You can be an adequate coder without being aggressively antisocial, but what Linus did requires something much more than that.
To be a genius, you need to be so far out of the mainstream that the mainstream will not cooperate with you. You'd have to be a saint not to lash out in anger from time to time.
We're talking about excellent, not just good. To achieve excellence, you absolutely have to put the mediocrities in their place or they will mess everything up.
Can any project prosper when technical success is no longer top priority?
Is there any way of forking off the whole damn thing to leave the SJWs to flounder in their own safe space? Linus has capitulated. I liked him better as a competent asshole than in his new incarnation as a wimp. But NO ONE OWNS THE CODE. Or something. These open source licenses confuse me.
Forking is divisive and fragmenting, you say? Compared to what?
is that it's a proxy measurement for Web based applications. PHBs love their Web apps.
And the real significance of this article is that what programmers want doesn't matter. Just take the money and write the code, code monkey. And try to forget why you went into software in the first place, because none of that matters anymore.
long before the Web. You can't say they should have seen it coming, because it had already come, decades before.
Allowing deep cross-linking of images was the fatal mistake. If they hadn't done that, probably no one would ever have come up with all the abuses that followed.
It's so damn simple. Keep ads on the same server as the site. Make them part of the site, under control of the site owner, who will lose his users if he doesn't police the ads. Don't support anything else in the protocol. Don't even put the idea of doing it any other way into PHB's heads.
And no cookies, except for session ID. Don't even have the concept of a "cookie" but have a header line for session ID.
Unless you've got really major marketing dollars to get everyone to switch over from their old ways.
The time to solve a design problem is long before it becomes obvious. Or, if you can't manage to spot it early enough...
They say make one system as a prototype and throw it away, then go design a better one. But the existence of a user base makes this advice impractical. The Web was a prototype-quality design that got established as a standard, because people were idiots.
but here's what holds me back. I'd be a johnny-come-lately to a long established culture, with its own established norms and shibboleths.
I can get alone fine with people so long as there's nothing at stake I care about. But having a few beers together is not at all the same thing as working on a project together.
I could maybe go solo and see how much I can fix things with just a forked implementation and maximum interoperability. But I don't have the know-how to head up an open source project.
Behind every technical problem lurks a people problem.
was because of various friends and groups that did everything through Facebook because it never occurred to them not to. They just couldn't grasp why I was so reluctant. They didn't see the problem.
In order to free myself from Facebook, I had to blow them all off. Let the hostages fend for themselves.
You can't just blow off a cultural institution. You have to count the cost and chew off a limb of your social life.
Society is other people. And most other people are morons.
It's unrealistic to expect empathy from the sort of people ho helm Internet companies. But it's realistic to expect them to change their ways when their ways cost them money.
He's not stupid, just evil. And evil can be reasoned with. All we had to do was hurt him enough.
then let's just say up front this is all about the windmills, and discuss the pro and cons of having windmills.
A dam is a mature and well understood technology. We know it and have reason to trust it. We don't need to introduce some other technology to justify the existence of dams.
I'm suspicious of special pleading for windmills and solar. If they need dams to be worthwhile, but the dams don't need them to be worthwhile...
As opposed to merely being possessed or controlled?
If you can fork it - without legal repercussions - it can be free. It's just a matter of effort and organization. How badly do we want freedom? How capable of we of protecting said freedom?
But I'd be willing to give the idea another shot if there were no dependency on a particular programming language and the protocol could at least be sufficiently nailed down for backward compatibility.
(This was years ago. If things had improved, I presume everyone would be talking about it.)
Fetching some stuff takes forever, but I'm not always in a hurry. There's always the regular Web, or maybe Tor.
Not just programming languages. Everything. Libraries, operating systems, user interfaces.
I'm not against innovation, but maintain backward compatibility for at least one major version. Deprecate APIs if you must, but don't break things on purpose. That's douchey.
Stability: easier to achieve if you don't change things without good reason.
Speed: sometimes it doesn't much matter, but when it matters, it matters a lot.
The fact that they even have a Code of Conduct is a big red flag. When you sign up with a company and they make you sing a big long thing about sexual harassment, doesn't that always turn out to be an awful company to work for?
I'd be all for Rust if they were all for freedom and prioritized solving technical problems. But with time, you learn to distrust anyone who doesn't make solving technical problems a top priority. Even if you agree with their values on other things. These people just don't know how to keep it real.
You can't work productively with others if you can't agree to disagree. Especially on matters unrelated to programming.
Grownups don't need a code of conduct. Codes of conduct are for children. Never try to work with someone who thinks of you as a child.
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You can be an adequate coder without being aggressively antisocial, but what Linus did requires something much more than that.
To be a genius, you need to be so far out of the mainstream that the mainstream will not cooperate with you. You'd have to be a saint not to lash out in anger from time to time.
We're talking about excellent, not just good. To achieve excellence, you absolutely have to put the mediocrities in their place or they will mess everything up.
Any coder worth his salt knows this is a red flag.
Anyone who doesn't see this is not a good coder.
I've known a few brilliant individuals. I've known many meek individuals. But I've yet to encounter both traits in the same person.
(Then again, how would I know?)
Meekness doesn't work. Sooner or later, a brilliant individual will figure this out.
Not a problem, so long as they can all gather and regroup somewhere else.
Here's a name for the new fork of the Linux kernel: Galt's Gulch.
