> I have to admit that I don't understand half of this blog post
It's because you haven't read al-Ghazali yet.
(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)
It's because you haven't read al-Ghazali yet.
(definitely the most pompous and self-important part of this post)
I’m quite familiar with both western and eastern traditions, don’t know any better source than Ghazali’s “the alchemy of happiness” about how people make decisions.
It’s kind of ironic to see people being triggered by just the mention of it though — just reflects what your heart tends to reject impulsively. I wish you curiosity.
P.S Here’s the full quote, it entertainingly describes the ignorance here:
“first, they didn't look at the dates of the emails. They don't understand the timeline.
second, they can't relate to standing your ground in a high pressure situation involving threats.
and third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali yet, don't quite understand how (free) people make decisions”
Let's put the same sentence:
"I'd love to explain to you, but if you haven't read $SOURCE_MATERIAL, you wouldn't understand it anyway".
Does it sound pompous and insufferable?
Of course we can agree to disagree. I'm not trying to win anything, but just express my perspective.
Have a nice day!
Politely pushes forward a freshly brewed mug of tea across the counter.
If getting wisdom from others is not your thing, I can respect that, but low-key insulting them for leaving you pointers for a more enlightened place is rude.
You can instead say "I don't understand why Al-Ghazali relates to this", and that would be completely OK.
Lastly, it's fine to quote someone but you need to explain how it's relevant to the conversation. The author could have summarised al-Ghazali's idea about free will or whatever and it would have been fine. But he didn't even bother, as if the ideas so basic and well known that it's not even worth doing.
I'm pretty comfortable with the way I've poked fun at the author's pompousness. If you need further explanation it's because you haven't read Chanakya yet.
I don't think that you're pompous because you cited somebody I don't know that existed. I'm not a god. People show me things I don't know, I take note of them.
Maybe I won't agree with the direction you show me, but at least I have a new direction to discover.
This is the difference.
> And third, they haven't read Al-Ghazali, don't quite understand how I make decisions.
Not everyone makes decision guided by the heart. Many people lean more on reason and logic.
Yes, when theres's no impulse strong enough to outweigh reasoning. You don't need Ghazali for this, Kant also explains it. Before suggesting that I rephrase things, I think you should explore the domain first.
I don't know that I fully buy this either, at least not the anger part.
I can look back on all this with wry amusement nowadays but I remember it being pretty frustrating at the time.
It sort of felt like, well, either you knew what the impact of unpublishing all your packages would be and you did it anyway, which makes you kind of antisocial, or you didn't know what the impact would be but did it anyway, which makes you kind of a hothead. And in this latest piece Azer has admitted that he didn't understand what the impact would be so... y'know... I do wonder if anger was at least a small factor.
Regardless, it's pretty clear that npm bear a lot of the responsibility for what happened. It's also something that happened a very long time ago and, as I've already implied, is just a funny story nowadays, not something I can manage any ire towards Azer over.
He wants to remove his stuff, but isn't sure what the right way to do it is, so he asks npm. npm provides him with a set of scripts to run to remove his stuff, and he, presuming that it's "ok" if npm told him to go ahead and run them, runs them. The impact isn't especially important to him, But since npm just gave him a set of scripts with an implicit "oh okay you want to remove your stuff, here I wrote you a script you can run to get it done," makes it more of an npm choice to handle it in this manner. npm asked him to handle it this way, so he did.
If NPM would have prevented the depublishing, he would have made a scene and in the worst case, they would have looked bad.
How they actually handled it, the library author got full freedom but also full responsibility
Lesson: Vendor your dependencies, I guess. Although a lot of the ire around left-pad was programmers using a library for something so trivial, but that's a different conversation.
Very true.
Although, from 2012 onwards, up to around the time of the leftpad incident, the trend - and the pressure - was to minimise the amount of work your code was doing and to publish tiny packages that only did one thing or solved one problem, deferring to other tiny packages for anything non-core. I remember colleagues more embedded in the JS world than I was passionately arguing for this in 2012/13.
