CodexArcanum

I would like to tell you that the skills you develop in any language or framework will help you with every other one. A joke I’ve been making my entire career is that every 5 years or so, someone reinvents the database or schemas or the spreadsheet or document rendering (or buses or trains) or some other fundamental tech. When you step back from the specifics and the proprietary bullshit tacked on to “add value”, most software is just a database.

If anything, working in many kinds of environments is very good for teaching one to see problems abstractly and find general solutions. From .NET (a jit compiled, memory-managed system), you might branch out into functional programming (F# is .NET and a good intro to ML-style functional languages) or into more dynamic environments (python, Ruby, typescript) or lower-level systems where you need to manage memory (c\c++\rust).

Anyway, I say “I would like to tell you” because as my initial comment laments, I kind of think this industry is dying. The push to replace development teams with one dev and some AI (or even one cheap non-technical “manager” and some AI) is breaking the ersatz system of mentorship that sustains actual knowledge transfers in this field.

I’m starting to feel like a dinosaur, not sure the kind of tech world I learned to survive in is going to exist much longer.

Most of my career is built on MS’s stack (I fell into .NET development and got good at it. Now I’m in the same boat as COBOL, Java, and Ruby-on-Rails devs: I’m basically a software doula.)

Every job I go into now I’m reccomending they get a migration plan for self-hosting and self-owning. The American tech system is collapsing. AI is causing massive ruptures in knowledge: it obscures searches, it deskills devs, it’s castrated the junior-senior-principle ladder such that we’re not training enough developers to even pass along all of the knowledge of how current systems work. SaaS is reaching the enshittification threshold and all those businesses that moved everything into the cloud are about to discover that they’re hostages and the sinking empire will drag down a lot of collateral damage with it.

Having now read the article, I will also add that this article is exactly emblematic of why Western elites simply do not get this stuff. They don’t even have language to describe it.

Describing these videos as “Trojan horses” is such a bad metaphor. Likewise all the fake-history and myth-making that being politically informative and entertaining are somehow left-wing phenomena invented by Jon Stewart.

People don’t engage with politics rationally, they do it emotionally. Most people engage with most things emotionally; thinking is hard and energy-intensive. Easily absorbed cartoons and entertainment are not “Trojan horses” because there is no secret message. This is the fundamental misunderstanding conservatives have about media: the messages aren’t secret, they are overt and obvious, you just aren’t trained to understand them.

Taking a media illiterate person and flinging complex jargon and symbols at them makes them feel stupid, so they reject it. Feeding them simple symbols (made for children) that speak in the language of simple emotions makes them feel like an insider who understands secrets. This feeling is so good that people start hunting for symbols in things with limited understanding of how to properly do so or experienced knowledge, so they start finding whatever their mind expects to find: demons, angels, enemies, government communist agents, whatever they’re afraid of.

Trump’s camp has become so insular they’ve forgotten that even media illiterate people understand things like not being able to afford food while the president posts a video of himself shifting on you.

Interviewer:

"In your opinion, if anyone around the world wants to take their revenge on the assassination of Soleimani and intends to do it proportionately in the way they suggest — that we take one of theirs now that they’ve got one of ours — who should we consider to take out in the context of America?

Iranian Cleric Shahab Moradi:

“Think about it. Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don’t have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn’t have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters — they’re all fictional.”

They’re brilliant: using Lego to create violent short form cartoons. In a very “master-slave dialectic” way, it’s quite apparent that Americans know nothing about the world while the rest of the world understands us all too well.