About a decade ago when Waymo was making all sorts of headlines, I was talking to someone who thought we had the same timeline in mind. That it wouldn't be long until every truck driver would be out of work, so let's armchair politician what that'll mean and what should be done. I laughed and said, yeah, probably around 2050. At the time he thought I was nuts and I didn't bother to explain why. Today we're still at least a decade or more away but at least we've surpassed a hundred bodies on the road to self driving.
I bring this up because I think it's too easy for people to convince themselves that isolating oneself in a cave can lead to super intelligence and that intelligence is all you need to control and shape the world around you. It's the same flawed assumptions that have some thinking you'll put your brain in a jar at some point or that you could upload your conciousness to a computer. I'm sure you were endlessly bullied as a kid for liking computers and being an antisocial recluse, but I'm sorry to inform you, it doesn't work like that. None of this works like that.
In reality, technologies, even ones that go on to reshape civilisations, act over decades. Humans have a tendency to highly overestimate short term impacts of technology and end up completely blindsided by the long term changes these technologies bring. When I got on the internet everyone was talking about how it would cut out the pointless middlemen of markets and bring people closer together in a global village. In reality, it has been a key part of doing almost the opposite. Over the last couple decades the internet has played no small part in ushering in a golden age of monopolies and grifters all while disillusioning people of centrism, leading us back to the age of unified visions, and with that, a renewed interest in political violence.
It's not to say that technologies do the opposite of what people worry they will. That's far too reductive. It's that even revolutionary technologies like electricity, fire, steel, or the wheel act over decades, not years. Why? Well for that it takes an article like the above. Reality is extremely complicated and detailed. To understand all the ways reality slows down the adoption of these technologies, it requires more work than I'm doing in a TIL post.
The guts of email are from a different era. Always love when people dig into it to share with everyone. Always learn your history. It's invaluable for helping you not say really dumb things in front of those who not only know the history, but those who were there. You may not get it all perfect, but much like learning to speak someone's native language, when you're at least trying it opens a whole lot of good will.
I will warn you, it ends with a, "That end's the part that's going up on Youtube." *cut to black*
Now I really want to know what was talked about after. It's a great talk, as all of Dylan's tend to be.
Might as well hunker down and learn how the mono-browser works. It's not as sad as it sounds. In many ways, the talk is all about the problem domain of browsers with footnotes into the Chromium codebase and not the other way around. Also of note, it's a little old, but only so much changes so fast and a lot of the foundation isn't going anywhere fast.
This goes far beyond designers. If you can't sell your work, you're in a dead end career. Full stop. Not just to customers, though that helps, no. The number of developers I know who are stuck in their career because they've never learned to sell their work within the organization is staggering. It's easily one of the two biggest things between senior developers and staff developers (the other being focus). The myth that great work sells itself needs to be seen for just that, a myth. Mike's here to help you with that.
Also, this talk is wonderful. It leans heavily on the old school preaching rhetoric. It's entirely captivating when done right. Once you've sat through this lecture to learn the material, sit through it again and take notes on the style. See what you can incorporate in your own speeches to take them to the next level.
We need so much more of this in software development. The practice of just telling people to use some library or other has hurt the field so much. You reinvent the wheel to learn how the wheel works, to improve the wheel, to design a wheel that works bettor for the problem you're actually working on, to apply lessons learned on different problems and cross pollinate innovations. Don't reinvent the wheel is probably the single least self-aware statement in history. The wheel is probably the single most reinvented piece of technology humans have ever used.
In any case, this is an excellent introduction to writing your own sound system. The downside is that every operating system has their own audio system, and the largest ones have nearly half a dozen different audio systems each. The one thing the libraries can do for you is try to cover over all the different audio systems. The problem is that not knowing how they work under the hood leaves your knowledge hollow. So study up. Write to them directly. Learn their idiosyncrasies. There's great insights on trade-offs is there.
By vehicle he means car, but the idea that there's limits to how much you can simulate in realtime for a game is absolutely true. Love that he shares a great base model for a vehicle though. A fantastic resource for anyone starting on a car in games. You'll have to play around with the feel until you get something better for your game, but a good starting point to understand the basics none the less.
