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Jonathan Blow - Preventing the Collapse of Civilization (English only)

bus · 268.4K views · 2019-05-18 · 1:04:41

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Overview

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

On Hacker News

A perennial HN reference for arguments that software is getting worse and that hard-won knowledge is disappearing.

Recommended by 11 HN people across 8 months · HN mentions 2019–2023

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What people said

colllectorof · 2021-05 · Strong recommendation

>Nostalgia for the simplicity of the past ends up having ugly cultural implications. It's easy to say "let's go back to the time when things were simple"; it's a lot harder to say "folks in (e.g.) Israel shouldn't be able to type in their native language". This is a ridiculous mischaracterization of what Jonathan Blow was talking about. Here is the full presentation. Very much worth watching in its entirety and thinking about: [VIDEO]

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spectramax · 2020-02 · Strong recommendation

I am not so sure. This is a handwavy advise I always hear from contemporary business wizbangs, but I don't think it is objectively or universally true. Pedantic, careful and attention to detail, perfectionist products that just work without things breaking all the time are a pleasure to use from the standpoint of the customer. Figure out the implementation details, funding, motivation, etc. as an entrepreneur - shipping broken products to paying customers is something that I only see in the software industry. You don't buy a vacuum cleaner and expect to send half of the missing screws to the customer 6 months later. Hell, just 20 years ago when you bought your SEGA game cassette, it shipped as a final product. Not to be patched ever. Once its out to the factory, if you found a bug, tough luck. Yes, this analogy has its limits, but silicon valley mentality of this startup hustle is questionable. I recommend watching this incredible talk (it's about software) : [VIDEO]

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PartiallyTyped · 2022-12 · Recommendation

> software actually becoming less efficient? I'd argue that software is becoming worse in some ways. It seems that the acceptable tolerance is _very_ low these days, with most people are just shrugging issues off. Personally, I find this talk by Jonathan Blow to be rather inspiring: [VIDEO] As for software becoming less efficient specifically, I'd say that it is, for example, relying on microservices for everything is probably not a good idea for most companies. Not everyone is AWS, nor do they need to be.

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