And I struggle to understand how can you make any real connections without seeing and hearing other person. There is so much communication hidden in body language and voice that for me any kind of text communication is just poor substitute. And I am not even extrovert that loves interaction with others (rather the opposite) and still know this intuitively to be true.
>>I know plenty of people who can do basic 3d sketching with no specific instruction, but that's not me
I used to think that I am tone deaf and have no memory for melodies. Bu t after I forces myself to spend a lot of time singing, playing guitar and listening to music it occured that I just lacked some basic skills that combined suddenly creates magical ability of recalling melodies in my head and even repeating them. The same was with drawing and public speaking and general movement coordination (strength training can do wonders in this department).
This made me believe that some of problems of education system comes from general inability to convince students to spend more (dozen times more) on practicing basic skills (being this writing, small/big motoric skills, logical thinking oraz even some seemingly unimportant stuff like voice emission)
I think there are three things here - which are not mutually exclusive.
1. No amount of practice will enable me to break the 100m world record - or even probably be within 30-40% of it.
2. However, training would dramatically improve my time.
3. Most importantly, in life I could beat Usain Bolt by simply starting running 5 seconds earlier - ie for most things peak performance isn't what matters - it's effort/persistence.
I really do not know the proper name here but it is akin to visualisation (but with music). I could not recall intervals and rythm that makes given song recognizable (could not replay the song in my head) just like if you lack visual imagination you cannot solve even the easiest geometric problems without pen and paper or create good shape composition plan for painting.
And basing my intuition on example of one (me) both visual and tone imagination and memory can be developed from almost zero.
How did you develop them from zero if you were missing those basic skills?
I am a musician and I'm keenly interested in music education. I believe you when you say that you lacked some basic facilities; I think it's rare, but more common than people think that someone is genuinely tone-deaf, or can't "visualize" pitches and intervals, or can't memorize songs, or can't feel a rhythm. I always wonder if those deficiencies can be overcome. I'm really interested in your tale, if you wanted to write more privately, would you consider sending me an email? It's in my HN profile.
>> How did you develop them from zero if you were missing those basic skills?
It is really hard to answer this question because it seems that they were an emergent property of dozens of hobbies that I had (I tend to be seriali hobbyist). Seems like trying to explain how I did learn to ride a bike - I can name few basic skills that are required, but showing which exact part of learning bike riding made it stick is no easy task for me (I remember it as trial and error process and this was the same with my children - they just practiced riding bike and the skills developed thanks to them sticking to the practice).
It all looks like a kind of tacit knowledge that can only be developed by pure practice (melodic memory through remembering and playing songs, aesthetics through creating your own compositions, logic through solving problems)
My own story is rather simple - I used to play guitar, a bit of keyboard, sing using karaoke, listening to songs paying full attention and than playing guessing games aking to local tv game called "What melody is this?".
At first I was awful at this. But then something changed; I started to notice that I can recall melodic and rhythmic structure of some songs - and this was totally new ability to me (I remember that as a kid I was made fun of by my peers that I could not recognize any songs and my singing voice was wildly out of tune).
One caveat though - It's not like I am any good at music - I estimate that getting to level where others would tell "wow you are good" will take at least another 10 years (and it is not that important because I prefer the journey part, not the destination). But still I know I was a lot worse before forcing myself to learn. And probably if I would get a teacher that would motivate me and give feedback I would get here a lot faster, but as I said - it's the journey, and I really like to learn everything myself.
The message here is that I do not think that most people are unable to learn this kind of skills (those being music, logic or even simple aesthetics). The problem is that most do not have the drive, will or simply the time to stick with practice to overcome their own limitations.
I noticed the same thing. We are at the end of Two towers and thanks to forcing those books onto my children (lets face it - they are quite slow and "boring" in comparison to normal children books) I have found new appreciation for stories contained in them.
But be advised that there are downsides to this - this time around I won't be able to stop myself from buying Frodos/Bilbos "Sting" when attending Fantasy Covent here in Warsaw (and its comming this weekend)
I think they are willing to put up with / indulge me reading something I enjoy to have a bit of close time together. The like the challenge of it being a massive book, but I remember finding the two towers pretty boring as a kid myself. I may stop for a bit after fellowship as I always thought that was the most readable of the books myself. I suppose that makes me not a true fan. I found the Silmarillion completely unreadable, but I do like middle earth.
>> I think these days your non-social approach might work out better
No, that's not possible - in the end all important decisions are still made by humans ( I'm still waiting for chatGPT 7 executive edition ) with their emotions and feelings being their decision center.
And while this is true, if someone isn't monstrously inept in social settings, the most important thing he can do is being out there to leave positive marks on other folks perception of himself/herself.
You can think that good work speak for itself, but the truth is that without leaving and breathing advocate it will be lost in translations.
Ok first thing first - allow me to vent my existential frustration with few off the cuff (mostly rhetorical) questions ...
You call decade a substantial longevity?
Is this some kind of a joke?
Is your ability to assess being held hostage by js ecosystem expererience?
But seriously - I expect a bit more from platform that could potentially waste my life and my venture. I am still happily supporting some Java (and JSF) code that I have written for clients 15 years ago (don't you just love that sweet support fees that you get mostly for being alive and breathing ?). Meanwhile my friend that build whole company around product written in silverlight almost went bankrupt. Now after few years working in AI (going into it a bit too soon) he is trying to create same product in ... yes you guessed it, Blazor.
Maybe some people do not learn from their mistakes :)?
Yes, I would call that fairly substantial considering its underlying architecture is no longer viable -- not because of Microsoft's fault, but as the industry as whole moved away from the plugin-based AIR.
Silverlight was somewhat of a unique situation, as it was a platform where it heavily relied on the platform that was phasing out. (And to clarify, that "decade" is the period that Microsoft was committed to support for latest Silverlight 5. Their first version was released in 2007, so it had about 14 years of history.)
As with Java or any other languages, you can still run it if the environment it runs can be resurrected. (I would not connect that to the internet, though)
And many parts of what actually powered Silverlight still thrive in a form of .Net.
I mean where they can support, Microsoft tends to keep its compatibility fairly intact, for instance modern Windows still can run many of the 32-bit binaries from early days. (And you even could do the same for 16-bit apps on a 32-bit platform, not sure if that's still possible, though.)
The difference is that Blazor is built on web standards (WebAssembly), not a proprietary technology. Sure, Microsoft could discontinue support for Blazor, but WebAssembly will keep running. C#/Blazor are not the only technologies using WebAssembly. I personally wouldn't use Blazor for a public facing website, and would only use it for an internal LOB app where I know I can dictate what browser technologies can be used, as well as knowing the binary blob for the runtime will be cached in most users' browsers. I still use traditional MVC structure with C# for applications that will have a variety of users over different connection types, and use progressive enhancement with JavaScript for things that enhance the user experience (for example, creating multiple items of some type on screen, instead of only being able to create one at a time like with a standard form). The thing is, I've already separated out my application logic so that I can change the front-end technology at any time. That really shouldn't have anything to do with Blazor, and is just a way to make sure your application can adapt to future front-end technologies.
No knock on C# or Java developers meant here, however I find that C# and Java Developers find 10 years of support not long enough, nearly every other ecosystem you're lucky if you get 3 year time horizons of backward compatibility and/or support.
If between you and your client four people are playing deaf phone (client's project manager, our project manager, team leader and some random product guy just to get even numer), then actually this is not what you are doing.
I would argue that the thing that happens at this stage is more akin to manually transpiling business logic into code.
In this kind od organization programmers become computer whisperers. And this is why there is a slight chance that GPT-6 or 7 will take their job.
