anonyme-honteux

I'm not talking about Musk, it may be hard to believe, but I genuinely don't care about him. He is the current guy with too much money, fame and ego.

I'm talking about his fans and their perceptions of Musk. They hear "he is the real life Tony Stark" and they think "WOW" instead of Tony Stark is a character of fiction that can't possibly exist in reality".

Absurdity is fascinating to me.

That's so true, why bother doing great work, which is a lot of work, when you can get the credit of many people doing it?

That's what Elon Musk has done since the start of his career and it has worked pretty well for him. For that you need to be a really good hype man because it's objectively true that great work that nobody knows about is pure waste. You need to be rich because in the US it's assumed that this means something awesome about you personally. You need to be the one who always announce the news on Twitter, you don't even have to lie, your strongest fan will assume you did all the work. Like they believe he is the founder of Tesla. Like they believe he is the real life Tony Stark. Like they believe that he, not the actual rocket scientists working at Tesla, design all those rockets. Like they believe that he invented the hyperloop when he renamed the vactrain concept from hundred years ago and then couldn't build it because it's bullshit. Like they believe he will save humanity by helping us anytime soon to escape Earth that people like him are destroying.

I don't really care about Elon Musk. The guy is a mix between a Tech Robber Baron and an emotionally immature 14 years old who has read too much science fiction. And remember more the fiction than the science.

OTOH his fan club is a fascinating experiment on how a cult of personality develops in public and in real time.

Great, love it when shitty work culture super, who doesn't like to have a boss that thinks he is a medieval landlord?

Max Weber's "Protestant Ethic" did not refer to the teaching of Luther that are mainstream in Germany but specifically to the Calvinists and Pietists that brought their value to the US.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protestant_Ethic_and_the_S...

When he discussed it in the Protestant Ethic, he used Lutheranism as the chief example of the unio mystica that contrasted sharply with the ascetic posture. Later he would associate "Luther, the symbolic exponent of bureaucratic despotism, with the ascetic hostility to Eros — an example of Weber's sporadic tendency to link together bureaucratic and ascetic modes of life and to oppose both from mystical and aristocratic perspectives."

However, Weber saw the fulfillment of the Protestant ethic not in Lutheranism, which was too concerned with the reception of divine spirit in the soul, but in Calvinistic forms of Christianity.[6]: 32–33 The trend was carried further still in Pietism.

For example Bernard Arnault is currently the richest man on earth and the cult of Bernard Arnault in France is pretty much inexistant.

Founder worship is a straightforward evolution of a general US/protestant (See Max Weber) worship of rich people. It's here to stay because that permeates US culture completely. Most don't even notice it.

I do because I was raised in a roman-catholic country rich people are not supposed to be worshipped - straightforward interpretation of the Bible.

On the other hand when I read stories of Elon Musk the real-life Tony Spark whose by the sheer force of its genius brain is going to save Humanity by making it multi-galactic, that does remind me of the hagiographies I had to read when I was young - those unbelievable but nonetheless believed biographies of the saints of the catholic pantheon.

Open source projects are under financed and their maintainers are overwhelmed. I would rather read proposed solutions about that because that seems like the more important problem.

Also matches my experience with Twitter

Using those kind of Unix tools is like having a time travel machine to understand what kind of mistakes you should never do when Iyou design a software.

Not having system wide keyboard shortcuts is one of them: vim, emacs, nano etc all have a different shortcut to quit the app

Worse still, every software invents his own configuration format.

Thinking that being ultra configurable is a good excuse for not doing the right thing by default is another big one. Syntax highlighting should just work, not only sort of work when you learn a configuration syntax and install little known third party packages

Isn't that because it's our true nature as human beings?

We used to be survival specialists knowing the basics of lots of things. Those who didn't didn't survive.

Then division of labor kicked in and it's both a blessing and a curse

I don't think so, many people have a wide array of skills and interests, but none of them is business related.

Are they being taken advantage of? Sure, most people are being taken advantage of, that's the system we live in, it's called capitalism. But in rich countries that often still leaves enough to have a good life.

No it's about generalists versus specialists, problem solvers versus maintainers. There is not one category inherently better than the other contrary to the 10x bullshit, they will thrive in different contexts

Nobody is removing null because null itself is not the mistake. The mistake was to say like in Java that null is a valid value for every possible class under the sun. What Kotlin & cie are saying is that if your parameter is a RandomGenerator, null should not be allowed there because null is not a RandomGenerator. Null is null and that's it. If you search something in a map, your value will be of type "String?", that is "String | null" and that's completely fine, the compiler will assist you with that too.

