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It was totally normal (especially back in the day) to edit a makefile on a remote host with vanilla vi. There weren't any electron apps in 1976. Hell, vi is only a few months older than make, so when it was created I bet the usual way of editing a makefile was with ed!

Talk about a badly configured editor...

Thank you for all your extremely considerate and detailed answers on this thread.

I'm interested in what the economic motivations were behind ornate buildings of old. I'm talking about the craftsmanship involved in intricately decorated buildings in urban cores, such as found in most of Europe and less baroquely in the art-deco buildings in the US. Surely at that time economic factors were at work too, and it is very expensive to have custom brick-work and gargoyles and copper accents, etc. At that time did we have a higher standard of what was passable as a public building? A pride in making something pleasing? Were these features actually not more expensive to create?

Disclaimer: I’m arguing to flesh out my thoughts more than disagreeing with you.

OK, but then if I saw a video of Brownian motion which is for all intents and purposes time–reversible, should I conclude the time is in fact not moving forward?

Maybe another way to phrase the question: at the end of the universe when entropy has reached its highest state, does the time dimension of the universe disappear?

Is anyone else fundamentally unsatisfied with the explanation that entropy is responsible for the arrow of time? The argument normally goes something like “a broken egg is very unlikely to spontaneously transform itself into a whole egg, so we experience time as moving forward only, never backward”. But if I did see an un-breaking egg, I feel like I would still need more convincing that it is actually moving backward in time.

Having worked at AWS and then a litany of other companies in Seattle that are mostly using AWS or Google cloud, here's my perspective on some lock-in that you might not have actively on your mind:

  * Larger companies generally have contracts with cloud providers to pay lower rates. Sometimes these contracts include obligations to use a technology for a certain period of time to get the reduced rate.
  * Any technology that isn't completely lift-and-shift from one cloud provider to another. It used to be that a JAR deployed to a 'real' host (say EC2) that accesses config through environment variables and communicates through HTTP was the gold standard here. Now docker broadens the possibilities a bit
  * All the cloud providers have annoyingly different queueing/streaming primitives (SQS, kinesis, kafka  wrappers...). So if you are using those you might find it annoying to switch
  * Even for tried-and-true technologies like compute, MySql, K/V stores, cloud providers offer lots of "Embrace and Extend" features.
  * If you are wise then you will have back-ups of your data in cold storage. Getting these out can be expensive. Generally getting your data out of the cloud and into another cloud is expensive, depending on your scale.

IMO the only way to truly avoid lock-in is to use bog-standard boring technologies deployed to compute instances, with very few interaction patterns other than TCP/HTTP communication, file storage, and DB access. For all but the largest companies and perverse scaling patterns, this will get you where you are going, and is probably cheaper than using all the fancy bells and whistles offered by which ever cloud provider you are using.

Bluntly, most tech people are either some kind of ADHD or Aspergers, or both. Well-Adjusted Adults (/s) don't generally want to spend all day speaking in extremely logical terms and fighting esoteric error messages from their computer. IMO a lot of scrum practices and tech company culture is centered around making work more tractable for people with these kinds of neurodivergances.

In relation to what GP was talking about, if you have spent most of your life with either of these conditions it is likely that part of your normal every-day functioning involves employing some set of defense mechanisms and learned reactions. Part of that in the past may have been developing an affinity for computers. It can be hard to navigate a world in which most people seem to understand more about interpersonal interaction than you do, and/or where most people are cool with ambiguities that don't make sense to you. These strategies take up a lot of CPU power in your brain, and can (among a whole host of other things) make your memory more foggy because you are busy spending all your time in a kind of low-level survival mode.

As an aside, poor autobiographical memory is a really common side effect of ADHD, a condition which can be philosophically framed as having a difficult time connecting to the past or future as well as other people can.

I've never been much for religion but maybe I just haven't gotten into the right stuff. Can I confess to you the sins of my .vimrc?

Agreed. This is one of the few articles that I’ve read this month that is really caused me to reflect on my own systems.

The insight that

  open(“foo.txt”)

is, from the perspective of component analysis, actually secretly

  open(filesystem, access_level, “foo.txt”)

is worth its weight in gold. I feel like I understand more about system design, capability-based permissions, and my own code.

Realistically it won’t immediately change the way I program and I won’t be running to the terminal to refactor my current codebase, but it’s like I’ve been clued in to a whole new class of code smells.

Baudrillard's visison of the hyperreal is becoming overwhelmingly true and at an exponential rate. I envision that soon we won't even need historical documents because we can just auto-generate documents based on historical data. Which will then become the new historical documents, in a process that keeps folding in on itself until the bubble our immediate reality shrinks and shrinks until there is only the smallest part of the inner ear vaguely recalling that gravity is acting upon us, while the rest of our senses and thoughts are wrapped in the warm blanket of an auto-generated fugue.

