We're just going to have to agree to disagree on that one. The effects of observation is all about consciousness, and has nothing to do with measuring.
I don't follow the jump from well-connected neuron to consciousness at all. Why does consciousness have to be based in the physical brain? That doesn't even begin to explain collective consciousness, or the fact that observation/awareness affects observed objects.
I find that blogging helps me untangle messy reasoning, to the point where I often end up improving the code to make it easier to explain. The marketing angle is less interesting to me, I'm not selling anything. What's missing from the article is the bigger perspective; by sharing ideas and knowledge openly, everyone wins.
Is it? I have nothing to sell, but I can't see anything wrong with planting a seed or two here and there :) To me it comes down to motivation, why are you pushing so hard? Is it only for your own gain or do you have a bigger perspective. I'm sick and tired of half-baked ideas being pushed in the name of awesome profits; but anything with substance that's shared openly is all good.
The cannibalistic reenactment that the catholic church is pushing so hard has very little to do with Christianity; it's anti-Christian if anything; it's sole purpose is to paralyze the subconscious with shame, guilt and despair; conditioning by trauma is a very effective way to turn people into helpless victims.
That's just silly, Bill Gates wouldn't save another life unless his own life depended on it. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either on his payroll or an ignorant fool. Bill is all about profit and power, at the expense of anything; and it's all public information for any one who cares enough to do their own research.
I'm not worried about that; computers will only ever copy, they are incapable of creating anything new; much like management. What bothers me is the amount of energy being sucked into this black hole, trying to mimic human intelligence in computers. The sooner we get over this stupid hump and start treating AI as a tool, the better.
I'm sorry, but given that we're gold fish looking out of the bowl from the inside; trying to predict the future from vague memories of the immediate past; we have no clue what's causing what in this mess. Any one who claims otherwise is an ignorant prostitute, doesn't matter if they're aware or not. There are huge monetary incentives to pushing this agenda, and plenty of bullying to get people to walk in line. Have a look around today, and most scientists seem to agree that we're rather heading into the next ice age.
At least when code monkeys copy-paste from Stack Overflow, there's a trace of common sense in the loop. Yes, it's possible to copy-paste your way to working software without having a clue. No, it's not a very good idea. How about if we shut these clowns down and use the money for research that has a chance of improving anything?
The only thing that is consistent and overwhelming about that data is the amount of energy put into falsifying and massaging it to support the chosen narrative.
This has less to do with Jason Fried and more to do with failing culture. Everyone and their grandma is busy chasing awesome these days, so busy trying to become the next whoever or create the next whatever that nothing else matters.
The future of medicine is ancient, natural, tried and proven; the game of soft killing the population for profit and control is over. Technological evolution has no human coordinates; it doesn't care about anything except more technology for the sake of technology; it's not here to save us.
Crumbles from the design-table. Oh look, a new object type. I'm not even sure this is an improvement to straight JS any more, it just fails in more exotic ways from pretending to be something it isn't. Once the choice is made to compile to JS, there are plenty of real languages to choose from.
Funding for long term, speculative projects like this with no obvious funny money in them is no more. Neural nets are toys in comparison to where these guys where aiming. That's why much of the really interesting stuff is old and mostly forgotten.
What did it ever mean? We keep piling on these titles while lowering standards when it comes to actual skills and experience. To me it felt like the full stack developer title came with the money and the suits; a way to degrade the developer role into something more resembling a janitor/secretary/butler; to steal back some of the power. I know a few Unix commands, and I can set up a database; but my real passion is writing better software; unfortunately, that's barely part of the equation any more.
Currently most active is Lifoo (https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo), a Lisp/Forth-inspired language that's embedded in, and compiles to Common Lisp. Good luck trying to generate funny money from of that idea :) Still, I wouldn't change the experience for anything; it might be imperfect, but this one is mine; no more squeezing ideas into what someone else once thought was possible.
