> Is it more human to live in a village where the local feudal lord has right of life and death on everyone?
Certainly, marginalized communities probably feel this was about their local police force. How do you think people feel about the police during the Uvalde shootings?
> Where people are bought and sold as cattle with the land they are forced to live on?
People live in expensive cities because that is where the jobs are and where they live are controlled by landlords who were eager to evict them during the pandemic until some cities enacted eviction bans for a time. Private equity are buying entire neighborhoods to rent them out. Sure, in theory no one is forced to live anywhere, but in practice they are.
> Is it more human to live in a kingdom that will go to war…
You mean the War on Terror? The proxy wars against communism (e.g. Vietnam)? The World Wars? The numerous conflicts the US fought to overthrow democratic elected leaders in South America and the world to install dictators more aligned with US business interests (for their oil, their resources, to “liberalize” their economy so US multinationals can take over the local economy)?
> Is it more human to live as a slave…
Is it more human that productivity has increased 10x in the past decade but wages have been stagnant? Is it more human that we are increasingly forcing people to have bullshit jobs when automation could do it better and faster and we could instead re-distribute the wealth robots make into a UBI so that everyone could enjoy a life pursing their real passions?
> An ever-increasing percentage of world population lives in the best of times…
An ever-increasing amount of the world are living under a dystopian nightmare where people are being dehumanized and the planet being made unlivable all so arbitrary numbers on a spreadsheet gets bigger and bigger.
———
The problem is not that we feel less human than we did before, but that we don’t feel more human now. With all of our progress and advancements, with our increasing understanding of ourselves and our world, why isn’t the world more human (more humanistic)?
This is not aimed at you; you just happened to be the comment that crystallize this thought I’ve been having for awhile.
I think this is one of the major problems with everything nowadays. Everything is so bloated and removed from its original purpose.
If we want a space for young adults to let loose and party before having to conform to adulthood, then let’s build that separate from education so my tuition isn’t paying for the frat parties that I don’t go to.
If we want diversity and inclusion, then let that be a separate nonprofit that works with schools so that my tuition isn’t paying for my college to have more administrators than professors.
Furthermore, college sports:
“SHAPIRO: The principles that underlay the NCAA's philosophy seem like reasonable principles. Students should be amateurs. They should be college students. They should not be paid millions of dollars. But so many of the stories you tell seem like distortions of those reasonable principles, like people are just divorced from reality or out to get a student for no good reason. Did you get a sense of what is actually going on (laughter) in people's heads in all of these stories that you retell?
NOCERA: I think I do have a pretty good sense of it. Amateurism, which is the core principle of the NCAA, may have started out as a good idea, but with so much money now flowing into college sports, it's become a sham. And it's become kind of an excuse not to pay the labor force who are brining in the billions of dollars that are enriching everybody else. The NCAA itself is a kind of bureaucratic, rules-oriented organization…” (https://www.npr.org/2016/02/15/466848768/indentured-explores...)
“The solution in my opinion is to do away with college athletic scholarships and preferred admission for athletes. Let school's field their sports teams from their normal student bodies and ensure that those teams are truly amateur and the participants really are "student-athletes". Let the NBA and the NFL field their own semi-professional minor leagues like baseball does.”
(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27581613)
Admittedly, I am bitter about my college experience and probably wouldn’t have such a harsh opinion if it had been better. Like the other comments here mentioned, I found a CS degree to be a sham and I learned more and better on my own than I ever did listening to professors all of whom were worse at teaching than YouTube (especially considering that high quality channels like 3Blue1Brown exist) and some of whom can’t actually speak or write English well. A CS degree didn’t help me get a job but starting a hardware club did which is where my gripe comes from. There was never funding for clubs (that actually get students doing things they would do at their future job) or for professors to do research projects that students (like me) get to help with and build job experience. But somehow the activities and recreations always got an expansion.
There truly is an unfathomable amount of things you can do wrong and you literally could spend your entire life trying something and still suck. It wasn’t until I understood the basics well enough that I could meaningful make progress towards getting better (at cooking but also coding) or even understand what getting better meant.
Trying to get better at something by just doing it a lot is like brute forcing RSA encryption: talent, intuition, or inspiration about how to get better acts as a quantum computer speed up.
Or to put it more plainly: practice only makes perfect if you know what perfect is.
From the web development perspective, the network is no longer the bottleneck; its CPU processing power. Doesn’t matter how fast your website comes if it’s shove full of trackers and ads that mobile CPU can’t handle.
Put another way, what’s the point of downloading a terabyte of data in seconds when it takes your computer minutes to process it into something useful? Also, where are we storing all this data that we can download at super fast speeds? Most computers cap out at around 8 GB of RAM (though this does seem to be trending upwards) and SSDs read/write speeds are measured in megabytes (with most capping out at single digit gigabytes) so with terabit we are potentially downloading more data than computers can physically store per second.
Reducing latency though would be the real game changer. When Starlink finishes building out it’s fleet, we could see worldwide latency drop to he point that video games would no longer need to have regional game servers because of lag! But then the problem becomes “how to do you manage all those players on one server”? Annnd we’re back to our CPU limitations.
