Reading this comment and other similar comments there's definitely a difference between people.
Personally I agree and resonate a lot with the blog post, and I've always found designs of my programs to come sort of naturally. Usually the hard problems are the technical problems and then the design is figured out based on what's needed to control the program. I never had to think that hard about design.
Aptitude testing centers like Johnson O'Connor have tests for that. There are (relatively) huge differences between different people's thinking and problem solving styles. For some, creating an efficient process feels natural, while others need stability and redundancy. Programmers are by and large the latter.
But is the diversity really that staggering?
I mean most animals including possibly dinosaurs that have ever existed share a lot of internal organs, in the same place. They have eyes, brain (with a lot of the same brain areas, even birds have something like a prefrontal cortex but it's called something different).
They all have legs, torso, head.
I would say there is a lot more commonality than difference. The differences come from slight variations on a basic template that works, and then the body looks different and so on.
I'm not sure how to think about the diversity that evolution creates and how diverse it actually is. I would say there are _a lot_ of repeating patterns all across history, with variations on those repeating patterns always changing.
You're choice of samples is rather skewed towards ones sharing a relatively recent common ancestor. Octopus and Sea Squirts are also animals, and they don't have legs or torsos or, in the later case, heads or eyes. Octopus brains are also rather different from those of vertebrates, and they have 8 mini-brains for more distributed/localized control of each major limb.
That said, I agree with you that there is a lot of commonality in life. Even in the case of Octopus we share a lot of DNA. I just mostly think that is due to common ancestor and common environmental pressures, not to some fundamental limit in the breadth of evolutionary potential itself. Its probably worthwhile to wonder at how that actually works though. Maybe evolutionary potential could be improved.
You hate on Louis Vuitton but have you ever tried one? Have you looked at all the designs they have? I think LV is better than Hermes bags with that horrendous closure they have on the Birkin and other bags. LV has cool colorful designs also in their ready to wear. You might object to the branding but the bags work very well and are designed well in terms of how easy it is to get stuff in and out and if you don't throw it around the canvas can last a long time. Hermes might have nice Pogo leather and so on but that doesn't mean that closure is worth the hassle IMO.
Also IDK what to think about the iPhone Pocket. It LOOKS like a hassle to get stuff in and out of it but if they have somehow managed to make it easy, maybe it's well designed. If not then I agree with you the product is probably garbage.
They hate on Louis Vuitton plastic bags, not Louis Vuitton in general, and they are entirely right to do so. It's the same with their perfumes, keychains, wallets and most other small accessories. All products which are far too expensive for what they are but remain reachable by the average person to capitalise on people who want the brand but can't afford the "real" products.
Buying entry level products from luxury brands is hard to justify. At their price point, you can generally get a far better equivalent product from a brand with less appeal. It's especially true with Louis Vuitton where the brand's cachet has been severely diluted by how many people own their bags.
Other random LV fact: Louis Vuitton was a lock maker, and the locks he made were advertised as “unpickable” (more advertising than reality, sadly.) He even had Houdini try to pick one. No, this has nothing to do with TFA, but I like locks.
This is kind of getting into the weeds a little bit but for me and a lot of others luxury items can be fun to own. You can get an affinity for certain designers style, whether it's Gucci, Louis Vuitton or Balenciaga. The items are ridiculously expensive sometimes but it's kind of a tough line to balance because the fact that they cost so much make them more special. So how cheap should they be before they don't feel as special anymore? Is it all a bit irrational? I guess. There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give. Some people can spend all their income on luxury items rather than other discretionary items because it's the most fun to them.
> There isn't a clear definitive defense for luxury items I think other than the feeling they can give.
Counterpoint: that is exactly what someone who charges $500 for a $5 pair of pants would want you to think. If you boil it down far enough, the principles you are describing are just inequality and luxury marketing.
While that is definitely at play there is a deep rooted instinct in humanity to show status and to have something that is worth a lot. It goes beyond just marketing, which is why it "works" economically. I think the luxury market serves a certain type of mindset that has been there since ancient egypt even. It would be nice to have a society where status didn't pay a role but there hasn't been a social movement that has crystallized what that would look like.
I also think as a sidenote there is a difference between luxury and fashion. Fashion is about creativity and self expression, and for a long time, the luxury market was sort of the defacto place for creeativity rather than the cheaper labels that had more 'standard' clothing, at least where I live. That has changed a bit in the past decade though. I like both fashion and luxury, but I am conflicted about it too. For example in the luxury fashion world there is a thing called 'grails', which are essentially items that are difficult to get but are considered very cool looking in some way and so they become grails. A lot of people like the feeling of chasing and finally acquiring grails, so that's one aspect of it.
I think AI is still in the weird twilight zone that it was when it first came out in that it's great sometimes and also terrible. I still get hallucinations when I check a response I get with ChatGPT on Google.
On the one hand, what it says can't be trusted, on the other, I have debugged code I have written where I was unable to find the bug myself, and ChatGPT found it.
I also think a reason AI's are popular and the companies haven't gone under is that probably hundreds of thousands if not millions of people are getting responses that have hallucinations, but the user doesn't know it. I fell into this trap myself after ChatGPT first came out. I became addicted to asking anything and it seemed like it was right. It wasn't until later I started realizing that it was hallucinating information.
How prevalent this phenomena is is hard to say but I still think it's pernicious.
But as I said before, there are still use cases for AI and that's what makes judging it so difficult.