This is what you get for relying on proprietary software, begging on your knees for crumbles while your supplier is busy pivoting themselves out of relevancy. It's always the same game, and we never learn; as soon as the next new shiny arrives, people get in the same old lines and beg for another round of abuse.
Not worth the effort; modern compilers are very helpful with identifying these kinds of slip ups; and they weren't really that common to begin with, not common enough to warrant the attention and energy sucked into this never ending argument. It's a rule for the sake of having rules, like so many others.
Rather Senior Developer === Enough perspective and experience to solve tricky problems and guide others. Exactly what I wrote in other words. Sorry if that stepped on sore frameworking victim toes.
And forcing everyone else by ultimatum. Facebook needs to go, period. It's too convenient, and we're too much into convenience to figure our way out of the mess collectively.
There's nothing in there that's remotely relevant these days, all ego bullshit, marketing and conditioning. Any one who's not forced or numbed has already fled the sinking ship. Zucker needs to find a new hobby; who knows, maybe this one will be the one that actually makes a positive difference...
I would expect someone throwing that title around to have rewritten most parts of the stack themselves, in several languages; to figure things out or to custom build something that needs a tight fit. That kind of general purpose capability; to jump in wherever and solve whatever problems; means tens of years of focused thinking and coding for most people. To me it's very much about being a potential leader/mentor, official or not; and duct taping what's hot today into working solutions is not the kind of experience needed to guide and teach; not enough perspective.
I feel so old writing this, we lost something priceless along the way to awesome profits.
Never got anything out of compiler books though, even SICP bored me a bit by not cutting to the interesting part fast enough. And I can see why; because the interesting part isn't very complex; barely enough for a couple of articles, not much of an ego booster. The rest should be exploration, rather than following instructions from the past. For me; it came down to trying, over and over again.
I don't get the fascination with who came up with what first, really. I'm not prepared to take credit for any of my ideas, I have no clue where most of it originates; and I don't give a damn about other people's claim to fame either. What is important is the ideas, not the messengers.
It's funny how they managed to smear enough lip stick on top of that idea to make us beg for it. These days you're not even allowed to question the less power is more mantra in Go circles, even though it goes against all common sense. We need to back track to where we lost track of the goal. Which is what I'm doing these days instead of playing the system, https://github.com/codr4life/lifoo.
I went from startup, to consultant, to freelance, to startup, to big company, to startup, to freelance. There is nothing in there that's worth the effort for me any more; I would rather starve than waste one more second on filling someone else's pockets with money using the wrong tools while being treated as dirt. That silly game is so over.
" One of the reasons I stayed at JPL for twelve years was that I was appalled at what the software industry had become. The management world has tried to develop software engineering processes that allow people to be plugged into them like interchangeable components. The "interface specification" for these "components" usually involves a list of tools in which an engineer has received "training." (I really detest the use of the word "training" in relation to professional activities. Training is what you do to dogs. What you should be doing with people is educating them, not training them. There is a big, big difference.)
To my mind, the hallmark of the interchangeable component model of software engineers is Java. Without going into too many details, I'll just say that having programmed in Lisp the shortcomings of Java are glaringly obvious, and programming in Java means a life of continual and unremitting pain. So I vowed I would never be a Java programmer, which pretty much shut me out of 90% of all software engineering jobs in the late 90's."
Word, this needs to be seen for what it has turned into if we're ever going to get out. I've tried every kind of paid software dev setup, it's all abusive business bullshit these days.
Even though Factor is based on Forth, that's about where the similarities end. Factor was designed from the start as a stand-alone general purpose language, which is not what I'm looking for here; I'm fine with Lisp as a foundation.
Object systems crammed into Forth will always be baffling, the fact that it's doable doesn't make it a good idea.
I don't really buy into OOP at all; but i strongly prefer CLOS to alternatives, including Smalltalk; as it let's me reuse pieces of functionality without dealing with the rest.
Using a fundamentalist language as a foundation will always come back to bite you from my experience. I prefer my foundations as general purpose as possible, which usually means C or Common Lisp.