What do you mean they didn't have an advanced civilization? They had city densities above the best in Europe and their gold work put European goldsmiths to shame. They had the abacus, pain medications, aqueducts, armor, dams, beer, gold plating along with sintering soldering and lost wax casting, roads, the concept of zero in mathematics, advanced astronomy, plumbing, the suspension bridge, multiple unique writing systems, and tons of food preservation techniques. That is a far cry from some dudes tieing rocks to sticks.
Friend, this is just not true. Thousands of years of large sophisticated governments and civilizations in what is now Mexico and farther south. Its reductive to the point of being completely wrong to think of the Americas in this way.
Teotihuacan shows excellent astronomy, civil engineering, and a very large implied economy built so long ago the name of the people group is not recorded.
Did Europe rock the Americas, hard? Yes. Was it because they were more advanced? In wartime tech, and psyops, yes. The rest? I would be cautious.
I'm in camp 1 too. I've maintained projects developed with that mindset. It's fine! Your job is to make the thing work, not take on its quality as part of your personal identity.
If it's harder to work with, it's harder to work with, it's not the end of the world. At least it exists, which it probably wouldn't have if developed with "camp 2" tendencies.
I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.
Customer pays me to make it work, not make a pretty thing that doesn't work and is over budget - but pretty.
I optimise for "make it work", that's what the deal says.
If there's extra time, I might go to step two which is "make it pretty". Meaning that I go through the code and see that it's all good and proper if we need to add features later on.
100% not what Camp 1 is or does. Their #1 goal is make it work. It is your #1 priority. So quite the opposite, Camp 2 will spin and make 100 "useful" (not) abstraction with the slickest imaginable code doing things you go "OMFG, how on Earth did you come up with this, insane" while during that development Camp 1 shipped 37 new features for its customers
> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.
Unashamedly, I would, but this is a false dilemma. We can have ten beautiful and useful things.
The thing that drives the camp 2 folk crazy is that often it would have taken no extra effort (or perhaps even less effort overall) to make a good version of the thing but the people who made thing simply couldn't be bothered.
The attitude you're describing here has led directly to our world being full of profoundly disappointing objects that proliferate because they meet a minimum bar of usefulness.
People don't like the minimum bar. They'll take it if it's the only thing on offer, but they like better things.
>the people who made thing simply couldn't be bothered.
There is nothing I despise more than someone who doesn't care.
I remember reviewing code once, a C++ class that allocates new objects on the heap, but was lacking cleanup code to delete these objects.
"It doesn't matter if the memory leaks. Those methods rarely get called."
And he was right, during the lifetime of the application it would've likely leaked only kilobytes worth of memory. But it would've taken very little effort to write cleanup code.
I believe those that take no pride in their work will never amount for anything more than mediocrity.
I don't get how camp 1 can ship more than one version (do they jump teams/companies each time?). If your code is immovable mess then how do you add features/fix bugs in time?
I think I fall in camp 1.5 (I don't fall in camp 1 or camp 2) as in I can see value in prototyping (with AI) and sometimes make quick scripts when I need them, but long term I would like to grow with an idea and build something genuinely nice from those prototypes, even manually writing the code as I found personally, AI codebases are an hassle to manage and have many bugs especially within important things (@iamcalledrob message here sums it up brilliantly as well)
> I think camp 2 would rather see one beautiful thing than ten useful things.
Both beautiful and useful are subjective (imo). Steve job's adding calligraphy to computer fonts could've considered a thing of beauty which derived from his personal relation to calligraphy, but it also is an really useful thing.
It's my personal opinion that some of the most valuable innovations are both useful and beautiful (elegant).
Of course, there are rough hacks sometimes but those are beautiful in their own way as well. Once again, both beauty and usefulness is subjective.
(If you measure Usefulness with the profit earned within a purely capitalistic lens, what happens is that you might do layoffs and you might degrade customer service to get to that measure, which ultimately reduces the usefulness. profit is a very lousy measure of usefulness in my opinion. We all need profit though but doing solely everything for profit also feels a bit greedy to me.)
Neither is the original assertion. There are thousands of examples of exceptionally well crafted code bases that are used by many. I would posit the Linux kernel as an example, which is arguably the most used piece of software in the world.
> [...] one beautiful thing than ten useful things
They didn't say beautiful/crafted things were not necessary.
They were critiquing viewpoints that all code needs to be.
Even if we (for humorous purposes) took their 1 in 10 ratio as a deadly serious cap on crafting, 10% of projects being "exceptionally well crafted code" would be a wonderful world. I would take 1% high craft to 99% useful! (Not disjointly of course.)
> Of 129 active groups, the top five posted 3,027 of the 7,655 claims (40%). After them, the field fragments quickly.
Does it?
The 4th group accounted for 5.0%, 5th was 4.5%, 6th was 3.4% and 10th was 2.5%, I think it doesn't fragment particularly any more quickly after the top 5 than within the top 5.
Always a bit harder to tell with marketing pieces because both LLMs and marketing love certain patterns and heavily lean on saying things that seem meaningful but are actually non-sequiturs.
Your site makes me make an account before I can use it, whereas excalidraw.com doesn't, and also excalidraw.com seems to save my drawing just fine? I closed a tab and reopened it and my drawing was still there, presumably from localStorage.
The three-lines-menu also has a "Save to..." option that lets you create a sharable link or save to your local disk.
Probably just reading the room, with States like texas making abortions illegal and allowing random citizens from enforcing that.
Famously, abortions are a woman thing.
Anyway, looking through the facts, it's just some random woman. There's better evidence that these facial recognition systems are much worse at minorities rather than genders.
Although you can probably interpret the facts differently, we've seen how any search function gets enshittified: Once people get used to searching for things, they tend to select something that returns results vs something that fails to return results.
Rather than the user blaming themselves, they blame the searcher. As such, any search system overtime will bias towards returning search (eg, Outlook), rather than accuracy.
So if these systems easily miss certain classes of people, women, minorities, they'll more likely be surfaced as inaccurate matches rather than men who'll have a higher confidence of being screened out.
If you want to ruin someone's web experience based on what kind of thing they are, rather than the content of their character, consider that you might be the baddies.
If you're constantly being harassed by someone and despite your best efforts, nothing is being done to help you, quite the opposite in fact, tons of people cheer your assailant on in the name of profit and progress, it's only natural that you lash out.
It's not all that productive, it's an act of desperation. If you can't stop the enemy, at least you can make their action more costly.
One positive outcome I could see it AI companies becoming more critical of their training data.
You don't, that's why it's unethical to block them.
If you keep getting harrassed by people wearing black hoodies, would it be ethical to start taking countermeasures against all people who wear black hoodies?
If they are coming to my door to harass me, then yes, it makes sense to take countermeasures against all black-hoodie wearers when I see them at the door.
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