88400+ entries in 0.024s
mircea_popescu: first-cleanner. then-oil. then-light cig. then put out fire.
mircea_popescu: this has been a very informative discussion, i had nfi.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i don't think su ever delivered 1mn of any kind of calculating machine, since we're on it.
mircea_popescu: puts in perspective what maga has to actually accomplish.
mircea_popescu: if pressed i wouldn't even have imagined there were 1mn people who doi things left in the 80s us.
mircea_popescu: got a number to save me from fishing through the memorabilia tripod ?
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform yes, they want to do things that don't involve talking to girls or ~~~horror of horrors~~~ being at their call.
mircea_popescu: "we'll end up hiring two excel support people for every backofice gurl!!"
mircea_popescu: which is ~how "from scratch for srs db" projects even end up engaged in by banks and their ilk. the it dept is pushing relentlessly for away-from-excel for this reason every single board meeting.
mircea_popescu: also, i dunno how relevant but factual in any case : 90% of in-house it support requests from excel users is exactly, "i did thing and it did i dunno what or why halp!1"
mircea_popescu: and my party girls would not have been well served by the soviet dress fashions for professional females cca 1965.
mircea_popescu: and this goes right back ot the literacy vs hyeroglyphs thread, amusingly enough.
mircea_popescu: it's just not clear that the particular sense is actually relevant in any public sense.
mircea_popescu: (and no, it NEVER happened that two people in the same team using the same tools actually had compatible notions of what the tools did.)
mircea_popescu: before coming up with the "Write it down. By hand." i had an excel depacker, which cost me literal man-years to have made and tuned, and which was good but far from perfect.
mircea_popescu: in my own (limited) experience, every time i found myself consulting for this lot i had them write, by hand, in narrative form, what they thought their excels did.
mircea_popescu: the attempt to understand another's excel pile is not unliuke trying to grok the intended functioning of the preferred emacs setup of a rabid squirrel.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform this naive view is mostly borne of not much using excel.
mircea_popescu:
http://btcbase.org/log/2017-04-10#1641504 << From experience, there's a definite slot for learning filled by sql. i personally show girls how to use a db for their own shit, which may be simply grocery lists ("now tell me how many kgs of pepper we bought by day last year"). truthg be told the path to a structured mind is long and arduous.
☝︎ mircea_popescu: lobbes see, because they made the mistake of banning things instead of simply banning stupid.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: let the man play with his excel and feel happy, just like some writers prefer to sketch their novels in gf's faeces on bathroom floor. none of this makes gf shit an economically relevant inkwell system.
mircea_popescu: i am not proposing an alternative for that function. doctor isn't in the line of proposing replacement for cocaine, and from the "i wanna feel good" perspective the whole pharmacopoea is a waste of space.
mircea_popescu: you realise all it takes is for someone to salt the parking lot with hello kitty usbs.
mircea_popescu: lobbes what happens when they starty paying the btc ransoms ?
mircea_popescu: and this goes directly to all the "no mp, dope totally makes you a better thinker" threads.
mircea_popescu: cocaine is the eminent example. it FEELS like it does things to you. it does not therefore HELP.
☟︎ mircea_popescu: trinque the issue is that just because it felt convenient to the wee tyke it doesn't follow it is ~useful~.
mircea_popescu: !!deed for instance works fine by my eyes, but it does not pass the "monkey do, monkey see" test.
mircea_popescu: i have no position here, merely observing the history of the thing.
mircea_popescu: yeah well. anthropologically relevant though, created a whole identity mythos.
mircea_popescu: batching was the preferred mode of engineers. historically.
mircea_popescu: this seems about as unlikely as saying "in sane russia, sexually attractive women and women with pleasant personalities are the same woman"
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform i make most of my money out of being capable to use the tool that's adequate for the job whereas everyone else just goes with the fastest loop.
mircea_popescu: it's their hypercad. "When i was a wee tyke this seemed like srs bzns"
mircea_popescu: "excel i understand" "no you don't" "but i've been using it forever" "not even that."
mircea_popescu: from what i could discern, it's because of familiarity bias.
mircea_popescu: that's the problem of wastage in opaque faux capitalism.
mircea_popescu: and no, the excel mentiuon was not a throwaway joke. it is factual reality, even today.
mircea_popescu: so, with some regret, i will confess that no, high finance doth not qualify as that place where they have real software (tm).
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform picture this : if tomorrow north korea came up with superlight hft method and tried to apply it... suddenly front running would be simply illegal.
mircea_popescu: the people paying themselves megabux aren't going to be doing for the reason they told you they did it.
mircea_popescu: how exactly this is disbursed, whether you need rifle to hunt and then crown taxes rifles, ie, through a technically mediated barrier, or purely conventional, is not properly speaking a technical discussion.
mircea_popescu: essentially speaking, front running is a natural crown monopoly, like hunting.
mircea_popescu: it's a complicated discussion to carry in those terms.
mircea_popescu: asciilifeform same relationship as between script kiddie and trojan writers
mircea_popescu: about half the "pro" trading houses do about half of their trading on the basis of poorly understood and badly maintained excel spreadsheets.
mircea_popescu: but in truth and behind the scene it's 100% code reuse in the most "found on forum and pasted in" manner.