smikhanov · HackerTrans

23 дня назадdiscuss

Intelligence is absolutely a valuable addition to dexterity, but no, current industrial robots have nowhere near the dexterity of a human hand.

smikhanov

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

The article says nothing about “skilled people who work with their hands” specifically, so it’s unclear what is being refuted here.

However there are people in the workforce who don’t identify with their work. Those are likely not in professions that Marx thought of when he wrote about alienation, but instead are Uber Eats delivery drivers, call centre workers, flight attendants on low-cost airlines, nurses in mediocre hospitals, and so on.

smikhanov

в прошлом месяцеdiscuss

“Scaling” as in “making sure the infrastructure can handle much higher load”, or as in “making sure the product remains genuinely useful to people, so that the user numbers go up and not down”? For both, it didn’t happen by itself, but it’s far from rocket science. A sane team of 15-20 people can do it.

smikhanov

2 месяца назадdiscuss

> real user pain point

That is obvious from all the upvotes your comments get on here.

smikhanov

3 месяца назадdiscuss

Oh dear, not again: https://lawsofsoftwareengineering.com/laws/brooks-law/

This one belongs to history books, not to the list of contemporary best practices.

smikhanov

4 месяца назадdiscuss

The Nebraska guy’s block remains surprisingly stable, even when the whole thing above it collapses. Very symbolic.

smikhanov

4 месяца назадdiscuss

That’s a lovely comment, thank you. If you’re keen to think about it more, consider the fact that the existing members of the project that’s being late are actually in not as much of an advantage compared to the new joiners, as it’s common to think.

Yes, they know how the feature they work on relates to other features, but actually implementing that feature is very often mostly involves fighting with technology, wrangling the entire stack into the shape you need.

In Brooks’s times the stack was paper-thin, almost nonexistent. In modern times it’s not, and adding someone who knows the technology, but doesn’t have the domain knowledge related to your feature still helps you. It doesn’t slow you down.

One may argue that I’m again pointing to the difference between accidental and incidental complexity, and my argument is essentially “accidental complexity takes over”, but accidental complexity actually does influence your feature too, by defining what’s possible and what’s not.

Some good thoughts (not mine) on the modern boundary between accidental and incidental complexity: https://danluu.com/essential-complexity/

smikhanov

4 месяца назадdiscuss

Several related reasons working at once. The nature of work changed. The boundary between accidental and incidental complexity shifted (and it’s unclear whether this distinction still exists). Niche specializations within the field emerged. The way to structure and decompose projects changed dramatically (agile and stuff).

One pathological example: if you’re running a server-based product, quite often what stands between you and a new feature launch is literally couple of thousands of lines of Kubernetes YAML. Would adding someone who’s proficient in Kubernetes slow you down? Of course not.

One may say, hey, this is just the server-side Kubernetes-based development being insane, and I’ll say, the whole modern business of software development is like this.

smikhanov

4 месяца назадdiscuss

That law (formulated in the 70s, I’ll remind the reader) wasn’t true for at least couple decades now.

smikhanov

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

    Pages are snappy, terse, consistent, clear and unsurprising

This is a fantastic summary. Also, when you switch to gov.uk after using literally any other modern website, it's always surprising how fast it is.

smikhanov

5 месяцев назадdiscuss

    gov.uk has a tendancy to treat everyone like a 5 year old

Which is not a bug, but a feature of the gov.uk website, and it's the best and the most important one. 89 year old you would absolutely appreciate it when you'd need to renew your passport via gov.uk.

smikhanov

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

I like how the author correctly shown the cover image for the "The Sciences of the Artificial", with plural 's' in 'sciences', but then in the paragraph praising it gleefully ignored it.

Probably means this article wasn't written by AI!

smikhanov

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

To be honest, in the pre-internet era, paid paper copy of FT had ads too. The delivery mechanisms for ads in the internet era are trillion times nastier and more annoying, of course. By the standards of today’s web, the print ad for Cartier on the second page of paper FT looks almost classy, interesting to read.

smikhanov

6 месяцев назадdiscuss

People who love thinking in false dichotomies like this one have absolutely no idea how much harder it is to “get paid for doing commercial/trendy art”.

It’s so easy to be a starving artist; and in the world of commercial art it’s bloody dog-eat-dog jungle, not made for faint-hearted sissies.

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

Well, fuel duty is a better example then

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

I need to think about this more, but the first thing that comes to my mind is not that this looks like “taxing the tool”, but that this can (ought to?) be similar to an alcohol or a fuel duty.

Nobody calls alcohol duty “micromanagement”.

For products like petrol, it’s widely known that from money paid for a liter when it’s sold, say, in the UK, more money stays in the UK’s government pocket via a complex web of taxes and duties, than profits the oil production company that supplied crude oil for that petrol.

Maybe taxing a kWh of the AI data center energy consumption should be a thing? I don’t know.

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

You could, but you’d be missing a big part of the picture. Humans are also (at least) symbol manipulators.

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

Oh, and there's also "grok" just few paragraphs later!

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

"Grabbed lunch" is an awful phrase

smikhanov

7 месяцев назадdiscuss

Yes