Freedom of speech exists in dozen of countries but "Free Speech (TM)" is a very US specific thing that seemingly generate an infinite amount of non-sense. People get lost in abstraction and start to think that giving a megaphone to fascists like Twitter did even before Musk is somehow good because the best way to defeat fascism, when you live on planet Mars, is on the "marketplace of ideas". On planet Earth this is not at all how it works, the rise of fascists correlates directly with diminishing freedoms, and to defeat fascists you need the Red Army.

There are so much bad hiring practices in our industry that I indeed choose to trust the rare companies that do it right over the ones that cargo cult Google brain teaser questions, make you implement quicksort on a whiteboard, give you a take-home project that will take you forever but they will hardly glance at, will stop replying to you because ghosting is good, ...

That's the first impression I get from an unknown company and I decided to trust it.

It's the US, there are no worker rights but there is this dumb ubiquitous storytelling about billionaires who became rich only because they are smarter and more virtuous than everyone else.

Unfortunately some people will need to suffer a depression or something before they realize they need to focus on their own needs and their own life rather than work 10-12 hours a day seven days a week (my god!) to satisfy someone else's ego.

It's not very buried, Mars'x quote that "religion is the opium of the people" is famous. But it's also misquoted.

"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

The complete quote shows that Marx sees religion as playing an ambiguous role. For him religion is often used to preach resignation "it doesn't matter what you suffer in this world, the next one is good". But sometimes it's at the center of the rebellion of the "oppressed creature". Think the black civil right movement in the US or the Liberation Theology in South America. So it's not blanket hostility.

Wahabism is an ideology. Saudi Arabia sucks because the owner of the country (yes the coutnry is owned by a family) made it a state ideology. Atheism is not an ideology, it's an absence of one. You can be atheist and anything, including a huge arsehole like Stalin, or including the exact contrary of that.

Irony of history is that young Stalin enrolled in the Orthodox Spiritual Seminary in Tiflis and apparently was very good at that, writing poetry and everything. But obviously being power hungry, he couldn't stay there.

You're right but Iran doesn't need to be pro West for a balance of terror strategy to be workable. Iran needs only to hate the US and Europe less than it hates Saudi Arabia, which I believe is the case .

It's one of the craziest self defeating decision that the US and to a lesser extinct Europe decided to pick a side between the two horrible oil financed theocracies - Iran and Saudi Arabia - instead of simply playing one against the other depending on our self interests. That makes us complicit for no good reason in things like the Yemen war.

Unpopular* opinion: actually theocracy sucks

* Not

Nope the git log is a merkle tree. The blockchain is a merkle tree plus all the layers of overengineering you need to have a consensus algorithm. And usually you "need" a consensus algorithm mostly for ideological reasons. My view is that building trust is better than assuiming it can't or shouldn't exist.

It has nothing to do with the platform really.

If a platform is huge enough, there are lots of humans there, including lots of humans who post very interesting content. Even LinkedIn, I used to think it was a pure waste of time to be on LinkedIn, but I recently realized I was completely wrong and depending on the subject you are interested in - but probably not programming - there are niches on LinkedIn that are incredibly interesting.

The scary thought is that we may loose track of those content creators that inspire us for a dumb reason like Elon Musk sabotaging it from the top, and our favorite content creators not being readily available anymore.

I hope if that happens that we do the effort to google the handles of those people and find them on whatever place of the web they migrated.

America with good public transit would definitely outperform dollar-wise America without it.

Sounds way less efficient than just building a train.

I'm confident that we should stop talking about crypto "currencies", because a currency where you get rich by just holding to it is the contrary of a good currency.

I create value in the real world and use the euro to exchange it against something else of value, which is very convenient, but the euro itself is not the goal.

Call it unregulated crypto gambling or something, that would be more honest.

Actually sending money directly to the poor is a very efficient form of government program.

It's the exact contrary of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is deciding for the poor what they are allowed to do with the money on the wrong assumption that they wouldn't know better than you what to do with it. In fact the less money you have, the more careful you are with it. Obviously. And at the extreme end of the spectrum, if you are rich like Elon Musk, you spend 44 billions on something dumb.

I don't doubt that the US can produce good schools and good engineers. Like I said what happened during world war two was unprecedented.

But good engineers from good schools won't stay and become great at their work unless they have big infrastructure projects to work on. Also money and prestige. Their colleagues from Japan, France, Germany and Spain have huge infrastructure projects to work on.

What's the equivalent of that in the US right now?

The relevant context here is that everything is done to crush any kind of wannabe unions in the united states of America, unlike say in Germany or Northern Europe.

I come from France where the desire from the elite to crush unions is also strong, but the USA is yet another level.

Given that context the unions that do exist today in the USA have been selected for their survival skills more than anything else. Like always you can only reap what you sow

So what do you think that the US plutocrats would welcome German style strong unions efficient at negociating higher salaries?