thrwawy1234

I will not miss the “DEI” components of NSF proposals (or the PIER part of the DOE ones), especially having been on the review panel side about 5 times now. It’s not that I disagree with their intent, but the fact that after you’ve read a few you realize that proposers know exactly what they are expected to write there, so they write that there. Those sections are basically a useless going-through-the-motions exercise, and everyone knows it. I’ve never seen a proposal win or lose, or even change positions in a tie break, based on that content. More or less we just look to see that it exists, indicate that existence in the review form, and concentrate on the actual content. It’s a performative waste of everyone’s time.

I get the impression they're hyper sensitive about the v-tuber persona, which is odd, because nothing seems to scream "look at me" more than adopting some very unusual virtual persona to publicly stream development for an open source project that a large number of people are interested in... So, they want attention, but don't want attention. They also seem to be engaging in the increasingly unproductive habit of putting "that made me sad" into the "that's [insert-favorite-prefix]-phobia!" bin.

I really wish we had a different word than "tool" for the stuff we use to assemble and work with software. These sorts of discussions inevitably devolve into people arguing about physical tools as found in the arts, manufacturing, our other "crafts" with nothing more than vague hand waving to justify why the physical tool analogy even makes sense when applied to the things we call "tools" related to software. It's not that the word "tool" is inappropriate in a raw definitional sense, but it seems to lead to these tortured analogies. At this point as I'm pushing 30 professional years in the computing field, I'm less and less convinced that the analogy is very strong.

Amateurs and dilettantes sure like to argue strongly about it though.

I know. Many of us have the photos app show us things we didn’t really want: dead pets, dead relatives, exes, etc. I think most rational adults can handle that and turn it off instead of getting super dramatic about it. Are these people similarly traumatized when they open a desk drawer or photo album and happen to see an old photo that evokes sad memories? Or so they only seek the dramatic trauma points when writing about tech on the internet?

I’m getting a bit tired of this style of hyperbolic journalism:

> My hands were sweaty, my heart was racing, and I ended up walking away from my desk to take five deep breaths.

Seriously? Over a product announcement for something you don’t have to use if you don’t want to? Grow up - if that’s really how someone reacts to a journaling app that nobody needs to use nor will be forced to use, maybe they have a deeper problem.

I just don’t get the overly dramatic style that seems popular amongst some writers on the internet these days.

Yes and no. As you said, in some areas we have wonderfully efficient codes that can take advantage of hardware for things like codecs. Efficiency through high level languages - that's debatable. Often they trade developer efficiency for efficiency of the computer - layers of abstractions to hide platform details, runtime layers to defer some things to runtime, etc.

I rarely see people using new tools to develop code that itself is more efficient - based on the ever growing resource needs of programs that rarely have corresponding growth in capabilities, I think almost all of the effort from the developer community as been on making developers feel more efficient at the cost of compute resources.

Personally I'd love to see people focus on efficiency even if it takes more time and effort. Unfortunately, the incentive just isn't there - developers focus on what make it possible for them grind out new code faster to the largest audience possible. Hence the layers upon layers of runtimes and abstractions that make that possible. If it means burning CPU and memory, they really don't seem to care. Hence the relentless consumption of more and more resources by software.

I'm jaded : performance analysis was a long term research area for me, so I pay a bit more attention to these kinds of issues than your average JS or Python jockey who thinks the computer is a magical container full of infinite RAM and compute resources that are theirs and theirs alone to consume.