I do think Wikipedia is something of a marvel of an online community. It's certainly got plenty of warts, but it's managed to remain broadly effective and focused on its mission. It's one of the last remaining vestiges of the open and free worldwide web that I grew up with in the 1990s, and that shaped my life as a tech professional. I will always appreciate its philosophy for free information and transparency, and I think there is a lot to learn from its ongoing success.
nativeit · 4h ago
> In the Oblique Strategies deck, Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt counsel us to "be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever thought of not doing before"[1]
This sounds a lot like Musk's engineering mantra "the best part is no part."[2]
Maybe I am reading to much into these things, but I'm consistently annoyed with the tech industry's habit of framing of age-old philosophies into revelatory paradigms.
Keep it simple. It's been taught to every Engineering 101 student since long before any of us were alive to hear it. It's fundamental design practice. Everyone needs to learn it for the first time, of course [insert XKCD comic], but I don't know that we need to pretend that Brian Eno or Elon Musk possess more insight than any given engineering student with a passing grade point average.
This sounds a lot like Musk's engineering mantra "the best part is no part."[2]
Maybe I am reading to much into these things, but I'm consistently annoyed with the tech industry's habit of framing of age-old philosophies into revelatory paradigms.
Keep it simple. It's been taught to every Engineering 101 student since long before any of us were alive to hear it. It's fundamental design practice. Everyone needs to learn it for the first time, of course [insert XKCD comic], but I don't know that we need to pretend that Brian Eno or Elon Musk possess more insight than any given engineering student with a passing grade point average.
1. https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
2. Which itself was a riff on Lotus' founder's "Simplify, then add lightness"