123 karma · joined November 8, 2007
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2007/07/scoble-ipho...
If the tech world is a big family, Scoble is the youngest kid whose incessant bids for attention have the older ones rolling their eyes.
I believe he is the one who has most encouraged the tendencies which led to the Perl 6 debacle. His strong charisma has made it acceptable to have the following attitudes in the Perl 6 effort:
- Actual use by mortal programmers is boring; satisfying your desire to be brilliant and clever is what matters
- Complexity and obscurity are fun. Perl is good or popular because the language is complex, therefore the next version of Perl should be even more complex.
Perl 6 really has nothing to do with Perl 5. It's more like those movies that say "a movie by the producers of $THING_THAT_WAS_AWESOME" which neglect to mention the script and the director are different.
OpenID is a simple idea that was seized upon and overwhelmed by a large number of asshats who wanted to embrace and extend the concept with dopey shit like XRIs.
Unfortunately, those people have way too much influence on the written spec. This is not to denigrate anything daveman692 is doing and BradFitz did, it's the other people that I wish would fall off a cliff.
Whenever i need to open an important account (say, with the power utility) I make up answers and record them on paper. Simple. Effective.
I realize that the USA is used to looking inward for solutions, but other governments are solving these problems, better, today.
Every discussion I have with Americans about healthcare leads directly to these imagined totalitarian futures, as if "everybody" knew that this was what happens. I don't understand it. Where did you all learn this narrative? Was there some nursery rhyme about the evils of socialized medicine?
I have lived in Vancouver and I'm not going to knock it, all kinds of cool things have come out of there, and the lifestyle is great too. But where is my Maker Faire? My functional language discussion groups?
To me, this is an attempt at lifestyle design. If I just wanted to grind away at something without my friends and preferred hangouts in close reach... well, that's not enough right now.
Perhaps the idea of 'lifestyle design' is incompatible with starting a new venture. I suppose I have to just sacrifice everything for the good of the idea?
I agree. Down with discrete; we need continuous packaging.
That is approximately the most depressing idea ever.
Except for the fact that existing drug cartels would kill you before you could succeed.
The next generation of Intel mobile chips are supposed to run on one watt. They already sell windup flashlights that run on one watt.
If it's just me, I'll be happy to be wrong. But the irony here is that my day job involves helping people schedule their leisure activity. I've seen research on what people actually do with their time and it's freaking dismal. After college people fall into a rut of work/sleep/TV.
People say things like "dinner parties" because that's the last thing they remember doing, but if you probe a bit further, this event is usually months in the past.
By "sustained effort" I wanted to distinguish a hobby from mere pass-times like television watching. I think 3 hrs/week is plenty. And tabletop wargaming is an activity that at least exercises the imagination, so I wasn't really talking about people like yourself.
It could be argued that the idea of having a hobby is some outmoded bourgeois affectation, an imitation of the Victorian idle rich. So, neither do I want to impose the necessity of having a hobby on anyone else. But I do feel the lack of one in my own life.
A hobby is something you can actually get better at. Watching TV is not a hobby.
A hobby is something to which you give sustained effort. Some people claim to be into cooking and have dinner parties, but if you do that less than twice a month I don't think that counts. I realize that many of us have been ruined by modern convenience living and the programmer lifestyle, so it is an effort to get a meal for four or more together. But cooking for other people is supposed to be normal; it's not hobby material.
And photography: everybody has a digital camera now. Get real. Unless you have gotten in a vehicle with equipment specifically for the purpose of photographing something and no other reason, you're not really a photographer.
I hesitate to call MMOs a hobby. They do meet the definition, but the physical experience -- sitting in front of a computer , collaborating with others in virtual spaces -- is very close to the sort of work most of us do for eight or more hours a day already. I think if you garden or do bicycle couriering, you're allowed to claim that MMOs are your hobby, but otherwise no.
Please understand that I'm not condemning anyone, but I think a lot of us are deluding ourselves. We don't want to admit how narrow we are, and how we really spend our leisure time. I'm willing to bet that programmed entertainments, like TV, movies, games, or pornography top the list of actual hours spent. It's sad, because at the age of 80, I don't think anyone's going to look back on their lives and say "DAMN! If only I had gotten through all my Galactica DVDs...." Maybe RescueTime should do something about this.
As for me: I used to have hobbies, but now I don't. It's a serious problem and I think it contributes to an ongoing low-level depression. I do read an enormous amount, but as stated above, this is not a hobby. It's a really bad situation. I think my hobby is dreaming up startups which, for visa and other reasons, I can't do much about.
Top execs complain it's hard to get stuff done at every company. In reality, Yahoo's internal regrouping around the Y!OS strategy is fast and pretty bold. The problem isn't that Yahoo is making slow decisions, it's that Yahoo is making stupid decisions. Corporate politicians and intellectual frauds are defeating the creative and competent people.
However, you need someone to work on the English right away. "Opinion Analizer" is... not quite what you think it means.
1) there is a consensus among the global business elite, and some of the government elite, about how things ought to be run: Western-style democracy with the flow of goods and capital as unrestricted as possible.
1b) Partially this is self-interest, and partially it's a belief in a near-Randian libertarianism that has become dogma in the American right, despite it never having been really tried. (Because they can't get their agenda implemented in stable democracies). In this philosophy, government is a parasite that first feeds off of, and then strangles, the true activity of free people: business.
2) But almost no country believes in doctrinaire free markets, especially poor ones struggling to develop a mixed economy.
3) When great crises arise, these government and business elites are needed to funnel money and talent. They use the opportunity to advance their agenda.
3b) In certain cases, they don't mind making crises, and will even make them worse, in the belief that the world will then reorder itself to the state they deem to be natural and good, where markets rule.
The extreme version of this is Iraq, where planners seemed less concerned about providing stability than free markets.
An even more insidious form: see the documentary "Our Brand is Crisis". You will see American consultants considered to be left-wing, like James Carville, manipulating a crisis in a Third World country to elect a leader whose faith in the market is not shared by the public.
This is all caused by people who are good and nice and believe they are helping the countries involved. No conspiracy theory required.
The fact that the Patriot Act was drafted quickly proves that there is a security establishment, waiting to pounce on opportunity. It doesn't prove that 9-11 was somehow caused by such a group.
Eric Schmidt is a hacker who became a manager. The executive search at Google was dreadfully prolonged because Larry & Sergey wouldn't accept someone without technical experience.
The problems they have come from too much success, too soon, and some boneheaded mistakes that they made in the glare of a media spotlight.
2) It sounds like your colleagues are not fully invested in having your project be a success. Is your project something that everyone agrees the company needs? If not you may have to fall back on your manager to explain why it is needed, or re-evaluate whether you should be doing this.
If the project is something that everyone agrees the company needs, and colleagues are still giving you the cold shoulder, something is dysfunctional here. Maybe they have a low impression of your competence -- why is that? Was there a group decision to hire you, or were you parachuted in?
Whatever you do, do NOT stop asking questions. Don't even DELAY asking them, if you really can't get what you need from the code. You stop asking questions when they threaten you with broken bottles.
3) A mistake that people fresh out of college often make: stopping dead when they don't get the resources or attention they need. In the workplace, if the problem is elsewhere and "not your fault" you still have to take steps to fix it.