lone wolf. maybe he missed the significance of lone in that phase when he heard it first and thought it could be dropped. That is my working assumption, it happens.
Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a fictional archetype.
It is a particularly common theme in Japanese fiction, where the deviation from the social hierarchy requires a stong force of individual will. Interesting it is also common in Japanese technology breakthrough documentaries.
Ogami Itto - Lone wolf and cub is the first thing that comes to mind when the author says wolf.
I read those stereotypes as people phantasizing about being wild and free and a fierce (coding) biest, without actually knowing the wild. But it does have the effect on me to not being able to take it serious. If they don't even know basic facts about the animal they want to use as their metaphor, I expect way more to be wrong.
Hint: think of the widespread expression used in terrorism debates: "Lone wolf". It's a self radicalized/motivated individual acting independently and alone.
Lone wolves are not happy animals, though. They are less successful in hunts, they can’t take down large prey at all. They don’t generally produce offspring. They’re an unfortunate effect of the social structure of wolves, where young males who cannot find a place in the pack are expelled.
There are plenty of lone wolf developers, but you won’t find them in large teams. Or if you do, they’re dysfunctional. On their own, a lone wolf engineer is not generally able to complete large, important pieces of work. Some do! But they are exceptions.
Whether or not the natural world has such wolves, its a well formed fictional archetype.
You assume "lone wolf" types are "one trick ponies" who can't learn. You also assume the only interesting problem space for these people is technical/code.
The lone wolf has a big limitations in transitioning to scale:
1. managers do what the article suggested, and stay out their way. The lone wolf never gets the experience of being managed, so it is difficult to transition to manage others.
2. they don't get why others don't "get it". e,g the solution is clear , the code can be done in a day, the comprehensive system model in their head should be shared by everyone.... it takes time to understand that the average engineer works slow and steady on a small scale understanding.
I will suggest there is a lone wolf type manager too. This is not a productivity skill, but an adaptivity and mobility skill.
you need to think in a different plane of isolation. i would say the pure machiavellian manager is a lone wolf in that the relationships hold no weight as interpersonal relationships, only as functional relationships - no different to how you would manage and integrate code.
> Then there's the weak, pathetic, scrawny dweeb who sits on a bench dressed up in fancy robes, who passes judgment on big strong men in handcuffs daily and sends them to prison for years. He may have some level of power, but he's Beta as they come. He was placed in power by an Alpha.
Whoa that's a lot to unpack. Most pressingly, why do you need to point out that judges are not "at the top"? They perform a duty with a lot of responsibility. And that is that. No, where I live judges don't get appointed by "alphas".
> Not everyone can be at the top of the bell curve.
This is me nitpicking and I understand you mean to say that "the alphas" are special. But "at the top of the bell curve" is where everyone is! The freaks are found down in the tails. Exceptional people will be in the middle with everybody else on most metrics that show a normal distribution.
I'd say you'll have to look at metrics that show a not-normal distribution to cluster "the alphas" together. But then I don't really know how "being alpha" is defined. So maybe there is a metric where humans distribute in a bell curve and "the alphas" crowd out one side of it? Got an example?
That is something I've found over the years with traveling.
You watch a bunch of travel videos and think the place you're visiting is going to be so different but its just the same overcast sky and ocean and washed out color palette as home.
Once you remove all the filters, color correction, and drone shots from influencer travel videos a lot of places look the same IRL.
I cannot relate to this at all. Even just Valparaiso and Venice (two towns) are so different from each other. Even if you make weather dreary it’s a different feeling.
Then you consider Patagonia or Norway and compare it with the California Coast. The world is full of beauty.
Agreed. Also the trick is, if you end up in an ugly place while traveling ... you just move on, until you find beauty again (so don't book in advance too much).
Really? I drove from Kansas to the Florida Keys in November, stayed at an ocean front hotel where it was a blissful 83°F, and it felt like our own slice of heaven. We stayed a few extra days over Thanksgiving just to laze in the pool while our kids splashed in the water. Being able to drive away from the snow and the cold into paradise was amazing, and being able to go with my family made me feel richer than a king.
I traveled a little and was also happy to mostly see the nice side of most places. Some of us are lucky, some just always try to see the best in things. Beauty is in the eye of beholder. Also, some people here commented that they like this antirender look. Maybe by contrast. I talked with someone from Ecuador and they said they like when it rains. It was this lat autumn, when we didn't see sun for several weeks and everything was gloomy, looking even worse than in those photos, additionally colored by bad mood of everyone.
Hard agree. Lviv feels like a real city (for better or worse) because no one demolished entire city blocks to make it more appealing in 1985. I was there about a year ago and loved it.
I'd say that despite similarities for places built at the same time as each other, there's a huge range of variation in the places I've been.
