A lot of people ask "why should I work in software development as opposed to math/physics/finance/etc.?" One reason is that this field is surprisingly full of "inadequate equilibria" (a steady-state in which low-hanging fruits are still available for non-experts to solve).https://twitter.com/b0rk/status/985224076758106112 …
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Take this passage from a summary of Eliezer Yudkowsky's book (https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3535 ). IMO one "authoritative institution" that has created a lot of inadequate equilibria in software development is Silicon Valley culture and its focus on rampant growth.pic.twitter.com/AzwPEI6YT6
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growth is often at odds with security/privacy/robustness, so those are subfields of software development where a newcomer can potentially make high-impact contributions (things that obviously should be done but nobody has done yet due to the incentives being screwed up)
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Replying to @bcrypt
What makes it hard & unrewarding is that, without huge amounts of work keeping up with growth in requirements/expectations, there's a high risk your better solution becomes irrelevant.
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Replying to @RichFelker @bcrypt
I feel like that's what happened with every single attempt to do a new browser from scratch (as opposed to forking an existing one).
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Replying to @RichFelker @bcrypt
There will never be a another successful browser from scratch. A browser in 2018 is one of, if not _the_ most complicated pieces of software on the planet with many moving parts and interactions. The work to gain critical mass will be obsolete by the time you have an MVP.
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I think it's possible. There are several companies with the resources to do it who have material interest in browsers and haven't yet because they're relying on other browsers' engines. Samsung, Amazon, Alibaba, probably a couple others.
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Any big company like that doing it is going to make something astronomically worse than what we're stuck with now.
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