SarikayaKomzin

I highly recommend Erewhon by Samuel Butler. The author is the namesake for Butlerian Jihad. Interesting book in our times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erewhon

People find it easy to be Utilitarians when they’re in the greatest number, don’t they?

I have crippling imposter syndrome. Using AI really aggravates that.

I want to be intrinsically motivated too, and I am a good bit of the time. But let’s not pretend intrinsic motivation is an infinite well. We can suffer intellectually from a lack of places to socialize our pursuits.

> No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence. The better a man knew his own duties upon it, the less he understood the duties of his neighbor, and in all the world there was not one who understood the monster as a whole. Those master brains had perished.

- E.M. Forster, _The Machine Stops_

Abstraction is terrific and terrifying. It is the shoulders of giants we build upon, but when it begins to scale nonlinearly I fear it endangers us as much as enraptures us.

> Why learn to code at all? The computers can do that for us. And so the rigorous, systematic thinking you need to practice in order to be a good programmer: all gone. The machines can be rational for us. We can just vibe.

This is how we manifest Forster’s _The Machine Stops_. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

I’ve been considering using Odin and Raylib for this because of its similarities to Go, but using Go itself is appealing. Do you have any good resources for what you’ve learned, or is it an unexplored frontier?

Reminds me of NumberWang from Mitchell and Webb’s skits.

https://youtu.be/0obMRztklqU?si=CA5NWDE6FVSSM5Ih

I have the same feeling on the back of my neck. I think it’s born from my crippling imposter syndrome, which is maybe a super power now.

It’s an interesting exercise to contrast Dune’s post-Butlerian Jihad world with the Hyperion pre-fall world’s reliance on AI. They could almost be in the same timeline.

I quite like https://smashrun.com/, but, to be transparent, I pair it with Strava.

Those dates are almost always not arbitrary. They're usually due to licensing and distribution agreements. Not trying to dissuade your from torrenting, but it's disingenuous to call those dates arbitrary. They're the simple reality of being in the content business, even originals aren't always fully vertically integrated, but that's certain the direction the industry is moving.

Aristotle had this figured out thousands of year ago https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-ethics/

> At the same time, Aristotle makes it clear that in order to be happy one must possess others goods as well—such goods as friends, wealth, and power. And one's happiness is endangered if one is severely lacking in certain advantages—if, for example, one is extremely ugly, or has lost children or good friends through death (1099a31–b6). But why so? If one's ultimate end should simply be virtuous activity, then why should it make any difference to one's happiness whether one has or lacks these other types of good? Aristotle's reply is that one's virtuous activity will be to some extent diminished or defective, if one lacks an adequate supply of other goods (1153b17–19). Someone who is friendless, childless, powerless, weak, and ugly will simply not be able to find many opportunities for virtuous activity over a long period of time, and what little he can accomplish will not be of great merit. To some extent, then, living well requires good fortune; happenstance can rob even the most excellent human beings of happiness. Nonetheless, Aristotle insists, the highest good, virtuous activity, is not something that comes to us by chance. Although we must be fortunate enough to have parents and fellow citizens who help us become virtuous, we ourselves share much of the responsibility for acquiring and exercising the virtues.

Even the Buddha was a prince before he was enlightened! With all that said, while I agree with the basic premise of this article, a good mental framework IS an important part of becoming a fulfilled person regardless of economic status. Money doesn't correlate directly with happiness, but it does make it a lot easier to pursue happiness when you don't have to worry about it.

As has been said in this thread many times, there is a middle ground here: geniuses exist, of course, but are not necessarily solely responsible for great leaps forward in progress.

What’s also worth mentioning is that geniuses stand on the shoulders of abstraction, the most powerful (and scary!) force known to man. The more and more we abstract away problems, the more and more geniuses can scaffold on top of that abstraction. This compounding effect is more responsible for innovation than the admittedly gifted and great individuals who channel it.

“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.” — Isaac Newton

Solaris is a beautiful book. It’s a short read, too. I highly recommend it.

The Lindy Effect[1] is a good answer to this question. In a sort of pseudo-evolutionary way, timeless ideas have a way of persisting because they are well-adapted for consumption no matter what the cultural milieu. There is, of course, survivorship bias to take into consideration, but I think this is a useful heuristic.

