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I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for. If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the s

I guess this is a question of what you believe code and software engineering writ large is for. If you believe that good engineering practice matters (in the sense that your software is maintainable, efficient, etc.), then this is horrific because the human has no idea what’s going on and any attempt to fix something by hand would probably uncover enough complications to make you consider rewriting from scratch. But if your only qualifier is “does it do what I want it to do?” then this is perfectly fine. If you throw out the assumption that a human will ever maintain the code or need to understand it, then who cares if your main branch is full of unused code and it’s outrageously complex. In a way, I guess this is a similar moment to abstract painting in the early 20th century. If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person, then abstract paintings are an abomination. If you believe paintings should evoke a feeling and depicting people or landscapes are only one way to get there, you can throw out all the sketching and composing and painting technique.

watwut 23d ago
Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.
mplewis 23d ago
ok, but when steve made gas town, it didn't actually do anything but build more gas town.
SchemaLoad 23d ago
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like_any_other 22d ago
> If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinformation should be quashed wherever it appears. "Accuracy" was never the goal. Look at Hokusai [1], at John Bauer [2], at Jeffrey Catherine Jones [3]. Even at so "realistic" painters as Beksiński [4], or Caspar David Friedrich [5] - even if you were at the site of such a ruined abbey, and it was late evening, and you had the camera of your choice, the resulting photo would look nothing like that - painted in 1810. Look at The Swing by Fragonard [6], from 1768. Trees don't actually grow like that. Light doesn't work like that! You could visit every tree in the world with a camera, and you couldn't even approximate the feeling of that painting. These were not accidents, it was not that they tried to be photorealistic, and came up short. They were deliberate stylizations. And modern artists, and abstract artists, well educated in the history of art, know this well, but they deliberately spread the lie that accuracy was the goal, that photography made beautiful art redundant, to justify their abominations. Because the sketching and composing and painting techniques were only half about capturing life, while the other half, the more important half (or in the case of composing, the whole), was about evoking a feeling. Something at which they were infinitely better than their modern art successors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) [3] https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-an-appreciation/ https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-a... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)

watwut 23d ago

Meh, the actual complaint is that it does not really do what it should and keeps burning those $$$ as you ask it to fix this or that.

mplewis 23d ago

ok, but when steve made gas town, it didn't actually do anything but build more gas town.

SchemaLoad 23d ago

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like_any_other 22d ago

> If your assumption was that the point of a painting is to accurately capture a landscape or person I know this is way off-topic, but this oft-repeated disinformation should be quashed wherever it appears. "Accuracy" was never the goal. Look at Hokusai [1], at John Bauer [2], at Jeffrey Catherine Jones [3]. Even at so "realistic" painters as Beksiński [4], or Caspar David Friedrich [5] - even if you were at the site of such a ruined abbey, and it was late evening, and you had the camera of your choice, the resulting photo would look nothing like that - painted in 1810. Look at The Swing by Fragonard [6], from 1768. Trees don't actually grow like that. Light doesn't work like that! You could visit every tree in the world with a camera, and you couldn't even approximate the feeling of that painting. These were not accidents, it was not that they tried to be photorealistic, and came up short. They were deliberate stylizations. And modern artists, and abstract artists, well educated in the history of art, know this well, but they deliberately spread the lie that accuracy was the goal, that photography made beautiful art redundant, to justify their abominations. Because the sketching and composing and painting techniques were only half about capturing life, while the other half, the more important half (or in the case of composing, the whole), was about evoking a feeling. Something at which they were infinitely better than their modern art successors. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hokusai [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bauer_(illustrator) [3] https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-an-appreciation/ https://darklongbox.com/2024/08/17/jeffrey-catherine-jones-a... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zdzis%C5%82aw_Beksi%C5%84ski [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Abbey_in_the_Oakwood [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)