The alleged crisis of the supposed engineering, or mistaken identities pantomiming a comedy of manners.

Sunday, 01 December, Year 11 d.Tr. | Author: Mircea Popescu

I do not agree with my lord Crypto-Alchemist, where he deems the day's cloaca "provides a few very good definitions of the term's meaning".

This isn't because (necessarily misplacedi) loyalty to ideology on my part, whereby "can't possibly agree with the simpletons, no matter what they say" ; nor is it because "definitions" can only ever be one, and if there's a plurality of supposed "definitions" available there's either no term being defined or no definition being offered. But engineering is not taylorismii, the item wikipedia discusses, the superset of which is of course early, romanticiii, soviet planned economy.

Nor is engineering simple casuism, either, some kind of of common law practice applied upon machineryiv, keeping incomprehended lists of recipes "known to work". I'm aware "Google engineers" made "a program to play go" in this manner, not to mention Monsanto "engineers" have been "developing" all sort and type of nonsense in a very similar way. Nevertheless, engineering isn't "keeping a (well indexed!) list of pictures of walls shit was thrown at" anymore than it's "throwing shit at a wall to see what sticks".v

What is it then ? Oh engineering is... well, you see, it's nothing. Nothing at all. Like "love", "engineering" is a null concept, a label put on putative panacea. Like "love" is the supposed solvent of all possible impediments standing between you and the fucking of the girl you want to fuck, just so "engineering" is the presumed lubricant, easing away all asperities on your way to a functioning you desire. There's exactly nothing more to it, claiming engineering as an identity is exactly like claiming "you're a lover". "Ok, but I mean, what do you do for a living ?" will be the necessary response. Outside of simple erotomania, "being an engineer" as a mental disease, outside of the deranged states of psychological breakdown in humans, engineering's just a conceit. It's something people who aren't engineers say to explain their dysfunction to people who can't do things -- because for very good reasons lack can not be directly approached by they who are lacking.

Yes, systematic approaches, both ontological and gnoseological, which is to say in one's activity as well as in one's thoughts, are ultimately the only way to obtain... systems. Whopee. "Engineering" has exactly as much to do with this as disco dancingvi ; and besides the world will stay meaningless irrespective how you go about convincing yourselves.

In the hope I've distertained and entressed...

———
  1. Loyalty may only ever be invested in persons, and never in abstracts -- let the latter toil for their bread, and be discarded as rags the moment they fail on any score for they are not persons.

    This, incidentally, is why the pantsuit theatrical performances wherein a person "accused" is supposedly confronted by an abstract "prosecuting" it, such that supposedly the person is held to defend his conduct in all particulars, any failure on any account (even if it were only the account of the cluelessness of the audience, as it often -- perhaps most often -- happens) resulting in a so-called "conviction", while the abstract's not held to defend its perdurant conduct to any standard, even the most egregious breaches being in general denied and on the rarest of occasions predendedly cured (and regularly to the lowest of possible standards, "actual damages") are so universally ridiculous and thus universally derided. The only correct stance available is that the abstract first defends itself from all possible charges, with failure on any account (including simple disinterest on the part of the audience) reducing it to non-existence ; whereas the person defends itself on a total balance, and only ever cures voluntarily, and on the actual damages standard. Until your state works that way -- the only way it possibly could not to mention the only way it conceivably should -- you can take your socialist nonsense and feed it to whatever ein anderes that'll take it. I'm not. []

  2. The strand that eventually yielded "Entreprise Resource Planning" in the post-modern era is simply a management technique, it follows human behaviour so as to enact partitions between sets of separable behaviours, and inhibit some while stimulating others. It's simple "a/b testing", if you prefer that terminology, though substantially it's the same fundamental approach to plant husbandry that yielded fruiting trees in the sad Iranian desert ten to twenty thousand years ago. []
  3. This is the whole value proposition of the early days, systematic and universal taylorism is what "soviet" even means in the first place, standing as the only possible meaningful interpretation available on the tradition of neo-protestant tractology inaugurated by Karl Engels & friends.