First trip to the US was California, and the geography of the hills around Central Valley were substantially different in different places just within that region. Southwest, I saw hills that looked like Bryce's default textures which I'd previously assumed were mediocre approximations rather than based in reality; the Redwoods and Yosemite are very different from each other and the aforementioned, and the hills west of Winters and east of Sacremento are different again, and of course all are different to the Valley itself. On another trip I saw the Bonneville Salt Flats, I've yet to see anything else like them. All these are very different from the views around Zürich, or the UK South Downs (which unsurprisingly given the name is similar to New England and Brittany), and all those are different to the west coast of Wales; when I later saw the Spanish Mediterranean coast and the area around Athens, they reminded me of some of the wine areas around Paso Robles (which shouldn't be surprising given wine).
Within cities, Berlin has incredibly wide streets unlike anything I've found elsewhere; Athens is the exact opposite, with at least a few of roads in the tourist core (near the Parthenon) almost too narrow even for the smaller size of car common in Europe and pedestrian paths only a few cm wider than my elbows are apart, and so many ancient ruins you could practically trip and fall over them. The UK and Germany where I've lived, one can quickly learn to spot which era any given house was made in, with a handful of still-standing medieval buildings in the UK (mostly churches), then typical stylings visible for late 18th century (e.g. Bath), then a gap to the late 19th century to early 20th (in both countries but with more Gothic in the UK and more Neo-Classical and Art Nouveau in Berlin), then another gap where little survives to today, then post-war (British housing estates and DDR soviet style Plattenbau); these are very different to Swiss rural styles, to the narrow buildings you can find in Amsterdam. The UK and France also still retain a lot of medieval castles in various states of repair and museum-ification.
Bologna still has a lot of medieval structures around, including two leaning towers. Venice may be famous for the canals, but the famous ones are not the entire set, the ones I remember seeing went right up to the hotel I was in and functioned like roads, with a similar vibe to the roads of Athens (only without the footpaths at all because footpaths were a completely independent system), while the canals in Amsterdam were broad and felt more like the spaces dedicated to the Straßenbahn and U-Bahn in Berlin.
Budapest felt like a decaying museum to itself, or a ruin in which people nevertheless still lived and worked.
NYC deserves the name "urban jungle", it was like walking through canyons where the "mountains" (skyscrapers) were so distant and large as to defy not just the instant parallax between my eyes, but also the time-delayed parallax one normally gets from walking towards or away from a thing.
Nairobi mixed a British 50s-60s Brutalist core (presumably because of who was in charge in the 50s-early 60s) with main streets that were variously poorly repaired and unpaved, and minor streets that varied from "this could be any middle class residential area in Europe" to "this has been accidentally cobbled by people treading plastic bottles into the soil as they pass"; there is another easily recognisable style here, best shown rather than described, this kind of wall lack-of-surface-finishing: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2844081,36.9005201,3a,30y,35...
Sun/Light has a lot to do with it. The place linked looks fine/tolerable but put that in the northern of Europe/America and you'll looking at the edge of depression (at least for myself).
Funnily enough, I live a couple of minutes walk from this spot, I guess you are nearby? HDBs can look a bit samey, but that photo does a bit of a disservice to Singapore. There are also quite lovely HDBs as well:
And of course the surrounding area there is pretty amazing, loads of green spaces and wildlife on your doorstep. A large part of this video was filmed just around the corner, for instance:
They are currently building a new HDB estate right on the edge of a coastal park five minutes from that location. Even without the sunlight, it’s a pretty great place to live.
It is a good place to live. I was just comparing how climate can make a place okay/fine versus not okay/depressing. You mentioned greenery: I'm a bit up north (Malaysia) and it's plenty green here too. Though that's more due to the area climate than anything they are doing (i.e., Dubai can't match that no matter how hard they try).
Yes, that's how a lot of Singapore looks like. It's an HDB car park.
But your picture of the Soviet Union is perhaps a bit too rosy.
I'm not sure why you'd be depressed? It's a picture of a construction site in a car park. Sure, I'd love having the car infrastructure being less front and centre, too. But otherwise it's fine.
I was saying I'd be depressed or it would be depressing, in Singapore. What I was saying is that if you match that place with a grey sky, in cold climate with slow rain, that will be the definition of depression (at least for me).
Well, we don't do cold climate in Singapore. Fortunately or unfortunately.
Slow rain is also rather rare: mostly it's either sunny or it pours.
For the occasional few weeks I like to escape Singapore. And I'm currently rather enjoying a cold and wet and grey London winter. No need for sunscreen, hurrah!
I was watching Dark Matter (the Apple series, not the older one; mild spoiler follows), and I laughed when they arrived at the futuristic utopia universe because it just looked like Singapore.
Most likely. I just checked and it uses embedded-graphics already which means you can plug in Mousefood directly. The touchscreen might be a bit tricky though, it might need some hacking on the event handler side. But it will most likely work if you map the coordinates to the terminal cells abstraction somehow.
fwiw, in my research into this, it looks like there are inconsistencies in the devices available, since there's no one manufacturer and they're clones of clones. one might have been reliable but then it goes out of stock
... but somehow fails to qualify that distinction in its actual content. "FOSS" includes opentofu and mysql and the redis alternatives and a lot more than just social media alternatives...
When you inflame that reader with grandstanding titles like "FOSS has delusions" perhaps they could be forgiven for taking that literally when nothing else clarifies your trite generality, me thinks.
reply