Kudzu is certainly incredible, but other invasive species in the southeast US (where I live ) are nearly as impressive. Wisteria comes to mind; it's not as obvious until it's in bloom. Other honorable mentions: Chinese privet, Asian Bittersweet, elaeagnus, and English Ivy. All of the aforementioned grow in my yard and their aggressive growth is unbelievable (especially elaeagnus... It's a shrub that can climb like a vine!).
I worked in the mail room of a dorm while in college. Part of the daily routine was mindlessly marking things "return to sender," rarely noticing the postmark date. In one instance (this was 2013) we received a pretty beat up piece of mail that was clearly a Valentine's Day card. The postmark date was "02 Feb 1999." Being very intrigued, I found a CV that seemed to belong to the recipient (the CV indicated that they attended the university around the same time) and emailed them. They expressed their gratitude and mentioned that the card was from their now deceased grandparents. I of course forwarded the mail to them. I've always wondered what kind of journey that piece of mail had... I imagine part of it was stuck behind a desk somewhere.
I'm not very familiar with Ansible but consider it to be somewhat interchangeable with Puppet (which I use extensively at work). You can certainly use Puppet to manage thousands of hosts but it entirely depends on other practices and technologies (an external node classifier in Puppet's case) to keep things manageable. I assume the same is true for Ansible.
> People don't have to spend thousands of dollars and four years of their life to paint or sculpt or whatever - it may not be proficient and lifelike but it'll still be art.
I don't think it's important to the overall argument of your comment, but this is incredibly reductive. If one has little appreciation for a particular form of art maybe this is true, but if, for example, all orchestras or other classical music ensembles were comprised of less proficient musicians I'd sooner stop listening to classical music altogether.
> Your world wouldn't be all that much more drab if we stopped forcing engineers to learn "culture".
I'm not sure if it was your intention, but quoting the word culture comes off as disparaging, but given the tone of your comment it certainly seems so.
I think I would've agreed with you if you'd simply said "engineers shouldn't be forced to take humanities in higher education; doing so is largely ineffective, at least in terms of imparting cultural appreciation and other related soft skills." Instead, I can't help but read it and think that it's single-minded and tone-deaf.