    Yes indeed, "marxism" is, exactly like "beans&ricely yours" Armstrongism or Ehret's "mucusless" diet (indeed there historically existed a firebrand moron who'd have logically regarded AIDS as the one true path to health) a barely lisible footnote in a footnote to a footnote to intellectual discourse, Calvin's obscure and deeply anti-interesting nonsense. Nobody cares, seriously now, all this provincial idiocy is about as interesting as the "particular" expression of precious cuntletry put forth as airs by whatever random (yet supposedly distinct) small town belle. This is the inescapable trap these poor souls forever toil in : that mere existence does not therefore also predicate identity, certainly not outside of the village they were born in. This is why we here in town have two words (bios, zoon) to discuss the situation, and this is also why... Nobody. Cares. []

  4. Artefacta, properly, items made by the hand of man. []
  5. Because these aren't things to be, I need new words to discuss the having of children with my father just as much as you do! What am I going to do with the supposed definitions of remaindered words ? []
  6. Do you suppose, by the way, the women didn't flock to you because you didn't have the moves ? When, that ? Now, or back in the day ?

    Who made the moves, then ? And how ? And were they engineering ? []

Comments feed : RSS 2.0. Leave your own comment below, or send a trackback.

24 Responses

  1. Inasmuch as Spyked's piece sought definitions of software engineering, is it not possibly the case that engineering, like loving, is just too broad to stand defining or identifying? Can't you be Sylvia's lover, and a software engineer?

    And holy shit that Ehret guy. I thought Kellogg was bad!

  2. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    2
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 2 December 2019

    I dunno. Are you asking whether you can be Sylvia's lover like you can be Sylvia's doctor, ie independently of Sylvia, part and parcel of flattening Sylvia's pretense to an identity predicated on mere existence, an' generally to wringing the special cuntletism out of her ? "Apendectomy will work on you because what you think of yourself is unimportant, whereas accute apendicitis is actually a thing", something like that ?

    Or are you asking whether you can be Sylvia's lover like you can be Sylvia's daydream/novel she's supposedly writing/prince charming/whatever such nonsense ?

    Because if the former then no ; and if the latter then why.

    In any case, what's said is not that love is "broad". It's not broad at all, nor is broadness any part of this. People who actually travel go to specific destinations ; from their point of view voyages have an endpoint which is peculiar and precise. For the people who don't travel, however, everyone who travels goes "abroad", the distances and differences melt, Miami and Malaga, Chichester and Chomolungma, they're all the same abroad. This doesn't make "abroad" "a broad concept", it's as narrow as it can be : something people who travel say to note their lack to people who don't. Love is, quite adequately, a principal preoccupation of the prepubescent, preponderently female demographic -- adult women don't spend a percent of the time twelve year olds do with the matter ; engineering is a symbol mostly employed by those who aren't (and who, by and large, can't distinguish "science" and "engineering" -- for this exact reason). Similarily, if you were going through cosmic space in a tub, and it sprung a leak, which you plugged with a wine bottle cork, you wouldn't claim the cork's vast because look how huge interstellar voids are, which the cork interfaces for you. Right ?

    Engineering's only broad on the stupid end, where all sorts of peculiar, personal idiocies of the prehuman mind come to the same need : for some manner of denoting white man's magic, the only sort that actually works. The other end's barely a pore, of little consequence ; but between a pore and a bore...

  3. Admittedly, it was unwise of me to quote Wikipedia, though it's not like anyone else bothered to properly define the terms. Anyway, it seems to me you're generalizing "software engineering" to mean the general field of engineering, when to my eye they're obviously distinct notions. Here's a definition -- not sure if it's complete, but at the very least it contains the necessary points that something needs to mark in order to be considered engineering:

    Engineering is the discipline which, given some specific problem, presupposes a. building a model of the problem within some (e.g. mathematical) framework; b. designing a solution within the same framework, and showing that the design is fit to solve the problem; and c. implementing said design, and demonstrating that the implementation conforms to the design.

