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plonh

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Consider: there are two diagnoses, OCD and OCPD. Both cover Obsessive Compulsive behaviors.

OCD is the Disorder where OC behaviors ruin your life and cause you distress.

OCPD is when you like your OC behaviors, but other people don't . It is a Personality Disorder, because your personality is socially "wrong".

Software Totemism 11 years ago

Suckless.org disproves the authors thesis. Heck, UNIX itself disproves the thesis. A project can grow to include more compatible components, without needlessly cluttering each component. Finishing one program is not the end of all software development.

Software Totemism 11 years ago

There used to be a concept called "professionalism" where people didn't let their personal cultural biases crowd out contributors, and people applied their humanity problem at hand at work, and engaged in unrelated conversations on breaks and after work, not disrupting people who are working on the project.

Software Totemism 11 years ago

You think its "phony" when someone shows up at X conference transparently focused of talking about X?

You think its selfish when some knows how we wants to help, and wants to find the people he wants to help?

I feel like I am taking crazy pills, where technical content gets zero attention in a technical project. It sounds to me like the conference are getting taken over by vacationers who want to have a party week (possibly soft-embezzled by expensing an employer) pushing out people who care about the project.

It reminds of when the college resume padders took over the high school math club, and instituted a substantial membership fee to finance a trip to a math competition where they didn't actually compete, and I had to create a new club to gather people for math activities.

Software Totemism 11 years ago

Having lunch with your coworkers gives you 250 chances per year to have an important work-related conversation. A conference offers precious little time, so it is important to be efficient in getting people together who have things to say to each other.

Turing Tarpit 11 years ago

Ironically, that 66 page document is a massively overcomplicated discussion of the simple idea that inessential mutable state causes problems.

Not sure I want to live in Walt Disney's utopia. He was great at his business, the original Jobsian, but dialed it up a bit too far.

www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1623/was-walt-disney-a-fascist

Gwern's analysis looks hopelessly naive in the face of modern ISIS-related acts; and ignores the difference between USA, where poison Tylenol causes a huge response, and China where people expect bad fake drugs with a certain frequency.

And he ignores that over-complicated (in gwern's view) cost over a trillion dollars in US response, from NSA to TSA to Afghan and Iraq war.