5,525 karma · joined August 10, 2012
There ars a lot of things in life that are like this, IME. There's a cynical or pessimistic way to look at something (often an interpersonal thing), and if you assume that it's true, then whether or not it was true, it becomes true for you. In those cases, the only rational thing to do is act as if it weren't true.
Example: incels. Lots of people have rough lives and have a hard time developing socially in all kinds of different ways. It sucks. Sometimes that leads to guys who have a fundamentally hard time interacting with women they are attracted to, which can lead to downward spirals of rejection and misery. Some guys cope with this by becoming incels or redpillers or whatever. "Girls don't like me, I'm so sad" is transformed into "Girls don't like me because girls suck and society sucks and it makes me awesome". It's really depressing, but there's a rationality to it in that it trades pain for anger without changing the situation. But even if someone isn't an actual incel type, once they assume that identity and start to believe it, they'll become one, which is why it never does anyone any good to start thinking of themselves as incels or redpillers. But this isn't just about incels. There are innumerable self-fulfilling, self-destructive viewpoints out there, in which even if they're rooted in elements of truth, it doesn't do anyone any good to accept the viewpoint.
Other examples include the Golden Rule, taking the high road, etc. EDIT: meaning, the notion that the Golden Rule or taking the high road all the time is for suckers, therefore you shouldn't do it. It assumes the worst in people, and if you live your life that way it ensures that you have bad interactions with people that reaffirm your already-cynical viewpoint.
But, uh, I may have gone off on some tangents there. Sorry HN. TL;DR even if your 1:1's with your boss suck, don't give up on trying to make them more constructive.
What you describe is more like Deism or Theism, where you believe in some sort of higher order intelligence behind the universe, but it's not incompatible with science and rationality and observation. You can't believe in both Creationism and evolution because Creationism is an explicit denial of evolution, and of anything but a literal reading of Genesis. But you're in good company, as you just described many/most of America's Founding Fathers, who today's Evangelicals would have lynched as heretics if they bothered to read their actual words rather than treat them as cartoon mascots for whatever they want to imagine America stands for at the moment.
Not that I would recommend using Fortran for anything, just providing context. Even Numerical Recipes didn't get a C version until 1988. The original edition from 1985 was Fortran and Pascal. So even Pascal was considered a more mainstream language for this sort of work than C, at that time.
For example, I started reading Slashdot not long after it started ('96?). I really enjoyed it, read it every day, occasionally posted. Then sometime around 2000 I just got disgusted with the quality of the comments- it seemed like there was a long slow decline, and no longer did the average commenter seem like they were my age or older, my level of experience or greater, my level of knowledge or greater- instead it just seems like a cesspool of pointless, toxic flamewars about stupid things that seemed to exist for their own sake. Reading Slashdot comments started making me feel stupider and angrier, not more informed. So I eventually stopped reading Slashdot.
But then, over the years I would talk to various people younger than me with the same experience- the only thing that changed was which year they thought Slashdot was good, and which year they thought it went so downhill that they just couldn't read it anymore. Like, "Slashdot was awesome circa 2007 but by 2011 all the commenters sounded like toxic teenagers". Which makes me think that what actually happened was Slashdot comments were always terrible, but if you started reading it your larval hacker years you might not know any better. Then you grow up some more and get more knowledgeable and mature, and the same level of commentary seems really inane.
People having emotional reactions as if some tribe they imagine they belong to has been insulted by someone else who they imagine belongs to some other imaginary tribe, instead of just, "yeah that's wrong nobody should do that, let's do better" has always been one of the most off-putting things to me about the whole free software community, such as it is. It was annoying on Usenet in the mid-'90s, it was obnoxious whenever RMS prioritized that sort of thinking over actually just turning the other cheek and making the world a better place, and wow does it not do anyone any good decades later.
My theory is that people get sucked into these black holes of rational thought because, like me, a lot of people drawn to the open source world tend to be obsessive introverts who often feel more comfortable with computers than people, and like me, are susceptible to getting sucked into feelings of belonging and camaraderie with often imaginary subcultures/tribes/families online or elsewhere, when in reality the only common thread is they're random people from mailing lists trying to work together towards a very narrow range of common goals.