    Mind that not all problems are solvable by engineering and not all designs are implementable in practice. This is where "software engineering" is distinct, in that yes, it's nothing but a bunch of dance moves/voodoo incantations frantically thrown around. And yes, Microoglazon's formulations of certain problems, e.g. definining the notion of a social network, are so ill-posed that TMSR's correct answer may as well be considered something than software engineering, yes. But IMHO that's no reason to shit on engineering, the discipline -- last time I looked they still made airplanes, bridges, CTs and other heavy duty items, through the exact steps mentioned above. By this reasoning, economics isn't a thing because of Keynes' stuff. Which brings us directly to:

    > "Engineering" has exactly as much to do with this as disco dancing

    I don't know what's the point you're making here. if you wanna define new words for the contemplated "this", then sure, by all means, as long as we understand each other. Look: Saligny's designs were quite impressive blazorpage.

  4. In other weirds, the pingback to the software engineering article didn't get in for some reason. Got any idea why?

  5. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    5
    Mircea Popescu 
    Monday, 2 December 2019

    > it's not like anyone else bothered to properly define the terms

    The problem here is that the terms being found undefined, you bring from home the assumption that they could be defined, if only someone bothered. Whereas in reality, bother one and everyone as they will, the terms stay undefined because they're not terms of anything in particular. There's nothing there for definitions to attach to, see ?

    > Anyway, it seems to me you're generalizing "software engineering" to mean the general field of engineering

    You are claiming I did something that not merely I did not do, but can not ever be done. The way attribution works is that the general meaning of the attribute is applied to the particular case of the term thus determined. If I expect something you called "a red crumple" to be the color red, I do not thereby "generalize" the red crumple to mean "the general field of redness". I can not actually be said to have done anything. I am entirely passive ; the doer is whoever called a red crumple red, and what they did was this exact generalizing : they made the claim that all general properties of redness now apply to the crumple they're discussing. Should it be the case I point out that red objects appear black in blue light thus therefore expect their crumple to look black under the moneycounting light I stand immune to any objection, for I didn't do anything.

    > to my eye they're obviously distinct notions

    If pairs such as "field" and "cultivated field", "woman" and "pregnant woman", "alocution" and "funeral alocution" etcetera present to your eye obvious distinction indeed nothing of very great value was lost : they very well fucking are distinct. The trouble only starts if you imagine the pregnant woman's different from pregnancy, the cultivated field different from cultivation, or the funeral oration different from pomp. This goes directly to the Sylvia discussion above : are you trying to think like a man ? Or "think", like a woman ? Because the latter's not think, the latter's how babies are made against what should've been the animal's better judgement. Yes Sylvia's disease is different from Sylvia ; but no it's not different from disease.

    > not sure if it's complete

    If you're not sure it's complete you're thereby sure it's not a definition. I'm sure my definition is quite complete, as given above : the term "engineering" is to homo faber what the term "grown ups" is to nine year olds.

    > Mind that not all problems are solvable by engineering and not all designs are implementable in practice.

    Nor by voodoo, nor coloidal silver, nor anything else in this vein. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do with such statements in your ruleset, if I simply discard them as comments at parse time it seems I'll end up discarding the whole buffer, and if I try to parse them they fail to attach to anything.

    Is it not self-obvious that the "engineering" thing being a null concept then drives the null attribution whereby there's exactly no difference between "coloidal software" and "software engineering", which nevertheless permits the female mind to express itself through colonizing the hole made by that expectation of a difference on purely nominative grounds ? So now you've constructed a self-special Sylvia, she's not "a slut" like* all those other Sylvias out there.

