JHer

I will keep recommending Hillel Wayne's crossover project whenever this "Software engineering vs 'real' engineering" discussion pops up.

https://www.hillelwayne.com/tags/crossover-project/

I'm disappointed and jaded by the state of our craft like you. But I'm also very suspicious of claims that other disciplines are somehow these much more earnest, pristine, derived-from-first-principles things. It just doesn't fit my view of human nature.

If all I have todo is ask the thing what I want, where is all the great new software? Why isn't everyone running fully bespoke operating systems by now?

While I agree with the sentiment that we shouldn't make things more complicated by inventing fancy names, we also shouldn't pretend that software engineering has become super simple now. Building a great piece of software remains super hard to do and finding better techniques for it affords real study.

Your post is annoying me quite a bit because it's super unfair to the linked post. Simon Willison isn't trying to coin a new term, he's just trying to start a collection of useful patterns. "Agentic engineering" is just the obvious term for software engineering using agents. What would you call it, "just asking things"?

I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.

I don't understand. It's not like the far left is Volkswagen's fan club?

The television, the atom bomb, the cigarette rolling machine, and penicillin are also "just tools". They nevertheless changed our world entirely, for better or worse. If you ascribe the impact of AI to the people using AI, you will be utterly, completely bewildered by what is happening and what is going to happen.

It irritates me a bit that many comments on HN are like a Yelp review of the linked article instead of adding to the discussion of their comments. Maybe you see HN primarily as a community-curated list of links while I see it as a place of discussions?

In this thread, for example, wccrawford gave an interesting perspective on choices in life. While they used the linked article as a reference point, the contents of their comment stand entirely on their own. The information value in the linked article is not that important, the value of the discussion is much more important. To me, that is.

DFW = David Foster Wallace

But there are other platforms out there (especially for books) that people will prefer if they make it easier to find high-quality content. I’m with the poster you replied to; it would make sense for Amazon to go after these fake products.

What gives you that idea? Of course we can build enough windmills and other renewables.

Murakami wrote a non-fiction book about the Sarin attacks and the Aum cult, Underworld. I’m not sure if it’s accurate (he’s a fiction writer, afterall) but it’s very fascinating and sent many chills down my spine.

You should read this: https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Do you mean a _low_ signal-to-noise ratio?

If you haven’t already, you should read the crossover project by Hillel Wayne in which he interviewed a bunch of engineers that became software engineers. It’s really good. https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

WFPB = Whole Foods / Plant-Based

For people interested in the comparison between “real” engineers and software engineers (as in this thread), Hillel Wayne wrote an outstanding series of blog posts summarizing a bunch of interviews he did with former “real” engineers who turned software engineers. I found it extremely interesting.

https://hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/

Could you share a link or give the name of the study, so that I can read it?

Perhaps the ones falling prey to fake news and disinformation are not doubting enough or their doubting is one-sided. What they lack is the doubt in their own thinking and believing. I believe we should question our own convictions as often as possible and try to understand where they are coming from. That is, try to be aware of how our upbringing, our current personal situation, the experiences we've had in life (and the ones we didn't have) might influence our thinking.

Entering "1984" yields "books similar to 1984 by Michael Dean". Entering "Nineteen Eighty-Four" gives me "Book picks similar to Nineteen Eighty-Four by Matthew Dunster". When I search for "Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel", the site responds with "Book picks similar to Beer in the Snooker Club by Waguih Ghali". I'm sure Dean, Dunster, and Ghali are terrific writers but what happened to George Orwell?

I found "Search User Interfaces" by Marti Hearst very informative. It's available online for free: https://searchuserinterfaces.com/

Debugging python processes running in containers unfortunately requires a bit of setup in VS Code (no idea about Emacs).

Whenever I see someone saying something like "just a tool" with regard to technology, I always want to recommend a thorough read of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" ("The Medium is the Message" and other adages).

I think you've got it precisely the wrong way round: it is not the morality of the times that is reflected by the use of technology, but morality that reflects current technology.

The French and American revolutions that began the current age of modern democracy are, for example, unthinkable without the printing press. No newspaper, no democracy. It needed the equalising force of mass-copied text to abolish the sacred order of monarchy in people's heads. Similarly, it is hard to imagine fascism without the preceding inventions of radio and cinema. Or J.F.K. without television.

Culture, society, customs, morality - everything that has to do with what we call 'evil' or 'good' - is fundamentally a reflection of their surrounding media. Morals under the conditions of television will be different from morals under the condition of the world wide web.

One can see that we are currently struggling to adapt our morality to a new media reality by the invention of new words ("fake news", "filter bubble", "clickbait", "post-truth") to describe it; the old ones are insufficient.

I propose that rules and guidelines that emerged under the conditions of offline media will leave us vulnerable to the dark and dangerous sides of online media. We should develop new ones.