I thought it was very interesting about how Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup may have been applying wisdom from their old fields of expertise and how that affected their philosophy.
There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work.
But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.
So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.
Another angle I was thinking about, re the need for omniscience: Physical systems seem compelled to play by these object oriented rules, where encapsulation is the norm, and information must be transmitted, and locality dominates. But if we are to try to emulate that ethos in our computer programs, one thing the OOP paradigm seems to glaze over is that you aren’t allowed to _only_ write the ‘atoms’ of that universe - we also have to write the ‘laws of physics’ themselves (if you follow the analogy). And what is more global and all-touching than the laws of physics?
So if you look at it through that lens, the need for a little omniscience seems natural. The mistake was in thinking that the program was identified with the objects that the laws govern, when really you have to cover those AND the laws themselves.
The universe may work this way, but we're not God, and modes of computation that work like this still inevitably be impossible for us to predict or comprehend. This may be interesting if you're trying to run simulations (remember the point about SIMULA?) but it's not something you could use to accomplish specific ends, I expect.
I am always fascinated by the kind of tech that Bret Victor works on. While I can grasp a lot of the things and how to apply them from his previous work (like 'Stop Drawing Dead Fish' etc) this newest stuff is beyond my understanding.
I would love to know more about how this whole system works and why it is so much easier to work with. Code and computation is generally so reliant on the specifics and the details, so this approach seems to be touching on something that has a fundamentally different design, and it is just really fascinating.
I put The Hunchback of Notre-Dame in that category, a pleasure to read from front to back. The association with work made it take me decades to get to some of the books assigned for class in high school, like these. A few were so good that I tried to read Anna Karenina again. Maybe in a few decades more I'll like that one too.
I read Hunchback of Notre Dame around 20 years ago. The ending is until today the only book ever to make me cry. Don't remember much else, probably a good time to pick it up again.
I would highly recommend pairing that with _The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo_ by Tom Reiss --- it's a fascinating look at that period of history.
For fun, if you like fantasy, Steven Brust's _The Baron of Magister Valley_ is delightful, one of his "Paarfi Romances" it is TCoMC w/ the names changed and serial numbers filed off in a fantasy world (which is actually a science-fictional one as noted on Penny Arcade).
I have an fairly underpowered phone (Samsung Galaxy M01 Core). I got it mostly because it's the size that I like.
I also use most sites in browser as opposed to app.
It turns out a lot of these sites and services are a lot less addictive when they're slow and the animations are lagging out, and I don't get sucked in any more.
Also ends up increasing battery life due to lack of use.
I also have access to the main apps that I do need - whatsapp, gpay, maps etc.
This is an interesting idea. The way I see it, there is a lot of really high quality content that does rise to the top of YouTube. But also the feed has a lot of recency bias. So a great creator who puts out things once every many months, ends up having their stuff at the top of the pile for just a week or two.
So as time passes, high quality quickly gets buried by the mediocre barrage of content.
So an interesting feed would have some dimension of time-indepedence.
I love the qoi format. I mostly adopted it for the wasm context.
While porting to wasm, using something like stb_image became a little complicated, so I wrote a png-qoi converter, and then use the qoi assets in the game.
Writing a qoi decoder is a fun exercise, though i think most languages have their implementations already.
That's such an easy thing to do as a product. All the comments you see are all clamouring for some set of features that will just complicate everything. Yet a majority of the users have absolutely no issues continuing on with what they already have. You need to be able to figure out how many quiet happy customers you have if you want to make any big breaking changes...
The job of a programmer, in a business context especially, is to take real-world requirements, and convert them into clearly defined systems where they can be solved / reasoned with.
I once had a manager telling me what needed to be done. Even with an actual person (me) in the loop, the code produced would often have glaring differences from what he wanted.
By its very nature, code requires a lot of assumptions. In any business context, a lot of things are implicitly or explicitly assumed. If you need a computer, or another person to give you exactly what you desire, you need to be able to spot the assumptions that are required to be made, and then clearly state them. And after a point, that's just programming again.
So this, or some other AI, is more likely to replace JS and python, or create another level of abstraction away from systems programming. But programmers will still always be required to guide and instruct it.
I interviewed for Zerodha a few years ago. They really did have quite an easy going attitude. Their tech team is really well shielded from the rest of the organisation and the CEO and CTO both recognise the value of this.
It was one of two roles on my final shortlist, but I ended up going with the other option.
I still love the fact that there is an Indian tech team that is really mainstream with such a unique outlook on development methodology.
It’s bit of both. The newer companies (startups mostly) are quite like US/EU companies—if not better in some cases. Excellent pay, great benefits etc.
The older, more established “MNCs” (think Adobe, AMD, Intel, Goldman Sachs) are slightly more rigid but not too bad.
The worst offenders are the services companies—Accenture, Infosys, TCS, the likes. They’re the sweatshops: terrible working hours, terrible culture (or lack thereof), shit pay.
But yes, as another commenter says, there are exceptions to everything.
Calling TCS a sweatshop is pretty crazy. There are office politics you will run into if you are a high performer, or even working hard to rise through the ranks. Other than that it's a pretty chill place. Your mind will eventually rot with no relevant work experience though. So definitely not 996, but not a great place either.
Anyway the amount of generalisation in both the question and your quite incorrect answer is pretty funny.
It varies - usually product oriented companies have a good work life balance - comparable to that of US and EU. Service oriented companies are sweat shops through and through. There are exceptions on both sides.
I can only speak from personal experience (and second hand I guess).
There is close to no 996 really. Most Indian tech startups are trying to emulate the FAANG style of work, both good and bad. So that means officially there is an 8 hour a day expectation, but in practice, there is a lot of cultural pressure to work more, stay at office longer, work on Saturdays etc. But even with that, I don't think I would compare that to 996.
My first job was a fairly early stage startup, and all of us were really young and rearing to go. So there was a group of us that did a 995 for about a year, but it was just a small group, and a lot of it was boardgames after 7pm.
My second one was a later stage startup. They were far more "professional". Nobody worked extra hours because no one cared enough to. So that got a little boring after a while.
Larger companies tend to have more sane working hours. But cultural pressures vary by the company.
My view on Zerodha itself, through the onsite visit I had, was that the hours would be fairly sane, maybe a few saturdays here and there. But there was also a huge social aspect that they highlighted, which was after-hours activities in the office premises, which comes with a certain amount of pressure to attend.
There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work. But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.
So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.