    *And of course now I can't find the discussion of how the very same seniors who had agreed sucking cock "is gross" as freshgirls four years prior now just as well agree "numa' tarancile nu sug pula", year after year after god forsaken year, new "agreers" to the same age-bound agreements forever. Whatevers.

    > Microoglazon

    Took me a while to distinguish the microsoft, google, amazon contents of that crashed delivery van -- but I did it!

    > that's no reason to shit on engineering, the discipline

    To quote Don Rickles, "if engineering's a discipline may God castigate me harshly with it ; and may I never recover!"

    Now, what the fuck discipline is it ? Please don't say something like "nothing's gonna be good while it's bad", will you ?

    > last time I looked they still made airplanes, bridges, CTs and other heavy duty items

    It's good you looked! So have I, and here's the concerning bit : what I've noticed looking is that the degree they're making them seems to have slackened over the recent years, at an ever appreciating rate. Concerningly enough, looking about my environment for similar patterns to match it, one doth in particular stand out : there's been an increase of "engineering" blather in shockingly the same proportion over the same interval. Did you notice this as well, but didn't deem it worth investigating, or did you simply not notice it ?

    Because it doth seem to me that 1930s America builds the Hoover Dam whereas 2010s US gives up going to the Moon anymore. At some point "the richest country in the world" could afford it ; but that point's in the past. Sa ti-o zic si-n engleza ?

    Coincidentally, sanitation bought about longer lived canaille. You're not gonna narrative all over yourself with engineering an' ourdemocracy for that coincidence now, are you ? Here, have a beautiful example of politically marshalled coincidence :

    S-a zis, cu drept cuvant, ca la inceputul oricarei miscari de libertate e o poezie, la inceputul tuturor biruintelor mari ale revendicarilor nationale, un mare triumf literar. E un profund adevar in aceasta axioma curenta. Literatura a fost totdeauna o energie precursoare, in campul ei s-au adunat mai intai si au cerut cuvant puterile latente ale unui popor, indicand prin proportiile lor raza de intindere a maririlor viitoare. In acest schimb Iliada lui Homer a luminat inaintea Athenei lui Pericle, Gloria lui Dante s-a ridicat ca un stalp de foc inaintea stralucirii lui Lorenzo de Medicis, orizonturile nemarginite ale lui Shakespeare au avansat cuceririle coloniale ale Engliterei si astfel, urmand o oranduiala consacrata, nu este numai o intamplare ca Romania unita, Sire, reintregirea solului national sub sceptrul Maiestatii Voastre, nu s-a putut indeplini decat dupa ce gandul romanesc s-a zbatut in avanturile infrigurate, dupa ce poezia cu culmile ei eterne a savarsit logodna, dandu-ne de o parte geniul lui Eminescu, si de alta paginile nepieritoare ale lui Gheorghe Cosbuc.

    That'd be one of the countlessly many such contributions of the similarily spurious "Romanian Academy", a sort of "software engineering" sui generis. Isn't it fucking beautifully stupid, this "bridges are being built" argument ?

    > By this reasoning, economics isn't a thing because of Keynes' stuff

    Economics isn't nor ever was deemed a thing, not "because of Keynes' stuff", but for very good fundamental reasons I alluded to somewheres among here and now I dare not even look.

    > I don't know what's the point you're making here.

    That what you call engineering is unrelated with the activities it denotes in the minds of the uninvolved much like "grown ups" is unrelated with the people who are so called by the children who so call. "Niggers" as imagined by "racist white people" aren't in any sense descriptive of anyone's experience living among black people -- not in the sense of "better" or "worse", but in the sense of at all ; nor are "racist white people" as imagined by "idle aspies looking for a cause" in any sense descriptive of anyone's experience living among rural poor white people -- again not in the sense of "better" or "worse". Engineering is this exact thing : an exonym.

    > if you wanna define new words for the contemplated "this"

    The this resolves to the previous sentence : "Yes, systematic approaches, both ontological and gnoseological, which is to say in one's activity as well as in one's thoughts, are ultimately the only way to obtain... systems".

