> Culture doesn’t reliably reward the serious. Neither does business.
> It rewards the resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects.
Enshitification is a very rewarding strategy, depending on which side of it you're on, and I think you'd struggle to argue that's, 'The resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects.'
The fact of that matter is that business and culture reward a vast range of different approaches in different contexts, and this holds over multiple levels of abstraction. From the sort of staff you want in particular jobs, all the way through to your position as a company relative to the market. Do you want your payroll admin to be playful? Really getting down, feeling that vibe - pay them whatever man - it's all in the vibe dude? Or do you want them to do their job to a standard? Do you want your impression as a company producing finance software to be that you're all about the resonant, the clear, the human, the work that connects? Or do you want it to be that you help the organisation meet its audit burden?
And just as business rewards different things in different contexts - so does programming. I'm not going to do low level systems programming in Ruby. I'm not going to go and do graphics programming in Rust. I'm not going to engage in banging out a CRUD app in C. You choose the best tool for the job given what's reasonably accessible to you at the time the problem occurs. Sometimes it's because a particular language gives you good access and support to a set of libraries - sometimes it's because the code you're working with was already written in that language. Sometimes the features of the language are well suited to particular tasks.
It's not a matter of the tool being serious or not. People are serious or not. Languages are just things and what makes the language serious when you pick it up is whether you're approaching your work seriously or not.
> "I also need to reproduce the command locally, with different paths, to see if the outcome is similar."
Uhm.
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I mean, sorry for the user whose drive got nuked, hopefully they've got a recent backup - at the same time, the AI's thoughts really sound like an intern.
> "I'm presently tackling a very pointed question: Did I ever get permission to wipe the D drive?"
> To prevent auto theft, all cars will be tracked and all parts must match serial numbers.
Well, I suppose that's one way to end third party repairs. Just refuse to turn on if the chip in the new part doesn't match up with a code in the ECU. Like printer ink, but for every major component.
'Error, cannot start engine: Authorised mirror not found. Please visit BMW for an authentic replacement. Driving with non-authentic mirrors may harm user safety.'
That may be true, but it's also a trap: You can say exactly the same thing to someone at a casino with their last £50 at five in the morning. Sometimes, the advice that people give you, if they care about you, is that the smart thing to do is to walk away from a rough game - and if you don't, the end can be very bad indeed. You are a variable over the search space, and the way that you interact with it alters the results that you will get as applied to your life:
Making this specific, I used to work in employment advice. As one of the things here is a job search, I'll touch on that one: There are people who have been applying for jobs for decades. I've met many people who haven't been able to get a job in north of twenty years. It's obvious that what they're doing will never work out for them. There may be one job in the world out there that will take them, but just doing a naive search will - in all probability - never locate for them that job. The world is too large and they don't have the time to search even a single percentage of it. What they need to do is to look at all the reasons they're not getting a job and prioritise addressing those:
- Do they have all the qualifications and certificates they need for their target industry?
- Do they have recent relevant experience?
- Do they have a good CV?
- Do they have a decent cover letter?
- Do they have a good interview?
Now, that's not an exhaustive list, but you get the idea.
The other way in which it's a bad piece of advice is that people aren't machines. When you've spent a great deal of time gambling and losing then the tendency is for people to seek bigger payoffs at higher comparative risks and/or lower comparative chances of success. The tendency is for people to be less likely to do the things, e.g. volunteering, that will improve their odds as their tally of losses increases.
People lose time in making the attempts, they lose energy (which is perhaps more important than time,) and they lose sight of other options - which game they're playing, why they're playing it, how they're playing it. It will, in all probability, not work out within their lifetimes - and the reason that it won't work out is that following this sort of strategy has made them the sort of person for whom it is unlikely to do so. Whilst their friends went and volunteered, and took concrete steps, they just kept trying that same strategy on the assumption that at least one was out there for them that met their requirements. And there just wasn't. Not in that timespan.
Now, I'm not saying just give up and never try. Reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. But if you've been trying to make something work out - as a rule of thumb - for six months say, and you're not seeing concrete steps towards success - you should re-examine your fundamental assumptions. Preferably, if it's something high-stakes, with the assistance of a competent third party that you trust. Because maybe you're the problem, and maybe there's something you can do about it. And you'd best find that out now rather than spending 20 years on some warmly meant advice that perhaps isn't going to work out for you.
I have been calling out specifically the difference between things you can try in parallel with little to know negative consequences - like applying for multiple jobs, going on multiple interviews, putting bids in for multiple houses - and winning one, and things that you have to do sequentially that cost time - like starting a business and failing multiple times that take 3-5 years each, cost real money and there are opportunity cost.
In the short run, I'd mostly agree with you. Something being parallelisable at a low cost lets you do more of it in a short space of time, and probably lends itself to what should be an earlier decision as to whether to reexamine your approach. You're going to have a lot more information earlier - all else being equal.
In the mid to long run, however, the costs mount up - however small they may start off as. You can make, say, 20 job applications a day - (not an uncommon thing to have people do if they were on mandated provision) - have a couple of hundred open in a few weeks and get nothing back. That takes something out of people. People will still spend time from finding and making those applications, energy, motivation, an awareness of the wider context in which their problem's structured....
There's a human component to the problem which generates opportunity costs for things that don't seem to have any. Like yes, technically, you can put 20 job applications in a day and then go and volunteer. But it's the rare person who's actually going to have the energy, motivation and awareness to do that when they're going hard on a broad search strategy.
From an investor perspective yeah if you put $200k into a 20 different business, 19 can fail but that one that gives you back 50x your investment is a massive payoff.
Of course this is of little solace to the 19 other "entrepeneurs" you funded, who wind up with zero for busting their butt for the gamble
Enshitification is a very rewarding strategy, depending on which side of it you're on, and I think you'd struggle to argue that's, 'The resonant. The clear. The human. The work that connects.'
The fact of that matter is that business and culture reward a vast range of different approaches in different contexts, and this holds over multiple levels of abstraction. From the sort of staff you want in particular jobs, all the way through to your position as a company relative to the market. Do you want your payroll admin to be playful? Really getting down, feeling that vibe - pay them whatever man - it's all in the vibe dude? Or do you want them to do their job to a standard? Do you want your impression as a company producing finance software to be that you're all about the resonant, the clear, the human, the work that connects? Or do you want it to be that you help the organisation meet its audit burden?
And just as business rewards different things in different contexts - so does programming. I'm not going to do low level systems programming in Ruby. I'm not going to go and do graphics programming in Rust. I'm not going to engage in banging out a CRUD app in C. You choose the best tool for the job given what's reasonably accessible to you at the time the problem occurs. Sometimes it's because a particular language gives you good access and support to a set of libraries - sometimes it's because the code you're working with was already written in that language. Sometimes the features of the language are well suited to particular tasks.
It's not a matter of the tool being serious or not. People are serious or not. Languages are just things and what makes the language serious when you pick it up is whether you're approaching your work seriously or not.