That’s not what GP is saying. He’s saying that a term like “autism” is a lasso trying to capture a gigantic number of individual traits and symptoms. This is true of any other “psychiatric disorder” as well. There is no “autism”, there is no “ADHD”, there is no “OCD”, any more than there are tables or chairs.
Something being a table is a label we slap on it to abstract certain attributes, that allows us to reason about it without having to think about all of the non-table-attributes it has. What do tables do? What can we do with them? We can put things on, eat off them. We can’t feed them to our pets. We can’t use them as a trampoline. The object being “a table” is just a categorization we make to allow us to think about the object; it isn’t something that the object is.
Similarly, people aren’t “autistic”. They’re just people, who have certain traits, which psychiatrists have decided should be lumped into a category called “autism”, because they’ve noticed a cluster of other people who have similar traits. So, from this standpoint, someone “being autistic” does not tell us anything. We can already see that person’s traits or characteristics. That categorization might be helpful to some people, and it might be harmful to other people; and they should use or avoid using it accordingly. But they can choose to do that, because “autism” isn’t a “thing” - it’s a mental construct.
I believe we all intuitively push whatever our advantages are, often without even knowing it. The advantage that the wealthy have are connections, capital, and familial support. These advantages lend themselves to activities such as starting businesses with high capital requirements, accumulating assets (“investing”), working through elite colleges to land a prestigious position, heading a philanthropy or charity, etc.
That advantage comes with a disadvantage. Because the wealthy do not have to work to earn their start, they never learn what hard work is capable of producing, and never build the “when the going gets tough, the tough get going” habit. What they have in money, they lack in grit. When they are faced with a challenge, they habitually say “what can I buy to solve this problem?”, “who can I consult to help me with this problem?”, etc.
Contrast that with folks who are working class. They know that they don’t have the advantage of money. They learn that hard work is the behavior that yields the best outcome. They put themselves in fields where what you get is proportional to what you put in, such as the trades, where working long, hard hours can generate quite good income.
When folks who were raised working class are faced with adversity, they handle the situation like Boxer from Animal Farm: “I will work harder”. It’s what they know how to do. While they don’t have copious sums of money to fall back on, or other natural advantages, their own work ethic is one of the few things that cannot be taken away from them, and so they leverage that.
That advantage also comes with disadvantages. Someone who works very hard will likely be overly self reliant. They might not get as much done as they could have had they spread the load across other people. They might burn themselves out, injure themselves, work to the exclusion of all other goals in life, etc.
These are vast generalizations that obviously won’t hold in all circumstances, but I think it’s useful to illustrate the point. People use the tools at their disposal, whether that be money or otherwise. Those strategies all have advantages and disadvantages. The net result of those is likely visible in the outcomes of various people, I’d bet.
Gifts definitely confer obligations on the recipient. You can experience this firsthand: take the next gift a loved one gives you, and then sell it, and let them know. Please report back on how you selling their gift impacts your relationship with that person.
People can license their code however they please, but comparing open source software to a gift is not an argument for permissive licenses.
I can’t comment on the nostalgia aspect, because I wasn’t alive back then, but I can say that there are several aspects of the statistic you used that make it not reflective of the experience people have.
One issue is median real income does not tell you anything about the distribution of income. It can be used to show that the top 50% of people have had “real income growth”, but can hide a lot at both extremes; the poor and rich have had vastly different experiences [1]. The metric on that page looks at “share of national income”, so it has issues as well (not anchored to any objective measures), but it illustrates my point just as well.
The bigger issue I find is the way that “real income” is measured. There are a slew of issues, IMO (hedonic adjustment, for instance), but the biggest is the way that asset prices are treated in CPI - that is to say, they are not! Shelter prices reflect “owner equivalent rent”, not the price to actually buy a home, which has ballooned massively in the last few decades, especially the past five years, relative to income [2]. The same applies to other assets such as stocks; they are nowhere in the CPI metric, but have a direct impact on our lives; higher-priced stocks impeded the purchasing ability of people with respect to stocks, costing them returns over time (couple this with the larger cost of other assets over time and it is clear retirement age will have to go up). So, yes, maybe real income has increased, but substitutions are being made and tricks are being played; more people are renting longer because of home prices. Future returns on investments will be lower because of a giant asset bubble.
Also, future liabilities are nowhere to be seen in the real income metrics. The national debt that the US has saddled its current and future citizens with is shameful and will inevitably cause financial drag in the future (could be higher tax rates, but my personal bet is persistently higher inflation over time; you can already see the Fed giving up on its 2% target).