    The overarching point is that the term "engineering" does no better job of denoting "the way to obtain systems" than the term "disco dancing".

    > as long as we understand each other

    I don't know whether we do understand each other ; we certainly seem to have disjunct approaches to definition and attribution at the very least, but I can't judge if that's a substantial disjunction or merely coincidental confusion.

    > Look: Saligny's designs were quite impressive blazorpage.

    At the time Saligny's work was occuring (unreviewed by his moronic contemporaries), something else was also happening : a bridge on the river Tay. That work was discussed on the level of Romanians (by, not coincidentally, a Scott from Ireland) ; but fortunately also by less fucked in the head contemporaries. Sir Thomas Bouch had some things pointed out to him, for which he made no allowance ; look through the extensive documentation of the matter and conclude with me : what distinguishes Saligny from Bouch was... that one was an engineer ; the other not. Yes ? How did you establish this fact, after the events ? What fact are you even establishing, to begin with ? "That the bridge that stood, stood", what are you turning into, Pangloss ?!

    > In other weirds

    I couldn't tell you ; the ping machine is like mystery meat, somebody'll have to untangle that mess. Ping unreliability's been an ongoing problem for lo these many years.

  6. > what you call engineering is unrelated with the activities it denotes in the minds of the uninvolved

    I can agree that it very much is, yes, and perhaps I'm guilty of judging "engineering" primarily on the method's theoretical merits rather than on current practice in the field. But then I'm wondering, if people misapply the method, isn't that a problem with... them? This is why I haven't mentioned the existing degradation in quality: I completely acknowledge it's there and I'm aware of the reasons, yet in my thought "engineering" attaches to the definition above, and whatever the wrecking the idiots are doing is something else, regardless of how they call it.

    As for the "software" in "software engineering", I see it completely the other way around: back in the '60s people had this (IMHO legit) "computer engineering" subfield where they studied what can be done with numerical computers. Then later people who knew nothing but "writing code" thought, hey why shouldn't software be considered an engineering discipline, which is how they invented those funny dances they call "software engineering methodologies". Thus from my point of view rather "engineering" got forcefully attached to "software", the results being something roughly similar to quantum boobs.

    Thank you very much for the Tay bridge resources, I'll give them a good read when I get some time.

  7. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    7
    Mircea Popescu 
    Friday, 6 December 2019

    The problem isn't at all whether you're judging on theory rather than practice. The problem, I'm saying, is that you're judging on nominalism rather than substance.

    Let's belabour this point. Consider the following pair : sluttery and homeopathy.

    As to the facts of the matter (where the theory-versus-practice dispute plays out), sluttery is defined as the correct (meaning objectively-adequate) stance of the female on herself, as her own self image, deeming that her own value judgements of both herself and the world around her are unimportant, both objectively (meaning, to others) and subjectively (meaning, to herself). This is what a slut is, and against this objective standard individual women will fall closer to the slut or closer to the exact opposite housewife end of the spectrum.

    As to the femalisms of the matter (where the nominalism-versus-substance dispute plays out), sluttery is defined as the contextually-valued epithet, and one could discern, by working of words alone, freed from any unpleasant rape by phenomenology, whether sluttery is "good" or "bad" and thence "desirable" or un-~, and so "slut" is a "bad word" in this universe. A bad word. It's a wordworld, you understand me ?

    Now on to homeopathy (or, for the exact same money, perpetuum mobile, circular cvadrature, "freedom" as the plebs conceive it and so following) : as to the facts of the matter, it is a thing that can never be. This is what it is. As to the femalisms of the matter, I dunno, would you like for it to be a thing ? Would it be good if it worked ?

