If you want learn how things scale across a team and last years, read or contribute to open source code.
It takes years for a single person to get a project to the point where it's a good learning ground for scaling and maintenance.
Gluing a few libraries together is real software engineering but unless you're really invested in the outcome it's not that engaging and it's not that educational.
> Gluing a few libraries together is real software engineering but unless you're really invested in the outcome it's not that engaging and it's not that educational.
That's only true if complex systems don't interest you.
Personally, I have always found the experience of "putting the pieces together" and orchestrating highly diverse systems into a coherent whole to be much more educational than learning about algorithmic details. I also generally find making things work well more interesting than making things work.
So if I'm understanding your argument correctly, if you enjoy it, it's what everybody else should do. The other points are just post-hoc justification.
For much of the developed world, the ratio of retirees to working age people is going to get a larger, causing economic difficulties across age groups.
Healthcare for the elderly will put huge strain on government budgets.
With the young struggling to afford housing with fulltime work, I find the authors disappointments about not getting those lavish vacations obnoxious.
Bunnie's "Hacking the Xbox" is still one of my favorite books ever. First read it as a teenager, it was my intro to bootloaders, encryption, copyright law, and so much more.
Nonsense. A Google controlled browser runs plugins Google allows with privacy settings Google creates. More data and no ad blockers is worth many billions of dollars to YouTube in the long run.
They directly benefit from people thinking Firefox is slow.
A healthy marriage of two people treating each other as equals takes a lot of communication, and that almost certainly can't be scaled 10x, nor do the same principles apply when someone is only getting 10%.
In traditional polygamy, the man with 10 wives would be the head of household for 10 wives with competing interests, so it does start to sound very managerial.
"You could have learned that stuff in the last 6 months"
"You might have to hand in your power user card over that one"
And these attitudes are why most consumers almost exclusively use proprietary software. You have to let people be lazy to get mass adoption. Businesses know and exploit this, the foss world writes tools with steep learning curves and says "take it or leave it." And that's perfectly fine as long as we can be honest with ourselves: the vast majority of people will never invest the time to learn to use cmd line applications, or debug wifi drivers, or learn to use an environment that's more complicated than what they already have. Time is money so even a highly motivated person should question spending months to learn new tools.
I love Linux for being superior for servers and hackable and having so much powerful software available for free...but if I weren't a software developer and I didn't enjoy this stuff there'd be no justification for the time I spent learning it.
If you aren't familiar with Ray Dalio's Principles for a Changing World Order, I can't recommend it enough (both the book and the YouTube video). You'll understand a lot better where the U.S. is in it's history and why so much is the way it is.
I'm a bit perplexed that you see trashing a man's character with certainty as right and pondering if his actions could reflect a struggle with mental illness as wrong.
I don't like Musk, nor do I trust the things he says, but I usually err on the side of granting people some humanity.
It takes years for a single person to get a project to the point where it's a good learning ground for scaling and maintenance.
Gluing a few libraries together is real software engineering but unless you're really invested in the outcome it's not that engaging and it's not that educational.