Going from punched cards to interactive terminals surely must have been a big productivity boost. And going from text based CAD to what is possible on modern workstations has probably also helped a bit in that field.
In that view I'd say the productivity boost by LLMs is somewhat disappointing, especially with respect to how amazing they are.
Too bad most of society is accidental as well. With which I mean to say that there are a lot of nonsensical projects being done out there, that still make a living for many people. Modern AI may well change things, similar to how computers changed things previously.
I get your sentiment, I've been through a few hype cycles as well, but besides learning that history repeats itself, there is no saying how it will repeat itself.
> With which I mean to say that there is a lot of nonsensical projects being done out there, that still make a living for many people.
I don't know why this is a bad thing. I don't think projects that you believe are nonsensical shouldn't exist just because of your opinion, especially if they're helping people survive in this world. I'm sure the people working on them don't think they're nonsensical.
The arts have a place in society. Tackling real problems like hunger or health do too, arguably more so - they create the space for society to tolerate, if not enjoy art.
But the down side is we have a huge smear of jobs that either don't really matter or only matter for the smallest of moments that exist in this middle ground. I like to think of a travel agent of yesteryear as the perfect example: someone who makes a professional experience of organising your leisure so you don't have to; using questionable industry deals. This individual does not have your consumer interests at heart, because being nice to you is not where the profit is generally.
The only role they actually play is rent seeking.
Efficiency threatens the rent seeking models of right now, but at the same time leads to a Cambrian explosion of new ones.
Yeah when you take 2 steps back, ignore IT for a second and look on whole mankind, there are hundreds of millions of jobs that could be called nonsensical from certain points of view. We are not above this in any meaningful ways, maybe its just a bit more obvious to keen eye.
Yet society and economy keeps going and nobody apart from some academic discussions really cares. I mean companies have 100% incentive to trim fat to raise income yet they only do the least minimum.
Apparently, it was created by Rick Lenssen [1], who works at the Development & Engineering department of ASML. It seems more likely that he used existing bricks, instead of molding new ones.
To be fair, the referenced comment (in Dutch) blames management:
> Helaas is het probleem bij Northvolt echt gewoon te herleiden naar slecht management (ex-Tesla), en bijgevolg een slechte keuze van leverancier van productiemachines (Wuxi Lead).
How is this different from previous periods in which technology companies harmed people and society as well? (Think coal mines, cars, television, what have you).
I fail to see what is so special about our current day and age, apart from us living in it.
To be fair, I don't think the idea here is to follow this advice without doing some proper research. The radar helps me to find interesting developments, and to sift through the enormous amount of garbage that is out there.
I appreciate that, and a good summary now and then doesn't hurt. But, for whatever reason, some recommendations come to be regarded as leading (and by SEO measures, this one is leading quite a bit).
My gripe is that it cements a certain way of thinking about how to best organise our stacks, to the degree that other companies are following suit by copying the 'radar' template without questioning its organising logic (why are languages/frameworks one category, for instance).
That's not to say we cannot categorise tools and techniques or inventorise new ones, but that we should not take the opinion of one entity to reflect industry as a whole.
This flocking behaviour is indeed an annoying trait of most humans.
As a nice counter example in this context, Zalando has tuned the quadrant categories to their specific way of working. Their categories are: Datastores, Data Management, Infrastructure, and Languages.
I love this initiative. We thought it would be a great idea to have a radar specifically for our own internal projects. Turns out that many companies are doing this already!
ThoughtWorks even provides open-source tooling to help you set this up.
For our second iteration we rewrote the entire radar frontend to better suit our needs. Using ChatGPT, Cursor, and Copilot, this was a breeze.
People sometimes combine two fields of study to create something novel and intriguing. However, such combinations often fall short, failing to satisfy the standards of either field.
Unfortunately, the typical art audience rarely appreciates the elegance of mathematical theorems, especially when they deal with something as complex as, say, the Riemann hypothesis. Similarly, scientists often struggle to understand the appeal of performance art, where an artist might, for instance, stare at an apple for an hour.
It is one thing that there is not enough audience for a niche thing, but the lack of criticism is even worse in my opinion.
I'm probably being a bit too harsh here, and I'm probably just jealous, but it's something that keeps frustrating me. "Circuit-bending" [1] was a particular annoying crossover of art and electronics that still makes me shudder. Using the golden ratio for no good reason is also up there.
As one of my contributions to “failing to satisfy the standards of either field” (math, astrophysics, or fine art), I wonder whether you would love or hate https://www.ouruboroi.com
I like generative art! And that seems interesting! But it seems totally broken on my computer - it flashes with random frames at 6k jump days for a few seconds then stops. The stop button does nothing, there's no way to restart it, the cursor can't be modified, etc.
I assume it'd be a smoother animation at a smaller number of jump days, I'd like to see that.
Edit: I finally got it working by changing the parameters, going to the order page, then clicking on the qr link. I did it with 1 jump day. But it still flashes like crazy (colors inverting ever frame) and there's massive moire patterns, among the low resolution and other graphical glitches. I think the idea is cool so I'd like to see something more fleshed out. Is this something you could do on e.g. shadertoy?
A formal program with funding, faculty and grad students would greatly help to make something which is not superficial. (Although I don't know of how much making art is a university subject, art criticism seems to be more in vogue).
Currently, undergrads take double majors (Witten was a history grad!). But, this doesn't tend to happen at the graduate level. The obstacles can be getting funding(siloed into departments), and courses being demanding enough already for one subject.
Faculty sometimes do hold a side appointment in other departments. But, the main incentive emerging from the academic job system is to get specialized expertise and publish in high reputation journals.
Circuit bending is pretty neat from electronics designer perspective: given the current electronics design state-of-the-art (MCU all the things), how do you design the circuit which responses to the random poking in a most interesting way, without being damaged?
It really forces one to bring back that obscure subset of analog-era skills... "This oscillator is almost never used because of bad Vcc-related frequency drift and distorts output in presence of even slight parasitics? Great, let's put it into the design!"
(Note that making entire circuit out of DFN parts with 3 mil traces, and then leaving large prominent test points is considered cheating :) )
