This reminds me of the concept I learned of recently: that metrics and simplified quantitative information has been digesting the world for a long time. Simplified metrics like 'pounds of strawberries sold' take over our value systems instead of more squishy values like 'humans enjoying varied and great tasting strawberries'.
The drive for 'number goes up' eliminates nuance and we lose something real but poorly quantified and thus not valued. And this dopamine fracking has been happening for a while, is the latest version of that. Whatever gets eyeballs and we can measure getting eyeballs, wins, despite the dystopian consequences.
The book 'The Score' by C Thi Nguyen goes into this, has given me a new way to see if something I value is actually just a metric I learned and unconsciously am following. He outlines 'four horsemen of bureaucracy' that have replaced more nuanced values: the need to scale (losing nuance and geographical variability), make something mechanical and repeatable (lose nuance and adaptability), replaceable parts (losing nuance, make everything fungible, humans as replaceable), and centralized control (lose individualized voices). These were great in the first wave as they've increased our standard of living and made e.g. mass production of medicine and such possible, but now as more ways are found to extract attention these forces are eating away at our lives
Zig plans to make LLVM optional. Rust has Cranelift. Go afaik has no dependencies on the C++ ecosystem including LLVM. Python and some other languages are built with C, not C++. So, progress is being made slowly to replace LLVM as the defacto optimizing code backend. Alternatives are out there, may they compete and win! C++ makes me pessimistic about the future of humanity..
This reminds me of the "three tribes of programming: mathematical poetry, machine hackery, and business value". I think each SWE gets similar but different feelings of satisfaction. I knew a coworker who cared about the result, and little about the code he wrote. This was foreign to me when I saw it, as I was and still am definitely in the love for "math poetry" camp when it's possible.
When I was a kid, I'd eat Trix cereal. I enjoyed it. Now - I find it sort of gross. It's too sweet. You can reach that same point with cake or pizza or a candy bar, etc. - in that, those foods become sort of gross. Foods like spinach become more satisfying. Not only that, but that satisfaction may yield a higher reward than you ever could with Trix cereal. But you'd never reach that higher level of satisfaction as long as you're eating Trix cereal every day.
I concur very much. HN is the only social media I use these days, after cutting reddit and others nearly a decade ago. I have had to set up blockers for the comments section, to limit my time, as I end up spending far too much time here. Even so, did I really need to spend the last few hours learning about corner-locked land, southwest's canceled flights, new rust features, wifi DFS, anecdotes about electric vehicles in winter, etc?
On the flip side, without HN, my life would be totally different. I likely would not have pursued the much higher paying job I have now. My enthusiasm for technology and software would not be as high, seeing the many ways tech is used here. I would not be aware of meditation, notion, chatgpt, ml, postgres, cloud, rust go, wait but why, the inner platform effect, and so much else. For better or worse, HN shapes my outlook on the world. Is knowing all this worth the time spent, or is seeking knowledge simply addictive? I don't know.
The drive for 'number goes up' eliminates nuance and we lose something real but poorly quantified and thus not valued. And this dopamine fracking has been happening for a while, is the latest version of that. Whatever gets eyeballs and we can measure getting eyeballs, wins, despite the dystopian consequences.
The book 'The Score' by C Thi Nguyen goes into this, has given me a new way to see if something I value is actually just a metric I learned and unconsciously am following. He outlines 'four horsemen of bureaucracy' that have replaced more nuanced values: the need to scale (losing nuance and geographical variability), make something mechanical and repeatable (lose nuance and adaptability), replaceable parts (losing nuance, make everything fungible, humans as replaceable), and centralized control (lose individualized voices). These were great in the first wave as they've increased our standard of living and made e.g. mass production of medicine and such possible, but now as more ways are found to extract attention these forces are eating away at our lives