Simon Verity believed in working the medieval way | Hacker News Reader

Simon Verity believed in working the medieval way

economist.com

51 pointsBluestein36 comments

My father turned 70 this last weekend. Whenever I read of someone’s passing, I feel now this weight of how much longer I have left to get to know him. Because I don’t. I find it hard to, as while we can chat amiably on the phone, in person we don’t get along well for long.

I lack the words to fully share what I’m trying to, but I think there’s a tremendous beauty in creating. It takes a unique talent to create from raw materials.

There’s some comparison I can’t quite articulate - between the stone mason dust- and that on some level we’re all just stardust.

Apologies for rambling here. I’m not sure it adds anything.

It served to remind me to be grateful my dad is still alive and to engage in a similar reflection.

I’ve heard people say that while you have the chance, you should sit down and interview your father. The other day I happened to stumble on a list of questions one might ask:

1. What is your best memory of your own father?

2. What did you have as a child that kids today are missing?

3. What has life taught you about love?

4. What are the three most important values in life?

5. What was the moment you were most proud of me?

6. What do you wish most for your children?

7. What is the most importantly family tradition you’d like us to keep?

Those are great but all really family oriented. Sometimes it’s nice to remember they aren’t just dads.

My dad doesn’t usually express much emotion or enthusiasm, but one day he told me about a group trip he had taken at 18 across Europe. He got very animated and enthusiastic describing how he became the coolest guy on the trip. Multiple girls liked him, and the guys wanted to be friends with him. He was never popular in high school but during those 3 months he felt on top of the world.

As he told the story it became apparent to me that this trip was the happiest and most exciting time of his life. I’m sure if you asked him he would name his wedding or our births, but watching him talk about this trip I knew his eyes wouldn’t light up in the same way recalling those events.

Anyway, there is this boundary of sterility between me and my Dad. So he would have never told me: “go travel across Europe while young and get into drunken shenanigans while dating multiple girls.”, directly, but he finally did tell me in a way by sharing his story.

You bet. Not only did he tell, he showed you, by virtue of that fire lighting him up.-

> lack the words to fully share what I’m trying to > Apologies for rambling here. I’m not sure it adds anything.

That wasn't rambling. You contributed by sharing a beautiful point.-

What a beautiful obituary. The world is full of people whose everyday work makes the world just a bit more lovely to be in, and they don't get the recognition they deserve. To the destroyers of drab, thank you.

And yet he walked around belonging to a fraternity of men whose work stands the test of time.

I’d never considered the kinship a mason might feel, taking up the work of restoring or repairing the work of a predecessor who may have died hundreds of years before.

It is a form of permanence where there would otherwise be none.-

Other than the incredible life story and piece, it makes me think about technology on three fronts:

- Permanence vs. ephemerality of information. Whole decades worth of content dissappearing. Contrast that to a cathedral; for example.-

- Craft, and excellence, and pride in one's work vs. "enshittification".-

- Know-how and institutional and personal knowledge "rot". Think Apollo program personnel dying off, Apollo program vs. Boeing Starliner.-

PS. I know. "Cathedral to info" is apples to oranges, a bit. But ...

... why can't we come up with systems that hold information available, for that long?

> I’d never considered the kinship a mason might feel, taking up the work of restoring or repairing the work of a predecessor who may have died hundreds of years before.

I wish I could feel that kinship with the programmer who wrote the code that I now have to maintain and extend, who quit and got a job writing spaghetti somewhere else.

Maybe that's how it is with masons too? You never know what you might find behind the facade :-)

> I wish I could feel that kinship with the programmer who wrote the code that I now have to maintain and extend

By all means it could, should (must?) be that way.-

> Maybe that's how it is with masons too? You never know what you might find behind the facade :-)

To that, indeed. Who knows what "debt" or "enshittifcation" is hiding behind obscure technical details of any craft, seen by experts alone ...

That said, by an large, cathedrals have endured the test of time. I so wish we could say the same about the systems we are building nowadays.-

The cathedrals in our industry pop up when least expected. I doubt the first IRS, Sabre, or American Express programmers working on IBM mainframes in the 60s/70s thought their programs would last so long, even at great cost.

Indeed. Cathedrals built with COBOL.-

In software, most people dislike most other people's work. I wonder how much that varies between fields, or if it's been studied systematically. It might be pleasant to work in a field where you'd enjoy most other people's work.

People aren't incentivised to write code that somehow carries true legacy the same way that a master mason will want their work to be a legacy for decades, if not centuries.

This creates a positive feedback loop where people just shit out software as fast as possible, which then means the next person to come around will be met with maintaining a pile of poo. This person will also not have any time (or mental energy) to do anything to be proud of and so the circle continues.

And it's entirely understandable. Clueless PM ABC wants to increase some barely relevant KPI so they can get a pat on their head from Clueless VP XYZ. PM ABC thus invents yet another user hostile feature in Windows 11, and thus Programmer 123 gets the thankless task to integrate ads in the right-click context menu. The programmer might be an artisan at their craft, but ultimately they just want to get their 9-5 done so they can do some actually exciting stuff in their free time. Then 1 year later Programmer 124 comes around and is horrified to see the boondoggle that 123 left behind.

