cfr2023
Meanwhile, at home, I would practically be shaking with excitement waiting for the show to start, I so appreciated it.
This tale somewhat suggests that people who perceive themselves as incompetent and inauthentic might spend more of their time striving at work, which could raise the bar, maintain a high standard and eventually breed something resembling confidence.
Or it could just continuously undermine their natural confidence and sense of self-worth and debase them such that they are easy to overwork and manipulate. It can also just feed into fears that invalidate the satisfaction of any jobs well done, leading to burn out and feelings of futility.
People who are overly confident can behave brashly and do damage, while automatically imposing costs on others, in the form of the time it takes to crack through their false beliefs or the duplication of effort it takes to walk back their mistakes.
So, this is kind of a nothing post, basically a lament. It's not clear whether suffers of Impostor Syndrome or Dunning-Kruger type symptoms have an easier path to a more moderate position, but each one seems likely to be rampant in just about any workplace.
Because a rigorous operational definition of “progress” is not provided in this brief post, you assume it is missing, just to heckle someone making the uncontroversial claim that there will always be people on both sides of initiatives intended to foster progress in a given area. A hilarious thing to be triggered by.
How would “achieving an organization’s mission statement within budget” or “improving working conditions for knowledge workers by creating more accessible tools” or “using fewer labor hours on repetitive tasks” or “creating custom tools tailored to specific tasks and using less electricity”.
But maybe any of those non-technical goals can all be achieved using the same old tech, and it’s people complaining about their feelings of disconnection from ancient telecom vestiges that are really impeding progress. Maybe the it is the masses that don’t get it, and it is the select few that truly understand things that get to define progress, while insisting that the power is kept in their hands, and that the work is done in their preferred paradigms.
Or maybe I am projecting all of this onto you to return the favor lol
The post literally ends ends with:
"But most importantly, have fun!"
You think a bunch of people who are on record as setting out to have fun are "limiting themselves" by not inventing the future of networking.
In doing so, you've invented the future bad posting.
I was acutely aware of it, shooting projects on horrible looking mini DV and expensive film stock.
No question they spurred progress, I'd just envisioned that they would continue to carry the torch with all of their piss and vinegar.
Now Black Magic Design produces ~$2000 cameras that produce consistently better images than RED to this day.
My only point is that their hearts were in the right place, but they may have ultimately done their best work as instigators.
As well, despite my appreciation for their company, I never liked the images from their cameras.
Some time passed and ultimately it was Black Magic Design that accomplished what RED said they wanted to do.
If you say you want to make high end cinema technology, or even just high quality imagery, accessible to the average person, a $17,500 price tag for just the camera body shows that you might have strange ideas about what constitutes an average person.
Writing software is a use for computer hardware, and people with minds broader than yours do it for pure enjoyment and exploration. The attitude expressed in your post is self-limiting.
Fossil fuels are widely implicated in climate change, opponents want to see them phased out, but I doubt they would deny that their use has ushered progress for humanity.
Your reply suggests you might be feeling hurt that someone has picked on your favorite tech stack or that you're getting bullied at work by people who see you as closed minded. They might be on to something.
You seem to think that a firm consensus definition is needed for something to be considered progress, which exposes and advertises that your opinion in the domain is highly combative and dysfunctional.
No amount of interface versatility/flexibility can come close to touching the utility of not having to take your eyes off your subject. NONE.
It's brave to say that no one has come up with better ideas than Unix and C because it's bound to rile up users of (your favorite platform + language here).
I also think that someone saying that there aren't any better ideas than Unix and C might just have different values/interests in computing.
That a technology stack can be the basis of an entire industry and still be unappealing and lacking for people that are obliged to interact with it directly/regularly.
The question occurs to me because I feel like I just spent 30 years on forums like HN reading nothing but effusive praise for the cleverness and elegance of C and Unix.
Separating/abstracting person from their experiences is as you say, a representation of a different, non-existent person - a mutant. Or worse still, some kind of dissection.
Disliking peanuts and being allergic to them each motivate abstaining from eating peanuts, an imitation of that person that abstained from eating peanuts without insight into why would be a rather pale imitation indeed.
Such that I think this comment of calling it a band aid for being in a bad situation is overblown, and that the situation in general is more comparable to drinking coffee to remain alert.
I'd be curious to know if you also think that drinking coffee to overcome tiredness at work is also equal to giving up aspirations for betterment.
If your employees are stressed to the point of burnout and are turning over every few months, do you think new trainees will make more or less errors than experienced employees under the influence of cannabis?
Will their training costs be more or less than the errors made by the person using cannabis?
As the employee, if you are stressed out and hitting a wall, and suddenly imbibing cannabis motivates you to continue working more than 10 cups of coffee would, but without the jitters, that seems like a better outcome than simply feeling terrible and also not getting the job done.
However, if it decreases their performance but improves their feelings towards the work, might that still be a net positive?
In other words, if you are going to be a little more pokey and error prone, but on the whole more eager to work and more resistant to burn out, that could be better than a non-cannabis user that makes fewer errors, while continuously stressing out and thinking about changing jobs.
Even so, you think there would be no worthy efficiency gains for pure sorting or materials mining in using machines that can identify known objects effectively, and hands that will go where humans will not?
Seems like a perfect machine learning/robotics application, but probably not one that will receive funding if it's pitched with the objective of, "look now all of this problematic crap is in one place."