0xcolton

Erlich, is that you?

Having worked as a frontend dev for a while, my observation is this - because the UI is closer to the user, and closer to the product side (for consumer-facing apps), it has faster iteration cycles, doubling or tripling the rate of technology decisions that are made.

You'd never rewrite an API twice in a year, but maybe you'd rebuild your site or interface that often, if you're responding to users.

With increased demand for tools comes more supply - more libraries and frameworks with more stars and follows.

The reason we don't see this in the mobile world is because it's a much more closed ecosystem - there's no open spec for mobile like there is for browsers.

Like all things, it depends. Your application architecture complexity is going to go way up, but your devops / sysadmin complexity goes to zero.

I run a web hosting service, and while my application code is a bit more complicated now, I don't have to worry about monitoring ec2 instances, process managers, and that's worth it. That particular trade of is worth it.

If you manage an application with a high level of application logic, such that keeping servers alive is relatively simple, maybe the calculus works out differently.

I'm happy to see this article posted here. Many people in technology seem so sure that AI is on some kind of path to singularity, and don't give respect to the deep controversy of that belief. Merely examining how the brain 'works' is missing the point. The nature of consciousness (qualia) that this author is talking about is not the same as the neurobiological machinery that sustains it.

Think about the limit at which the problem of consciousness is falsifyable or measurable. Qualia is whatever is beyond that. Its subjective experience.

From the author:

Perhaps it’s not surprising that most Deniers deny that they’re Deniers. “Of course, we agree that consciousness or experience exists,” they say—but when they say this they mean something that specifically excludes qualia.

Keep positive man - as you know so much of product development is about feedback and iteration. I would really push your ex-interviewers or even the recruiting folks to share their exact thoughts on what didn't go well - even if you have to go through a few people to get the truth.

I have the same feeling. When I was a less experienced programmer, I found coffeescript to be a great tool for helping me to write 'better-looking' code while avoiding the 'bad parts' of javascript. Later, I decided to focus my expertise on javascript, learning its imperfections and beauties. Reading through parts of the sourcecode for Node.js and the popular Express.js library, I became more comfortable writing pure javascript. It now seems to me like a much more practical solution to just learn javascript and stop trying to write in a different language than the one used by the runtime

Seriously? What arbitrary metric of cultural value is this guy using other than nostalgia? He makes a truly fascinating comparison, but like many of you have said, his statistics are dubious. Technology's influence on evolution / selection in modern society pushes us towards efficiency, connectivity, knowledge, and truth. Its influence on art/music is profound, too, but we can't qualify art anyway