Too much cyncism in any person or organization will lead to gridlock and/or burnout as new ideas are immediately scrapped and morale tanks. Just ask anyone who has worked for 10+ years in government. However, for a private company that kind of critical thinking is often important to make sure that all the lemmings don't run off the cliff.

It is interesting to me that cynicism is stifled at a cultural level at Meta. It is some kind of low-level cult like behavior, to stifle internal criticism. It must also breed a kind of in-group/out-group mentality, as I don't know a single person IRL who has a positive view of the company, its products, or the metaverse.

Not unless the soloist was using a RNG to inform their choices. Improvisation is different than “chance” in this context I think.

You are right, a lot of people who think everyone around them are horrible narcissists are actually likely to be narcissistic themselves. They project their inability to hold other viewpoints or be vulnerable on others.

To anyone who has had prolonged contact with this style of personality, then you’re also well aware that the first thing they’ll do is say someone else is the problem. Think about Trump’s repeated bald-faced accusations that his opponents are doing what he is accused of.

If you can’t see things from someone else’s perspective, then it seems to you like other people can’t see things from your perspective. If you are completely absorbed with worrying about yourself, then people who aren’t constantly worrying about you seem self-centered (i.e., centered on “not you”!)

A good way to tell the difference is to see how much detail a person goes into when describing a conflict with another. If they describe the conflict from both sides and in detail, then things are probably ok. If they describe conflict in very vague terms and vilify their opponent, then run for the hills.

Healthy relationships have a tendency to grow more slowly. A person with secure attachment tends not to instantaneously fall completely for a stranger and then immediately start treating them like the stranger is the love of their life. That’s a love bomb. It’s the way a young teenager expresses love for their crush.

On the other side of the coin, if you met a new person and they immediately started talking about how they were completely in love with you and showering you with attention and affection that didn’t have any real backing in a developed relationship, it might make you uncomfortable. Unless you are feeling very insecure, in which case this behavior might seem like a gift from the gods.

Over-all it’s the lack of boundaries or long-term plan to follow through that differentiates honeymoon phase from love bombing. The narcissistic person just wants the attention, even if only for a couple of weeks. It can leave the other person feeling used.

I have similar thoughts, but I actually think if our society continues in the way that it is going that narcissism will become more common, and the types of things that are labeled emotional abuse will go to encompass actions that make narcissists feel uncomfortable.

This is exactly what happened to me. I have more borderline traits than straight up narcissism, but they share in common that incredibly self-centered personality core and need for external validation. Kind of like two ways of expressing the same gene.

I was treated for a long time like I had anxiety and depression in therapy. But therapy just allowed me to go on and on about my problems and got a lot of tips and tricks about my mood, but they were all just papering over the core issue which is that I trap myself in situations I don’t like and then feel like I can’t leave because then I’d be all alone.

Through a fluke I ended up changing therapists to someone who got their thesis studying narcissism. She was the first person pretty much in my whole life who would cut through my b.s. and tactfully push back. Suggesting there might be more colors to situations than my distorted vision would let me see.

Now when I see someone else with unchecked narcissism it really bothers me because I know what kind of hell they must experience internally. It still hurts, but I’d like to think I’m starting to be more self aware.

This reminds me that as far as wall street is concerned, it is actually an afterthought that airlines operate airplanes, all the money is in the credit cards.

I think parent is talking about the COM interface.[1] powershell still has a legacy of object oriented manipulation as opposed to text/line based manipulation. I’m too much living in Unix world to give more insight as to how well it functioned though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_Object_Model

There are a lot of personal attributes and social behaviors that unlock opportunities. In the US a positive attitude, gratitude, and genuine interest are among them. In general just being pleasant to be around and personable will get you far in the engineering world because those qualities are often times lacking. When people managers are making decisions about resourcing I think that they are not honest with themselves about how much them 'liking' a person goes into their decision making process. Same for hiring.

If you are a terse and dour person, it isn't that you will experience more rejection per-se, it is just that opportunities will not even be presented to you because the person with the opportunity doesn't want to spend time in your presence.

Reminds me of the classic laws of spacecraft design

https://spacecraft.ssl.umd.edu/akins_laws.html

I read the article and I still can’t help mis-parsing the headline. The author meant “programming is a romantic activity”. I read “how can we overcome romanticizing programming?”

Maybe it’s just my perspective. I used to be in love with programming. But doing something I loved as a job left me open to burnout and vulnerable to being used.