“That whole Xerox PARC thing in the 1970s—the thing that supposedly gave us the Mac, etc.—was actually not about having a mouse and windows; the big core idea was that we'd build models of our world in software and adapt them as we explored. Doctors could simulate new treatments; children could simulate rocket ships. We'd all have highly visual pocket climate models we could explore and manipulate, or the doctors would all be programmers themselves and make better patient-management systems. The idea was for software to become the humble servant of every other discipline; no one anticipated that the tech industry would become a global god-king among the industries, expecting every other field to transform itself in tech's image.”
A different way of interpreting the article is not why we (computer programmers) haven’t made things better for other people and their industries but why we haven’t found better abstractions for computing itself so that they don’t need us to make the software they need.
We no longer have physical human elevator operators pushing buttons for us because we made an friendly abstraction over that anybody could use. So why does the job of a software developer even exist? Why can’t people productively and easily make their own software? It would likely be better: extremely customized to their own needs, highly tuned based on their own in-depth domain knowledge, and continuously updated since they don’t have to ask and wait for someone else to do it for them. Why do we still have human operators pushing buttons for people?
it’s not just that our tools are poorly suited for non-programmers, they’re barely even suitable for experts! Today I lost 8 hours trying to get XCode to build our app after a library update. Last week I lost 8 hours wrestling with a build server, 8 more hours trying to test changes to some untestable legacy code, and another 8 hours just trying to get our code to do the things it looked like it was obviously written to do. I’m on a team of 4, and if it’s going like that for all of us, simple features like “send an email when <event>“ happens end up costing thousands of dollars to develop.
No wonder our industry is skewed to only solving low-complexity problems in domains that move lots of money!
I have, recreationally, written code to simulate a rocket ship. It was a pretty significantly different experience than my day job. My usual tools didn’t help much, but you don’t actually need a lot of data modeling or fancy UI to draw a trajectory. Debugging was awful, though.
Maybe it’s a good time to re-read Brett Victor’s “Inventing on Principle” and ask ourselves what we can do to get closer to that vision
> Why can’t people productively and easily make their own software?
The problem is that software does not understand tacit knowledge, only explicit knowledge. Many people are good at things on an intuitive level, but aren't able to explain clearly and unambiguously and comprehensively why they do those things. Structuring thoughts and processes like this is an important (and quite rare) skill in itself.
Secondly, "tech" is not a completely homogenous or bland medium, certain things are simply much easier to do than others. It's much easier for humans to drive cars, even with an error rate, than for computers. While it's much easier for computers to do arithmetic. The implication of this is that it's often much better to change your process - or possibly replace your entire business - than to take the current one and freeze it into a computer.
That's the problem with a lot of bureaucratic efforts. Often the "process" doesn't actually work as written down, and relies on a lot of slack and human judgement by individual low-status people who aren't included in the software development process. So freezing the process in software, even if done exactly to spec, doesn't work.
See also "Seeing like a State"; the process of making people and processes 'legible' to a bureaucratic system changes them, as does computerising them.
Third related problem is demarcation: even if individuals want to automate their workflow, they're still part of an organisation which would prefer they stay in their lane. So many "enterprise" disasters are the result of the people making the purchasing decision refusing to work with the actual users.
I think the question "why do software engineers even exist?" can be reframed to ask "what would an end-user programming environment that gives everyone the power of a software engineer look like?"
There are already a few decent task-specific programming environments that let end-users create valuable "software" — the most obvious example being spreadsheets for anything finance-related — however we're still a long ways away from programmers being replaced entirely.
Software engineers are pretty much the modern day scribes. We're literate in programming languages, while the rest of the population is illiterate. We're the only proxy for communicating with computers. So, how do we get the remaining 99% of the population to become literate?
I'm not sure the analogy of the scribe works or that the population needs to be come "literate" in programming languages. You can essentially substitute any profession and the analogy holds true. For example, doctors are literate in medicine, while I am not. Do I need to become literate in medicine (beyond a surface level)? No, this is why professionals exist in the first place, so that I do not need to become "literate" in everything.
No, the analogy still stands in my opinion - medicine is not "eating the world". It has only very narrow application (very important but still narrow) and software can literally change everything in our lifes (if for the better that's up for discussion). So seeing every one else as illiterate sounds lot better than saying that we need better alphabet.
This is a harder problem then it seems. Lots of applications are built to be programming for non-programmers and the company I work for loves the idea and falls for it all too often. In reality what happens are the users still can't or won't learn how to translate their own work processes into a logic required by the application regardless of how "intuitive" the interface is and the system ends up in the hands of software devs that now have to use a tool with significantly less flexibility and more bloat.
In other words, there are elevator buttons out there but people don't know what floor they need to go to.
I would also like to add that the notion that “because hand writing is more involved so you remember it better” doesn’t work for me. Hand writing is actually distracting because I don’t do it enough for it to be fluid so I focus more on the hand writing than what I’m thinking of and end up losing my train of thought. Typing on the other hand I’ve been doing since I was a kid ever since I became interested in computers and because it’s so natural and fluid I have an easier time putting thoughts down on paper and going down my train of thought.
Like you said, I think a better takeaway from this study is that you don’t remember what you don’t think about or engage with. I’m perfectly capable of not thinking about what I write and subsequently forgetting it just as much as this study claims only happens whe you type stuff out.
