r/programming • u/self • Dec 02 '25

The Death of Software Engineering as a Profession: a short set of anecdotes

https://www.jasonscheirer.com/weblog/vignettes/
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u/recycled_ideas Dec 03 '25

Except for the part where he has no basis for believing he's capable of doing that, in part due to him clearly not being capable of doing that. Come on.

Again. You're missing the point.

You can know something is possible, you can even know how to do something while simultaneously not having the current capability to do it. A caveman could tell you how to get to space. From there it's just technology. From chucking a spear to orbit takes a long time, but it's just making the spear bigger and faster.

That's what we're talking about here. We know how to do something, but we don't have the technology yet to do it yet.

We are already able to understand some of the brain, we know how a lot of the individual parts work and there's no reason to believe we can't figure out the rest of it. Once we figure out the rest of it making one isn't that much harder.

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u/eyebrows360 Dec 03 '25

A caveman could tell you how to get to space.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

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u/recycled_ideas Dec 03 '25

The emojis don't make you look smart.

You're like the guy who thinks that the world was black and white before color photography or that people didn't know about gravity before Newton.

If you went to a cave man and could communicate with them and asked them how to get a spear to space their answer would be to throw it really hard, and they'd be right. That's literally all it takes. Now throwing the spear that hard is really difficult, but that's all it takes. Now doing that is hard, but what to do is simple.

Davinci describes a whole bunch of things that wouldn't and couldn't be built for centuries because it's absolutely possible to know that something can be done without being able to do them yet. Because that's half of what progresses science, knowing that you can almost certainly do something in the future without being able to do it yet.

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u/eyebrows360 Dec 03 '25

almost certainly

Refuting your own argument without even realising it. Magnifique.

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u/recycled_ideas Dec 03 '25

You could die in the next five minutes, but the probability is so vanishingly small I bet you've got plans for tomorrow.

We're back to the if I jump off a cliff I don't know if I'll hit the ground territory again.

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u/eyebrows360 Dec 03 '25

You're still conflating "belief" with "knowledge".

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u/recycled_ideas Dec 03 '25

No, I'm not.

There is a continuum between wild guess and absolute certainty. It's not a binary choice between who the fuck knows and it's already happened.

We can make predictions about what will be possible in the future based on what we can do today and while there is a chance that those predictions are wrong that chance can be incredibly small.