On one hand, a general macro-economic problem we have is that the more we automated, the cheaper labor gets, the less we want to automate. Stuff like public transit -> Uber is a clear productivity loss, even.
So we need to restructure our society to have economy the promotes leisure not output.
That will at least align the incentives right with a lot of more extreme engineering that just doesn't make economic sense today.
On a completely different level, yes, this is the sort of thing that does require passion. There is a lot of obscure stuff that is hard to plan or otherwise validate society. I'm a bit of a utopian I suppose in thinking if we had more leisure and guaranteed consumption, people would be able to do more passion projects, and we could give people hindsight recognition just instead like this.
Basic needs can be unconditional, renown can be the reward for "extra" work.
Finally, I hope as more monoliths are broken into libraries, we get more of this sort of stuff organically. Beyond the economics, conways law holds us back. (Even within the kernel!) Need to make sure people feel free and safe to really get down in other people's code, to develop the macro view, to see stuff like this.
This is the sort of "macro" refactor you can't get to with just local optimizations alone. We can and should break it into steps, but by not means does every commit have its own clear perf benefit.
So we need to restructure our society to have economy the promotes leisure not output.
That will at least align the incentives right with a lot of more extreme engineering that just doesn't make economic sense today.
On a completely different level, yes, this is the sort of thing that does require passion. There is a lot of obscure stuff that is hard to plan or otherwise validate society. I'm a bit of a utopian I suppose in thinking if we had more leisure and guaranteed consumption, people would be able to do more passion projects, and we could give people hindsight recognition just instead like this.
Basic needs can be unconditional, renown can be the reward for "extra" work.
Finally, I hope as more monoliths are broken into libraries, we get more of this sort of stuff organically. Beyond the economics, conways law holds us back. (Even within the kernel!) Need to make sure people feel free and safe to really get down in other people's code, to develop the macro view, to see stuff like this.
This is the sort of "macro" refactor you can't get to with just local optimizations alone. We can and should break it into steps, but by not means does every commit have its own clear perf benefit.