Subj : Re: RIP Niklaus Wirth
To   : Dr. What
From : Adept
Date : Tue Feb 13 2024 02:45 pm

 DW> Closer to the real world than you might think.  Especially if the tech
 DW> lead of the project suffers from neophilia.

"We want to use the blockchain!"

No, you don't.

"We want to replace everyone with AI!"

Nope, still a bad idea.

Yeah, it does seem like that, with a variety of things. It's not even that blockchain and AI are "bad" technologies; just that you need to know what they're good at, what they're bad at, and which of those things are true now but may not be true later.

And if it fits the industry.

Obviously, with K-Mart, it wasn't blockchain or AI that would've been the issue. And we're mostly talking about business people. For tech people, honestly, while it's exhausting to be changing things all the time, it's also pretty exciting to be trying new things all the time.

 DW> It's no wonder why their IT dept stayed in the 70's so long.

The other problem is that something that already works is generally going to outperform something that might be better, but will have teething problems. Sticking in the 70s is fine for a lot of things.

 DW> Kinda make me think that that college needed to take a page from
 DW> Dartmouth and their BASIC program.  It got a very high percentage of
 DW> people involved in computers - and not just the one going into computers.

Yeah, that makes sense. And, honestly, anything that increases general computer literacy is probably a net positive for most everyone. If all your Political Science majors gain some basic tech understanding, maybe the next generation of lawyers and politicians will be that much more likely to understand some technical topic that's pertinent.

I'm not _sure_ it mattered for a philosophy of logic class, since I'm not sure if the topic has changed much, realistically, in the past century.

Though, on that note, if memory serves, this philosophy of logic class was a prereq for other philosophy classes. I'm not sure if I _took_ any other philosophy classes, but I really enjoyed philosophy of logic and doubt I would've much enjoyed general philosophy classes.

Since, with philosophy of logic you can go, "okay, do you accept these assumptions? Then this is true. If you'd like to continue arguing, please tell me which assumption you want to change.".

With general philosophy, "I think, therefore I am" is controversial enough that we ended up with, "I exist" and "there are thoughts", and everything else people are still arguing about.

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