> People aren't incentivised to write code that somehow carries true legacy the same way that a master mason will want their work to be a legacy for decades, if not centuries.

You raise a great point. Methinks there's a pernicious "assumed ephemerality" of software systems that has a "flywheel" sort of effect in that loop, creating sinks, which, thus, "enshittify".-

I honestly wonder what it would look like if software were "set in stone", and the assumptions were reversed. You were building systems for the ages, and ever and ever ...

This is really it. There's no permanence and little to no personal consequence for bad code. In fact, everyone wants everything done ASAP. Time is money, and very few places have the culture and the resource to afford to build long term stuff.

And yet there is software that has stood the test of time. It might not be pretty from a purely ideological or aesthetic perspective, but it lays the foundation of many great things. Consider something like Numpy. The internals are a multi-decade boondoggle of graduate level python code, Lovecraftian Fortran that causes you to take psychic damage just by looking at it, and random hacks that some disgruntled researcher submitted at 10pm on a Sunday after an all weekend marathon to get his stuff finished on time.

But so much good stuff was built on this pile of bad code, because it is not the concrete code that is ultimately of value and worthy of admiration, but the concept. The implementation is sort of secondary. So perhaps it's the ideas and the concepts that have legacy in computer science, code is just a carrier. The same way that genes are the definition of the human race, an individual human is just an ephemeral implementation of those genes. It is the genes where the miracle happened really and which gave rise to beings that are self aware (to quote Richard Dawkins).

> Lovecraftian Fortran

This is great. "Abandon all hope all ye ..." :)

> perhaps it's the ideas and the concepts that have legacy in computer science, code is just a carrier.

Interesting thought. Only that implementation has consequences on resulting system quality, durability, performance. In other word, it is what we have live (and contend with) in the "flesh" - to follow the genetic analogy ...

> or if it's been studied systematically

I'd honestly be very curious to know.-

If you have some spare time, it’s worth playing with Squeak Smalltalk. I’m sure some of the object instances in its live image date from the 80s, first instantiated in the Xerox Smalltalk days, copied once in a while with a system tracer but never deleted or reallocated.

There is some code as well in Darwin (Mach) that have changelogs dating backu to the first years of NeXT, too.

Ah! "Heritage" ...

Very interesting.-

> the destroyers of drab

Nicely put. "Destroyers of drab". I like it. Well put.-

Living and being alive are two such very different things.-

> Living and being alive are two such very different things.-

Rabinovich's doorbell rings.

— Good morning, gentlemen.

— Good morning, sir. Does Abram Rabinovich live here?

— No.

— Okay, just for our forms, who may we say we spoke with today?

— Abram Rabinovich.

— But you just said you didn't live here!

— You call this living?

This must be just about the funniest thing I've read in a long while. Kudos.-

PS. I am totally going to practice that to a still deadpan. Along with a pipe, perhaps ...

That would be a good bit for a Peter Sellers movie.

"That is not my dog!"

Indeed.-

Sellers, a legend ...

How many such people are there who do not have a wealthy uncle who can support them while they find their purpose? How many do we lose in the morass of making a living?

We don't have a culture that recognizes the value of higher and highest ends. This is part of the self-described pragmatism of liberal societies. For "pragmatic" reasons, we say that we cannot agree on what those higher ends are. So, we restrict common life to economics. The result, of course, isn't that we simply disagree on what those highest ends are. We reduce life to economics and reinterpret life in economic terms. So, rather than accommodating them, the liberal order actually progressively erodes higher ends, coercing life into the narrow straitjacket of economics, recasting even human relationships according to the market paradigm. Economics becomes the point of life, its ordering principle, an end in itself that we serve rather than something that serves us as we pursue higher ends. This is why economists are held in such high esteem. They are something of a priesthood of the salvific religion of Homo Economicus, with the Market as its god.

The result is perhaps more material wealth, but aimless, ugly, mediocre, and vulgar in its nature, because we suffer an acute spiritual poverty. Consumerism is what happens when material goods are not ordered toward a higher end. We have replaced the cathedral with the hamburger and the dildo.

Amazing comment.

But hamburgers and dildos are good. It's not pleasure itself that has an ugly face; rather, it's seeking pleasure in spite of the cost to others.

You offer spiritualism as a cure. I think our higher end should be not spiritualism but the well-being of those we care about.

It's nice that spiritualism covers all bases: you should care about and help your friends and family; you should practice gratitude; etc. But we should state those things directly, lest fundamentalist screwball ideas like restriction of individual expression creep in under the guise of moral righteousness.

Indeed. I also wanted to appreciate the comment. It deserves a longer form.-

> economists are held in such high esteem

By whom? Not by anyone I'm familiar with.

Perhaps least of all other economists

“The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.”

John Kenneth Galbraith

This is great :)

PS. And yet, forecasts and "expectations" happen. Look at Nvidia. 3Tn. worth and down sharply, with increasing profits just because of market expectations.-

> The result, of course, isn't that we simply disagree on what those highest ends are. We reduce life to economics and reinterpret life in economic terms. So, rather than accommodating them, the liberal order actually progressively erodes higher ends

This is an impressively sharp observation. And, this, in a comment that is already gold. Really appreciated.-

(I informally refer to that as the "tragedy of the minimum wage Einsteins" ...)

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