Now I’m not “in love” with programming. Partially because it doesn’t intrigue and surprise me like a new lover does. We have a comfortable relationship, we’ve settled down. I’m married to programming and it’s work but it’s worth it. There’s still fun and fulfillment, but I’m not infatuated like I used to be.

Just because something is in memory doesn’t mean that it is realistically executable. That’s why you can download a virus to look at the code without it installing itself.

You aren’t wrong that even downloading untrusted data is less secure than not downloading it. But to actually exploit a machine that is actively sanitizing unsafe data, you need either (A) an attack vector for executing code at an arbitrary location in memory, or (B) a known OOB bug in the code that you can exploit to read your malicious data, by ensuring your data is right after the data affected by the OOB bug.

That may be true, but I wouldn’t underestimate the terror caused by 100000 armed drones hovering over houses and streets and bridges.

From what I understand of playing a saxophone the variability would come from the mouthpiece. On a type of instrument like a saxophone the valves should always be cleanly opened or closed.

In a transaction of the style of musical performances, I think it’s inevitable that an entity like Ticketmaster would begin to exist. The issue is that we have a many to many to many relationship between fans, artists, and venues.

In database design when you have such a pattern it is common that you’ll have a new table to maintain the complex relationship. It doesn’t make sense for venues to sell tickets because each artist has their own tour through many venues. Selling tickets for a tour becomes a hassle as many venues would have to coordinate. To complicate things, opening acts often switch during the course of a tour. Conversely, it doesn’t make sense for artists to sell tickets because the process of coming up with the ticket price and negotiating with the venue and handling transactions and returns , etc. is not their core competency.

This is why promoters like Live Nation exist—to bridge this gap and take on the capital risk necessary to put on a large tour. They aren’t necessary but their value to venues and artists (the business owners) is palpable. For Taylor Swift to go on a world tour, an amount of centralized coordination makes it much easier and much less likely to end in financial ruin.

I appreciate your intentions but the overall description sounds like you’re attempting to mummify yourself!

“The human body is the best image of the human soul”

I think this essay gets overly bogged down in thinking that personality is some thing that exists in the brain. Obviously it does to some extent. But instead of trying to self investigate your own personality or your own consciousness, meditate on the people that are close to you. Especially the ones that you love and the ones that annoy you. It’s so blindingly obvious that there’s giant differences between people, but those differences aren’t just in some abstract corner of their brain. People walk differently. They smile differently. Their attention is drawn to different things. What it means for someone to love you is completely different depending on who that someone is, they go about it in their own special way.

Interacting with other people is also your best window into your own personality and your own consciousness. Who are you comfortable with? Who shines brightly in your memory? What things do you miss about a lover when they’re gone? In solipsism our personality doesn’t mean much and our consciousness might as well be a brand floating in a vat. But in community we are as differentiated as can be.

It's all stereotypes. As I've done more therapy though I just realize that all the people that I know from the midwest really /really/ don't want to open up about how they are feeling. It isn't about swearing or being a part of 'polite society', it's about not addressing perceived issues interpersonally or in a group dynamic.

Like I just see from my hometown near Minneapolis that people would rather just act like uncomfortable things aren't happening or don't exist. They put on a smile and act all nice to each other but secretly there's all this shit that they harbor against one another. It is definitely a small-town thing too though. In a small town the people you are around have been there for a long time and they are going to be there for a long time in the future, so one way to cope with disagreement is to paper it over. Just not my personally favorite interaction style.

As a mildly autistic person who grew up in the Midwest, my understanding is that it is not at all direct haha. East coast is much more abrasive and easier to get. If someone things you’re an ass they’ll let you know. And you can let them know why they’re wrong in a loud back-and forth. Then laugh and get a drink.

In the Midwest people are too polite to say anything. Many midwesterners will bear an annoyance for years before speaking up as they are afraid of offending.

On the west coast if you’re an ass people will just stop interacting with you. You just won’t be invited anymore. The lack of interaction is the interaction.

But we end up having to make other arbitrary assumptions about what happened at the very beginning of the big bang or about multiverses that we have no scientific justification in making. Calling the observed physical constants 'arbitrary' is a very mathemetician-like move. It is true that they are free variables in the sense that they cannot currently be derived--mathematical models of the universe must include these constants as hard-coded values. But the word arbitrary implies that they could have been something else, and we really don't have justification for that.

We write the modeling program and somewhere we write

  FINE_STRUCTURE_CONSTANT=1/137;

It is very tempting to instead write

  ./my_universe.sh --fst=0.007 ...

The code does the same thing, but as far as we know that constant is as invariable and intrinsic to what it means to be a universe as PI is to what it means to be a circle.

It is fun to think about but it can't produce scientific results. It's epicycles, coming up with more complicated stories that over-fit for a singular observation.