3. Young people who realize this dynamic and start their own companies because old people are less energetic toward picking up new tools / learning new tricks and run circles around them.
If we're talking conscious thought, millions of simultaneously firing neurons to form words. If we're unconscious intelligence, it's closer to latent space. A lot of intelligence that can't be articulated.
We need to reboot Bryan Cantrill's "Don't anthropomorphize the lawn mower" talk with a new edition titled "Don't anthropomorphize the internet document simulator"
There has never been a more fertile environment for motivated learners to do more with less, and yet we still have a bias as an industry to seek the more experienced hand versus the energetic one.
The one thing they had was enthusiasm, but even the most committed and energetic junior hire cannot touch the productivity of AI on most of the work junior software devs are handed.
People are focused on absolute llm accuracy, but time-to-90%-there for AI vs junior dev is seconds to hours/days.
- Linus Torvalds wrote Linux at 21
- Steve Wozniak built Apple I at 25
- Palmer Luckey created Oculus VR at 20
- Vitalik Buterin designed Ethereum at 19
- Mark Zuckerberg coded Facebook at 19
If we view the person we are looking to hire as a "junior dev", a "junior dev" is what you will get. But if you seek a young, competent software dev—one you might find.
Mind-blowing. In effect, among humans, what separates the civilized from the crude is the quest for universality among the civilized. To say it differently, thinking in terms of attaining universality is the mark of a civilized mind.
The phrase was made famous in an influential essay[0] by Richard P. Gabriel, where he laments Lisp's relative failure to compete with Unix.
In Gabriel's opinion, Unix proved to follow the more adaptive design strategy in certain ways (in spite of his involvement with and admiration for Lisp), and the phrase "Worse is better" is meant to capture the essence of that advantageous strategy (as outlined in the essay).
The essay is worth reading and is a bit more elaborate than just saying "less is more", or "keep it simple, stupid".
"Worse is better" comes from an ancient story where the Lisp folks were trying to design an elaborate system for resuming interrupted syscalls, and the UNIX folks just returned a "we fucked up" error to the caller instead. People take different lessons from this. Personally I feel like this is one of the earliest software forms of YAGNI: the (lack of) severity didn't merit the engineering effort to "fix" it. But, OP's interpretation is also valid.
> It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase with functionality: that there is a point where less functionality ("worse") is a preferable option ("better") in terms of practicality and usability.
