Re:I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and ...
by headmelted on Sunday August 30, 2020 @02:17AM
(#24321734)
This.
There’s a surprisingly massive amount of money being spent making more expensive, less stable and feature deficient versions of Squarespace everywhere.
I like to think I understand my work pretty well but in all the years I’ve been in this industry I can’t give a genuine reason for 90% of jobs in this industry to exist at all.
Re:I thought I would have accomplished a lot more today and ...
by ChrisMarshallNY on Sunday August 30, 2020 @07:48AM
(#24322732)
The other side of this, is that we are living in a "dependencyshpere," where people can't build projects on their own. This is a bit jarring to me. My first computer was an MC6800 STD Bus board, screwed onto a piece of wood, with a hex keypad and an 8-digit LED readout. I got pretty used to knowing what was going on under the hood. I can't even imagine looping in a bunch of code without understanding what it will do.
Dependencies are great. They are how we can do huge things with small teams. They are also bad (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/2347/).
I'm currently #1 in "clean EPE matched" on the Sintel AI benchmark - by re-implementing a 2006 paper. I'm taking advantage of the additional computing power that we have nowadays by brute-forcing what used to be a gradient-descent solver. It appears that people have re-invented the AI wheel many times, but nobody checked to see what was there before deep learning became fashionable.
I see the same issue everywhere. Companies have a large agile web 4.0 team using obscure frameworks that I had never heard of before. But all the stuff that they built would have been included in a $9 WordPress hosting plan.