Preventing the Collapse of Civilization / Jonathan Blow (Thekla, Inc)

Comments · 695

• DA

  @DavidNwokoye · 4 months ago

  This whole presentation has aged like fine wine

  32

• EN

  @engineerhealthyself · 3 months ago

  “What if we just let software get really complicated and then make an AI that actually understands it, but having civilization not understand how to make software does not sound good”<br><br>This quote at the end is horrifying watching it unfold in realtime.

  11

• TH

  @theharsay · 1 year ago

  This presentation is even more relevant in the advent of vibe coders...

  287

• NI

  @Nightmaregamer360 · 5 years ago

  Meanwhile on r/gamedev, some guy wants to learn about how engines work and everyone told him that he is wasting time and should not even bother do it.

  1K

• HU

  @humanperson8418 · 4 years ago

  As a student, its scary how much of this applies to me.

  77

• KE

  @KenOtwell · 6 years ago

  As a retired software engineer - Software complexity grows during development until you hit a critical point where nearly everything works, then if you are allowed by management to keep going, it will get simpler and simpler as you refactor based on what you&apos;ve learned during development until everything actually does work. Unfortunately, management rarely allows you to keep going much past that complexity peak because it&apos;s close enough to ship.

  787

• DR

  @drno87 · 4 years ago

  I read an article a few months ago where Computer Science professors lamented that incoming students often didn&apos;t know how to navigate files and directories. Nowadays, people come into computers through smartphones and tablets. While convenient, they offer far less opportunity for tinkering with the hardware or exploring the system. Probably makes it more likely for some kind of capability loss to occur.

  236

• SY

  @SyeedAli · 1 month ago

  This did age like wine.

  4

• ZE

  @zetaconvex1987 · 4 years ago

  &quot;Supply chain issues&quot;. Wow, that one turned out to be more prescient than even he could have predicted. Great talk.

  215

• RO

  @robertwallace5498 · 2 years ago

  This talk resonated with me so deeply. My brother always asks me why macs cant play games or why so-and-so program cant be made, and as I try to explain it, it always does seem unnecessarily complicated. Additionally I think about all of the software that I have in my possession that I cant really use anymore (whether it is games or phones or storage disks, none of them are compatible with anything else so they dont work), and I think about how much knowledge we are constantly losing

  25

• AD

  @adamschlinker972 · 5 years ago

  Software has DEFINITELY been free riding on hardware. Because memory allocation and garbage collection and resource management are tedious and people don&apos;t want to do it, we just use languages that don&apos;t require you to think about that stuff. Our databases don&apos;t necessarily need to be well designed because we can compute millions of lines in a matter of moments. We&apos;ve been spoiled with crazy computing power.

  145

• BD

  @BdR76 · 4 years ago

  I watched this talk on my smart tv and the youtube app just randomly froze, which in a way seems fitting.

  22