I hear you, but uncle Karl names and shames the growth-obsession in Das Kapital which predated Reagan by over 100 years. It's a part of the system that many people have incentive to deny, hide, or minimize, but endless growth seems to be a requirement of "the system of organizing our resources that prioritizes turning capital into more capital" aka capital-ism.

in the space of cve or malware detection, the user wants a safe/secure computing experience with minimal overhead, but the antivirus / cve-scan vendor wants to claim that they're _keeping_ the you safe. so they're motivated to tell you all about the things they scanned and possible attacks / vectors they found. You probably would've been safe responding to only a subset of those alerts, but they have no incentive to minimize the things they show you, because if they ever missed one you would change vendors.

in the space of cryptography, the user wants secure communications that are unbreakable but with minimum hassle and overhead, but the advisory boards etc. are incentivized to act like they have important advice to give. So from the user perspective maybe it makes sense to use 2048 bit encryption for a few more decades, but from the "talking head" authority figure perspective, they can't afford to ever be wrong and it's good if they have something new to recommend every so often, so the easiest for them to do is to keep upping the number of bits used to encrypt, even if there's 99.99% odds that a smaller/shorter/simpler encryption would've been equally as secure.

IDK, it'll probably make more sense in another 15 years as we clear away the cruft of all the things that tried to bring "cloud native" paradigms into a space where they didn't really fit...

Another thing that's missing is the lifetime expectancy, e.g. "for how many years does something encrypted in 2030 need to be unbreakable?"

The author doesn't seem to be a big authority, so has little to lose by staking their reputation on "you don't need it to be that good," whereas by the very nature of their authority, anyone in the resource you link is going to be motivated to never be wrong under any circumstances. So if someone with some reputation/authority/power to lose think there's a 0.001% chance that some new incremental improvements will allow for fast-enough breaking of 2048 bit encryption created in 2030 within a window where that would be unacceptable, then they're motivated to guess high. The authority in this case doesn't directly bear the costs of too high of a guess, whereas it could be very bad for, i dunno, some country's government, and by extension the org or people that made that country's standards recommendations, if some classified information became public 15 or 50 years earlier than intended just because it could be decrypted.

To me it's an interesting touchstone work showing/reminding that the "invisibly neutral" tone we've collectively adopted is still an editorial choice and cultural moment.

I'm sure writing and communication styles will drift back and forth over the next few decades. Sometime soon (if not already) another generation of younger developers will coalesce around some document that feels authentically counter-cultural, like their own late-night jokes and dreams have been given just enough coherence to hook them in, and then I probably still won't get it because I'll be out of touch.... :)

I still strongly prefer the worldview, circumstances, mindset, etc. where that kind of content is written, read, and celebrated over today's focus on Influence and Professionalism.

So anyway "animal models" just means "an animal mice/rats/monkeys/etc. that we have decided has enough of the same symptoms of the human disease that we can use it to study treatments of that disease", and it's fairly common for something to work in mice but fail in monkeys, or even to work in both mice and monkeys but not work or have very undesirable side-effects in humans. (side note: one of the least discussed things in pharma is how they source the first humans for trialling a new treatment, which does carry non-trivial risk to the human "guinea pigs" - it's generally people who are poor and desperate.)

I did pay it an homage at a couple of points, before slack completely took over, by writing a simple unsanitized HTML chatroom, hosting it on my own work computer, and telling my coworkers to all go to 192.168.x.y/chat or something -- the kind of thing you can do at small companies when you only have a couple dozen coworkers. It was incredibly entertaining to me (and some others) and I did it at two companies, but I was a little surprised that nobody ever said "hey this reminds me of geocities chat"!

or for a narrower slice this paper is reference [6]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11500666_What_Geome...

The full mathematics are quite challenging, but the gist of the result (iirc) is basically: many common hallucinatory experiences, including the geometric patterns reported from both psychedelics and migraines, can be explained by the inherent connectivity patterns in the visual cortex. Consistent with this idea, there's other strains of research (sorry, too lazy to look up more citations) that show that psychedelics tend to decrease input from the primary sense organs, so that during a trip we really are literally turning inward. (if you want to look it up, iirc the effect is called "thalamic gating" or something? the senses all come up the spinal nerves into the thalamus which helps gate our attention, but during psychedelic experiences all thalamic input is turned down.)

So what happens when you turn down the dimmer on external senses, is that you "see" only from the "higher" cortical areas: suddenly the neurons that are several synapses removed from primary sense activity are the 'loudest' in our experience. This is why "set and setting" are so important in a trip, because you're going to literally experience your mood and emotional state more strongly than usual, since it won't be mediated as much by external sensory events. That's not to say there's no external senses- most people report experiencing a sort of psychedelic remix of ordinary reality. But back to the geometric patterns -- sometimes what you see really does seem to be based on the fundamental connectivity matrix. it's like in absence of strong input, the visual cortex just has activity rippling across it along its own wiring.

anyways hopefully this rambling with a few sources cited helped a little.

IMO there's nothing wrong with finding the beginnings more fun and enjoying the fun parts, but part of what prevents us from moving towards utopia is a blindness to the whole cycle, an unwillingness to engage in the difficulties of endings and change. This isn't to say we need to celebrate "the end" either, but just that in some sense, contentment _is_ utopia, and contentment requires making peace with both beginnings and ends.