Breaking Smart
breakingsmart.com
breakingsmart.com
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rWspzjvnv4a3bRkVaaFFMWU_...
Unsurprisingly, it harbors plenty of confusion.
"Towards a Mass Flourishing" makes the outrageous claim that the hacker ethos is best embodied in Silicon Valley. In reality, SV is one of the most detached from the MIT hacker ethos, instead having its own entrepreneurial hacker culture that is markedly distinct.
The "Purists versus Pragmatists" essay romanticizes the release of Mosaic and gives little credit at all to Ted Nelson's ideas, who is shoved aside as a purist crank. It's a false dichotomy through and through.
"Agility and Illegibility" again romanticizes widespread access to personal computers as some entrepreneurial Randian vision, that of Bill Gates specifically.
The "Rough Consensus and Maximal Interestingness" essay misquotes Knuth and incorrectly attaches philosophical meanings to technical terms like dynamic binding and lazy evaluation. It further espouses the "direction of maximal interestingness" and grand visions in the post-dot com bust era, when in fact systems software research is becoming increasingly conservative compared to as recent as the 90s.
"Running Code and Perpetual Beta" presents the dogmas of "release early, release often" and constant chaotic flux in software as a natural result of great ideas, as opposed to being the result of a cascade of attention-deficit teenagers. Note that fault tolerance, stability and security are not mentioned once.
"Software as Subversion" equivocates "forking" as being a Git terminology that somehow reclaimed its negative stigma, when it is purely a GitHub redefinition. The author makes no distinction between a clone and a fork. Also a misrepresentation of OS/2's mismanagement to argue in favor of "worse is better" (ignoring all other great systems besides OS/2) and babble about how blockchains are pixie dust.
"The Principle of Generative Pluralism" sets up the false dichotomies of hardware-centric/software-centric and car-centric/smartphone-centric. I suppose it somewhat reflects the end user application programmer's understanding of hardware.
"A Tale of Two Computers" prematurely sets up mainframes as obsolete compared to distributed networked computers (they are not exclusive) and makes the error of ascribing a low-level property to an ephemeral, unimportant abstraction - its marvel at the hashtag when the core idea of networking has enabled the same for much longer, and will continue to.
"The Immortality of Bits" is one of the worst, and makes this claim: "Surprisingly, as a consequence of software eating the technology industry itself, the specifics of the hardware are not important in this evolution. Outside of the most demanding applications, data, code, and networking are all largely hardware-agnostic today." This reeks of an ignorant programmer, oblivious as to how just how much hardware design decisions control them and shape their view. In fact, this is a very dangerous view to propagate. Our hardware is in desperate need of being upgraded to handle things like capability-based addressing, high-level assembly and thread-level over instruction-level parallelism. This stupid "hardware doesn't matter" thinking will delay it. The essay also wrongly thinks containerization is a form of hardware virtualization. It further says the "sharing economy" will usurp everything, which is ridiculous.
"Tinkering versus Goals" again sets up tinkering for the sake of it as leading to disruption and innovation, and not churn and CADT.
The "Free as in Beer, and as in Speech" essay clumsily and classically gets the chronology and values of open source and free software wrong. Moreover, the footnote demonstrates a profound bias for the "open source" ideal of pragmatism. This is in spite of the fact that many of the consequentialist technical arguments for OSS like the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" argument have proven to be flawed, whereas free software making no claims of technical superiority and using ethical arguments has a much stronger, if less popular case.
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Overall, I do not recommend this.
Seriously. Facepalm.
RMS would not be happy to read this.
> we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.[1]
[1] http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...
Richard M. Stallman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpAKasXdrXI&t=2m55s)
This is also where the nerd-power term "Libre" comes into play which inspired such misnamed catastrophies as "LibreOffice."
Free ~ Libre = Freedom of User Modification, free as in "I'm free, I'm not a slave" — nothing to do with monetary "free" of not paying for code you can see, though that is seemingly a prerequisite.
Open Source is just putting stuff up online and saying "lol whatevz." If your system runs code, it may have had an origin in open source software but got forked and now the new creator doesn't want you to see it. Open source binaries give you no rights as a user (developer retains freedom of distribution and profiteering off other people's code without giving back; user has no rights).
Update: Free Software also prides itself on excessively pedantic terminology and 16 different kinds of Free Software each with their own rights and restrictions (e.g. AGPL (or "The Coward's License") versus GPL2 versus GPL3 versus LGPL versus TEAPOT-GPL, ...)