And it did make some sense: bandwidth matters, particularly on mobile devices (which became a key source of traffic during that period) so why pull in some gigantic do everything library when you only need a handful of functions[0]? Sure, minifying and pruning help but, due to JS's nature, pruning can only get you so far.
But, yes, I think leftpad was something of a teaching moment on the downsides of this approach.
[0] Of course, if you then stick 6 different tracking scripts in all your pages, it's super-easy to undo all the good you've done by minimising your bundle size, but that's a different conversation.
I mean he says he asked them to remove all his packages, expecting them to do so gradually, following whatever mitigation strategy they felt appropriate (e.g. some kind of warning and fadeout process), and instead they gave him a script to do it immediately so he did that.
As opposed to looking much worse? Easy decision.
grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference
This whole problem was trivially avoidable, and people get mad at him because they were too lazy to avoid it.
Lots of people made a big mistake, they found out the hard way. Lesson learned.
Being neutral and seeing a good way forward is not something practiced, taught or celebrated in western, esp. American culture much. One always needs to have a thrust source (mostly an emotion driven by logic, taught during being grown up (e.g.: You should be angry about it)) to make decisions.
In fact, sometimes, you just don't have a thrust source, you just feel like doing it. It feels the right thing to do, and you do it with no emotions attached.
This is a boon, in fact it's called "clarity" brought by being with yourself. Either spending time outdoors, doing some reflection work, or by meditating. I use the same methods when I face with a non-urgent but important decision. Let the way reveal itself. Putting logic and emotions aside and finding the right way is not easy, or the process is not smooth sailing, but I never arrived to a wrong place by following that path.
So, im gonna try and read something by al-Ghazali.
When this happened, people started making assumptions. A few of them:
1. I’m irrational 2. I’m angry 3. I’m greedy
They came to one of these conclusions, based on how they see themselves in the same position.
I can be of course one of these three in some other situations, but in the left pad incident, I done all purely with my heart, to stick to my values and principles which was behind my motivation to do open source for such a long time.
Ghazali is the best source I’m aware of about how to put heart in the driver seat of life, and without fighting but using logic, greed, anger etc as tools.
If my reference made curious about him, I couldn’t be more happy. Here’s a great lecture about his book, The Alchemy of Happiness: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zBwWc0DflRQ
One thing I have learned about al-Ghazali today, thanks to your efforts, is that philosophers aren't always right, faith and logic can work together, and doubting everything can lead to truth.
But, most importantly, live ones faith honestly - and this is especially true for those of us who detest imperialist/corporate interference in spiritual activities, such as publishing packages to the npm ecosystem intended to make ones fellow human beings lives' more rewarding, in spite of the lack of personal rewards to be gained in doing so.. that the value in seeing this is lost on a lot of HN responses in this thread so far, is no big surprise - but it is surely disappointing.
I hope you will consider adding Aquinus and Augustine of Hippo to your references, also. Sometimes it helps to see how the universality of true philosophy crosses cultural divides.
What compels you to say this? Would you be more satisfied if he'd suggested the reader acquaint themselves with Thomas Aquinas or Augustine of Hippo? Are you familiar with al-Ghazali, the scholar, or is he new to you?
You have, rather literally, proven the philosophers point - while remaining, it seems, ignorant of it.
Or perhaps, you mean to imply that /u/akoculu was doing a good deed not because he cared, but to show off?
The irony is, al-Ghazali asked his readers to question their pomp and self-importance, and to do good deeds because they truly cared, not because it would result in social acknowledgement by the mass collective, whose motives should always be questioned, effectively.
Perhaps, then, your position is more of a reflection of your own condition? One would hope your disdain is borne on an actual understanding of al-Ghazali's position, vis a vis self-doubt ... or rather, one would hope your current position is based on an ignorance of his works, actually.
One should never feel so compelled to deny the enlightenment of others, especially if by doing so, you resort to personally-motivated obscurantism in response.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."
"Edit out swipes."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44245579.