I still think it's an interesting question if Infocom had not tried to keep the Z-Machine proprietary "secret sauce" if it would have been a larger platform of general computing for much longer and broader than Infocom's own lifespan and primarily games focus. If Infocom had taken a Sun-like stance on the Z-Machine being a JVM ahead of its time and building a broader compatibility ecosystem "write once, run everywhere" might have been an earlier part of computing.

Mac OS was said to skip 9 on the way to 10 due to a combo of some Asian numerology (just as Western numerology often encourages skipping "unlucky" 13) and also trying to make a clean break more obvious between System 8 and OSX. (The X being the 10, as Apple's favorite way to write 10 for various reasons. Which is why "OSX" was always a misnomer, accidentally burning the version number into the operating system name. Part of why Apple has been trying to get everyone on the "macOS" brand lately to pull the version number back out.)

My push into Common Lisp was a current revision of a classic AI textbook that mixed up usage of nearly the complete history of lisp because some of the examples presumably dated to the 1960s/1970s with moderate adjustments to make sure that they still compiled in SBCL or the like, so it was a natural lesson from that textbook. Maybe not the best way to learn Common Lisp, but that was an interesting semester for me. (I and the few other people in the class that semester decided to learn Lisp by choice for the class and I think I was the only one to also decide "I'll do every assignment with implementation language choice in Common Lisp this semester", which was most of my classes, just to keep grad school interesting.)

But most "triple A" games don't just release under Steam's weaker terms, they also want Xbox and PlayStation certification, which have been strongly enforced.

The visual interpretation/intuition of Big O notation can be a useful way to build a visual intuition of what a function's derivative and integral "shapes" may look like, so some Calculus books teach Big O notation, too.

I think the real pain though is that AI also often removes the feedback loop between "good" engineers and "bad" engineers. A lot of "good" engineers started as "bad" engineers that learned, sometimes the hard way and sometimes with patient mentorship, how to be better engineers. Patient mentorship becomes harder as code reviews become less personal. "The Hard Way" becomes harder when the consequences get divorced from actions. For a bad engineer it becomes "Claude broke Production" more often than "I broke Production" and learning mostly ceases.

We're starting to recognize how many junior developers AI is replacing, making the pipeline to senior developers harder (if not disappearing), but we also maybe aren't focusing enough on how much we are also losing the pipeline from "bad" to "good" engineers.

Similarly PC games with mod support often have to disable Achievement systems as soon as any mod is installed just in case the mod happens to offer cheats. Which also seems to have impacted mod culture to some extent with entire classes of gamers not installing mods ever to make sure that they still win Achievements.

It's an interesting social dynamic and I think one of the clearest lines in the sand for when cheat codes disappeared, especially in genres like the FPS where "God Mode" and "noclip" codes were genre staples until Achievements. (Because DOOM offered them, every FPS offered them. Until they stopped.)

But also, maybe more importantly, as soon as money changing hands is involved, that's a business transaction and if you aren't watching like a hawk who your business transacts with, then yes that is often assumed intentional (and classically a sign of a bad business) because it shows up in your accounts and impacts your bottom line.

I was offered an MBA for relatively cheap, but the sort of PM/Middle Management roles that most easily opens up are also feeling pressured by AI Layoffs and seeming to disappear from the job market. Even "relatively cheap MBA" doesn't at the moment look worth the opportunity cost.

Of the suggestions from friends and acquaintances, the one that would have sounded bizarre to me four years ago that somehow sounds like one of the most viable suggestions I've heard is applying to Law School and getting a JD. That doesn't sound like a great use of my time either, and I do still have a mortgage to pay (even if no kids to worry about) if I did go back to school, but suddenly in this economy it sounds like one of the more useful suggestions I've heard in recent months since my last layoff.

This current direction seems to be bad both for workers and for long-term health of companies. If they layoff enough workers and can't easily replace them because they find other uses of their time like art and creativity they risk sustainability by not being able to hire back the people they need and the skills that they trained those people to have in the first place.

The article stops short of offering proposed solutions to this current crisis, though.

Until it does. That's the scifi answer, right: if LLMs lead to AGI, AGI has a right to be offended at being micro-managed. That's a part of intelligence to human experience and if we want the machines to artificially resemble human intelligence, we should expect things like being offended by micro-management.

(Rival Hershey's ties to Pennsylvania history/culture similarly leaves ideas for National Treasure-style conspiracies in the chocolate world in the early history of control over the national identity.)

Free silly plot ideas for Hollywood or a graphic novelist hoping for Hollywood adaptation opportunities.

Trends are sometimes cyclical. (Not to be light about lung cancer being a trend, of course. I don't get why smoking is back. I'm just pointing out that it is back in the 2020s.)