Update2: They also like parrots, but please do not buy one just for them to play with. Parrots are a lifelong commitment.
Second, you're conflating copyleft with free and permissive with open. This is not the case. The definitions of free software and open source are largely identical (copyleft/permissive being OK both under free and open definitions), however the open source movement rejects all ethical, moral and social arguments, in addition to not concerning itself with privacy rights, DRM, Tivoization and other threats to user freedom.
Normal humans aren't supposed to understand this stuff. You are supposed to sit back and absorb it potentially while under the influence of mind expanding substances. It has also been rumored it helps to have two or more brains to understand ribbonfarm posts after 2012.
Plus, these writings are explicitly "inspired" by spending a year with Valley Thought Leaders and growing their already delusional viewpoints to even higher extremes (source: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/07/28/breaking-smart/). If you want to know how the movers and shakers in SV view their positions on high, read these essays and bask in the glow of their perfect prophecies of how the future will play out and how they, the ones on high—they, and they alone, are instrumental to the future of humanity. (plus, like, lol sharing economy with 25% vig so you maintain a monied billionaire class, obviously. feel free to share, but always give us 25% or we'll cry.)
These essays follow in the modern ribbonfarm style (high concept stream-of-thought/forget-the-world story telling—start with a thesis, see how far you can go until the world breaks). For example, here's a recent totally serious ribbonfarm excerpt about email: Stream workflows avoid the illusion of perfectability of information flows implicit in notions like Inbox Zero altigether. Flow Laminar is an asymptotic ideal you will never actually reach, because incoming flows always bring in entropy, and while you can impose laminar flow on downstream parts of a stream, the only way to get rid of turbulence is to shut down the flow altogether.
When republicans stand up and say "kill all abortion doctors," we don't necessarily have to start out with "while you have a good point, sir, ...."
Sometimes you have to call out crazy when you see it. Venkat's posts aren't crazy though. His writing consists of entertaining thought experiments and protracted observations of technical society. It's easy to poke holes in his writing when he assumes his experimental concepts have become ground truth reality then further expands, basing new concepts on his own personal ungrounded reality. It's an entire memesphere created by one person. Unless you follow along from the beginning, it feels weird and slimy until you observe how everything connects back through a single stranded conceptual birthing process.
I've been a member for almost four years and I still haven't figured out what it is, but it makes me shake my head every time.
"I didn't mean to make the book controversial. I was trying to make it efficient. I didn't want to waste people's time telling them things they already knew. It's more efficient just to give them the diffs. But I suppose that's bound to yield an alarming book."
Also, comments that amount to "I like this" can be compressed to an upvote. So we don't see many of those.
When you make claims and take up people's time, that's credit. When you don't fulfill that credit with something you promised, you have taken more than you've given.
That upsets people.
So people ignore homeless folks because all they can do is ask for credit without ever fulfilling it.
Some posts on HN are like that - they take up your time by sounding grandiose in this case and then you realize it's just nonsense and you feel like they've not re-paid that credit.
With homeless people, you know they won't pay back so you ignore them. With HN and other data aggregators, you take your chances. Sometimes, you give out so much credit without getting anything back, that you grow frustrated.
People refer to that as click-bait and there are many other forms of growing pains - some of them simply stemming from the fact that you can't please everyone.
Assuming this clears up the confusion you've had for 4 years, I've justified you reading this and earned some future credit :)
Perhaps this ties into the engineering mind, which can be very quick to spot potential issues. That's one primary way you make your living as an engineer, by spotting potential issues in a process or activity before they occur and mitigating them. But this can quickly turn into simple bashing of someone's work if we're not careful.
- Michael O. Church's latest: https://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2015/07/18/technology-i...
- Giles Bowkett on the decadence of the current consumer software industry with regard to QA: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/07/actually-no-stuff-u... See also his takedown of Paul Graham's essay on immigration: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/06/let-other-95-of-rea... and why we should currently be scared of software eating the world: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2015/05/my-skepticism-re-ub...
- A couple of posts from Alex Payne: https://al3x.net/2014/06/17/dear-marc-andreessen.html https://al3x.net/2013/12/18/bitcoin.html
- Unicornfree with Amy Hoy, which promotes bootstrapping profitable businesses (remember, Mr. Rao dismissed steady-state models of profitability as self-limiting purism in "Rough Consensus and Maximum Interestingness"). For example: https://unicornfree.com/2014/4-economic-facts-that-say-boots... https://unicornfree.com/2010/dont-bite-the-shit-sandwich https://unicornfree.com/2011/fuck-glory-startups-are-one-lon...
