butMebbe
Aggregate engineering and customer experience are cost centers.
Our management culture is irreparably broken. Somehow the Linux kernel runs the world without them. Very few CRUD apps out there need a literal people pipeline to copy-paste React deps into git.
We’re missionaries for nation state currency, sharing the wealth we create with our neighbors through make-work tasks. We’re not engineers engaged in craft.
It would also eliminate who knows how many lines of code in the form of parsers/lexers for dozens of random static formats, and embedded HTTP clients that reach out to APIs being copy-pasted all over to handle ops.
It would bin a whole lot of cognitive gibberish that comes with Docker and k8s, and move SRE/ops thinking to leveraging the same language ecosystems as app developers, normalizing jargon.
But yeah let’s stick with your simple reduction. Apathy and lethargy are the zeitgeist of the day. The “disrupt!” industry has become a “wait not me though!” jobs program.
Effectively a government jobs program as the rate hikes forcing layoffs show. As soon as the Fed shut off the money printer, big techs house of cards started wobbling. Truly innovative measure like layoffs, a form of politically correct economic insecurity[1], not novel new ideas, was big techs reaction to government policy shift.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/27/business/job-insecurity-o...
So you have to appear novel to early adopters, and grow into being a landfills cash cow in a politically correct way.
There is so much bloat due to everyone making a DSL to learn distributed systems with, or every little bit of UNIX coming with its own text config format.
I’d like to get away from generating yaml for Docker and k8s and import balancing forks of microservice logic v8 style; read kernel telemetry from eBPF in the app to determine how many forks the code can add or needs to subtract, and terraform because it’s still just a Linux box under there.
But the cottage industry that profits from these ideas is threatened by these ideas and sticks with showing off a new arbitrary string parser that ALSO sends the strings to an API for you!
The software industry has turned into a jobs program and has little to do with novel engineering.
Same as we were taught in school; keep the numbers you work with day to day by using a simple noticing.
Add 1 to 3.654 x 10^11, another billionaire appears!
Their wealth is mathematical inference. None of them have Scrooge McDuck Vaults full of real money.
Tangentially, Paul G Tweeted a few weeks ago about America being “fake”; American cheese was one thing he called out specifically. No one Tweeted back “billionaire wealth.” I had del’d my Twitter years ago, did not seem worth making a new one.
Congress is a thing and could force change, but it’s preferred the people don’t think that way and keep it gridlocked.
The public is a thing but they’re happy as punch to sit and complain that engage in alternative agency.
It’s always just the figureheads fault!
The intentional effort to instigate apathy and create a feckless people is working.
A material minimum to sustain biology and abundance of time for altered states of such resolution and variety produced through nascent regenerative medicinal therapies like bio electrics is way more interesting; hack realities fields directly versus build synthetic machines to upgrade forever? Sign me up.
IMO more building of synthetic stuff to appear different and novel is the wrong path. It’s classical physics.
It may reduce industrial consumption as the outputs are the uniform means of producing a variety of experiences not a literal variety of things necessitating bespoke assembly lines.
But humans are so literal. Carry on with rockets because Star Trek. Few think “take pill, believe I’m Captain Kirk with Orion cadet for an hour.” Drugs are bad, mmmk.
Maintain minimum required force of trigger happies for all the shooting scenarios.
Our secular society isn’t anymore sacrosanct than religious based choices. It should be readily reorganize-able as logistics demand.
Optimizing for 24/7 status quo politics, profit margin optimizing and rent extraction “or else the world ends” is not so different from forcing unfalsifiable magic down our throats.