It’s already currently true that many mid-tier shops employ an army of low-knowledge practitioners who will always “solve” whatever problem you give them in record time by abusing the tools you give them, reinventing wheels, punching semi-truck-sized holes in otherwise functional abstractions, barely testing anything. All is well until scaling problems or distributing desyncronization bugs or severe data-loss/replication happens in production.
Once you’ve seen this happen, and especially when you see it cause outages that costs thousands of dollars, you understand why it’s worth it to “pay more than you need”. When the rubber hits the road, having an army of automata who “get things done” is functionally not the same as having skilled developers who own their craft in the long term.
If I were starting a company today I’d probably be fine taking on some tech debt to get v1 out the door and then worry about investing in a dev team who can scale/rewrite it into the version that can scale to whatever level I need. But in no way would I want to ever again watch a junior dev who doesn’t understand how to read logs trying to implement a caching + crontask solution to reduce app load times from 30s to 15s on a backend query against a table that holds 10k records, because their code retries 500 times because they don’t understand timeouts, indices, or ORM induced n+1 issues.
In the long term, automaton armies will always curse you to the problems of local min/maxima problems unless they are backed up by someone with enough global vision to get them out of that hole.
Life is zero sum. Space I exist in is space someone else literally can’t exist in. Anyone telling you something else is lying to you and doesn’t have your best interests at heart.
Yes. Finally. I'm tired of people spewing this zero sum buzz word. Literally everything has a limit. It's all zero sum. Actually it's negative sum. Entropy only increases.
It's not just space that's taken up. There's a fixed amount of energy in the known universe. The usability of that energy continuously becomes less and less and less.
We have gone from living to caves to quantum computers and curing several types of cancer, and we are several orders of magnitude away from any kind of hypothetical energy usage limit imposed by the known universe. This could grow to hundreds of orders of magnitude easily as we learn more.
In the everyday life, there are negative-sum, zero-sum and positive-sum situations and events all over the place.
So, I don't get what your comment is supposed to mean and what it is exactly that you are tired of.
"Your statement implies that the situation/economy/whatever is a zero sum game. It's not."
^thats what I'm tired of. Baseless statements like that.
Fundamentally all things are negative sum. Anything beyond that are temporary local phenomenons.
Energy is has no "limit" in the sense you imply. It always exists. Once you "use" it, it still exists. In this sense energy is zero sum. The quantity never changes. Unless you count mass which is convertible to energy. Mass and energy are fixed zero sum things.
And since mass and energy are zero sum. Fundamentally, everything that extends from mass and energy is also zero sum.
The quantity outside of this that is negative sum is entropy. It always increases. But that's only because we set the baseline. It could be that maximal entropy is equilibrium and we are just an oscillation away from this baseline. In this case even entropy would be zero sum.
All forms of computations including coming up with cures for cancer or inventing quantum computing requires conversion of part of the universe from low entropy to high entropy. Once that conversion happens, the overall entropy of the universe goes up and it cannot be reversed. Even from a practical perspective we are using up fossil fuel resources and solar resources faster than then the sun can regenerate.
So if you technically knew what you were talking about. You'd know life and reality is overall practically and universally speaking is zero sum or worse.
