Contrast that to a fine piece of furniture which barring fire or flood can just sit abandoned in a warehouse for 300 years and then be even more valuable than it was initially.
I have had several existential crisis wondering *"what the fuck am I doing this for, we produce nothing."*
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This happened to me at FB, SF, Lucas, Brocade...
I was like "yeah, im doing well professionally, making money - but at the end of the day, it was just "we produce nothing of intrinsic value"
I find it ironic that NFTs are now the version of creating something of digital content, but it has non-fungible (intrinsic value) and they are attempting to make a money laundering network out of NFTs (if you may not be aware, the art market is the largest money laundering scheme ever devised up until where we are at present.
I am currently going through a mid-life, as I can't stand tech at all - but its all I know, so I am attempting to just get into gardening and maybe work at a nursery...
I think it depends on what you work on. For example, I once created a small program to split some file for my mother. She uses it every day at work and saves ~30 minutes of manual work. It's a source of pride for me. She can use that time to work on more substantial things, maybe come out of work earlier sometimes, and in general avoid some mind-numbing work. Many people use computers these days, and by being programmers we have a lot of power in our hands. You can reason that saving a bit of time will amount to nothing in the end, but it usually generates lots of positive feelings.
If it were up to you, alone or with a team you're in charge of, do you think you could come up with a piece of software which would be less ephemeral and more lasting, perhaps being able to work unadministered or requiring minimum administration for a while, and be usable AND useful for years without any major changes?
What would it look like, and what would its pieces be made of?
Take a look at the sort of old software people write emulators for.
There's an active scene that resurrects 70/80s video games - Space Invaders/Galaga/Defender et al have way way longer useful life than most of the software written in the subsequent ~40 years.
IBM maintain a VAX/VMS emulator, and there are various ports if it (including OpenVMS and an x86 version). This is mostly (I think?) used for "legacy apps" particularly finacuial/governemnt/adacemic/military software written in Cobol, Fortran, or Ada.
Looking at those sorts of software would be interesting in terms of knowing what sort of 40+ year old software people still care about...
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With that said - I love this question!
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The premise, as interpreted:
**"A self-teaching application which can adjust behavior and performance with minimal input"**
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Proposal A: [NMAP/PRISM/ETC for AI/ML systems] ((I'd be sure Palantir has this covered...))
This one will be long winded and off-the-cuff based on some work we did with tracking software in the past (people places, things, things-that-kill-people-places-and-things, etc)
I would like an AI awareness layer whereby an AI/ML system can locate adjacent 'other' systems and either silently learn - or actively map/learn etc...
We have had netmon tools for decades. I'd prefer a single firewall device;
I plug it in at home - and its my VPN/PROXY that ALL my familial devices run through. ALL.
So its just a simple VPN etc - all my mobile devices in the family of devices only route through my home device - which in-turn also keeps a small constellation of other nodes several hops out - such that BGP is sorta accomplished - cant get to primary node, go here instead.
I've designed SDNs on mass-fiber btwn HK, JP, Indonesia, Malaysia, etc...
Its doable (this is when Palo Alto Networks was just coming online with their product line...)
Doing this in a manner which utilized AI/ML/etc to more intelligently setup these systems...
Yes I could lead a team that does that....
Lets think this thing out into the zeitgeist and if its lame, then let it die - if it is not lame - then I will work with anyone who may want to explore it?
Idk about that. You could say the same about a farmer or a banker or a teacher etc. Even the guys who build the Empire State building - there were probably hundreds of them, each only building a small part - and someday that will get lost in time also.
“Intrinsic value” is whatever you define it to be. I guess if you’re working for some ad-sales-management company making software for other big companies, then you probably don’t think you’re making much intrinsic value. But my philosophy is, just try to make the world a slightly better place to live in when you leave. And even a small library or project may help others working on bigger projects, which influence bigger projects, which cause real change.
Absolutely not. None of these professionals are ever working on superfluous projects of unknown worth to the society. In fact, their worth to the society is immediate and totally tangible: you couldn’t eat without the farmer’s work, you wouldn’t have a house without the banker, and you would be dumb without the teacher.
However for most software projects, you would have a hard time to define their positive contribution to the society. Not saying useful and positive software doesn’t exists : there are plenty of those. But they are a visible minority in a sea of unknown, buggy, driven by bankable MVPs rather than useful and well crafted user centered software.
The guy who produces one tomato is worth more than the entire team who produces, say a mobile DLC/Gambling/betting game.
CMV
You can choose the type of company and the value it provides... plenty of companies that produce meaningful software products.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
In one of these Harry Melling plays a handicapped performer of poems in the "wild west", and the segment starts with him reciting this poem. Liam Neeson plays his manager. The segment is one of the most Darwinian, cold things I've ever seen. The whole movie is great, but this vignette especially.
EDIT: the beginning of the segment: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdQKUvv3bew
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Luxor_Temple_-_panor...
I think the biggest difference between software maintenance and maintenance of most physical objects is that physical maintenance is calming, tactile and pleasant.
Routine software maintenance, on the other hand, is hacky, frustrating and stressful.
I would much rather sharpen my knife on a whetstone than fix a dependency on a CI server or wrap my head around Apple's latest code signing bullshit.
A lot of folks don't think this way. I do, but I know many who don't so it's important to remember that, especially when trying to make systemic judgements on fields of industry.
That blog post is old, urbit does exist now.
Also: Is "C. Guy Yarvin" Curtis Yarvin?
One way to do this is to design a system where all events of the system can be replayed from start to finish in an immutable/repeatable way. Taking the advantages of state guarantees from functional language design and applying something similar to an entire OS.
You can design something that abstracts this general design away from specific implementations of pieces that interact with the underlying system today (*nix).
This podcast doesn't a decent job of introducing some of the concepts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/understanding-urbit/id...
It's a little hard to summarize in a really short comment because there's a lot of new/first principles thinking that doesn't analogize super cleanly to the existing software stack people are familiar with (which is why it's interesting).
Yeah that's Curtis Yarvin, I think his neo-reactionary politics are wrong [0], but the design and ideas behind urbit are good (and he's no longer directly involved in the project).
[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-f...
Yeah, Urbit was Yarvin's project until 2019 when he left the company.
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