I suspect that this is an instance where “the scientific consensus” is wrong because to suggest contrary to that is wrongthink and enough to have one ostracized not only from science, but also society as a whole. I would love to be wrong, so if someone could explain this to me, I’d be very receptive to an explanation of why this logic is wrong:
First, let’s substitute emotionally charged terms for more neutral terms; e.g. imagine rather than discussing intelligence and race, we are discussing something else highly heritable and some other method of grouping genetically similar individuals, e.g. height and family. The analogous claim would therefore be that “although height differences have a large hereditary component, it does not follow that disparities in height between families have a genetic basis.” This seems very clearly false to me. It is in the realm of “I cannot fathom how an intelligent person could disagree with this” territory for me. If variable A has a causative correlation with variable B and two groups score similarly with respect to variable A, then they are probably similar with respect to variable B. Of course there are other variables, such as nutrition, sleep, and what have you, but that does not eliminate a correlation. In fact, for something which is “highly heritable” it seems to me that genetics would necessarily be the predominant factor.
It’s a really unfortunate conclusion, so again, I’d love to be wrong, but I cannot wrap my head around how it can be.
Others have given a lot of good suggestions about books for general software engineering. Some book on how to structure code and some book on how to be a professional and some book on the human aspect of the profession would all be beneficial. Pick one that covers each of these areas and they’ll provide you a good foothold.
I’m surprised I don’t see more advice to read a language- or domain-specific book. If you know what type of technology you want to work on and what language(s) you want to use, I’d read a book or two to gain expert-level understanding of those languages or domains. I cannot tell you how beneficial it has been to me to read books covering all the intricacies of C, C++, and Rust. Not to mention countless pages of documentation covering the Linux kernel, shell scripting, etc. Even if you have great general software engineering skill, you still have to be able to quickly read, write, understand, and modify the code you work on. You never know when you might find yourself 50 files deep in an exploration of why some open source software behaves a certain way that’s really boiling your blood, or when you need to parse the code to find an undocumented feature you’re certain exists (or, if not, to hack it in). Knowing the language is very beneficial for this, and getting eyes on open source code to recognize common patterns is very useful.
I understand that isn’t what’s being suggested. What I’m suggesting is that there is perhaps a distortion of the common idea of who is “responsible” for something. I think the idea that fault bubbles up to the highest level in the chain of command is silly. Fault is distributed across the entire chain, and if we want to address this issue, we can’t ignore that.
To draw an analogy, if someone’s 16-year-old child is texting while driving and gets in a car accident, is their parent to blame? Most people could see that there is some fault on the part of both the parent (for perhaps not emphasizing enough the importance of safety while driving), and the child (for doing something they know is unsafe). And this fault exists in a continuum; maybe the parent told their child every day to not text while driving, and the child did it anyway. Maybe the parent never told them anything about safe driving habits, so the child had never considered that texting while driving was unsafe.
My point is that pretending that the highest C-suite executive is wholly responsible for everything that goes on in the company is extreme. Everyone along the entire chain of command has to do their part to ensure secure products are shipped - the executive needs to prioritize it, hire the right people to develop a plan, ensure people are enforcing the plan, etc., all the way down to the software engineers, the cleaning staff, etc. If one link in that chain breaks, the entire system fails, and it could be because of a weakness anywhere along the chain.
The people “whose negligence made this possible” are probably just rank-and-file employees. Careful what you wish for. I know I sure wouldn’t want to be legally liable if my software were vulnerable to something I didn’t know about.
Maybe a reasonable first step is third-party standards, audits, and certifications around data security to make privacy- and security-conscious consumers aware of what a company is doing. If consumers really find value in that, then they will preferentially deal with that company, and other companies will follow suit.
This is another consequence of the surveillance state. The same data that can be used to surveil us by the government can be stolen by who-knows-who. We’d all (mostly) be far better off, IMO, if companies didn’t retain such records.
Of course I’m only speculating on how someone who has lived their entire life primitively might feel - I haven’t done that myself. I’m looking at things from the perspective of if I were born into a tribal, primitive society. As you alluded to in your previous post, things clearly change when you’ve lived a modern life.
Having lived a modern life, we know that the diseases primitive societies face are preventable. We know that we don’t need to struggle for food. If we didn’t know that, we’d probably feel differently. For example, a lot of primitive cultures have very different relationships and views of death.
I think that “going from modern to primitive life” versus “always living a primitive life” is a huge difference.
In future discussions, you might have better luck eliciting useful responses from people when you don’t pit them to argue against an AI, IMO. It reads to me like “I didn’t want to put in the effort to generate my own thoughts, but I expect you to: good luck!”
That aside I’ll focus on the Maslow point since I think it’s the easiest to discuss and has the most obvious carryover to a lot of the other points. Maslow tells us we have a hierarchy of needs. At the top of that is self-actualization, but we need to fulfill all the lower-level needs before we feel any need for self actualization. I strongly doubt anyone would be disappointed that they are not “actualizing themselves” if they were fighting every day for food, shelter, etc. self-actualization is basically what Ted describes as a “surrogate activity” - a need we have made up because all our “real” needs have been met, and now we have all this spare time with which we have to do something. So we create new needs for ourselves to fill our time.
