> Compression culture is refusing to do any work, demanding instead a mere summary of calculus or a novel
This sounds rather tautological. My intent was to give an example of compression that is an obvious good. If we re-define compression to exclude that, pretty quickly we've just reduced the definition to compression = bad things. Bad things are, you know, bad, by definition, so this gives us no guidance for our future decisions.
> more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel
I was just having a conversation over in the jutjusu post about how and why you make commits, when you squash them, when you reorder them, and so on.
What is a "pull request" if not a compression of the work I did to develop the required change? I even include a summary at the top so people don't have to read all of the actual code.
I never said that compression was inherently bad, and I don't think the article author did either. Here's what I said about the subject in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44649897
My objection wasn't about good vs. bad. I think the distinction is between mastery and superficiality. You can master calculus without starting from complete scratch like Newton did. But you can't master calculus by reading the CliffsNotes (for the older crowd) or AI summaries (for the younger crowd) of a calculus textbook. You have to put in the work. Even standing on the shoulders of giants such as Newton, it still doesn't come easy.
This sounds rather tautological. My intent was to give an example of compression that is an obvious good. If we re-define compression to exclude that, pretty quickly we've just reduced the definition to compression = bad things. Bad things are, you know, bad, by definition, so this gives us no guidance for our future decisions.
> more than reading a novel is the compression of writing the novel
I was just having a conversation over in the jutjusu post about how and why you make commits, when you squash them, when you reorder them, and so on.
What is a "pull request" if not a compression of the work I did to develop the required change? I even include a summary at the top so people don't have to read all of the actual code.