Which was written as a call to action. The Valley should remember how trade is kept free, especially all those electronics moving Eastward across the Pacific. Worth reading Mahan if you're confused.
> How much do you remember these books your family was gifted before you were five years old?
I remember nothing of the books that were read to me before I was five. However, I was five when I picked up a book that my mother had been reading to me and found, for the first time, that I could read it myself. I suspect that it worked out that way for me because she'd been reading to me for years before that.
I've got a friend whose firm has started using 'cognitive surrender' to describe the habit of delegating thinking to the LLM in the way that we used to skim code reviews and say 'LGTM' while missing something important.
> If coding is easy, how come programmers were in high demand, and have demanded large salaries for years (even before ZIRP)?
My take on that question is that programmers were in high demand because, for the last 60 or so years, it has been cheaper to write software for general purpose computers to automate things that were done by people and more rudimentary machines, e.g. accounting, manufacturing, music production, etc than it was to pay the people to continue doing those jobs. So, it continues a trend for programmers to be replaced by software, at least until something in the process breaks.
At its core, there is something difficult about programming. Fred Brooks talked about the need for perfection, Don Knuth about there being about 1 in 50 persons who had the mindset for computer science. But we haven't really been paid because it's difficult, we've been paid because we're cheaper than the alternative.
Exactly.
Personally, I gravitate toward book and topic-specific notes and highlights in the book itself and use the notebook for bigger-picture things for which book references play some role. I do a lot of highlighting in ebooks and lately I've started using LogSeq. I'll pull quotes from books into LogSeq and then tag them with whatever #bigger-picture topic I deem relevant, mimicking what I do on paper.
And if that book doesn't appeal, Dr.Weinberg (he'd prefer 'Jerry' though) has an entire sub-genre of really useful books on humans doing software development. Three other favorites: 'How to Become a Technical Leader', the four-volume 'Quality Software Management', and the click-bait-titled but terrific 'The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving & Getting Advice Successfully'.
He joined IBM in the 50's, led the design of the telemetry system for NASA's Mercury project in the 60's, aimed to put humans at the center of software development with 'The Psychology of Computer Programming', and spent the rest of his life working on helping people do software development well together. IMO, any time you spend digging in to his large catalog will be well repaid.
I can go for a month, probably longer, without, say, the internet. I could also go a month without food, maybe, but there are people who can't. Food is different because it is essential to life.
The food that is patented isn't essential to life, though. Essentially all of humanity has lived all of it's lifetimes without this modern varietal of nectarines just fine.
There are certainly tons of cases where modern developments might be actually essentially to life or extend life like with medication, medical devices, temperature control, moves to modern electric technologies versus combustion to reduce pollution, etc. How do we incentivize new medication development, something way more lifesaving than nectarine varietals, without some period of exclusivity? At least there, twenty years from now, the solutions will be more accessible versus never developed.
My point isn't about a particular breed of nectarines, it's that they are part of a class of goods - food - that isn't optional at any time for any human on earth, and laws have tended to support the view that survival is a fundamental human value. In cases where the choice is between survival and innovation, it isn't unreasonable for survival to take precedence.
This relates in no way to the availability of food, which in the US at least is high enough that starvation is the preserve of the terminally ill, anorexic/bulimic, addicted and indigent, rather than people who can't find calories to eat. This is almost entirely an economic issue that would be a lot easier to discuss without the incessant and repetitive emotional comments.
What this made me think of is life before computers, where people mildly handshake, create agreements on the fly. "Where communication is fuzzy and locked in on an individual basis."
TBH, to me, this imagined future looks a lot like it'd have all the problems we already have.
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