On Thursday, 26 April 2018 at 02:31:07 UTC, Nick Sabalausky
(Abscissa) wrote:
On 04/25/2018 05:49 AM, Chris wrote:
Well yea, all the hipster nerds say Google is God and Chrome is
what you should be using, so it must be so. ;)
At the very least, I just wish there was a good choice. Mozilla
used to be the Burger King of browsers ("Your way, right
away."), but they've spent the last decade hopping on silicon
valley's "Our developers matter more than our users" bandwagon,
too. (The "Soup Nazis" of software.)
Technology, science etc. are no exception to (natural) human
behavior: do as everybody else does, sure it's good. The problem
is that pragmatism ("I have to write in JS, if I want to write a
web app") turns into an ideology/relgion ("It's the best thing we
have, if it wasn't, we'd be using something else, wouldn't we?").
Rationalizing irrational bs and irrationalizing the rational is a
defense mechanism of humans. Groupthink and tribalism (hippsters)
are part of our DNA, sometimes it makes sense, sometimes it's an
obstacle.
I remember that Walter once wrote that whenever he saw some work
of engineering he would have the feeling that he could do it
better. That's why we have D and that's why we are here on this
forum. The "sure there must be a better way" kind of thinking
(with the benefit of hindsight) is what keeps technology
evolving, but there will always be groupthink, tribalism,
concentration (and abuse) of power that slows down progress...You
could write a book about it. It's been like this, since we
learned how to light a fire. Fire...wheel, think about how long
it took us to get there :)
