I think there are a few things that make it "worthy" of literary consideration:
1. Read a straight horror story, it's quite a surprising twist at the end
2. A critique on the senselessness of following tradition just for the sake of it -- the way a society can just go along with something without really understanding why
3. The banality of evil, and how it can often look like something totally ordinary, rather than some nefarious demon
I loved it when I first read it -- it truly shocked it in middle school and I still have a visceral feeling when thinking about it many years later
> with a pre-built you're at the very least paying for someone to assemble it for you, so it's always going to be more expensive as a baseline
Except isn't it possible that pre-built companies actually get better deals on hardware bought in bulk, and therefore could offset the labor costs with cheaper materials?
Surely nothing has ever done wrong with this limitless source of clean energy to give people pause? There's no uninhabitable areas of the Earth due to this?
Or maybe their actual problems are caused by automation, tax cuts on the rich, and a lack of social safety net that lets people live in dignity, but the media they consume mostly blames immigration and crime.
Yes. But also, all technologies will eventually be used as weapons. And so its important for us to understand how they can be weaponized and to consider the social cost of that weaponization.
You're dependent regardless. You are dependent on your service provider, your hardware, your UPS battery backup, your RAID drives being easily replaced, your backups.
It reminds me of people who raise their own chickens and think they're living off the grid. But they need the materials to build the coop, the chicken feed, fencing, etc.
> I think we exist to bring new things into existence. If you ask me, to the extent there is a meaning of life, that’s it. We exist to create. It lights us up in a way nothing else does, putting something new into our world—and in doing so, fundamentally changing it, in whatever way, however big or small.
I find this a rather strange, limited way of looking at our existence.
I believe there is joy in creating. I believe there is joy in just spending time with the people you love. I believe there is joy in exploring new places, people, ideas. I believe there is joy in being still and present.
We are always looking for some singular, defining thing in our lives. What does it all mean. It has to be for something.
But I disagree. It doesn't have to be for anything. It's enough to just do what brings you joy, to evolve and change, to treat others in kindness. The rest is just personal preferences.
No amount of fame or success will alter who you truly are inside. If anything, laying your happiness at the foot of external validation from others in the form of critical success or fame is a poisoned apple.
There are plenty of examples of wildly successful people unable to manage their own demons -- see Kurt Cobain or Anthony Bourdain.
Being compensated fairly is important. But so is empathy from management. So is being flexible when I have stuff going in my life or need a mental health day.
Meat and dairy specifically accounts for around 14.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO).
If people collectively just ate a bit less meat and dairy, it would go a long way. Don't even have to be perfect. Just show a little bit of restraint.
It seems the author has given their own meaning to Senior Engineer as a sort of weird gatekeeping, "you aren't a REAL senior engineer unless you're done X, Y, and Z"
My counterargument is that the very few job titles in Software Engineering was a bug, not a feature, and forced good engineers into management, as it was the only way to climb the career ladder.
By now creating more defined rungs on the latter, software engineers are able to climb a more reasonable career ladder with more than "junior engineer" and "forged in the crucible."
Part of being a good engineer is finding the right balance.
I know engineers who would gladly duplicate code all over the code base to avoid creating a new abstraction.
I know engineers who create polymorphic abstractions for a single caller with a very obvious set of parameters.
So much of wisdom is in finding balance and not being dogmatic about rules.