Sarah Brown on Nostr: Imagine being one of those academics who realised in the 80s, or even earlier, that ...

Imagine being one of those academics who realised in the 80s, or even earlier, that software development needed to be an engineering discipline.

And then you watch as the tail end of Gen X and the early Millennials teach themselves to code and some of them you can convince of your worldview.

But they end up working not as engineers or scientists, but as artisans in an industry that comes to depend on them working as artisans.

And then gets greedy.

And then decided it needed a million or more artisans.

And there just weren’t.

And because nobody turned it into an actual engineering discipline you then got an industry of senior artisans with a million idiots working under them

And now the idiots are being replaced with idiot machines that somehow, despite being computers, forgot how to even do arithmetic.

And then the ageing artisans are replaced by the idiot machines redigesting their own multiply ruminated “stack overflow from
2015 in a blender” over and over and over until it’s just whatever the silicon equivalent of drool is.

Imagine being one of the people who tried to prevent this and nobody listened to you.

It must be infuriating.