chris_armstrong

Yeah, the perspective sort of suggests the foreshore east of Milsons Point, but it isn’t landscaped like that, and Opera House would appear different relative to the Harbour Bridge (not to mention Ms Macquaries Chair)

I like the Sydney one (the jacarandas are a nice touch; a banksias or wattle option would add an interesting local touch).

For any city, a thunderstorm or light drizzle option would be very moody.

I think the problem can be traced back to the fact that we've failed to develop a popular design language since pre-WW2^1.

That in itself could be traced back to the professionalization of building manufacturing - the small-scale building and design that happened before this industrialisation of construction did away with all the little vernacular architectural decisions that would have been part of a building's design. Far more of the labour-force was involved in building construction, and less was done with pre-fabricated materials (probably just bricks and mortar), and certainly not as much was done on a mass-scale with the same homogenous approach^2, and with much less concern for the labour costs associated with those little details that add "character" to an older building^3.

I'm starting to find small examples of lower-scale construction projects in my home city (Sydney) that seem to return some interesting elements to newer building construction, like variation in materials such as perforated shading or different colours or textures of prefab cladding, using brick for feature walls in other pre-fabricated concrete buildigs, more external hanging gardens, etc). This is better, and I'm happy to see it, because while the older federation terraces in Sydney are nice to look at, they're hopelessly underdesigned for the climate (too hot in summer, too cold in winter, too dark in a country that is blessed with natural light, and often with damp and mould problems that shouldn't exist on a building post 1900).

^1 popular in the sense that its widespread amongst the general population, not the way modernism is popular with architects, both for its cost and the way its become part of the popular taste of architects as a profession

^2 the treasured old neighbourhoods in cities that are preserved and made "heritage" are the results of hundreds of individual decisions by dozens of individual builders and tradespeople, which although similar, contain enough difference to convey a sense of character. Compare that with a small team of planners working for a single construction company remaking a block or entire suburb.

^3 I could be wrong, but I would have thought labour costs were a much lower component of building construction then, or at least there was far more labour hours that go into a building's construction, allowing more time for the little details that give an older building its little characteristics like lacing, fancy brickwork or unusual reliefs.

A similar design trend of using terracotta everywhere in the 1990s permeated Australian housing design that was similarly ugly and monotonous. I'm only slowly undoing the damage to mine now.

breaking this by putting it in earshot of a lyrebird

This one resonates hard. So many companies are rushing headstrong into automating everything with AI, risking their ability to reproduce the critical skills their organisation needs that are experiential and social.

(And yes, it's telling that the author has clearly used AI to generate the argument, because not only does it weaken their argument, I think they miss the point slightly because of their reliance on it.)

They focus on safety-critical systems in aviation, which is narrow part of all industries, when the bigger issue is organisational resiliency and reproduction. The skills that allow an organisation to weather change and disruptive market conditions are not tied up in proprietary information, but are captured as unwritten social rules and context that isn't passed on when labour is outsourced, either off-shore or via computerisation.

The problem is particularly acute in software development, because software engineers not only make the system that encodes proprietary knowledge and organisation advantage, they maintain it, and without a continual replacement of labour that understands the system and the reasons for the system's behaviour, the ability to extend it or fix it is lost.

This problem predates AI, and even software, where organisations die because they outsourced too much of their critical internal function. It eventually manifests at an industry level, where the critical knowledge to do a certain thing is lost (see, for example, the ability to produce new IMAX projectors as a microcosm, but also the loss of machine tooling skills, etc.) - at the heart of why some countries subsidise inefficient industries because the firms within them have no incentive to preserve themselves but their skills are invaluable to preserving national autonomy.

I can appreciate the pain of trying to bind against GTK4 with a functional language. You definitely get a lot of difficult-to-verify and special-case boilerplate C code.

Reinforced continuously toward a fixed goal is not an incentive, it doesn’t lead to a creative process

A small bone to pick, but describing an AI that is operating autonomously as creative seems wrong - at best, this process is accretive, because the AI is adding and adding, but has no ability or incentive to shape its output toward something a human would find of value. Value is subjective (individual), changing over time. An AI doesn't know when it needs to be taking away - removal is a key part of the creative process.

I interpreted this as being a little tongue-in-cheek - reflecting the obscurity of CL and the way the expressiveness of a lisp can make you feel powerful that others will struggle to understand

I didn't interpret it as an argument about layers of abstraction. You need to be in the detail at the level you're writing (and it's certainly advantageous to know some of the detail of the abstractions below) because you're building abstractions on top of that, because the details subtly change at the base level you're building at, impacting the level that you're building to.

It might just be me, but I find his baroque style very readable. Despite using a vocabulary much broader than mine (irritating but admirable), he at least seems to have read his prose aloud, and considered how it's meter makes its meaning fluent.

I agree that many writers fill their works with needless diversions and unnecessary expositions on their life that add nothing to their text, but this is different from a "baroque style".