Am I supposed to talk to you like this? Should I do some psychoanalysis here? If you wanna say I’m pantomimed machinery, then I think we may need to have a discussion.
Because here’s what it looks like to me: I think there’s a lot of people who arguably had a pretty good handle on how their corner of computing worked. They can understand a pretty deep dive into the stack they use, and where they have to deposit something into the intellectual hinterlands, it can safely be abstracted away on dependable, engineered machines or standards. That is no mean feat; lots of people cannot say that. The fact that someone who does say it doesn’t fully understand paging or floating point arithmetic is not a sign that something is wrong, but rather that we have succeeded in big shared engineering problems. Cool.
Some new shit is afoot. We are entering into a new, turbulent, uncertain era of computing. A lot of people who previously had a pretty confident grasp of both the core in the frontier of their work now do not understand what is driving the frontier. They have made the fact that they do not understand this everyone else’s problem. Rather than admit that they do not understand an area they used to understand we are subjected to incessant infantile progression through what I hope are stages of grief. Because at least then it might come to an end.
Everyone has an explanation for why this is all gonna collapse tomorrow and why they don’t need to learn about it. Everyone has a smart remark about the use of AI for some very important moral reason which also means they don’t need to learn about it. They both add up to the same thing which might just be healthier if treated as a true admission of ignorance.
Am I supposed to talk to you like this? Should I do some psychoanalysis here? If you wanna say I’m pantomimed machinery, then I think we may need to have a discussion.
Because here’s what it looks like to me: I think there’s a lot of people who arguably had a pretty good handle on how their corner of computing worked. They can understand a pretty deep dive into the stack they use, and where they have to deposit something into the intellectual hinterlands, it can safely be abstracted away on dependable, engineered machines or standards. That is no mean feat; lots of people cannot say that. The fact that someone who does say it doesn’t fully understand paging or floating point arithmetic is not a sign that something is wrong, but rather that we have succeeded in big shared engineering problems. Cool.
Some new shit is afoot. We are entering into a new, turbulent, uncertain era of computing. A lot of people who previously had a pretty confident grasp of both the core in the frontier of their work now do not understand what is driving the frontier. They have made the fact that they do not understand this everyone else’s problem. Rather than admit that they do not understand an area they used to understand we are subjected to incessant infantile progression through what I hope are stages of grief. Because at least then it might come to an end.
Everyone has an explanation for why this is all gonna collapse tomorrow and why they don’t need to learn about it. Everyone has a smart remark about the use of AI for some very important moral reason which also means they don’t need to learn about it. They both add up to the same thing which might just be healthier if treated as a true admission of ignorance.