nevdka

Why would you assume that was the fault of computers? There are many social, economic, and policy changes that would have much larger effects.

You need to be able to hold facts in your own working memory while you think about them. If you do this with the same facts, and think through different combinations, they’ll stick in your memory for longer.

I never sat down to memorise trivia about the Roman calendar, but I know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the 15th, the ides of March, because of repeated exposure while thinking things through.

It seems like old assessment techniques could luck in to testing comprehension, because the people who understood things would also remember them. This devolved into the recall being seen as the goal, instead of as proxy measure of something harder to test.

Americans use their social security numbers like id numbers in all sorts of systems. This problem has nothing to do with id numbers.

A big problem with online discourse about programming if that so many people are in bubbles that they think are normal and think that anything outside of their experience is niche and rare.

‘Enterprise’ software includes SaaS, internal LoB software, integration work, and a bunch of other things I can’t name. The LoB and integration work is usually boring from a technical point of view, so articles don’t get written as much, and they likely wouldn’t do as well on HN, compared to something highly technical about scaling something to serve millions of users. There’s probably many more hours of work, and more programmers, doing LoB and integration, but people in a SaaS bubble don’t see what happens elsewhere.

Redundancy is easy to misclassify as waste, particularly for someone who has incentives to find more ‘waste’ they can cut and claim credit for.

There are a lot of group chats I'm not in because I'm not on messenger.

I work with Australian tax - lots of regulatory complexity, add the documentation often assumes the reader is a CPA. I've got decent results by telling the chat bot to ask questions instead of making assumptions, and then grilling it to find edge cases.

I did a live demo in front of the CPAs, using their documentation, and Claude asked clarification questions they hadn't thought of and exposed gaps in the old manual processes.

Then there’s perl, which doesn’t free at all.

None of which were made by accountants. They were instead made by engineers who have experience and training in dealing with complex software systems.

Native apps are where power users and other non-developers can do programming. The type of things that an engineer who lives in the terminal might make a CLI or TUI for, an accountant or project manager might want to do with a GUI. This is where VB6 and VBA lived, probably also HyperCard. Web tech has too much complexity for that.

People will often write about something that worked for them, and from that pull out abstractions they believe are generalised and universal. They rarely are.

Organisational patterns that work for startups rapidly iterating to find product market fit won’t work well for a consultancy building a better defined product for a single client, or a corpo IT department trying to shoehorn a new distribution channel through a 30 year old logistics system.

A team of experienced engineers who know the problem domain and have worked together for years needs different organisational structures than a team of new hires and grads. A team of introverted hermits and a team of extroverts will function differently regardless of organisational structure.

You need to have some idea of where ideas work and don’t work before you can design the ones needed for your specific situation.

I think the observed feminisation isn't a causal factor, but instead shares a causal factor - that every space must now accept everyone. This causes a few problems.

0. One of the ideas that has tagged along with inclusion has been changing from an input focus ("e.g. No girls allowed in treehouse!") to an output focus (Fewer girls than boys are in the treehouse). In the input focused model, you want to change the rule to stop excluding girls. In the output focused model you also need to change the treehouse to be more attractive to girls. From this, any 'deviant' interests that happen to be gendered (or racial, cultural, etc) get suppressed in the name of creating inclusive outcomes.

1. Most humans have a natural urge to conform to those around us, some just experience it stronger or weaker than others. When 'deviants' are included in a non-deviant space, their deviant tendencies face a subtle yet strong conformity pressure that wouldn't be felt if they were excluded entirely.

2. 'Deviants' being accepted more widely means they don't need to create or find their own spaces. Hence there are fewer spaces where the deviation is locally normal, which would allow the conformist pressure to enhance and refine the deviation.

You mentioned restrictions around sending money, but not restrictions on receiving money. If you put obligations on the banks receiving payments to refund scam victims, those banks will have incentive to stop people using their services to conduct scams. Basically, unusual payments get stopped or delayed until the bank can confirm their own customer isn’t running a scam, identities haven’t been stolen to open accounts, etc.

It wasn't just storage. In the 90s, most servers were single core. Databases already had network interfaces so they could be shared by non-web applications running on desktops, and so were the natural place to split a website over multiple machines. This turned into the received wisdom of always putting your database on a separate machine, despite processing power and storage latency improving so much since the 486 and pentium days that network overhead dominated response times.

They perform elaborate cleansing rituals on any item brought into the crystal-writing room. When they enter, they wear special clothing, lest the impurities of the outside world taint the crystals.