    As a bonus, socialism : Stalin was implementing it, and then he didn't [implement it anymore]. It's not that the homeopath's practice was just as consecvent with the supposed discipline while it seemed to work, and once it became obvious it never actually worked. It's that while "nobody could accuse it of not working" Hillarity's "implementing" houswifery, and once it's plain obvious it ain't working, such that nobody need be bothered to "accuse" or anything, then... it was Hillarity's fault all along!! Like back in the day, exactly.

    Engineering isn't a thing. This is not a matter of whether "the practice" bla bla bla. It's a matter of exactly the same substance as "the quest for the perpetuum mobile" : for as long as you "think" in those terms, female terms, no actual thinking can possibly occur in the same box. Degradation of quality follows from this ejection of the thinker, necessarily and unyieldingly-unavoidably, through brownian fucking motion. It is the reversion to enthalpy of former systems meanwhile abandoned by the ghost that kept them systematic, the elementary particle of what in the female mind is not called (though should be called) "rape by phenomenology". So no, I wouldn't say you're aware of the reasons. On the contrary, I'd say you're dis-aware of the reasons, through the workings of the disavowal engine, elementary mechanism of the perpetuation of the female mental space.

  8. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    8
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 7 December 2019

    PS. Meanwhile in vaguely related readings, I recuperated a beautiful piece with a beautiful story.

    See! Now Beelah's beauteous sights begin, whose curling stream shall ever flow within and underneath this splendid, monstrous bridge. Shall floods henceforth descend from every ridge, yet more'll flood the wonder at such glorious widge where trains run over height, aloft, both day and night. For ages past no human tongue could tell of such a piece set over Cumbria's crease ; time will roll on, and mortals may increase, while those who see it now we hope will rest in peace.

    Apparently the sad pigdin can indeed produce thread to match tear for tear Romanian's exceedingly strong Cind a ninge si-a-ngheta n-o sa-mi mai vedeti urma.

  9. > you're judging on nominalism rather than substance

    Well, I've uttered a definition for the thing, WTF more can I say.

    > Engineering isn't a thing.

    No, I understand this. What I don't understand is where it follows from.

    For the sake of figuring out whether my mind lies indeed on another planet, let's make the following thought experiment: you have a fridge in your home, right? Or say, a washing machine. Through what method do you say were any of these items obtained?

  10. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    10
    Mircea Popescu 
    Saturday, 7 December 2019

    The fridge in my home, or my washing machine, were obtained through the same "method" the girlfriend in your home was obtained : we named them so.

    If, if! we share any further assumptions besides the name, such as "she's about his age" or "there's a reverse carnot cycle engine utilizing a very specifically poor choice of working gas" then we perhaps also share some further substance -- in the given examples it'd be "she was produced through dating" (as opposed to, say, abduction in the street -- there are alternatives) or "it was produced through applied pantsuitism".

    If, and only if we share something definite and predictable, and if (and only if!) we agree to name that engineering, then, and only then your presumption that engineering is a thing follows from somewhere. Otherwise, the self-obvious null hypothesis needn't follow from anything -- that's why it IS a null hypothesis : because it's that which needn't follow from anything.

    These are our two problems here, and the actual something both definite and predictable at the basis of suspiction that indeed your mind is on another planet : that you appear to expect the null hypothesis be grounded ; and that you appear to expect your very peculiar construction methods, such as say dating, are universal. They aren't universal, I don't entertain girlfriends and I obtain fucktoys through impressment. Literally, like 17th century British navy, I give a shilling to women on the street of cockfaring habits.

  11. Great examples you picked there my man spyked, fridge and washing machine. Are you two in cahoots?

  12. @anon: What "great" examples, man? They're just examples.

    > "it was produced through applied pantsuitism"

    And is this "applied pantsuitism" something? If so, then what is it? Because my mind from another planet thinks that there exists (or existed), supposedly, some dude somewhere who designed those things -- which are, I assume, of some use to you -- through some means bearing some substance or another. Are those means worth looking at? And if not, why not? And then is it any worth considering any means (at all) of obtaining fridges and washing machines? -- and indeed, other objects that are worth obtaining and require more than driving nails into wood, because the two examples above were just apparently not that great examples. And if so, does it make any difference that I call them "engineering"? And so fucking on, by now I hope to god it's clear where my line of inquiry is going.

