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Yoric / yoric.github.io

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https://yoric.github.io
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Coding for a Finite World #28

Open Yoric opened 10 months ago

Yoric commented 10 months ago

https://yoric.github.io/post/coding-for-a-finite-world/?

(This is meant to be the first entry of a series which will cover individual points more in depth. We’ll see how that goes.) We’re the tech industry. We have ideas. We have ideas all the time. And we’re used to turn our ideas into applications. So, how does it go… here’s the back-end component… here’s the front-end component. We’ll write the former in Python, or perhaps JavaScript, to optimize for prototyping. After all, we have so many ideas, we need the ability to iterate quickly. Sprinkle in a few dependencies, that will speed us up. Oh, and let’s use ChatGPT and Copilot, we’ll be even faster. Oh, and performance, yeah, performance: microservices, Kafka, Redis, Kubernetes… we’re now ready to scale up. Oh, Sentry, Prometheus and Grafana, too, where would we be without ’em? For the front-end, we’ll write a website, and for mobile, Electron. Oh, wait a second, we need to make money and to fidelize our users! Let me see… ads, tracking, and good reasons to revisit our app, perhaps a little NFT here, gamification… alright, we should be good. Three… two… one… and we have shipped v1! Also, the world is burning. Perhaps it’s time we revisited how we do things?

Tan-Aki commented 10 months ago

You rock buddy. We need more people like you, spreading ideas like that. Thank you.

ExploryKod commented 10 months ago

Very interesting, we need more posts like this one.

AssortedFantasy commented 9 months ago

Copied from the Reddit post:

I really like this post. You don't normally see a cross between /r/collapse and /r/programming content but here we go.

These ideas aren't popular in the world of software (and to some extent hardware) so this isn't going to be well received, but its about high time that tech start making like other disciplines of engineering and practice careful environmental and social responsibility even if it *trigger warning* comes at the expense of income (including the wages of you all).

Even if you don't have a line item on your budget for the user throwing out their old phone and laptop because your latest bloatware doesn't run great on it doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact. Maybe your company should think twice before you create yet another way for people to hate on each other and create social divides (looking at you dating app companies).

Special mentions to Uber and other gig economy apps and a standing ovation for Air BnB.

MichaelrMentele commented 7 months ago

This was interesting thanks for writing. There is def backlash against the VC model but I think it's a natural part of the cycle given how much cash has sloshed in the system and how much has been allocated to nonsense.

But I don't think evidence supports this view/framing of a finite world (technically earth is finite 100% but practically it is still infinite) for two reasons:

  1. Life for humanity has objectively never been better or more privileged. Less violence, less poverty, etc. the crisis we face now against the stage of history aren't too bad
  2. It's indisputable fact that there is effectively infinite resources and energy all around us -- the only missing piece is our tech to exploit them i.e. infinite solar, infinite metals (we have barely touched earth's reserves, metals are sparse on the surface).

The greatest limiting factor is probably our caveman biology and our medieval institutions really. We are wasteful, slow, badly coordinated, etc.

I think a better framing is that there are near term shortages and if we don't navigate them well you can have extreme outcomes that could tip us to a point of no return i.e. climate change. I can get behind that.