I'm all ears:
1. Feel free to share why unmasking Banksy was in the public interest
2. Whether you feel all other public interest priorities had been served by investigative reporting prior to commissioning his unmasking.
I have no idea, nor care, whether or not unmasking Banksy, specifically, was in the public interest. My only point is that it's not limited to topics that you consider important.
As for your #2, that seems reminiscent of "why are we going to space when there are so many problems here on Earth."
I knew someone who got a master's in nursing and did this. She ended up really liking the population that she worked with and stayed there past the required number of years.
And there will always be people who think that driving around in a heated/air-conditioned truck with a big claw that picks up and empties the cans is a fun job and will happily do it at any reasonable pay level.
Not everyone wants to work in an office; some people really like working outside and being indoors is like prison.
Those jobs require some physical handling of the garbage. That big claw doesn't always work as expected, and when things go wrong, they have to get out and clean up the mess. There's also items that don't fit in the can and have to be manually handled.
But you're right, the job isn't as bad as it used to be.
Well, my point wasn't really that the job has gotten easier, it's that some people simply prefer doing that kind of work.
I remember being in a meeting once when a manager looked out at the guys on a scaffold cleaning the windows and remarked "at least we don't have to be out there like them." My first thought was that they were probably thinking "at least we don't have to be inside like them."
While I can understand the sentiment, I think most of this is fantasy. A lot of people vastly underestimate the toll manual labor takes on one's body. It may be nice to ponder "Wow, it must be so great to work out in the sunshine all day!", compare anyone doing physical labor (and I count extended driving in that) age 50+ with any office worker 50+. Sure, anyone 50+ has standard aches and pains, but I've seen many physical laborers dealing with constant pain and a lot of degenerative diseases at that age.
And perhaps they'll get that convenience from an application that they don't even know came into existence because they asked their agent to do something.
I completely agree. Just going through the beginner & hobbyist forums, the change from "can you help me with code to do X" to "I used ChatGPT/Claude/Copilot to write code to do X" happened with absolutely startling speed, and it's not slowing down. There was clearly a pent-up demand here that wasn't being met otherwise.
People are using AI to get code written. They have no idea what code quality is and only care that what they built works.
AFAICT, every time technology has allowed non-technical people to do more, it's opened up new opportunities for programmers. I don't expect this to be any different, I just want to know where the opportunities are.
It usually is. I try to think of these things not as "waste" but as "cost." As in, what does it cost vs. the alternative? You're using 40Gb of some kind of storage. Let's say it's reasonably possible to reduce that to 20Gb. What's the cost of doing so compared to the status quo? That memory reduction effort, both the initial effort, and the ongoing maintenance, isn't free. Unless it costs a lot less to do that than to continue using more memory, we should probably continue to use the memory.
Yeah, there may be other benefits, but as a first order of approximation, that works. And you'll usually find that it's cheaper to just use more memory.
I love mechanisms. It's amazing how much mechanical complexity we were able to build before the advent of computers. Even more so when you learn how very minor changes like shaving a few degrees off an angle can be the difference between success and failure. As an embedded systems developer, I've been fortunate to work with a number of talented mechanical engineers over the years and come to realize that the complexity that they have to deal with isn't that far from what we have to do in software.
If you want to think in knots, go down the internet rabbit hole of investigating how the knotter in a hay baler works :-)
I love how so many mechanisms revolve (hehe) around revolutions - because that's the simplest form of mechanical effort to make and use.
I also love the accuracy you can get if you work on it - I'm thinking things like those giant castle doors weighing multiple tons, but a child can push them open if unbarred.
Main reason is easy availability of developers. Can't swing a dead cat without hitting a web developer, whereas try finding one that even knows what LVGL is.
Tons of existing libraries and frameworks. Essentially every UI problem you're likely to have is solved already, there are Known Good ways of dealing with most problems that you'll encounter.
Consistent interface: the primary interaction element is the browser and HTML is the simplest thing there is to generate. You can write a basic webserver in an afternoon.
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