    > your presumption that engineering is a thing

    I'm not presuming that engineering is a thing. I'm presuming -- or rather, stating, based on those examples -- that there is "a thing" there at all, and I'm applying the label "engineering" to it. Not that I care about the label, but I do care about having a meaningful discussion about -- if indeed you think there is something there that's a systematic approach etc. If not, I don't know what.

    > you appear to expect the null hypothesis be grounded

    I don't expect anything -- I'm trying to understand your reasoning, and mentions of applied pantsuitisms and how I name my woman sure as hell ain't helping. If indeed what I call engineering, the whole fucking practice, as it exists, is nothing, then I'll call it a day and we can all go do subsistence farming or something.

  13. Mircea Popescu`s avatar
    13
    Mircea Popescu 
    Sunday, 8 December 2019

    @Anon You can find anything on Trilema.

    @spyked >And is this "applied pantsuitism" something?

    Yes, it' a metaphor. It doth seem to me this conception of swag-engineering necessarily ends up with Windows (tm) (r) (nt) Vista smartphone-dildos wut wut up everyone's butt, so that's what it is : another way of saying "Windows (tm) (r) (nt) Vista smartphone-dildos".

    > my mind from another planet thinks that there exists (or existed), supposedly, some dude somewhere who designed those things

    And yet your exact same mind, this time however from this planet, well knows how this theory actually worked out in practice : some guy was one day hired by a collection of hirtoage, selected some chunk of them to make some random byte errors into and hey, that was "the new line of airwashing machineconditioning" from ourcompany. His name was Carly. Carly Fiorina. She one day designed the Jewlet Packbutt smartphone dildo, the Le Nouveau lipgloss. Remember that time ?

    What the fuck did she "design", the end of US computing ?

    Oh, right, right, it wasn't her, it was "some dude somewhere". Where the fuck, also on another planet ?

    What happened to lipgloss, the original brand, before Le Nouveau took it over, anyway ? I'm stuck managing an ever older fleet of the damned thing, because what the fuck am I gonna do with Lenovos.

    > Are those means worth looking at?

    The means are worth looking at ; the assignment, however, whereby we call "whatever the idiots do" "the means", is not worth looking at. This is the problem with the imposture of pantsuitism : that while science is well worth looking at, "whatever Phil Daian did" is NOT worth calling "science" -- and the fact that "there doesn't seem to be anything else available" doesn't change this.

    > And then is it any worth considering any means (at all) of obtaining fridges and washing machines?

    Any means at all, no. NO.

    But that aside, it's prolly obvious on re-examination that a serious discussion on "how to make fridges and generally useful things" necessarily starts with "how not to be fashionable". This is different from "how to be not fashionable", of course.

    > does it make any difference that I call them "engineering"?

    You may call anything howsoever you wish, provided if asked what it is you answer. This is how Trilema's been working for well over a decade now, and everything else for slightly longer than that. If however you can't answer, you're invited to not call. Doesn't this strike you as reasonable ?

    > that there is "a thing" there at all

    I do well hope there's something there at all, because indeed the whole world as conceivable is predicated on there being a thing there at all ; if there's no thing there at all there's indeed little point to anything else we do.

    However, we're well advised to avoid the well known historical trapholes. The reason taylorism, say, Fordism, "neoprotestant reasonable", however you'd call the ideology of the last golden age is no longer a thing is that the enemy, whether you call it women or niggers, the dumb or the alien, uppity laziness or marauding stupidity, the horde of anal children or Richard Rorty whatever the fuck -- have found a hole. You can't just re-do the defeats of the past, yes ? It's not worth the living's time, to retrace the paths of ghosts. Right ?

