It is a great book, and it includes an amazing essay by him titled You and Your Research [0][1] - which explains why it is important to "always be learning".
Thanks for this post, I hadn't seen the linked conversation when it happened. Here's my reading. The conversation blog post you linked begrudgingly points out that companies aren't sunk by bugs, technical debt, or inefficient development practices. If you have a good sales team and a product that people want, need, or will be forced to use, you can succeed even if you have to burn money on dev, ops, customer support.
However I think what this langchain conversation is about is overeager VCs and a product that maybe doesn't do anything we need. It's not that langchain is slow or hard to use; it's that we can just do this stuff with Python or whatever. I don't have enough langchain experience to substantiate these claims but I think that's what I'm reading here.
tl;dr she's making a feminist argument that a lot of our stories (Joseph Campbell, monomyth, etc) involve this phallic potency of going out into the world with our pointy sticks and poking wooly mammoths or whatever. she thinks maybe instead of pointy sticks we could think about this carrier bag model.
but I can't figure out what she really means in practice, because surely she wants her politically-oriented work to be...potent? if her stories aren't effectively pointy sticks then what should they be? anyway I haven't even read Earthsea so I should probably shut up and go do that, but if anybody figures this paradox out lmk.
Great link, thank you. She really is an interesting thinker, and her stories have a lot to tell us. Earthsea is worth reading.
Re potency, I think she’s saying it is more common, if less glamorous, to receive and collect than to fight and conquer. Perhaps she chooses to collect and share stories and questions rather than tell you what to do. That is why her tales can seem slow to some - there is a lot under the surface, a lot of meaning nameless or unsaid.
I think of her stories more as questions than answers.
