I saw a cool line in a play once where the protagonist - an English major who ended up going into coding as a career - gets mad that his fellow programmers don't understand what he means by "Scylla and Charybdis" Ranting about how it's a failure of abstractionhttps://twitter.com/NarandiaOwl/status/1302537758720876545 …
-
-
"When I say Scylla and Charybdis I convey in a three word metaphor what would take a paragraph for me to describe literally"
Show this thread -
"Having to explain how it's different from a rock and a hard place, how Scylla is a known threat with frightening fixed costs but Charybdis an unknown one whose costs are probabilistic, which might do nothing or be catastrophic"
Show this thread -
"And hence why Odysseus displayed a difficult kind of moral courage by erring on the side of Scylla even when she was devouring his men Do you see? Today it takes one line of code to do what once required a hundred, but it takes a hundred lines if English what once required one"
Show this thread -
"We make it easier and easier to communicate with our machines, just as it becomes harder and harder to communicate to our fellow humans And we wonder why we've come to prefer the former"
Show this thread -
It was kind of a Boomer rant (the guy was an obvious author avatar for the author, who was in fact a Boomer who majored in English and became a programmer) But he has a point Memes are the new literary allusions, but the audience for memes is probably a lot narrower
Show this thread -
The very fact that, you know, if I'm trying to use the Distracted Boyfriend meme to say something I'm probably not talking to anyone my parents' age
Show this thread -
Actually I'm trying to think if there is a Twitter meme that means what "Scylla and Charybdis" does "The movie villain vs the real villain" isn't really it
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.