yeah there wasn't much substance or anything I hadn't heard a thousand times before. he repeated himself a bunch too. it felt like I was listening to someone who just stumbled upon /g/ and was...
yeah there wasn't much substance or anything I hadn't heard a thousand times before. he repeated himself a bunch too.
Also I hate the memes and his attempts to appeal to edgelord culture.
it felt like I was listening to someone who just stumbled upon /g/ and was blown away by all the zany and whacky words and phrases
Does this guy not remember sitting in front of a CRT screen ALL DAY feeding the noisy machine a dozen floppies to install Windows 95? You can install Windows 10 in about 20 minutes with just a few...
Does this guy not remember sitting in front of a CRT screen ALL DAY feeding the noisy machine a dozen floppies to install Windows 95? You can install Windows 10 in about 20 minutes with just a few clicks.
Ignoring obvious hardware progress, programmers weren't miraculously smarter in previous years. Computer programs do a LOT more today than they ever have. You can't compare old software to new software, it doesn't even make sense.
I feel this is a good arguement that is just very poorly argued. The anecdote about the programmer seemed to be especially flat. Like it or not, a lot of the Unix utilities are actually arcane...
I feel this is a good arguement that is just very poorly argued. The anecdote about the programmer seemed to be especially flat. Like it or not, a lot of the Unix utilities are actually arcane knowledge. Unlike python or JavaScript, there is no easily searchable database to find Unix utilities when someone needs to perform a simple task. Worse, you can't expect to see all of them in every environment, or even expect them to behave the same way. The "guru" types I know typically tend to use programmable text processers like sed or awk.
Add in that basically every one of those guru components are usually very complex of themselves and there's no clear structure of what you're even looking for because many things can be done in...
Add in that basically every one of those guru components are usually very complex of themselves and there's no clear structure of what you're even looking for because many things can be done in many ways. So you end up with a huge ecosystem of barely even discoverable, extremely complex tools.
As someone starting to explore those tools, I kind of like it. There is a barrier to entry which is likely unintentional but has the benefit of keeping out those who aren't interested enough to...
As someone starting to explore those tools, I kind of like it. There is a barrier to entry which is likely unintentional but has the benefit of keeping out those who aren't interested enough to dive into the history of those tools, and it also means those tools are not likely to radically change in a year or two. Look at modern WebDev and the flavor-of-the-month frameworks... yuck.
EDIT: I do not like this guy lol. The unabomber look is not good and walking around in the woods talking to your phone is not a great way to deliver info. And he comes off as pretty obnoxious.
I think it's just easy to take the tech we have now for granted. It's easy to compare increments and believe things aren't getting faster. Also, easy to forget that as hardware gets more...
I think it's just easy to take the tech we have now for granted. It's easy to compare increments and believe things aren't getting faster. Also, easy to forget that as hardware gets more sophisticated so does software thus making the comparison even messier. If it were possible to make a 1 to 1 comparison between modern systems and older computers (which it really isn't), the winner would be very clear.
Computers are definitely WAY faster than they used to be, we just expect more out of them now than we did before. Things like image processing to search for faces in live video, and then making...
Computers are definitely WAY faster than they used to be, we just expect more out of them now than we did before. Things like image processing to search for faces in live video, and then making realtime modifications of the video before displaying it to the screen is now considered a TOY.
People also overestimate how bad high level languages are, and in many cases high level languages can fix some of your bad code. Even pessimistic takes say javascript/java are within 3x of optimized c.
I'm sure as coding becomes an essential life skill there will be more and more amateur code, but that's a good thing. If something minor needs doing, anyone can put together something decent to get it done. If it's important, someone can eventually create something more permanent. Sewing is a useful skill to have, since you can quickly fix damaged clothing, or even make some modifications to clothes to suit your tastes. That doesn't make clothes manufacturing or tailors worse.
