Yes, but I think the reason things become that important is when they are used by a lot of people. People (or small teams) building purpose-specific tools for themselves don't require any of that.
I don't know where you take the idea that it's dead or dying as a discipline. The need for software solutions is clearly bigger than ever and growing. And what I see, even as and especially with LLM coding becoming more prevalent, is a breakneck rapid decline in the quality of delivered software and a downright explosion of security issues and incidents.
AI is making it so that”working with computers” is no longer a viable career path. At least that’s the goal.
As AI allows more and more people to accomplish tasks without a deep understanding of computers, “working with computers“ will be as much of a marketable job skill as “working with pencils” 50 or 100 years ago.
Yeah, they don't really teach this part in history [1]:
> At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, law enforcement and intelligence leaders like J. Edgar Hoover at the F.B.I. and Allen Dulles at the C.I.A. aggressively recruited onetime Nazis of all ranks as secret, anti-Soviet “assets,” declassified records show. They believed the ex-Nazis’ intelligence value against the Russians outweighed what one official called “moral lapses” in their service to the Third Reich.
And NATO [2]:
> The most senior officers of the latter group were Hans Speidel and Adolf Heusinger, who on Oct. 10 and Nov. 12, 1955, respectively, were sworn in as the Bundeswehr’s first two lieutenant generals... Heusinger, a POW until 1948, ...
> That spring Heusinger succeeded Speidel as chief of Combined Forces when the latter was appointed commander in chief of Allied Land Forces in Central Europe becoming the first German officer to hold a NATO commander in chief position
And it goes on.
Nazi links are well-established to Operation Paperclip [3] under Werner von braun.
And there are many others [4].
I didn't say all the non-communists were Nazi. I said the neoliberal and imperialist projects of the US and Western Europe post-WW2 sided with and gave haven to Nazis to fight communism, which is true.
Fascism in the US didn't begin with the Nazis however. You can trace back the roots to the white supremacy the US was founded on, the slave trade, the Civil War, Reconstruction and even the Business Plot [5] that sought to overthrow FDR in 1933, probably labelling him a communist.
But the Nazis were very popular in the US, culminating with the German American Bund rally in Madison Square Gardens in 1939 [6].
Oh and let's not forget Henry Ford's contribution to all this, notably The International Jew [7], so much so that Hitler praised him in Mein Kampf.
Personally, I'm of the view that a lot of this can be traced back to simply not stringing up all the former slave owners after the Civil War.
That's not the point of his piece, and spending time virtue signaling to the reader would undermine the message that this kindness is a form of grace, given freely without expectation of reciprocation.
reply