Oh huh TIL. I also looked it up, and it seems like a real doozy of a word. I had no idea. Looks some some dictionaries say that the two words are interchangeable, whereas others distinguish between them, and in the latter case, I used the wrong one. Language is fun!
theluddite
joined 1 year ago
Yeah I agree. That's why I said it was their ostensive goal. Their actual goal has only ever been profit.
At some point in the last decade, the ~~ostensive~~ ostensible goal of automation evolved from savings us from unwanted labor to keeping us from ever doing anything.
The goal of every company is to do shenanigans at the top while profiting off an underclass of laborers at the bottom. The more shenanigans they can do to squeeze the underclass harder, the better. Uber et al are genuine innovators in automating labor law violations to maximize that squeeze. Looks like they're expanding from chauffeurs to every other kind of household servant. Awesome. This will be very cool and fine.
Our entire news ecosystem is putrid trash. Even our most prestigious and respected outlets are pumping out a constant stream of genocide apologia right now. Manufacturing Consent is decades old and should've ended the New York Times, and that was before they cheerlead our war into Iraq.
Allowing advertising to decide which content is allowed and which isn't won't do anything but punish sites that deviate from mainstream orthodoxy and reward bland corporate friendly bullshit. Here's what that Internet looks like.
Honestly I almost never have to deal with any of those things, because there's always a more fundamental problem. Engineering as a discipline exists to solve problems, but most of these companies have no mechanism to sit down and articulated what problems they are trying to solve at a very fundamental level, and then really break them down and talk about them. The vast majority of architecture decisions in software get made by someone thinking something like "I want to use this new ops tool" or "well everyone uses react so that's what I'll use."
My running joke is that every client has figured out a new, computationally expensive way to generate a series of forms. Most of my job is just stripping everything out. I've replaced so many extremely complex, multi-service deploy pipelines with 18 lines of bash, or reduced AWS budgets by one sometimes two orders of magnitude. I've had clients go from spending 1500/month on AWS with serverless and lambda and whatever other alphabet soup of bullshit services that make no sense to 20 fucking dollars.
It's just mind-blowing how stupid our industry is. Everyone always thinks I'm sort of genius performance engineer for knowing bash and replacing their entire front-end react framework repo that builds to several GB with server side templating from 2011 that loads a 45kb page. Suddenly people on mobile can actually use the site! Incredible! Turns out your series of forms doesn't need several million lines of javascript.
I don't do this kind of work as much anymore, but up until about a year ago, it was my bread and butter..
I agree. I've actually written about this.
It gets solved by planning. Actual long term planning that includes the relevant stakeholders. Currently everything is run by and for VCs who only plan in terms of funding rounds and exits.
You're not wrong but I think you're making too strong a version of your argument. Many people, including wealthy people, are genuinely, deeply moved by art. I love the symphony, opera, and ballet. If I were rich I'd absolutely commission the shit out of some music and get a lot of real joy out of that.
Yeah, I totally see that. I want to clarify: It's not that I don't think it's useful at all. It's that our industry has fully internalized venture capital's value system and they're going to use this new tool to slam on the gas as hard as they can, because that's all we ever do. Every single software ecosystem is built around as fast as possible, everything else be damned.
Not if you're too busy between your two jobs manually training the LLM models and supervising the supposedly autonomous cars to make rent.