Not that I believe you shouldn’t read new books (because you should sometimes) but that would be a more interesting question: “Why should you read new books?” Because given the half-life of information/facts/data, it’s a risky proposition from a opportunity cost standpoint. You’re basically hoping the book becomes a classic — and therefore it has staying usefulness and that answers the original question on why you should read classics — or you simply what to be plugged into the zeitgeist for networking or other reasons.

Unrelated, I am always fascinated by classics, especially ones from antiquity, because they really demonstrate how very little we’ve changed as a species. The problems facing Seneca or Cicero and the questions they asked themselves aren’t all that different from the ones we have today.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

Very relevant on a day where people are parroting the “respect the dead” false truism when people criticize Rush Limbaugh in death.

As many have pointed out, this is an obviously oversimplified maxim. But I’d like to add two reasons why I think it is a useful heuristic despite that.

1. Great content can’t be commodified, despite the industry’s best efforts.

2. Content lives in extremistan. [1]. Though the average piece of content has little upside, the upside of a great piece of content is nearly limitless.

At the very least, content is a “prince” alongside distribution (network effects).

[1] “Taleb provides another example of Extremistan: book publishing. Suppose one randomly chooses a thousand authors, and adds up the total number of books they have sold. Now, add the bestselling author in the world, J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books. Her book sales with vastly exceed the total of the other thousand authors.”

https://people.wou.edu/~shawd/mediocristan--extremistan.html

This is basically the Lindy effect in action.

I like the idea of a “yeoman” programmer/engineer movement. It’s like homesteading except for consumer appliances/software — sustenance coding. I was happy to see a step-by-step guide to building a doorbell camera on the front page yesterday.

It really just depends if the costs of the physical version’s packaging and distribution was ever even costed into the product in the first place. And even if it was, there’s the offsetting cloud and digital storefront costs. It’s a really interesting discussion. I don’t think it’s cut and dry.

To add more to the discussion, books and game are value-priced, aren’t they?

Legitimate question: is there a strong economic argument for this line of reasoning? How much of the price of a physical book is actually for the commodities and distribution, and how much is for the content itself, marketing, contracts, etc., which remain the same regardless of medium.

I ask because I also see this argument frequently made about digital video games, but it’s a little too reductive to be a clear cut deal. With video games, you really aren’t paying for the commodities and distribution (discs, packaging, etc. make up a insignificant portion of the pricing). You’re paying for the development team, the marketing, the content itself (value-based pricing), etc. I realize books have different economics than games — especially considering there is usually ONE writer, not a massive team — so I ask this in good faith. I am very interested in the topic.

Good start, but I’d like to add technical empathy and literacy to the list.

I’m a PM and too many of my peers don’t know a lick about how the products in their portfolio even work at a fundamental level. This lack of basic technical literacy leads to the inability to communicate and empathize with their development team. That makes requirements writing a Herculean effort of wading through abstractions, which obviously isn’t going to translate to quick delivery.

Perhaps worse is these types of PMs instinctually don’t include their developers in the ideation process, because they struggle to understand what they could even add to the discussion.

A PM must be curious, and that includes curiosity about the underlying tech. They must be in the business of demystifying and democratizing the building blocks of their products. This shouldn’t be at the expense of the business functions of the job, but it should be part of the multi-pronged nature of the job. PMs shouldn’t just be lobbing requirements over the wall with no idea what they’re asking for. And this doesn’t mean we always need to hire PMs with a technical background. One of the best things about the nebulous “product manager” profession is that it’s really just a catch all for people from all related disciplines who have a talent for working at the intersection of the user and the business. All I’m saying is at least watch a damn YouTube video about React Native, GraphQL, Drupal, or whatever the heck you use and I guarantee it will pay dividends in your requirements writing and your communication with your developers.

I worked in the news industry for about 5 years, and, once I left the 24/7 cycle, I sort of instinctively understood the half-life of information and began to stop paying attention to the news. I was later pleasantly surprised to see this concept formalized in a few places, notably from Morgan Housel[1], Nassim Taleb[2] and Samuel Arbesman[3]. These men’s writing really crystallized what I had learned from experience but didn’t have a framework to explain.

It is of course a privilege to ignore the news completely. I don’t advocate totally unplugging. But once you better understand the material value of information, you can make better decisions about what to consume.

[1]http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowled...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-life_of_knowledge

This is ones of those essays that pops up on Hacker News every so often, and I'm always happy to reread it. Regardless of how the technologies have changed or if the prognostications were correct, this article is about timeless and relevant themes.

