296 karma · joined November 20, 2014
This is someone who prefers solitude. It's not surprising that he doesn't like collaborative work.
He seems to be projecting his own preference onto the software industry though, which is misguided. Lots of great software has been built with all kinds of different workflows.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/09/wo...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwFIJyWKs1k
He also happens to be blind.
It's surprising to me that someone compared your work to Wittgenstein's. His writing contains an extraordinary amount of dense, finely-honed philosophical content per page--rather the opposite of the 'let it all hang out' approach you seem to be taking. Which isn't to say either one is strictly better, although the previous commenter may disagree with me.
If you're looking for more feedback, I would suggest that you read. Read orders of magnitude more than you write, in fact, no matter how much you write. No matter how old or how experienced you are, philosophy is a party that has been going on for thousands of years and you have only just arrived. There is always more to read, and for any novel idea or theory you have that is keeping you up at night pondering it, there is almost certainly someone whose entire life's work was dedicated to the exploration of that one idea.
Read Wittgenstein on language, sure, but you're gonna then need Frege and the logical positivists for context. Then read into Hilbert and Russell's work on the foundations of mathematics, and then about Gödel's famous theorems and how they affected that program. There's a rewarding parallel to be drawn between what the conclusion of Wittgenstein's Tractatus says about the philosophy of language and what Gödel's incompleteness theorems say about the foundations of math, but you gotta do the work to get there.
Stream-of-consciousness is a well-worn technique at this point, and not just in writing or speaking. Read about theatre improvisation and jazz, and hip hop, and what those artists have to say about their processes, and read theorists and critics who are skeptical of the very possibility of what you're calling "honesty" in your writing.
Read history. Read about propaganda campaigns and why they worked, and past instances of "information radiation". Look up all the 20th century theorists who warned us about the power of television to make even the most horrific atrocities banal. It's all been said before.
Contributing new thought is hard work, and one of the reasons why it is hard work is that you have to first understand the entire conversation that had been already happening right up until you joined the party. Read anything and everything you can get your hands on, and then read more.
Second thought was a conversation between an electrical engineering professor I had in college and one of my classmates. We were learning about flip-flop circuits, which led to a discussion of computer memory in general. The conversation went:
Prof: Flip-flops and latches will lose their memory when powered off, so not necessarily the best solution for storing something important.
Classmate: Then how does my USB memory stick store data when it's unpowered?
P: [explanation of floating-gate MOSFETs, which can hold data intact practically forever, although actually forever is a different story]
C: What's the best way we know of of storing data for the longest possible time?
P: Carve it into the side of a mountain.
17 = 1 (mod 4)
but rather
17 ≅ 1 (mod 4)
i.e. "17 is congruent to 1 mod 4", not "equal", though congruency mod n is an equivalence relation.
Hammer is viewed as a ubiquitous [sic] tool; however, its design limits its potential as a reliable and high performance drill. Unfortunately, not every carpenter is aware of its limitations.
I found that after a while, when I would go back and read what I was worrying about, say, a month prior, it seemed so alien and absurd that it helped a lot to put my current worries in perspective.
Best of luck to you.
You're forgetting the thing about him where he makes art that is unbelievably beautiful. He says himself he'd still do it even if his materials were worthless.
But who knows why people want to spend hundreds of thousands to own it.
"Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy"
Rather than what it is: our best model.
Consider that a command-line interface is an extremely inconvenient way for most people to use a computer but perfectly natural for others.
Agreed. But the way it tends to work is that if (say) 60% of all engineers are men and the rest are women, then a man more closely fits the idea of an engineer that those people who are in charge of giving the chances have in mind, and so they're more likely to prefer a man to a woman.
You sort of run into this chicken/egg problem though: are women underrepresented in engineering because of what I described above (bad), or do they actually have equal opportunities and simply aren't choosing to become engineers (okay), OR do they actually have equal opportunities and are simply not choosing to be engineers just because the profession currently comprises mostly men and they feel discouraged when they see that, even though they're otherwise interested (bad), or etc. etc.
Else, a whole bunch of bullshit jobs would be pulled out of nowhere, and we'd have teens spending their summers making internal websites for banks.
If there's really excess money burning a hole in someone's pocket, I'd rather see it go to a community garden or something than creating artificial demand for even more tech.