randcraw (u/randcraw)

randcraw commented on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed jamesdrandall.com/posts/t... · Posted by u/jamesrandall

small_model · 4 days ago

Same as assembly programmers felt when C came along I guess

randcraw · 4 days ago

I don't think so. A decent C programmer could pretty much imagine how each line of C was translated into assembly, and with certainty, how every byte of data moved through the machine. That's been lost with the rise of higher-level languages, interpreters, their pseudocode, and the explosion of libraries and especially, the rise of cut-and-paste coding. IMO, 90% of today's developers have never thought about how their code connects to the metal. Starting with CS101 in Java, they've always lived entirely within an abstract level of source code. Coding with AI just abstracts that world a couple steps higher, not unlike the way that templates in 4GL languages attempted but failed to achieve, but of course, the abstraction has climbed far beyond that level now. Software craftsmanship has indeed left the building; only the product matters now.

randcraw commented on I started programming when I was 7. I'm 50 now and the thing I loved has changed jamesdrandall.com/posts/t... · Posted by u/jamesrandall

alt227 · 5 days ago

They are thriving where I live. There is a huge artisinal market for hand crafted things. There are many markets, craft centers, art fairs, regular classes from professionals teaching amateurs etc. In most rural communities I have visited it is similar.

randcraw · 4 days ago

The problem for software artisans is that unlike other handmade craftwork, nobody else ever sees your code. There's no way to differentiate your work from that which is factory-made or LLM-generated.

randcraw commented on Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

randcraw · 5 days ago

If fluid intelligence is based on the ability to recognize new patterns (unsupervised learning) and crystallized intelligence on recognizing known patterns (supervised learning), then more than physiology, age alone may differentiate the two.

Youngsters know no patterns so they can't match new events to known ones. Oldsters know that most seemingly new stuff is not really new, it's just the same old stuff, so they reduce the cost of thinking and reject the noise by adding the new unlabeled event to an existing cluster rather than creating a new noisy one. That's wisdom. But that's also a behavior that will inevitably increase as we age and our clusters establish themselves and prove their worth.

So aren't those two forms of intelligence less about a difference in brain physiology and more about having learned to employ common sense?

randcraw commented on Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

giantg2 · 5 days ago

I peaked in high school

randcraw · 5 days ago

Intellectually, maybe. But emotionally, let's hope not. I was a major twerp in high school.

randcraw commented on Humans peak in midlife: A combined cognitive and personality trait perspective sciencedirect.com/science... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

skeeter2020 · 6 days ago

that's before you even look at medically-related and late age cognitive decline, but unfortunately there are massive socio-economic effects that work against this

randcraw · 5 days ago

More than socio-economic, the chief factor that advances US political candidates is, simply, fame. These days fame is achieved by somehow becoming an outlier: loud extremism, incessant self promotion, and spending truly insane amounts of money. Intelligence of any kind is irrelevant.

randcraw commented on English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings yaledailynews.com/article... · Posted by u/cmsefton

azinman2 · 14 days ago

Computers have not advanced education — the data shows the opposite. I think we should just go back to physical books (which can be used!), and pen and paper for notes and assignments.

randcraw · 13 days ago

At the very least, every school, subject, and teacher should be obliged to conduct experiments during the school year -- A/B/C trials in which various forms of note taking are explored: handwritten, computer-typed, and neither.

Then see how it affects the kids' learning speed and retention of the various subjects. Then they need to compare notes with the other teachers to learn what they did differently and what did or didn't work for them.

Ideally they'd also assess how this worked for different types of students, those with good vs bad reading skills, with good vs bad grades, esp those who are underperforming their potential.

randcraw commented on English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings yaledailynews.com/article... · Posted by u/cmsefton

Flavius · 13 days ago

That friction is trivial. You are comparing the effort of snapping a photo against the effort of actually reading and analyzing a text. If anyone chooses to read the paper, it's because they actually want to read it, not because using AI was too much hassle.

randcraw · 13 days ago

You can certainly make it harder to cheat. AIs will inevitably generate summaries that are very similarly written and formatted -- content, context, and sequence -- making it easy for a prof (and their AI) to detect the presence of AI use, especially if students are also quizzed to validate that they have knowledge of their own summary.

Alternately, the prof can require that students write out notes, in longhand, as they read, and require that a photocopy of those notes be submitted, along with a handwritten outline / rough draft, to validate the essays that follow.

I think it's inevitable that "show your work" soon will become the mantra of not just the math, hard science, and engineering courses.

randcraw commented on Over 36,500 killed in Iran's deadliest massacre, documents reveal iranintl.com/en/202601255... · Posted by u/mhb

randcraw · 19 days ago

Some mainstream coverage of this, at last.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/jan/27/i...

randcraw commented on Design Thinking Books (2024) designorate.com/design-th... · Posted by u/rrm1977

HillRat · 24 days ago

Design thinking, at least in its formal STS approach, is essentially applied sociology; it's about using various toolkits to build a sufficient understanding of a domain from the "inside out" (using desk and field research) so that you can design valuable experiences that build upon the expertise of those actually inside the domain. In this, it's a bridge between UX/product and users/stakeholders (technical stakeholders are admittedly too often an afterthought, but that's a process problem). If anyone comes in and attempts to blindly shove workshops at you without first conducting in-depth research, interviews, and field studies in your domain, then they are (without resorting to the One True Scotsman) not doing design thinking, they're doing cargo-cult brainstorming. (It's also a process orthogonal to agile development, since by definition it's a linear process that needs to be conducted prior to developing the actual product features and requirements.)

The books and papers the OP cites are solid (Rittel and Webber, Buchanan, etc., though TRIZ, I think, is rather oversold), but in my experience the problem with most design thinking practitioners is that they aren't qualified sociologists and ethnographers, so a lot of design thinking is basically a reinvention of the last century of sociological middle-range theory and ethnographic principles, without being strongly informed by either, likely due to the field's foundation in early software requirements studies.

randcraw · 23 days ago

That's a great answer that offers concrete insight into what design thinkers are trying to achieve. And it seems like they have a chance to succeed if they also employ iterative experimental methods to learn whether their mental model of user experience is incorrect or incomplete. Do they?