contact the cold realities of real life too, and many of them still succeed, still live beautiful lives. And no matter how bad things are, they still write history in the long-run.

wk320189 7mo ago

Standard AI promotion talking points. Show us the frigging code or presumably your failed slow website that looks like a Bootcamp website from 2014.

krona 7mo ago

I don't mean to be rude, but you write like a chatbot. This makes sense, to be honest.

tern 7mo ago
Yeah, you're absolutely right. I was just thinking yesterday ... that because the majority of reading I do now is output from chatbots, I'm starting to think and write like a chatbot. A little terrifying. Probably the solution is to read 19th century literature before bed.

sdf2df 7mo ago

Ok fella. But show me something then. This is all talk. Personally I have been able to produce a very good output with Grok in relation to a video. However, it was insanely painful and very annoying to produce. In retrospect I would've much preferred to have hired humans. Not to mention I used about 50 free-trial Grok accounts, so who knows what the costs involved were? Tens of thousands no doubt.

godelski 7mo ago

But that knowledge was never hidden or out of reach. Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Everyone has tons of ideas. But every good engineer (and scientist) also knows that most of our ideas fall apart when either thinking deeper or trying to implement it (same thing, just mental or not). Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again. The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it.

tern 7mo ago
I hear you, but I have subtle disagreements: > Why not read books, manuals, or take online classes? There is free access to all these things, the only cost is time and energy. Sure, but it's just way faster now. I can get the exact right piece of knowledge I need to advance my understanding on demand, rather than having to spend minutes or hours tracking down the right information, then scanning around the text to filter out all the irrelevant stuff. There's also a motivational effect: the activation energy of bothering to do this was such that in many domains, it didn't seem worth it. > Everyone has tons of ideas Most people have profoundly bad ideas > Those nuances and details don't go away. They don't matter any less. They only become less visible. But those things falling apart is also incredibly valuable. What doesn't break is the new foundation to begin again. Agree, however that's the challenge of this time. Things are becoming less visible. On the other hand, you can implement and get that feedback ten times faster, or point ten minds at stress-testing a concept in 3 minutes. For many of my projects, that's the difference between getting anything done vs idly fantasizing. For others, it could easily be irrelevant. > The bottleneck has never been a shortage of ideas nor the hands to implement them. The bottleneck has always been complexity. As the world advances do does the complexity needed to improve it. I don't think this is a coherent statement. How could you possibly surmount complexity with anything other than better ideas and more hands?
- godelski 7mo ago

overgard 7mo ago

So from my perspective as a professional programmer, my feeling is good on you, like, you're empowered to make things and you're making them. It reminds me of people making PHP sites when the web was young and it was easier to do things. I think where I get really irritated with the discourse is when people find something that works for them, kinda, and they're like "WELL THIS IS WHAT EVERYONE HAS TO DO NOW!" I wouldn't care if I felt like "oh, just a rando on the internet has a bad opinion", the reason this subject bothers me is words do matter and when enough people are thoughtlessly on the hype train it starts creating a culture shift that creates a lot of harm. And eventually cooler heads prevail, but it can create a lot of problems in the meantime. (Look at the damage crypto did!)