The entire article is based on online group dynamics over people trying to figure out how to come to grips with historically ignored problems.
I fail to feel outraged by this process. Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").
It is going to take a while for society* to come to grips with this new shift, because we're clearly not going back, but it definitely is rough around the edges, IMHO, because we haven't found the right vocabulary and framing. Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy, and that is something most people cannot tolerate.
It depends, I worked briefly for Flex(tronics), and my projects were entirely focused on battery life and size (or at least, the client design requirements were).
There's a difference between a customer who plans on selling a billion units, and some company like this game controller design team that clearly making some crappy kids toys. I think the OP twitter person just learned a valuable lesson.
It seems no one has stopped to consider that some people just like poetry, whether it is from an "authenticated" human source, or AI and is close enough to language to engage the brain in a variety of ways. Does it matter?
I'd be interested to see a HN poll to know how many of you roll your own (that is, you're serving all HTTP traffic on the back end of a load balancer), or using a website hosting service. But I don't know which hosting services are popular so I don't know what to add to the poll.
I have a happy little node server that's been running on an AWS micro instance since 2013 and I periodically stick a new SPA into the public area with auth through the express middleware. It might look a bit frankensteinish, but it works just ducky and costs like US$10/month with 20GB of SSD (most of that is the elastic IP + load balancer).
> Am I even a competent developer if I have to use the Internet every five minutes to code?
It just means you are slowed down by the need to look things up. Do you consider speed part of competency?
The ability to look everything up on the internet didn't appear until the late 90's. I finished my BSEE + MS CompSci degrees before 1994, effectively without the modern internet. We had manpages. And enormous books. All that's really changed is most pop languages don't have manpages, but at least we aren't killing forests for the X specification printouts!
There are many centuries of engineering behind this. I went to the Museum of Horology in Austria. It has examples of the first mechanical clocks, up to today's timepieces. It is fascinating looking at the giant, wrought-iron town clocks that kept shitty time and bent and rusted, and seeing different parts of the clock evolve over the years, especially as engineering & metallurgy improved.
Another excellent catch. I'm obviously a white dude and I was addressing white dude issues: college radio was largely white punk bands; and rap and hip hop was being marginalized until it exploded in the mid-80's. I don't have perspective on underground black music as a black teen. Did it have the same contour as white experience? Is "nonconformity" just a wypipo problem? Thanks for comment.
I'm in my mid-50's. I missed the 1950's and 1960's in the US, but I recall the 70's and onward vividly. It is hard to impart to today's generations just how subversive MTV was in the 1980's. Being different in school in the 70's was a mortal sin, so people who did it were either truly weird or had immense self-confidence. "Alternative radio" didn't exist in most of the country, let alone cassettes and albums: department stores only sold what big labels offered. Punk and alternative had to be sought out by college students or people in cities. MTV changed all that radically. "Nonconformity" was a big word for teens in the 70's and 80's. It is all but gone now, today my friends teen-aged kids are about fitting in, not sticking out.
Because there is no more "sticking out". Everything has been commodified and accepted. There is no longer a way to differentiate yourself from the pack, because the pack is so diverse. I think that has really shaken things up: there's nothing to rebel against, and Gen-X cynicism/nihilism has left an identity crises for Mil/GenZ. Although it appears these groups are going back to tradition and don't give a f*k about nonconformity.
Steve Albini (legendary producer) wrote an essay in "Commodify Your Dissent" from the Baffler magazine around the time of the Dead Kennedys. He hits on the ability to buy anarchy patches in department stores as fashion items when in the past they were signs of a true counterculture. I highly recommend it, it captures what you are feeling up to a point, because it refers mostly to the 80's and 90's, and not the utter weirdness of today.
30+ questions and everything was a composition of shift, rotate, and, or, nand, nor, xor.
If you're a programmer it's just a matter of figuring out what operations are used. If you're not a programmer, you probably have no language to describe the relationships, and therefore can't just zip along looking for common assembly-language instructions.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, I bet I could make an increasingly challenging logic puzzle generator just by increasing the number of composite operations and operands. I bet if I googled I could find a dozen such projects that already exist. My work here is done. :)
Back in 1995 I had a moment of massive intellectual insecurity and joined MENSA. There were about 30 of us who took the test. Keep in mind this was before email privacy & hygiene and the mailing list went out to all instead of BCC so we found out that everyone passed. Literally everyone.
I'm suspicious of the MENSA selection criteria. You can even join without taking the test by having an SAT score above a certain value. Dubious.
But then, why would anyone join a High IQ society? I did because I needed proof I was smart, and wanted to be around other smarties (my social circle was nill), but the people were just kinda average and boring.
There are many sides to apple. The CPU architecture side is not the same as software, cloud, or products/apps, it is run very differently. It's almost a different company. The architects and designers I know left because they were tired of Intel forcing crazy product roadmap twists and turns, and demands on their time, seemingly going nowhere. Apple's Mx silicon has been a smashing success, quite a change from Intel's architectural constipation and chain-yanking of their engineers. Most employees at Intel are pigeonholed, and it is rare that an opportunity to break out without having to move cities occurs, and many took it.
It is impossible to remain an individual contributor at Intel. This will last about a year. There are simply too many employees to maintain a flat hierarchy. People dream of this, but in reality, if you're really that good, you will absolutely become a manager, there's just not enough hands on deck.
Plus there is also social pressure: while you're cavorting about as an individual contributor, many other peers will be crushed under management pressure, and will start to resent you, and demand to the VPs that you share the load.
That being said, Intel is really taking a hard turn back to engineering. I might even consider going back there, assuming Gelsinger doesn't go back to the old school ranking-and-ratings that forces you up or out, or the "you must give 120%" bullshit. Being forced to work in "dungeon mode" for months at a time is what drove me out. "Dungeon mode" is supposed to be a 1-2 week thing to fix a serious bug. (DM is spending 14 hours a day in a conference room 7 days a week.) YOu can only do that so many years in a row before saying enough. That's why Intel lost so many people to Apple a few years ago.
> I just don't understand how very smart people can so passionately believe in a closed loop
Does good programmer == very smart?
Does good mechanic == very smart?
Part of the echo chamber bias on HN is that programmers are an elite class of citizen that is head-and-shoulder's above the rest in terms of intellect. I whole-heartedly disagree with this proposition because I've met many, many programmers who were absolute ding-dongs.
If you stop deifying programmers (& engineers) it becomes easier to see they are just average tradespeople who trade happens to be in extremely high demand right now. And then other things fall into place, like how they can fall for their own bubbles.
You can export QXF and QMTF (and CSV) but the online QXF converters seem dubious... (not QFX, that's different). Although you have inspired me to spend some time examining the formats.
I fail to feel outraged by this process. Is "White Fragility" without criticism? Probably not, I think it is a fantastic book, but it scares the bejeebers out of some people and we get instagram drama and articles like this which I interpret as another attempt at purity (trying to outsmart "wokeness").
It is going to take a while for society* to come to grips with this new shift, because we're clearly not going back, but it definitely is rough around the edges, IMHO, because we haven't found the right vocabulary and framing. Unfortunately it is going to require people to sit with feeling uneasy, and that is something most people cannot tolerate.