Abstraction is the most powerful force within the human mind. It is perhaps solely responsible for the world we've built around us. But it is also absolutely terrifying how increasingly reliant we are on it.

"Contemporary culture is a two-tiered system, like the Morlocks and the Eloi in H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, except that it's been turned upside down. In The Time Machine the Eloi were an effete upper class, supported by lots of subterranean Morlocks who kept the technological wheels turning. But in our world it's the other way round. The Morlocks are in the minority, and they are running the show, because they understand how everything works."

We are more and more surrounded by technology that the majority of us don't understand even at a fundamental level (for the record, I include myself in the Elois). More often than not, these technologies are essentially taken for granted as magic. While no reasonable person should expect everyday people to understand the inner workings of their handheld supercomputers or their cable TV box, we would all be better off if we better understood the fundamental building blocks of the technologies we are surrounded by -- whether that's basic logic gates, the simple patterns of conditional statements in programming languages, what caching and cookies are on the web, or how a hard drive works at 30,000 feet.

"So GUIs use metaphors to make computing easier, but they are bad metaphors. Learning to use them is essentially a word game, a process of learning new definitions of words like "window" and "document" and "save" that are different from, and in many cases almost diametrically opposed to, the old."

Like Stephenson so vividly describes, the way our technology mixes metaphors is not instructive to what's actually happening on the metal. These lossy abstractions don't seem harmful at face value because they aren't, but, as they compound and more complex technologies are adopted in our homes and places of work, they threaten to make us less efficient at our jobs, more reliant on manufactures for repair and troubleshooting, more susceptible to disinformation and encroachments on our privacy, and, in my opinion most importantly, at risk for critical failures in our infrastructure (what if there aren't enough Morlocks?)((the IoT, machine learning and social media algorithms are what really frighten me)).

And we haven't even mentioned how we are now increasingly reliant on fragile systems that no single person can understand, and the dynamic nature of software means that many, many applications out there are essentially ships of Theseus that could sink at any time.

This isn't hyperbolic Doomerism. I don't think this is the Decline and Fall or anything. It's also not a condemnation of super-abstractions or casual technology use. I, like Stephenson, am a paying Disney World customer if you will. I just believe we need to invest more into the right kinds of high-level technocratic education for the general populace (and continue to combine it with liberal arts, of course), and our technologists need to invest in redundancies and stable technologies.

Luckily, we have built the Library of Alexandria 2.0 in the internet; we just need to use it.

Some fun, relevant links off the shelves of that library:

https://reasonablypolymorphic.com/book/preface.html

https://blog.nelhage.com/post/computers-can-be-understood/

https://www.nand2tetris.org/

https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology

https://cs.stanford.edu/people/nick/how-hard-drive-works/

https://singularityhub.com/2016/07/17/the-world-will-soon-de...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

https://medium.com/message/everything-is-broken-81e5f33a24e1

P.S. I love this related thought experiment --> https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/rebooting-civiliz...

I was standing in Magic Kingdom at Disney World in Orlando about a year ago and had a very similar thought:

If alien archeologists ever came to a post-human Earth, they might discover the ruins of Disney World and mistake it for our temples. A tribute to a pantheon of gods.

I guess it sort of _is that_ in a way, ha.

I see a very common misunderstanding of Stoic thought in this thread. It doesn’t advocate passivity. As a matter of fact, the Roman Stoic school was a school of many doers and had a very cosmopolitan outlook.

Stoicism simply advocates an indifference to things outside of your control. You should not be perturbed by your emotions; your perceptions and reactions are the roots of your suffering. In our reality, and Cicero’s before, old age and death are inevitable. That does not mean we cannot attempt to prevent it or research a “solution” to it. It simply means in the interim our opinion of it should not perturb your inner peace (easier said than done!). The one thing you almost always have control over (forgiving biochemistry :D) are your opinions about things.

If that research was fruitful, then it _would_ be something in our control and the Stoic evaluation of it would change. Cicero‘s comments here are contextual and, I might add, beautiful.

No, thank you for reading my rambling. I’m glad you got something out of it!

Great recommendations!

I would like to add Paul Tillich’s “The Courage to Be” to the list. Not only is it a good work on existentialism, it’s also a fascinating reminder that theology is not as one-dimensional as it is often portrayed.

In my opinion, nihilism is a problem, not an solution. That is to say, it isn’t something that can be “believed in”. Embracing it is ultimately paradoxical.