They don't match other definitions of "soft technologies" and I'm having difficulty figuring out what the definition is here that only includes writing, money and software (frankly, I suspect if anyone other than an American had written this, money wouldn't be on the list).
What I'm really curious about is how to best consume these. I suppose a mailing list would be the norm, but I'd like to see them automatically land in Instapaper or Pocket. I'll have to see if there's a way already.
It was a little laborious, but I went through each essay and used dotEPUB (http://dotepub.com/) to convert it to epub, then transferred to my ereader manually.
I considered looking for a more automated solution, before realising that it would take more time looking for a solution than just manually doing it.
Similarly for pocket I imagine with the frequency these are coming out it would be easiest to simply manually add each essay to pocket.
All you have to do is input a txt file of links, in this case: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=8PTFJ2x4
Here is the output epub for all to enjoy: http://cl.ly/022V1Y1t2I24
In cases when I care about formatting/metadata, I might use pandoc to merge all the \d+.html files, regex or edit, and then use pandoc to output *epub
And only two of these, written language and money, were soft technologies: seemingly ephemeral, but capable of being embodied in a variety of specific physical forms.
For example: math, the OODA loop, indexing, laws, logistics (ex siege warfare, "never start a land war in asia"), contracts, empire / political hierarchy, etc.
Agree Ribbonfam peaked with the Gervais Principle essay. Agree with some of the criticisms here. Will add my own: the first three essays are somewhat accessible but after that the author is talking to the echo chamber which is his regular blog audience.
Also lots of references to previous great insights: Alan Kay, Carlota Perez, Jeff Bezos,
I refer to this as "cementing the drive."
Edit: i get what turned me off by this. It was the positioning as a radical new media concept and the convoluted and confusing explanation.
What do you call the development and research of a text based narrative which is catalogued for direct and total consumption online?
> an e-book. Got it now guys.
I'm sorry, what? Oh it certainly is, believe me.
A somewhat darker view (from a certain perspective) is that he wanted to say his piece without being contradicted or argued with. To write a series of essays that don't have to respond to "the community" and get weighed down by reaction. One could even say that it's an expression of a pastoral utopia of pedagogy! :P
This is a great collections of essays, I'd say bed time reading for the budding entrepreneur and/or VC.
Ignore (or misunderstand) at your own peril.
This is that, except in ascii.
The lines are over 120 characters long at 16px. On a 1080p screen this is just to small and wide to follow properly.
This sort of thing is bearable here on HN when skimming comments but for reading over '30,000 words' it's just too off putting to even start reading.
For some reason there's always some highly-rated complaint on HN comments about the website layout, and I do not understand why. They are honestly the most boring comments to read.
> A reader emailed to complain about how this and other HN discussions often become derailed by off-topic carping about blog design. I agree completely. Could there be a more classic form of bikeshedding? It would seem parodic if it weren't sadly real. This has become more of a thing on HN lately. It needs to become less of a thing.
> I don't mean to pick on you personally, or just on this one comment. (Your second sentence alone, by the way, would have been a helpful contribution.) The problem is the tedious stampedes such comments spawn.
You realize you can shrink your browser window width and
increase the text size to make the layout how you want?
I would much appreciate an answer as I've tried taking up the responsibility of doing my part in keeping HN a great place with valuable comments and insights!
To divorce the content and the presentation is simply not feasible and pretty insulting to the good work of designers/typesetters and indeed readers.
I suspect the frequency of this sort of comment is due to the frequency of bad design.
Perhaps in other cases this sort of comment isn't relevant, I can accept that argument. I argue that here it is relevant because the entire premise of the material is that it's for reading and the presentation makes that unviable.
Do we also stop positive comments like this[0] one?
Perhaps what I should have done is make a more detailed post outlining the issues with the content and perhaps linked to well accepted design practices that help improve the reading experience. But to suggest 'these types of comments' are without relevance (*and deserving of flagging) is to deny conversation about an important part of the submission content.
I definitely would not flag every design-related comment, but I was mostly wondering if it is ever justified to do so.
(and just to be clear, I had no particular opinion on your comment - it just reminded me to ask about flagging etiquette)