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Yes, they'll be able grasp the beauty of Les Misérables or The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire so long as it is fed to them as a stream of <280 character tweets, dohohoho.
Mr. Munroe is falling victim to the unfortunate phenomenon where people believe their popularity means that their opinions outside of their areas of expertise are well-informed. Whether they can spell better or not, minds weaned on little chunks of text laced with memes and emoji are going to struggle with chapters, let alone full books.
Given the comic is an echo of conversations like this, I think perhaps that if he is guilty of that then so too are you and I and all others here.
Myself, I say that to equate the modern proclivity for tweets with a degradation of intellectual rigor is as fallacious as imagining that the concise elegance of Tacitus foretold a dulling of Roman wit. Or something like that.
Will they (kids these days) like the style of old classics? Of course not, just as few native english speakers alive today wish to speak (or write) in the style of Shakespeare — breaking a long thing up into tweet-sized chunks, that is simply style, no more relevant than choice of paragraph or sentence length.
But to dismiss a generation’s capacity for engagement with monumental works (be they Les Mis, The Decline and Fall etc., Shakespeare, Dickens, or any other) on the basis of their chosen tools of communication betrays not only an ignorance of how often communication has changed so far — when Edward Gibbon wrote the Decline and Fall, literacy in the UK was somehere around the 50% mark, but still the illiterates could watch plays and listen to tales — but also modern attention spans when we also have binge-watching of entire series of shows as a relatable get-to-know-you-better topic on dating apps.
I mean, I'm pretty sure that more people have read Sam Pepys in the last 15 years than in the previous few hundred, due to https://www.pepysdiary.com (it's a bot that tweets Pepys' Diary in real time; no longer available on Twitter due to API changes, but it's still on RSS, Mastodon and Bluesky. It's on its third run through the diaries).
> "More than any other profession, many of us - as software developers, mathematicians, scientists - have a better grasp of complex systems."
Having read various opinions expressed on HN about politics, history, physics, medicine, and so forth, I'm pretty sure that we don't. Coding is not that difficult and many here are quick to say that they learned nothing of use to them in college.
Not particularly powerful and it's unclear that any amount of engineering can make it deliver more power to each round while still keeping it man-portable.
Hello, I am making a new account, for my business, yes. Do you have some sort of personal vendetta?
edit: wonder who voted this comment down. I would encourage you to make a product and serve customers, rather than freelance "moderating" HN in your leisure hours.
Tech is bigger than just coders. Electrical engineers have not had the cornucopia of job-hopping opportunities that web developers have enjoyed over the past couple of decades.
Or maybe it's because they're busy fighting a war and trying not to die so that they haven't had the time to provide records for the historians and analysts to ruminate over.
It works the other way as well. More or less everything I know about the UK I learned from watching "Spitting Image", both the original as a child and the more recent revival.
The little blemish in that scenario being that that the US's food supply and natural resources come from its rural areas. If the prices of food and other goods keeps rising, you won't be able to count on urban voters behaving sensibly either.
Hired farmworkers make up less than 1 percent of all US wage and salary workers (per USDA 2023). 43 million acres of corn is for ethanol biofuel alone, the need for which diminishes over time as light vehicle electrification continues. Urban areas are unlikely to go without food entirely, although the mix might change (less beef due to cattle herds shrinking [1], less dairy as smaller dairies continue to collapse [2], and so on). Based on the data, there is plenty of slack in the food production system as Rural America evaporates [3]. California is the country's largest ag product producer, for example, and also the world's fifth largest economy. You know who imports the most soybeans from the US? China [4]. Good luck to those farmers as China retaliates against US tariffs.
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