    > and I'm applying the label "engineering" to it

    You can't label unknowns, by the very definitions of labels and unknowns. If you're unhappy with this theoretical result, and distrust theory in the general, go right ahead and run some experiments -- I have some ready designs to propose for your consideration : go down in the basement, undo the lightbulb, then proceed to label away in the dark there ; otherwise get yourself an airplane eyemask, a box of labels and a labelmaker, cover your eyes, spin around labeling and then write up the report.

    > there that's a systematic approach etc

    There's no naive approach available, however. This is no great drama, it happens all the time : there's a way, for instance, to "cut with light", works even on heavy metals ; but it's not reproducible out of whatever things the average preteen can find in his immediate environment.

    > and mentions of applied pantsuitisms and how I name my woman sure as hell ain't helping

    Now how did you establish that "ain't helping" ?

    This is an important question, don't brush it aside, because the path of turning this "engineering" as you dream it into pantsuitism as you actually live it is precisely built out of this brushing aside of "inconvenient", supposedly-hard but really very easy questions.

    It doesn't become a hard question just because you don't particularly relish the changes it implies in your lifestyle, you realise ? And, as an added bonus, alf went on his merry way precisely for making the stupid choice there ; you will go exactly the same way if you follow in the same manner. Life's lived with all chips on the table or not at all, there's no "safe way to play" available.

  14. @spyked:
    >But IMHO that's no reason to shit on engineering, the discipline -- last time I looked they still made airplanes, bridges, CTs and other heavy duty items
    >Through what method do you say were any of these items obtained?

    copy-paste. iterating copy-paste operations isn't engineering. to generate, in genere, per se, would actually mean to come up with something from scratch.

    from your blog, "the establishment and use of sound engineering principles in order to economically obtain software that is reliable and works efficiently on real machines.", is technicians' coursework, because, applying 'a list of things that work without having any idea of what it is' ("sound principles"), is precisely that, a skill, a technique, not an ingenerated thing.

  1. [...] tell me again about "engineering", and about things and matters ; gaze upon the header yet again and tell me your story yet again ; [...]

  2. [...] in the day, but also because well... have you read FFA? Now tell me, how is that the product of nothing? Suppose it is, though; suppose a trillion monkeys wrote it by accident on an old, dusty [...]

  3. [...] never had we also made some important discoveries -- chiefly, how utterly worthless a shipful of "engineers" is for any purpose besides idle blather. Such discoveries are chilling, but then again cold [...]

  4. [...] idea which stays with me is that source code -- along with, perhaps, many of the (by)products of "engineering" in general -- is so shitty mainly because it lacks (among others) clarity, that is, the property [...]

  5. [...] article started out as a comment, on his lordship the crypto-alchemist's blog (again) ; but it became an article once it got to discussing who gets to call who bitch when and why [...]

  6. [...] vision whereas most of them sit put on the dedicated screen. Magic of technology brought about by lovengeneering, must [...]

  7. [...] is ultimately the problem with these humorous fucks : captive inside their own skull, they keep engineering about the fundamental problem of beings an engineering : nothing outside my skull can [...]

  8. [...] shit. Mere chaos is guaranteedly mediocre, exceptional results outright require systems and systematic approaches. [↩]From scratch, meaning wheat flour, bean-shaped garbanzo beans and so on. [↩] [...]

  9. [...] we know who the hell designed it ; and also end up with a beneficial if unintended aesop on over-engineering : by the time your friends at Vault-Tec are done with it, "learn how mail-in ballots are safe" and [...]

  10. [...] suptstancin' cucks on a stock already! [↩]Here's an abridged thesaurus : The .best spamblast, The alleged crisis of the supposed engineering, Coltunasi, The last blog, thelastpsychiatrist.com - Bad At Math. Adnotated, The life & times, [...]

Add your cents! »
    If this is your first comment, it will wait to be approved. This usually takes a few hours. Subsequent comments are not delayed.