You can carry this concept, of our needs being relative to our position in life, over to a lot of the other philosophies you listed. Concepts like love, generosity, pleasure, purpose, are all relative. From a modern western perspective, generosity might be buying a friend a nice gift, cooking someone dinner, etc. Those are much smaller in magnitude than, say, sharing the limited food and resources you gathered with your tribe so that they can all survive. We today think of pleasure as sex, or achieving a goal, or seeing something that makes us happy in passing. Those probably pale in comparison to the sense of pleasure of knowing a hard day’s work allowed you to live another day in a hostile environment. We think of purpose as what we were put on this earth to do. Had we not all the resources we needed, and had to work for them, I think it’s very reasonable to expect our sense of “purpose” would change to match our capabilities.
You can even see evidence of this in modern society by comparing high and low income areas. Children from lower income areas, where their physical and emotional needs are not being met, don’t get as good of grades. Why should they care about who built the pyramids or how to work a Bunsen burner when they don’t know where dinner is coming from?
I had a different take on his writings than yours. Rather than thinking his solution was bad, he encouraged me to question why we “spend our days improving humanity”.
What does “improving humanity” even mean? What’s the metric we are optimizing for? Are we, humanity, any happier than we were when we were hunter-gatherer tribes? I don’t think so - we’ve just found new metrics to focus on and to be disappointed in ourselves in.
His writing encouraged me to consider that we are evolutionarily ill-suited for our current situation. We have resources far in excess of our needs, and yet we struggle. We find new issues to focus on, new problems, new fights, new causes. Our desire to “improve humanity” will never end, because it cannot end. When it does, we will find something new to take its place.
Maybe our purpose in life is to find food to survive. It is the task our ancestors evolved to do for millions and millions of years. It is our inheritance, in that way.
I don’t understand why there is still the false dichotomy between performance and speed of development/readability. Arguments on HN and in other software circles suggest performant code cannot be well organized, and that well organized code cannot be performant. That’s false.
In my experience, writing the code with readability, ease of maintenance, and performance all in mind gets you 90% of each of the benefits you’d have gotten focusing on only one of the above. For instance, maybe instead of pretending that an O(n^2) algorithm is any “cleaner” than an O(n log n) algorithm because it was easier for you to write, maybe just use the better algorithm. Or, instead of pretending Python is more readable or easier to develop in than Rust (assuming developers are skilled in both), just write it in Rust. Or, instead of pretending that you had to write raw assembly to eke out the last drop of performance in your function, maybe target the giant mess elsewhere in your application where 80% of the time is spent.
A lot of the “clean” vs “fast” argument is, as I’ve said above, pretending. People on both sides pretend you cannot have both, ever, when in actuality you can have almost all of what is desired in 95% of cases.
Maybe the way by which the subscription software becomes better is different: perhaps because the SaaS model provides higher recurring revenues, these businesses and products draw more investment, which allows them to develop more quickly and leapfrog the competition.
I think your point about non-SaaS being a Ponzi scheme is valid. However, I think it conflates several separate phenomenon, at least in my mind.
I’ll use Fitbit as an example, since I have one. I purchased a piece of hardware that has certain capabilities, and links to the Fitbit app, which ought to provide me access to those capabilities. I can only use the app to access those capabilities (at least without some hacking; not sure if anyone has done this). I’d much rather use an open source app and self host the data - Google hosting the data and providing me an app to interface with it isn’t valuable to me except to the extent I cannot access it any other way. The fact that they paywall certain components behind a monthly subscription, when the device I purchased is fully capable of interacting with the app in the same way without me having a subscription, is exploitative, in my opinion. And I would be more than happy to pay money for new software versions if they provided me anything useful. Instead, Fitbit has become more SaaS-y, and I have gotten nothing of value from that.
Sorry if that’s not a very cohesive set of thoughts; I think there are a lot of viable reasons for subscription services (I have no issue with Spotify, for instance). At the same time, I do not think worthless software upgrades, holding users’ data captive, and bug fixes are worth a dime, morally nor economically.
Something being a table is a label we slap on it to abstract certain attributes, that allows us to reason about it without having to think about all of the non-table-attributes it has. What do tables do? What can we do with them? We can put things on, eat off them. We can’t feed them to our pets. We can’t use them as a trampoline. The object being “a table” is just a categorization we make to allow us to think about the object; it isn’t something that the object is.
Similarly, people aren’t “autistic”. They’re just people, who have certain traits, which psychiatrists have decided should be lumped into a category called “autism”, because they’ve noticed a cluster of other people who have similar traits. So, from this standpoint, someone “being autistic” does not tell us anything. We can already see that person’s traits or characteristics. That categorization might be helpful to some people, and it might be harmful to other people; and they should use or avoid using it accordingly. But they can choose to do that, because “autism” isn’t a “thing” - it’s a mental construct.