This whole thing is nerd fantasy come to life but its not particularly useful and right now the world for most people is about trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything thanks to a poorly planned war against Iran.
When Apollo 8 went up in December 1968, the US was near the peak of its involvement in the expensive and poorly planned Vietnam war, inflation had been rising in the US for three years and had hit 7.2% in October, the doomed, corrupt, and paranoid Republican president-elect had ran on lowering the price of hamburgers and medical care but was actively trying to manipulate the Supreme Court's composition behind the scenes, Israel was bombing its neighbors, control over the Panama Canal was being contested, the Hong Kong Flu epidemic was winding down, popular news was gripped by a kidnapping story involving a celebrity, and the NTSB was struggling to explain why so many passenger aircraft were being involved in fatal crashes and collisions with ground structures
This just isn’t true, people have tons of interests beyond “things that are useful” and “trying to figure out how to deal with the cost of everything.”
I’m almost certain you have genuine interests beyond your financials, and enjoy entertainment in general.
The fact is, the vast majority of people (and perhaps yourself) never actually cared about space or space exploration. I think most of this dismissiveness comes from people thinking they SHOULD care, and need to rationalize why they don’t.
It actually doesn't really matter whose. There are a lot of good ethical frameworks to start from that would lead to better outcomes than our current system of "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people"
It rather matters to me if in your morality some people I care about are "problems". It matters to me if your morality is based on a religion specifically -- I find no reason to follow the worlds faiths, they seem much more concerned with control and/or prohibition of individual action than with fostering good societies or people. Being specific, I find the current incarnation of Christianity in the US to be particilarly immoral -- yet if we're going to start making law based on morality this is the most likely source to be applied where I live.
So we disagree rather vehemently, except for "Whatever makes the most money for powerful people" is bad.
Yeah I'm not sure if it's collapse or just the bad that was there all along has been let off the leash. I guess my point is I'm not sure that people lost their morals as much as the people with the morals lost the power.
it's definitely a little of both. Founders my age (18-25 range) have spent the last 10 years of their life seeing that morally reprehensible behaviour is rewarded. Whether it be Trump, Musk, whoever - the reward circuit in their brain sees that being a scumbag results in success. The people who don't act that way keep their mouth shut or get publicly executed (metaphorically). It's funny that people still criticize Jobs for being hard when he was 10x a better person than 99% of AI founders.
I would say it was a collapse of ethics, not morality. Most people have morals (their own belief system on what is fair), but their morals may not be ethical (rule-based morals to achieve fairness). I personally attribute it to cars and the internet.
The internet removed consequences. You can say the most vile thing imaginable to another human being and… nothing happens. No social cost, no awkward eye contact at the grocery store, no reputation hit in your actual community. Just a dopamine hit and a notification count.
Cars did something sneakier. We spend hours every week sealed in a metal box, alone or with the same people. No random encounters, no friction with people who think differently. Just you, your podcast, and whatever is important in your tiny echo chamber.
Put those two together and you get people with deeply held morals and zero framework for applying them to anyone outside their bubble. Ethics requires seeing strangers as real. We've engineered that out of daily life.
this is really mind-boggling to me as someone who grew up on the (old) internet.
I think the reward factor is also a large part of it, for most of the last 10 years young people have seen that unethical behaviour results in success. For a developing brain, it's easy to see how that resulted in the current state of SV.
Too true. I won't say who it was but a prominent partner in my batch referred to, essentially, a lack of morality as a "competitive advantage". I went back to the east coast after lol
the behaviour that was one socially unacceptable in Silicon Valley has become mainstream. The woke stuff went way too far and, like everything, the pendulum swung back the other direction with equal force. VCs are largely the problem as they set the tone. I have a lot of personal acquaintances that work in VC, and legitimately all of them fall on the spectrum of morally dubious to outright reprehensible.
Agreed, the ultimate state-monopoly on use of force, right to private property, legislated penalties and remedies, the time and expense of pursuing fairness, in the absence of full moral consideration, or common sense for lack of a better term, is a giveaway to entrenched authority, attorneys or deep-pockets, and not a sensible approach to dynamic real world right and wrong.
It's the end of era where the plucky code crafter gets to have a seat at the table of production. Those skills are going to become less and less useful going forward. Industry is going to stop hiring those types.
The future of software looks a lot more like factory production lines with a small group of architect-tier engineers working on a design with product management and then feeding it into the factory for prototyping and production.
If you're not an experienced late senior or principal engineer at your career stage by now there is basically no future for you in this industry. Lower end roles will continue to be reduced. People who can build and maintain the factory and understand its outputs are going to be the remaining high-value software talent.
I'd really like to see package managers organized around rings where a very small core of incredibly important stuff is kept in ring 0, ring 1 gets a slightly wider amount of stuff and can only depend on ring 0 dependencies and then ring 2+ is the crapware libraries that infect most ecosystems.
But maybe that's not the right fit either. The world where package managers are just open to whatever needs to die. It's no longer a safe model.
The OS distro model is actually the right one here. Upstream authors hate it, but having a layer that's responsible for picking versions out of the ecosystem and compiling an internally consistent grouping of known mutually-compatible versions that you can subscribe to means that a lot of the random churn just falls away. Once you've got that layer, you only need to be aware of security problems in the specific versions you care about, you can specifically patch only them, and you've got a distribution channel for the fixes where it's far more feasible to say "just auto-apply anything that comes via this route".
That model effectively becomes your ring 1. Ring 0 is the stdlib and the package manager itself, and - because you would always need to be able to step outside the distribution for either freshness or "that's not been picked up by the distro yet" reasons - the ecosystem package repositories are the wild west ring 2.
In the language ecosystems I'm only aware of Quicklisp/Ultralisp and Haskell's Stackage that work like this. Everything else is effectively a rolling distro that hasn't realised that's what it is yet.
In practice, "ring 0" is whatever gets merged into your language's standard library. Node and python both have pretty expansive standard libraries at this point, stepping outside of those is a choice
The authors want me to trust them to handle all my passwords. I'm not going to do that if they don't respect me enough to tell me I'm reading AI-generated content.
You're right, it's actually the people throwing around inflammatory statements like "bootlickers" to virtue signal and score fake internet points that are doing the most harm.
Sure it does, just say you "established org-wide coding standards and drove adoption of automated linting tooling, reducing review friction and enforcing style consistency at scale" in your assessment.
Ugh this makes me nostalgic for the days of Q3-era game map making and custom servers. I used to get lost in the various games Radiant variants as a teen building DM and CTF maps for my clans server.
Did you end up going into game dev or just generally software development? I'm always jealous of the people who grew up making maps or game mods, I wish I'd been more motivated when I was younger to do stuff like that.
Software dev. Game dev never really appealed to me. I kind of have an artsy streak inside of me and map making always felt like additive sculpture which is probably why it appealed.
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