In the anecdote they shared someone didn't know how to add line numbers, and ended up using a home-made script which might've been slower than something already available. So they could either spend a bit of time googling around to find the correct command for their version of the OS, the correct parameters, etc, or they could whip up a script, run it, and be done with it. Long term it's better to learn these things, but none of that really has to do with CPU time, since almost all the time spent on either solution is human time (writing code/reading man pages), not CPU time.
I'm generally curmudgeony about how badly written a lot of modern software is, but this video seems to have really gone off the deep end.
yeah there wasn't much substance or anything I hadn't heard a thousand times before. he repeated himself a bunch too.
it felt like I was listening to someone who just stumbled upon /g/ and was blown away by all the zany and whacky words and phrases
And here I’ve still been saying “cringe inducing” like some kind of pretentious fop.
If you've ever been to /g/ he's the archetype of /g/ user, though I'm not sure he does it genuinely or ironically.
I think the issue is that he's not sure either.
Does this guy not remember sitting in front of a CRT screen ALL DAY feeding the noisy machine a dozen floppies to install Windows 95? You can install Windows 10 in about 20 minutes with just a few clicks.
Ignoring obvious hardware progress, programmers weren't miraculously smarter in previous years. Computer programs do a LOT more today than they ever have. You can't compare old software to new software, it doesn't even make sense.
I feel this is a good arguement that is just very poorly argued. The anecdote about the programmer seemed to be especially flat. Like it or not, a lot of the Unix utilities are actually arcane knowledge. Unlike python or JavaScript, there is no easily searchable database to find Unix utilities when someone needs to perform a simple task. Worse, you can't expect to see all of them in every environment, or even expect them to behave the same way. The "guru" types I know typically tend to use programmable text processers like sed or awk.
Add in that basically every one of those guru components are usually very complex of themselves and there's no clear structure of what you're even looking for because many things can be done in many ways. So you end up with a huge ecosystem of barely even discoverable, extremely complex tools.
As someone starting to explore those tools, I kind of like it. There is a barrier to entry which is likely unintentional but has the benefit of keeping out those who aren't interested enough to dive into the history of those tools, and it also means those tools are not likely to radically change in a year or two. Look at modern WebDev and the flavor-of-the-month frameworks... yuck.
EDIT: I do not like this guy lol. The unabomber look is not good and walking around in the woods talking to your phone is not a great way to deliver info. And he comes off as pretty obnoxious.
here is a talk about this and why its a prolem by Jonathan Blow
The Collapse of Civilization
I think it's just easy to take the tech we have now for granted. It's easy to compare increments and believe things aren't getting faster. Also, easy to forget that as hardware gets more sophisticated so does software thus making the comparison even messier. If it were possible to make a 1 to 1 comparison between modern systems and older computers (which it really isn't), the winner would be very clear.
Computers are definitely WAY faster than they used to be, we just expect more out of them now than we did before. Things like image processing to search for faces in live video, and then making realtime modifications of the video before displaying it to the screen is now considered a TOY.
People also overestimate how bad high level languages are, and in many cases high level languages can fix some of your bad code. Even pessimistic takes say javascript/java are within 3x of optimized c.
I'm sure as coding becomes an essential life skill there will be more and more amateur code, but that's a good thing. If something minor needs doing, anyone can put together something decent to get it done. If it's important, someone can eventually create something more permanent. Sewing is a useful skill to have, since you can quickly fix damaged clothing, or even make some modifications to clothes to suit your tastes. That doesn't make clothes manufacturing or tailors worse.
In the anecdote they shared someone didn't know how to add line numbers, and ended up using a home-made script which might've been slower than something already available. So they could either spend a bit of time googling around to find the correct command for their version of the OS, the correct parameters, etc, or they could whip up a script, run it, and be done with it. Long term it's better to learn these things, but none of that really has to do with CPU time, since almost all the time spent on either solution is human time (writing code/reading man pages), not CPU time.
I'm generally curmudgeony about how badly written a lot of modern software is, but this video seems to have really gone off the deep end.