grufus's comments

One should not confuse growth as in producing more and more stuff with growth as in progress.

Of course you can't produce more stuff ad infinitum. A balance to reach net-zero stuff is necessary to be sustainable.

But nothing prevents you from advancing technology ad infinitum. It can be sustainable to keep progressing. You just can't exhaust the resources around you, but you don't have to to keep progressing.

Rather, the result of sanctions, i.e., the almost total absence of cross-border trade.

Historically it was through trade that societies/nations became successful, were growing, were eventually dominating. The early dominance of Europe was thanks to its long coastal lines, allowing to quickly connect to neighbors and thereby exchange goods, thus trade. The industrialization was kicked off in Great Britain, the culmination of extensive trade combined with the abundance of cheap energy (coal + steam engine). Which then took off in all of Europe, again trough trade.

If you artificially limit trade of a country, either externally because everybody hates you, or internally because you are crazy, then you automatically limit your development and thereby growth. Communism or not.

Issue with system design is that our industry is so highly opinionated about things. You design something to the best of your abilities, it works (though may have its pros and cons) and then you go present it to a crowd of engineers (HN, say) ... and you get destroyed. There will always be people telling you that these were dumb choices and that that's obvious. And if you go and do what they say is the obviously better solution, then the exact same thing will happen with another crowd.

Our field is too immature to actually agree on things being good or bad.

Not? "After a few hours of playing with it I give the opinion that it can't be that hard" is kinda the essence of basically not having a clue but feeling competent to express such a judgement nevertheless.

> I urge people to shift their mindsets and approach cutting edge technology from a perspective of what it could be in the future, vs what it is today

Maybe they realized that too many jumped on the blockchain BS train.

> At this point the word "engineer" has lost its original meaning. Until there's a formal theory of how we can interact with LLMs and you make use of that in a systematic fashion, "prompt engineering" is really closer to "prompt artist."

Interesting angle. Are you saying there are rarely any "software engineers" out there, that they are all merely "software artists"? Cause none of these uses a formal theory for their craft. If they were then all those highly opinionated discussions of whether to use goto in C or what are the greatest flaws of node.js would just not exist.

I think you are mixing up the general concept "hiearchy" with the very concrete concept of a "pyramid scheme".

The defining characteristic of a pyramid scheme is that the income at each level is predominantly connected to the recruitment of new members into the scheme. Twice as many new members per unit time translates to twice as much income, roughly speaking.

In management hierarchies, that may play a certain role, but your manager in a company isn't payed proportionally to how many new employees they recruit each month (unless they are explicitly a recruiter). It is rather proportional to the amount of responsibility which often correllates to the number of reports and their reports.

In other words, oversimplified, in corporate hierarchies, the pay relates to the number of people below you, while in a pyramid scheme, it relates to the first derivative of that value.

The theory of 16 stages is pretty entertaining.

> According to Ingram, one must continue to meditate through these awful experiences until reaching a deeper state of awakening. He makes it clear that the consequences of stopping are severe.

Ron Hubbard himself couldn't have stated it any better. He'd be proud.