The instant people get sucked into the dark side, next thing you know they're going around IRL saying stuff like "ACTUALLY it's guh-noo SLASH lee-nooks and anything else is disrespectful and I will personally feel disrespected by anyone who defies me". And then all is lost and this whole thing becomes a net negative for everyone involved. No fun, no fun at all. Nobody should feel personally insulted by anyone pointing out obvious technical flaws in anything really, including their own work, but certainly not in open source operating systems that they may or may not even contribute to.
On the other hand, TIFF writers can (very conveniently!) be almost as simple as you want, including no compression at all, just blobs of raw pixel values, and a smattering of tags for width, height, pixel format, and that's it. The only thing simpler to output IMO would be uncompressed ASCII formats like XPM.
So in that sense you're correct- the simplest possible JPEG writer is much more complicated than the simplest possible TIFF writer, but TIFF in general is extensible to a fault (arguably), in the sense that the number of possible combinations of pixel and metadata encodings you have to prepare yourself for when opening arbitrary .tif files are far greater than when opening arbitrary .jpg files, including JPEGs within TIFFs.
Throughout my life and career I've seen so many statements of this nature from my peers: "the status quo will only ever be a 90% solution at best, therefore we should throw all of that away and just do everything on a case-by-case basis in isolation from one another, then we'd all live in an ideal meritocracy (or something)".
See also any discussion about flat management. "Explicit management hierarchies obviously aren't perfect, therefore let's get rid of them altogether and assume that everyone is awesome and will magically self-organize and do the right thing."
I guess the common theme is, someone is greatly overestimating their own rationality, and projects it onto other people, and ends up with an almost religious faith in the self-organizing competencies of unmanaged people, or the natural inclination of unregulated schools or industries to always do the right thing even when it's not in their own self-interest.
IME there are lots of fundamentally messy or imperfect things in life, where any choice you make has negative consequences. There's also a personality type that is repelled by this sort of messiness and will always be drawn towards throwing everything away and starting from scratch, often with a childlike belief that things they don't understand aren't important, and why can't everyone see how obvious and elegant their solution is? IME they're usually wrong about those situations, but I guess I'm still glad people less pessimistic than I am are tilting at those windmills.
Pretty much anything I’d hire them for would involve some degree of systems programming and/or graphics. So, having one or more OS classes and/or graphics classes are significant. Of course if they are knowledgeable about those things by learning on their own, that’s great too, but that’s even less common.
Once someone’s no longer fresh out of college, education specifics become a lot less important, and the focus shifts to their career history. But for people without a prior history, there’s little else to go on. For example, if a particular internship or junior position involves graphics, it’ll make a big difference if the interviewee has some sort of introductory foundation of knowledge and won’t be starting from scratch. That could be a critical difference between two otherwise equal candidates.
TL;DR if you are a student with an interest in any interest in a specialty that you might want to pursue professionally, and there’s a course dedicated to that specialty, by all means take that course. Whether it’s graphics, or AI, or operating systems, or whatever. It could definitely help you get that first job or internship in that field. It sounds painfully obvious, but it must not be based on my personal experiences.
In my bubble, you have to be very careful about hiring because it can be very difficult to fire anyone at a large company. Or it just ends up being such a long, awkward, multi-stage process, that even objectively terrible engineers will get transferred elsewhere within a large company rather than get fired, because it's that much easier for the manager who wants to get rid of them.
Some of it might be a cultural affinity for giving people second chances, but I think a lot of it is just the hoops you have to jump through to avoid the possibility of a future wrongful termination lawsuit if you fire somebody. But I've heard that it can be very different elsewhere, in different industries or countries. I bet it has a lot to do with the legal system too, like whether or not there's a framework of worker protection laws in place.
On the other extreme, you have people up in arms about gentrification, where they oppose new or better housing because they're worried it'll increase their property values. But in both cases, it's the people who already live there that push back on more and/or denser housing.
Perfect example: I'm in SV, and I bet there's a not insignificant slice of the population around me who think that the cure to budget deficits (i.e., debt) is to reduce income by cutting taxes, based on a mystical belief never seen in reality that the growth fueled by the tax cuts will result in both lower taxes for the population and higher tax revenues for the government (i.e., investment).
I'm almost 50 years old, and there has never been one iota of truth to this notion in my lifetime. Not one teeny tiny iota. But some people just can't resist going back to that well over and over again with the same results every time. The notion that you can kill two birds with one stone, and both ignore debt and create wealth at the same time via magic Austrian fairy dust must be very powerful. It's like a black hole of self-evident idiocy that people keep flying into for some reason. It must be a form of cognitive bias, but if so I don't know what to call it.