Can any project prosper when technical success is no longer top priority?
Is there any way of forking off the whole damn thing to leave the SJWs to flounder in their own safe space? Linus has capitulated. I liked him better as a competent asshole than in his new incarnation as a wimp. But NO ONE OWNS THE CODE. Or something. These open source licenses confuse me.
Forking is divisive and fragmenting, you say? Compared to what?
I write my own GUI stuff and I use Python. I used to use Perl, which is a very, very messy language. I got fed up with that and switched.
No regrets. A reasonably clean object-oriented language is what you want to tame the mess.
Can't really defend the lambdas, but the rest of it... oh yeah.
I've also done C++ with MFC, because PHBs. It's a bit of of a mess, but at least it's a fast mess.
is that it's a proxy measurement for Web based applications. PHBs love their Web apps.
And the real significance of this article is that what programmers want doesn't matter. Just take the money and write the code, code monkey. And try to forget why you went into software in the first place, because none of that matters anymore.
What you can and can't get away with.
Everything else is just talk.
How much for a robot that just shuts up and does what it's told?
long before the Web. You can't say they should have seen it coming, because it had already come, decades before.
Allowing deep cross-linking of images was the fatal mistake. If they hadn't done that, probably no one would ever have come up with all the abuses that followed.
It's so damn simple. Keep ads on the same server as the site. Make them part of the site, under control of the site owner, who will lose his users if he doesn't police the ads. Don't support anything else in the protocol. Don't even put the idea of doing it any other way into PHB's heads.
And no cookies, except for session ID. Don't even have the concept of a "cookie" but have a header line for session ID.
But that's all too late now.
Unless you've got really major marketing dollars to get everyone to switch over from their old ways.
The time to solve a design problem is long before it becomes obvious. Or, if you can't manage to spot it early enough...
They say make one system as a prototype and throw it away, then go design a better one. But the existence of a user base makes this advice impractical. The Web was a prototype-quality design that got established as a standard, because people were idiots.
It's probably way too late to do it right.
but here's what holds me back. I'd be a johnny-come-lately to a long established culture, with its own established norms and shibboleths.
I can get alone fine with people so long as there's nothing at stake I care about. But having a few beers together is not at all the same thing as working on a project together.
I could maybe go solo and see how much I can fix things with just a forked implementation and maximum interoperability. But I don't have the know-how to head up an open source project.
Behind every technical problem lurks a people problem.
1. That's life, and there's no escaping life.
2. There's no one out there I trust to decide on my behalf what's bad and what's good.
was because of various friends and groups that did everything through Facebook because it never occurred to them not to. They just couldn't grasp why I was so reluctant. They didn't see the problem.
In order to free myself from Facebook, I had to blow them all off. Let the hostages fend for themselves.
You can't just blow off a cultural institution. You have to count the cost and chew off a limb of your social life.
Society is other people. And most other people are morons.
It's unrealistic to expect empathy from the sort of people ho helm Internet companies. But it's realistic to expect them to change their ways when their ways cost them money.
He's not stupid, just evil. And evil can be reasoned with. All we had to do was hurt him enough.
Then why are they saying to shut off the AC?
A whole lot of things in California don't add up. This is one of them.
then let's just say up front this is all about the windmills, and discuss the pro and cons of having windmills.
A dam is a mature and well understood technology. We know it and have reason to trust it. We don't need to introduce some other technology to justify the existence of dams.
I'm suspicious of special pleading for windmills and solar. If they need dams to be worthwhile, but the dams don't need them to be worthwhile...
If the water comes from the dam in the first place, wouldn't it be more efficient simply to leave it there until needed?
Basically, they want us to do their jobs for them? Because if we can, we can set up and run our own businesses.
As opposed to merely being possessed or controlled?
If you can fork it - without legal repercussions - it can be free. It's just a matter of effort and organization. How badly do we want freedom? How capable of we of protecting said freedom?
Can we just take our ball and go home?
Open isn't as open doesn't.
But really. What's to stop someone from forking the whole shebang and then running the fork properly? The nuclear option.
But I'd be willing to give the idea another shot if there were no dependency on a particular programming language and the protocol could at least be sufficiently nailed down for backward compatibility.
(This was years ago. If things had improved, I presume everyone would be talking about it.)
Fetching some stuff takes forever, but I'm not always in a hurry. There's always the regular Web, or maybe Tor.
that can undo all the damage done by all the lesser programmers out there.
Not just programming languages. Everything. Libraries, operating systems, user interfaces.
I'm not against innovation, but maintain backward compatibility for at least one major version. Deprecate APIs if you must, but don't break things on purpose. That's douchey.
Stability: easier to achieve if you don't change things without good reason.
Speed: sometimes it doesn't much matter, but when it matters, it matters a lot.
The fact that they even have a Code of Conduct is a big red flag. When you sign up with a company and they make you sing a big long thing about sexual harassment, doesn't that always turn out to be an awful company to work for?
I'd be all for Rust if they were all for freedom and prioritized solving technical problems. But with time, you learn to distrust anyone who doesn't make solving technical problems a top priority. Even if you agree with their values on other things. These people just don't know how to keep it real.
You can't work productively with others if you can't agree to disagree. Especially on matters unrelated to programming.
Grownups don't need a code of conduct. Codes of conduct are for children. Never try to work with someone who thinks of you as a child.